Masakado's head mound in Ōtemachi: a curse in print by 1926

The National Tax College tells it in a few lines. After the great earthquake of 1923, when the Finance Ministry rebuilt on its old ground, the mound of Taira no Masakado was broken up.⁸ In 1926 the finance minister Hayami Seiji died suddenly, and Yabashi Kenkichi, the engineer who headed the works section, died the next year.⁹¹⁰ Rumours of a curse followed, the page says, and it adds that no one can show the curse was real.¹¹⁷ In June 1940 lightning struck a neighbouring ministry and the fire reached the Finance Ministry.¹² After the war, it says, American forces tried to level the site and a bulldozer overturned, killing its driver.⁷ The mound is still there.¹³

What stands there now

The mound is at Ōtemachi 1-2-1, in Chiyoda ward, in a gap between office buildings.¹³ Chiyoda ward’s tourism site and the society that keeps the mound give the address, Kanda Myōjin places the mound at Ōtemachi, and both the shrine and the society call it a Tokyo-designated site.¹³ The society says Tokyo’s Board of Education notified it on 1 April 1971 that the mound had been designated on 29 March.¹⁶ The society was formed in July 1960, and its by-laws provide for a rite at the mound each September.¹⁷ Kanda Myōjin’s timeline says the mound’s sixth refurbishment was finished in 2020.¹⁸

At the Kanda festival, the society says, the shrine’s portable shrine was always set down in front of the mound for an offering, in Edo, after the Meiji restoration, and still after the war.¹⁹

What the oldest texts say about the head

The Shōmonki tells the war in the east. It says Masakado was struck by an arrow in the second month of 940.¹ It also dates the report of his head to the capital, 25 April.² Fujiwara no Tadahira’s diary, the Teishin-kōki, has an entry of the same day, quoted in the Kojiruien, saying the news of Masakado’s head had come, although the character after “head” is printed as a box that may mark a gap.²

The Shōmonki makes no mention of a flight. Kajiwara Masaaki, writing in the Sekai daihyakka jiten, says it ends with a rumour that Masakado in hell sent word of his torments to his family, and that the Taiheiki and old-print Heiji monogatari tell of a head that would not close its eyes.²⁰

The Taiheiki, a war tale, gives the head a long paragraph in its sixteenth book. The head is hung at the prison gate, its colour does not change for three months, and every night it calls for its body. A passer-by makes a verse, the head laughs, and its eyes close.³ It does not leave Kyoto.

The first flying head, 1662

Edo meishoki, a guidebook of 1662 by Asai Ryōi, has the head fly.⁴ In its chapter on Kanda Myōjin, Hidesato strikes Masakado down by a ruse and the head goes up into the sky and into the clouds, then comes to rest at the shrine’s place.⁴ The head is then sent to the capital and hung at the prison gate, where it curses until someone makes the Taiheiki’s verse and it laughs.⁴²¹ A shrine is built at the place to calm it.⁴

A book of 1687, Kokyō-gaeri no Edo banashi, tells it differently. In its chapter on Kanda Myōjin the head flies and is shot down in Mino by the mountain god of Nangū, and the body is what comes to Musashi.²² The enlarged edition of 1694, as Oda Kanshi quotes it in 1907, has lights appearing and the ground shaking, so the governor reports to the capital and the head is sent down and buried with the body.²³ That ground is where Kanda Myōjin was said to have begun.²³

Oda gives no credit to any of it. He calls the stories absurd and thinks Masakado’s remaining followers tried to take the head back, and at last asked for it from Kyoto and buried it with the body at Shibasaki.²⁴ Yada Sōun, writing in 1924, tells the same plain version: followers carried the body to Shibasaki and the head was fetched from Kyoto later.⁵ The society’s text of 1972 and the ward’s tourism page have the head fly east, and Oda reports that Torigoe Shrine is said to stand on the hill the head flew over.¹⁴¹⁵²⁴

Who tended the mound at Shibasaki

The ground where the Finance Ministry later stood was Shibasaki village.²⁵ Nichirin-ji, a temple there, tells how Masakado’s spirit was blamed for illness and early deaths until the Jishū priest Taa Shōnin held a service and gave him a Buddhist name.²⁶ The sources we read date that service between 1303 and 1307.²⁷ The society’s page prints 1303; the temple’s report, quoted by Oda, has the slab stupa raised in 1307.²⁷ Kanda Myōjin dates Masakado’s enshrinement beside the temple to 1309 and the shrine’s move to its present site to 1616.²⁸

