Tomoe

"Mitsudomoe" redirects here. For the media franchise, see Mitsudomoe (manga).

For other uses, see Tomoe (disambiguation).

A tomoe (Japanese: ,), commonly translated as 'comma,' is a Japanese heraldic symbol or crest describing a comma-like swirl. It closely resembles the usual form of a magatama.

The tomoe appears in many designs with various uses. The simplest, most common patterns of the device contain from one to four tomoe, and are reminiscent of similar designs that have been found in wide distribution around the world. When circumscribed in a circle, it often appears in a set of three, with this design known as the mitsudomoe (三ツ巴).

Etymology

The character 巴 has several meanings in Chinese, ranging from a Szechwan toponym to a crust formed by dryness, parts of the body such as hands or cheeks, and, as a verb, bearing the sense of "to hope", "expect" or "be anxious over". One view is that the word refers to a picture e (絵) of a tomo (鞆), or drawings on the latter, the tomo in question, in archaic Japanese tömö, being a round leather arm protector worn on the left elbow or wrist of an archer. An alternative interpretation takes it to be a stylized magatama.

Theories of its origin

The origin of the tomoe design is uncertain. A pattern resembling the two-comma tomoe (futatsudomoe) has been found in ancient cultures on all inhabited continents.

Symbolism and uses

The tomoe is a common design element in Japanese family emblems (家紋, kamon) and corporate logos, particularly in the set of triplicate whorls known as mitsudomoe.

Some view the mitsudomoe as representative of the threefold division (Man, Earth, and Sky) at the heart of the Shinto religion. Originally, mitsudomoe was associated with the Shinto deity Hachiman and can be found in Hachiman shrines across Japan. Since Hachiman was worshiped as the guardian of warriors, it was adopted as family crests by various samurai clans such as Kobayakawa and Utsunomiya. Among aristocrats, the Saionji family used it as its family crest. The Koyasan Shingon sect of Buddhism uses the mitsudomoe as a visual representation of the cycle of life.

The tomoe crest history

A Japanese-style banner regularly displayed on the Shō clan's ships bound for Satsuma.

As a leather wrist protector tomo appear to have been employed at least as early as the Kofun period, where they are attested on haniwa terracotta figurines depicting archers.

The tomoe crest established itself as a common emblem during the Fujiwara ascendency of the late Heian period, around the 10th-llth centuries, and proliferated through to Kamakura times. It is thought that a resemblance between the tomoe and the Emperor Ōjin found in the Nihongi may also account for its rising popularity among samurai, since Ōjin was apotheosized as a god in Hachiman shrines.

In the Nihongi account, when Ōjin was born, inspection of his body revealed a fleshy growth on his arm similar to a warrior's wrist or elbow pad, and for this reason he was called homuta, an old word for a tomo.

The Mitsudomoe was adopted as the family crest of the royal family of the Ryūkyū Kingdom of Okinawa Island apparently by the First Shō dynasty's last ruler, Shō Toku. It was called hidari gomon (左御紋) there. Since it was the royal family's crest, its usage was once severely restricted in Okinawa. Okinawans who visited mainland Japan shortly after the Japanese annexation of Ryūkyū in 1879 were surprised that mitsudomoe banners were flown everywhere.

Fragmentary sources suggest that the use of mitsudomoe can be traced back to Okinawa's first Shō dynasty. Together with the date of 1500, a mitsudomoe was inscribed on a wooden coffin found in the Momojana tombs in northern Okinawa. The divine name of King Shō Toku was Hachiman-aji and his half-brother was called Hachiman-ganashi. Shō Toku also founded a Hachiman shrine named Asato Hachimangū. For its close connections to the Hachiman cult, some scholars speculate that the first Shō dynasty had its roots in Wakō pirates worshiping Hachiman.

Ryūkyū's official ships bound for Satsuma Domain displayed a Japanese-style banner featuring the Shō clan's family crest while private ships were forbidden to do so. Hidenobu Itai, an expert on pre-modern Japanese ships, conjectured that by following the mainland Japanese practice, Ryūkyū had shown allegiance to Satsuma. Since Ryūkyū was ordered to conceal from China its subjugation to Satsuma, the banner is highly unlikely to have been flown during voyages to China.

A highly distorted, oddly colored version of the banner of the Shō clan's ship drifted to mainland Japan in 1798. Presumably a product of miscommunication within mainland Japan.

In 1797, a privately-owned ship chartered by the kingdom was wrecked on its way to Satsuma and in the next year eventually drifted to Chōshi, a port in modern-day Chiba Prefecture. Since Chōshi was not far from Edo, the seat of power for the Tokugawa shogunate, this incident gathered a great deal of attention. Even though the banner flown by the ship was of standard Japanese style, some miscommunication within mainland Japan resulted in the creation of an oddly colored variant of it, which was erroneously labeled as a "flag of Ryūkyū" (琉玖; note the non-standard choice of the second character) in the Bankoku Hakuki Zufu (1854) and a couple of other books published in mainland Japan from the end of the Edo period to the beginning of the Meiji period.

