The North

On the last night of the year, men in straw capes and red demon masks come down from the hills of Oga and go from door to door. They stamp into the house and shout: any lazy ones here? Any crying children? The children scream, the parents apologise on their behalf and offer sake, and the visitors leave. These are the namahage, and they are not demons. They are marebito — gods who come from somewhere else, once a year, to inspect a household and bless it. The mask frightens and the visit blesses, and both happen at the same time.

Further north, at Osorezan in Aomori, a caldera of yellow sulphur and bare rock has been held for a thousand years to be the mouth of the other world. Families still climb it in July to speak to their dead through the itako — blind women trained to lend the dead their voice. There is no grandeur in it. It is bleak, it smells of sulphur, and people go anyway.

In Hokkaidō the gods were different again. To the Ainu, kamuy inhabit anything useful or dangerous: the bear, the owl that guards the village, fire, the river. A bear cub raised in the settlement for two years was sent home to the gods in the iyomante ceremony, loaded with gifts, and was expected to speak well of the people who had kept it.

For most of the first millennium the court did not rule this. The people here were called Emishi, and they fought. In 789 an imperial army of over fifty thousand was broken on the Kitakami river by a force under Aterui. It took thirteen more years and a general named Sakanoue no Tamuramaro before Aterui came down out of the mountains and surrendered. He was taken to the capital and executed there.

Then, briefly, the north was rich. The Northern Fujiwara ruled from Hiraizumi in the twelfth century on the region’s gold, and built the Konjikidō — a hall covered inside and out in gold leaf and mother-of-pearl. It is still standing. Their city was destroyed by Minamoto no Yoritomo in 1189. A century later Marco Polo, who never came near the place, wrote that Japan was a country roofed in gold. Whether that report started here is a guess people have been making ever since, and it is still only a guess.

The last time the north lost was 1868. The northern domains allied against the new imperial government and were beaten one by one. At Aizu a company of teenage boys saw smoke rising over the castle, believed it had fallen, and killed themselves on the hillside. The castle had not fallen yet. Aizu is where the red cow in this collection comes from.

From November to April the fields are shut. That single fact made every craft in this region. Everything here is something a farming household could do indoors, beside a fire, with what was already in the house.

At Naruko the woodworkers who served the hot springs turned slim dolls on a pole lathe for the children of visitors, and each district settled on its own shape of head and its own stripes, so that you can still tell a Naruko doll from a Tsugaru one across a room. In Tsugaru the domain forbade peasants cotton, and hemp does not hold heat, so women stitched white cotton thread across indigo hemp in counted patterns until the back of a work jacket became geometry. At Morioka the Nambu lords had iron sand, charcoal and river clay in one valley, and the kettle followed.

And the red cow. Smallpox took children here as it did everywhere, and red was the colour the pox god was said to dislike, so a red papier-mâché ox with a nodding head was set beside a sick child. The shape came from a legend: an ox the colour of red earth that hauled timber for a temple at Yanaizu in 807 and, when the building was finished, turned to stone rather than leave.