Masakado came out of Kanda Myōjin’s main hall in the 1870s, and the shrine says he went back in 1984.²⁹³⁰ Oda, writing in 1907, calls the earlier removal a mistake.²⁹

The mound inside a daimyo’s courtyard

In Edo times the mound lay in the courtyard of Doi Ōinokami’s compound and then Sakai Utanokami’s.³¹ Oda says that under the Sakai house the shrine on it was called Masakado Inari, and that in alternate years under the fourth shogun the Kanda festival’s portable shrine was carried into the compound.³² After the domains were abolished in 1871, the Finance Ministry stood on Sakai’s old ground.³³

By 1906 a preservation stone stood in the ministry’s garden, raised under the finance minister Sakatani Yoshirō.³⁴ A photograph book of 1914 shows the stone and the mound.³⁴ Fujisawa Morihiko printed his own photograph of the mound in 1925.³⁵

The society says the ministry’s secretariat looked after the mound after the restoration, and credits Shibusawa Eiichi’s efforts for its survival.³⁶

The ministry’s courtyard, 1923 to 1928

After the earthquake of 1923 burned the building, the National Tax College says the mound was broken up in 1924 when a temporary building went up.⁸ Yada, writing the same year, saw it bare to the street after the fire.³⁷ Other sources keep it standing: a city survey of 1932 and a ward history of 1935 still list the mound in the ministry’s grounds.³⁸ Kanda Myōjin says a new stone was raised in 1936 after the quake had cracked the old one.³⁹ We cannot tell from these what stood on the site in each year.

A column of 10 December 1926 in the Osaka Asahi, reprinted in a book of 1927, links the mound to the ministry’s troubles.⁴⁰ It lists the finance minister’s death, a vice-minister’s illness and others’ injury, and says the finance minister Kataoka took it to be because the mound was not honoured, and that he would build a shrine and hold a Masakado festival.⁴⁰

The minister who had died, Hayami Seiji, had become finance minister on 3 June 1926 and died on 13 September, a little over a hundred days later.⁴¹ The Rekidai zōshō-den of 1930 says illness kept him shut in for most of the term.⁴¹

On 27 March 1928 the ministry held a Shinto service in its second dining hall, with a priest of Kanda Myōjin officiating, and planned a Buddhist service at Nichirin-ji for 14 April.⁴² The Tokyo Asahi item of that day says that after a run of deaths in post and illnesses, the staff agreed it seemed to be Masakado’s vengeful spirit.⁴³ It says the mound was stamped down under the budget bureau’s barracks after the earthquake.⁴³ It names the minister and Yabashi, and counts a dozen or so others.¹⁰ A report printed after it in a booklet of 1928, credited to the Hōchi shimbun, says fourteen people had died so far, listing the finance minister and Yabashi first.⁴⁴ Its credit line gives 15 March 1928, twelve days before the service it goes on to describe.⁴⁴⁴⁵

By the Hōchi report’s telling, the talk began after the barracks went up over the mound, and a former finance minister, shaken by it, had meant to hold a service in spring.⁴⁶⁴⁷

The memorial year, the fire, then the bulldozer

In 1940, the thousand-year memorial of Masakado’s death, Kanda Myōjin and Nichirin-ji held a service at the Planning Board’s grounds in Ōtemachi.³⁹ The society says the ministry copied Taa Shōnin’s slab stupa for the occasion.³⁹ That June lightning struck the Communications Ministry’s Aviation Bureau at Ōtemachi, and the fire spread to the Finance Ministry and others.¹² The fire museum’s page gives the cause as lightning on the bureau’s chimney, with a faulty earth on the lightning rod.¹²

The bulldozer story has two tellers. The National Tax College says a bulldozer overturned and its driver died when American forces tried to level the mound.⁷ The society’s page, an excerpt from its late president Endō Tatsuzō, written in 1972 by its own dating, adds that the neighbourhood association head Endō Masazō knew the mound and petitioned MacArthur’s headquarters, calling it “the grave of a great chief of old”.⁶ The page gives no year for the incident.⁶ We found no document of the 1940s that records it.⁷⁶

The society says the thousand-and-thirty-third memorial service at Nichirin-ji was held on 14 February, which it gives as Masakado’s death day.⁴⁸ The Shōmonki’s own date is the 14th of the second month, and the 1928 item says the temple’s register gave the 14th of the fourth month.¹⁴⁸⁴⁷