. human hair in japanese esotericizing embroideries 881
The Cleveland work appears to be made solely of green, purple, yel-
low, white, black, and blue silk, but close examination of the embroi-
dery under an electron microscope reveals a startling fact: human hair
was used to work the snail-shell curls of Amida and also the child’s
hair. By contrast, the hair of the two adults kneeling in the house with
the child was embroidered with silk thread. Although the embroidery
lacks accompanying documentation, it is tempting to speculate that
two parents commissioned this welcoming descent image in order to
enhance the spiritual well-being of their deceased child. The child’s
actual hair would have been used for the hair of the child figure in the
embroidery, and probably also for the hair of Amida, although other
believers, including the parents, might have contributed some strands
of hair to the central image. In this way, a physical association between
the child and the Buddha Amida would have been dramatically con-
firmed. This association in the embroidery would be a promise of the
union with Amida that the child and all other believers could expect
after death and rebirth in the Western Pure Land.
The human hair embroideries are certainly linked to the Japanese
Pure Land tradition, but it seems evident that ideas concerning human
hair also emerged from a basic substratum of Japanese culture related
more to the kami-worshipping or Shintō tradition than to the Bud-
dhist tradition. In his thought-provoking book Hair: Its Power and
Meaning in Asian Cultures, Gary Ebersole writes about hair symbol-
ism in Japanese popular culture in both premodern and modern times.
Ebersole makes the point that his research is limited to popular non-
sectarian Japanese religion and does not deal with the symbolism of
hair in Japanese Buddhism (Ebersole 1998, 75). However, the popular
Japanese cultural presuppositions about which Ebersole writes must
surely have been one basis upon which an overlay of Buddhist belief
was added in the creation of devotional embroideries incorporating
human hair. He writes:
[H]air was used in ancient Japan to signal both normality and abnor-
mality, wildness and enculturation... hair was associated with sexuality,
female reproductive power, and ritual communication with divinities
(kami ) and the dead. (Ebersole 1998, 77)The positive and negative powers associated with hair—its association
with vitality or fertility on the one hand, and with disease or death
on the other—may be partly due to the biology of hair. In addition
to the hair with which we are born, there is significant growth of new