Wolf, Extinction and Fukushima

Iitate, Fukushima is a village designated as ‘whole village evacuation’ since April, 2011 despite being located over 30km from the Fukushima Daiichi Plant. The village had maintained its traditional rural landscape as one of the “The most beautiful villages in Japan”, and was renowned for its high quality beef and dairy products. The farming community’s spiritual wellbeing is deeply ingrained in their land, both of which are under threat of being lost in the serious contamination and the prolonged evacuation.

In Iitate, there is a shrine devoted to the local community of Sasu called Yamatsumi-jinja. The shrine’s guardian or holy messenger is a ‘wolf’ considered to protect farming villages from pest animals such as deer, boar and monkeys. The wolf’s mighty power is also considered to deter disasters, illness, fire and theft, and there is a record that at the end of Edo in Ansei period, wolf worship flourished as a series of disasters and unsettling events overwhelmed Japan. Yamatsumi-jinja, known for its 237 ceiling paintings depicting the wolf as its holy messenger, kept its door open to the evacuated community in much the same way as the wolf worship supported the community in Edo. Tragically however the shrine burnt down in April this year.

This paper reports on an ongoing project that attempts to record the significance of local beliefs interwoven in the natural environment and restore the legacy of one significant belief of the village people, namely the wolf paintings. It is argued that attending to the spiritual wellbeing of the community deeply ingrained in the ‘spirit of the place’ is critical in the ‘reconstruction’ process, even if the community may not return to the village fully in near future. Clearly the project has an anti-nuclear message though it does not take an overt ‘anti-nuclear’ action.