A flag created by USCAR in 1954.

Another colored variant of mitsudomoe was created by the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR) in 1954. The American military occupier used the flag unofficially and informally for a brief period of time in 1954 but never officially adopted it. The flag was part of USCAR's effort in creating a Ryukyuan identity in order to counter the ever-intensifying reversion movement by Okinawan people, or Ryukyuans as the occupier labeled them. At first, USCAR tried to impose the complete ban on the display of the flag of Japan but was unable to do so because the U.S. acknowledged that Japan had "residual sovereignty" over the islands. USCAR grudgingly allowed special conditions on when the occupiee could fly the Japanese flag, and Okinawan people fought for an unconditional right. To counter the reversion movement, USCAR attempted to create a Ryukyuan national flag. The American occupier believed that the new flag, which was based on the family crest of the old Shō kings, would stir a Ryukyuan nationalistic spirit. USCAR displayed the flag at the Ryukyu-American Friendship Centers but was soon disappointed with the occupiee's apathy toward the former royal family's symbol. Most people did not even know what the symbol stood for. The unofficial and informal experiment went largely unnoticed by Okinawans. For this reason, historian Masaaki Gabe called this flag a "phantom flag."

This flag appeared in a historical novel titled Ryūkyū shigeki: Tomoebata no akebono (1946). The fiction was written by Chōchin Yara (1895–1957) and was mimeographed in Nara, to which he had fled the war. It remains unresolved whether USCAR referred to Yara's self-published novel.

The above-mentioned colored flag once circulated in mainland Japan, but not in Okinawa, has been erroneously displayed as "the flag of the Ryūkyū Kingdom" in Wikipedia for many years. In 2012, it got media coverage. In a column on the Ryūkyū Shimpō, Daisaku Kina, a part-time curator at Naha City Museum of History, pointed to the fact that Wikipedia hosted this flag with the wrong caption. He was unable to find contemporary sources in which the phantom flag is used as the national flag. He argued that, as a pre-modern polity, Ryūkyū had no notion of national flag. He raised concern about the circulation of misinformation.

Similar designs

The two-fold tomoe is almost identical in its design elements to the Chinese symbol known as a taijitu, while the three-fold tomoe is very similar to the Korean tricolored taegeuk. Also note that the negative space in between the swirls of a fourfold tomoe forms a swastika-like shape, which is fairly prominent in many Indian religions such as Hinduism and Jainism and Buddhism. A similar design can also be found in the some forms of the Celtic spiral triskele as well as with the Basque lauburu.

Gallery

• 
  Futatsudomoe, "twofold tomoe"
• 
  Hidari-mitsudomoe ("left threefold tomoe") is widely used in Shinto shrines and as a family crest
• 
  A mitsudomoe design on a taiko drum
• 
  Fourfold tomoe

See also

• Gankyil, a symbol in Tibetan and East Asian Buddhism composed of three swirling and interconnected blades
• Lauburu, the Basque cross
• Mon (emblem)
• Taegeuk
• Taijitu
• Triskelion, a widely used, ancient, triple-branched design based on either interlocking spirals or three bent human legs
• Gogok, a comma-shaped jewel found in the Korean Peninsula
• Pig dragon or zhūlóng, a zoomorphic stone artifact produced in neolithic China with a C- or comma-like shape

Sources

• Brown, Steven T. (June 1998). "From Woman Warrior to Peripatetic Entertainer: The Multiple Histories of Tomoe". Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. 58 (1): 183–199. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Darvas, György (2007). Symmetry: Cultural-historical and Ontological Aspects of Science-Arts Relations; the Natural and Man-made World in an Interdisciplinary Approach. Springer Science & Business Media . {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Miki (三木), Fumio (文雄) (1969). Haniwa: the clay sculpture of protohistoric Japan. Tuttle Publishing. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Kerr, George H. (2011) [1958]. Okinawa: The History of an Island People. Tuttle Publishing. ISBN 978-1-462-90184-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Repp, Martin (2002). "Protecting kami of the Japanese Nation". In Kubota, Hiroshi; Antoni, Klaus J.; Nawrocki, Johann; Wachutka, Michael (eds.). Religion and National Identity in the Japanese Context. LIT Verlag Münster. pp. 169–191. ISBN 978-3-825-86043-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Turnbull, Stephen (2012) [2002]. Samurai Heraldry. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-782-00014-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• van Gulik, Willem R. (1982). Irezumi. Brill Archive. ISBN 978-1-782-00014-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

External links

• Japan Emblem Library - tomoe design patterns Template:Ja
• JAANUS/ tomoemon
• The Shinto Trinity
• Aikido Sangenkai: Mitsu-domoe at the Kami-Shirataki Shrine