Commentary : Lost Manchurian Shamans

                                 

                                                                                                                                                                             ★ Saman =Shaman

Kin Taii’s film Lost Manchuria Samans shows significant departures from his earlier work. For example, in Resurrection: Last Words of Tsurumi Kazuko (2001) and in Selected One Hundred Tanka: From Resurrection to Flower Road” (2004) he described the life and poetry of Tsurumi Kazuko. And in “Shuririenen” (2004), Unadama no Miya: The World of Ishimure Michiko  (2006) Light,Becalmed and Poems from the Village of Origins (both 2011) and “okudo of Flower (2013) he explored the world of the writings of Ishimure Michiko.

 

In Lost Manchuria Samans, however, Kin probes deeply into his own roots, showing the light and shadows of the world of the Manchurian samans that is being lost, or has already been lost. Whereas the earlier works were concerned with the works and world of other people, Lost Manchuria Samans touches on the origins of his own roots and poetry. For this reason it may be referred to as a “film of self-discovery”.

A shaman is a medium for transcendence. This world and the world beyond, the world of evident reality and the world of spirit, the world of things that can be seen and the world of things that cannot be seen, the reciprocal oppositions and separations that are tangents and lines drawn from the mutual possibilities among multiple worlds—shamans help us to establish a higher level of balance and order among all of these things.

KinTaii lives at the center of the succession of the endangered Eurasian saman culture. The words in his narration at the end of the film, “I looked into the heavens. The heavens also looked into me,” attest to this.

 

A shaman is a “person” who exists at the interface between the heavens and the earth. He is a person who sees the heavens. At the same time, he is a person who is seen by the heavens. He restores the pathways to and from the heavens in a mutual action. In other words, by bringing them together he tries to establish renewed activities and order among them. The skies and the heavens are of both this world and that world. They are tangents of both the world of reality and the world of spirit. By means of the prayers and festivals of the rites and ceremonies, shamans bring together these tangents. In this way, they breathe life into people and communities, drive away troubles, and bring about peace and order. This is the kind of mission they carry out.

However, in the modern age, shaman culture has been cast into disrepute as representing outmoded, anti-modern, pre-modern superstition and occult practices. In China, during the Cultural Revolution period, it was systematically repressed. Nonetheless, since 1984 there has been a slow revitalization of the shaman culture that had once appeared to be on the verge of dying out. This was linked to the China’s policy of welcoming its various ethnic cultures that emerged at the end of the Cultural Revolution period. It was also part of the bringing back to life of traditional Chinese medical practices such as qigong and shaman culture.

 

Nevertheless, following the tendencies of recent times in which China has evolved from a one-party communist controlled nation to an unusual sort of capitalistic oriented socio-political culture, the survival of shaman culture has been endangered.

As Kin Taii tells us in the narration of this film, “Among the more then ten million ethnic Manchurians living in China, there is almost no one who can speak the Manchurian language.  In the near future, the Manchurian language may be lost.”  The degeneration and loss of the Manchurian language is linked to the degeneration and loss of the Manchurian culture. This is because the vitality of ethnic cultures is rooted in the life of ethic languages and dialects and ethnic religious practices and beliefs. The words of the Manchurian sacred songs, prayers, lullabies, and such are all in the mother tongue of the ethnic Manchurian language. Therefore, without the Manchurian language there cannot be Manchurian culture.

 

Kin Taii was born in Liaoning Fushun City in China and moved to Japan in 1979.  Some thirty years later, in the summer of 2008, he traveled to the Manchurian autonomous region in the northeast of China. There, in Jiutai City, in Jilin State .he met the shaman  SHI. In the following year, 2009,he went to   Heilongjiang State, where he met GUAN Yulin the elder (86 years old) head shaman of the GUAN family. GUAN Yulin is one of the few remaining  great shamans who carry out the “Outdoor Ceremony” which is a rite of worship of nature. The Manchurian tribes originally came from the forests and woods and so the “god tree”  which is a central part of this ceremony, serves as a place for connecting the pathways and uniting the worship of the heavens and of the earth.

In this film we hear stories of the experiences and wisdom of saman culture told by the drummer and cut-paper artist GUNG Yunde and HE Shihuan who speaks entirely in Manchurian、and MENG Xianxiao of the MENG saman

family. In this way, through interviews with the living bearers of shaman culture, Kin Taii discovers how shamanism represents the spirit and soul of the Manchurian people. Moreover, his eyes are opened to the essence of shamanism as a “technique that transcends dimensions”. And, finally, he comes to the realization that he, himself, Kin Taii, is a saman.

 

A shaman (saman) exists as one who “serves the souls of the dead  as an intermediary between heaven and earth”. In this film Lost Manchuria Samans Kin Taii, as a descendant of the “lost samans” dives deeply into the springs of his inner self and explores the openings of the skies above and sees into the heavens. Surely his words in the final scene, “I looked into the heavens, and the heavens also looked into me” attest to the fact that he succeeding in restoring the disappearing world of the samans.

And so the words that appear on the poster for this film “A tale of the heavens” and “In search of the origins of the Manchurian peoples and the time-space cosmos of the samans,” express both the destination of his longings and searchings for truth and at the same time the announcement of a starting point for integration, from this contemporary person of the heavens and earth.

 

                                                                                   Toji Kamata（Philosopher of Religion)