A Culture without Temple
Tsutomu Iyori, professor of Kyoto University, Japan

We usually take it as a matter of course: the existence of Temple architecture in any culture. Any Temple, if it is temple, accompanies a series of practice of religious rituals in it or around it and expresses a certain phenomenal significance corresponding to the rituals. In case of a temple where the ritual custom or its documents had been lost, we can not trace back into an enlived space-experience of the origin, even if the physical structure of the temple still exists there. We are then solicited to discern a phenomenal being of a sacred place in ritual contexte from its physical existence. We can call this point of view as an phenomenal approach into ritual spaces.

We do not theoretically presuppose here as a fact that any architecturalization of a sacred place, beginning from a primitive provisory hut-temple until an eternal stone-temple, could be a sign of simply natural development or progress in the history of human settlement, as is a case of Laugier's primitive hut-temple to be developed into a stone temple.

We then present here a contradictory example in a certain Asian culture where there was no role of temple nor any architectural type of temple in its traditional religion: It is ancient Ryukyu Kingdom (1406-1879), nowadays forming a southern peripheries of Japanese territory since 1972 after the occupation of the U.S.A. from 1945, being called as Okinawa. The characteristic features of Ryukyuan traditional religion (see Libra 1966) consist in the role of women authorities in the practice of rituals not only in the Royal Castle (in Shuri) but also in any provincial part of the Kingdom. Even nowadays the annual rituals play an important role, but they are maintained by voluntary participations of women, liberated from an ancient feudal politico-religious organizations under the Kingdom since over 100 years from the incorporation of Ryukyu in 1879 into the territory of modern Japan. And its symbolic system concerning sacred places and rituals are still alive : sacred forest, feast court in it and in the villages, women's alters in each house for the Divinity of Fire, fi nu kang, (Kitchen's Deity, mixed up with a Chinese furnace Goddess). The rituals have been done along with agricultural annual calendar, where, each time a certain Deity, symbolizing a fertility of crops and fishery or the ancestor, is believed to come from the other world beyond the Horizon. The lady priestesses, after a certain days of purification, went out from the village (the palace of priestess in case of the supreme queen priestess of Kingdom) into a sacred forest (of the Kingdom) and then to the seashore(to the Eastern Coast of the Main Island) to welcome the deity. And then possessed, they come back to the village (to the Royal Castle Shuri) being welcomed in a Feast court in the village (or in the Royal Castle).

What is important here is the fact that we can not find any existence of Temple in every step of rituals except a divine seat for the possessed deity-women and a tent upon it. In the practice of rituals the presence of the deity-spirit of the horizon, mediated by the presence of the priestesses, seems more important than any architectural devices furnishing the feast court. And the route of the procession followed by the priestesses makes a tour by passing every important places in a cosmological image of the Landscape where every village or the royal Castle are situated. In a sense the ritual procession used to revitalize an environmental and cosmological significance of the entire landscape (human settlement and its natural surroundings) where a village or even a Royal Castle were located as a center, and the landscape itself could have been a "temple" despite the absence of a type of temple architecture in the Ryukyu.

Tsutomu Iyori , born in Japan in 1949
architect & professor in the Graduate School of Human & Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, develops his studies in three domains
1) Okinawan cultural & environmental studies
2) Modern & Contemporary history of the urbanism in Kyoto
3) Le Corbusier's theoretical formation in the 1920s.

Publications
T.Iyori, Space Analysis on the Ancient Ryukyu Kingdom's Annual Rituals in the Royal Palace of Shuri and in Kudaka Island, Scientific Research Report: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) by the Ministry of Education, 1999.1.

Grout et Iyori (ed), Le paysage de l'espace urbain: Actualit£ødu jardin, questions urbaines, Editions in situ, Enghien-les Bains, France,1998.9.

T.Iyori et al., The Deformation of Traditional Space-Composition and its Culture in the Town houses and City Blocks of Downtown Kyoto: What has been Brought About by Urban Policy after World War II, Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University,1999.11.

T.Iyori, Hidden Landscape: An Environmental Reading of the Garden of the Royal Villa of Katsura by a Philosopher, Tetsur£øWatsuji, Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University,1999.11.