The Haunted Camphor Tree

By PatrickDrazen 1 year, 6 months ago

Camphor trees are legendary in anime, as they are in China and Japan. They have a magical air about them, because of their height, breadth, age, and medicinal properties. Those camphor trees regarded by Shinto shrines as especially powerful are usually marked as such by a shimenawa: a rope made out of braided rice plants.

We’ve seen the colossal camphor tree that was home to the title character of Miyazaki Hayao’s Tonari no Totoro. A large camphor spoke to miko in training Ayako Matsuzaki in the Ghost Hunt anime and manga. There’s a large tree (presumably a camphor) on the grounds of the temple where Higurashi Kagome’s grandfather is head priest; the same tree held the arrow-pierced body of Inuyasha for half a century. But the most amazing account of a camphor tree dates back to a famous historical event in the 17th century.

A famous fire in 1658 destroyed one-eighth of the city of Edo, the new capital of the nation, which would be called Tokyo. One nobleman, the Daimyo Lord Date Tsunamune of Sendai, had built seven houses there, but lost them all in the fire.

Lord Date Tsunamune wanted to rebuild his palaces with a splendor that would almost match the houses of the Shogun. (For obvious reasons, he couldn’t rebuild them as more splendid than the Shogun’s.) He appointed a nobleman to see to things, Harada Kai Naonori; he in turn met with a lumber broker named Kinokuniya Bunzaemon. The broker pointed out that, because of the fire, good lumber was hard to find; Harada replied that money was no object.

Kinokuniya was only concerned about one piece of wood: a single beam cut from a camphor tree for the ceiling beam of Lord Date Tsunamune’s main house. Most of the camphor trees, however, were old and regarded as sacred. The one tree that would best suit the purpose was in the forest of Nekoma-myojin, and was the responsibility of one of the Shogun’s retainers, named Fujieda Geki. He in turn met with four local village elders and, over dinner and drinks, determined that none of the four elders could read or write. This suited Fujieda Geki. All four of the elders told Fujieda Geki that the large camphor tree in question could not be touched, but they also agreed to put their seal to whatever document Fujieda Geki wrote. And Fujieda Geki was now assured that he could write the lumber permit any way he chose, regardless of the respect and veneration in which the local people held the camphor tree.

The next day, Kinokuniya sent a crew to the forest in question, four days travel away, with the vaguely worded permit signed by the seal of all four elders. The local caretaker questioned the four elders, who thought they had exempted the large camphor from being cut, although the permit didn’t read that way. When he realized what had happened, Hamada Tsushima, the caretaker of the camphor tree, committed suicide, stating before he did that his spirit would enter the camphor tree, so that he might have revenge on the corrupt Kinokuniya.

Eventually the crew brought down the camphor tree, but it was difficult: the men could not move the felled tree at all, and, whenever they came close to it, the branches would lash out at their faces and bodies. The fallen tree’s branches swung so quickly and powerfully that members of the crew suffered broken limbs, and some were crushed nearly to death.

In the middle of all this, with word spreading on the inability to take lumber from the camphor tree, a messenger from the Daimyo arrived, ordering the lumber crew to leave the camphor tree alone and return home; the four elders, on the other hand, were summoned to court so that they might commit suicide to atone for their foolishness.

As for the corrupt contractor Kinokuniya, he stated that he was sick and hid in his rooms. A servant was sent to look in on him, and a barber came to see him; nobody remembered seeing the barber leave. Shortly thereafter, Kinokuniya was found dead. The head of the crew sent to harvest the camphor tree, a man named Chogoro, did penance by building a new shrine for the fallen camphor tree and hiring a new caretaker to replace Hamada Tsushima, who had committed suicide to save the tree. At last report, the fallen camphor tree and its new shrine are still there.

You can’t really call this a typical Japanese ghost story. It’s an amazingly diverse genre, from comedy to tragedy to shiver-inducing stories, ancient and modern. Typical or not, ghost stories are appropriate, especially in the dog days of summer.

But that, as they say, is another blog.

Patrick Drazen is old enough to have seen the first anime feature film shown in the US: Tezuka Osamu’s “Saiyuki”, released as “Alakazam the Great!” Patrick’s 2003 book “Anime Explosion: The What? Why? and Wow! of Japanese Animation” (Stone Bridge Press) is a major guide to the art form and the ways it reflects Japanese culture, history, and society. He has also written for Animation magazine, Time Out New York, and spoken at a variety of conferences and events. You may reach him at patrickdrazen@yahoo.com.

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