Taira no Masakado

Taira no Masakado was a warrior aristocrat of the Heian period, from a branch of the Taira clan settled in the Kantō plain, in eastern Japan. In the tenth century, after getting entangled in land and blood disputes among relatives, he was accumulating military power until openly confronting the central government of Kyoto. Between 939 and 940 he took eight eastern provinces and took the step that no warrior had dared to take: he proclaimed himself Shinnō, New Emperor, planting a parallel throne in front of the court. That rebellion, the first that challenged imperial authority so directly, lasted little. In 940 he was defeated and killed by Taira no Sadamori and Fujiwara no Hidesato, and his severed head was sent to Kyoto and publicly exposed as that of a traitor. His military failure, however, was not the end of his story, but the beginning of the legend.

The attribute that defines Masakado is his severed head, which tradition denies to let die. Exposed in Kioto entire months, it is said that it did not corrupt, that it maintained the eyes open and the gesture of rage, and that it gnashed the teeth claiming its body. One night, according to the legend, the head detached from the scaffold and flew through the airs towards the east, seeking the trunk that they had torn from it, until falling in Shibasaki, a fishing village of the Kantō that with time would be Edo and then Tokio. There it remained buried, and over it the kubizuka was raised, the mound of the head. Masakado is not, then, a spirit of diffuse powers, but the will concentrated in that head that does not rest: a defeated rebel whose resentment transformed him, after death, into a force that no one in the Kantō has dared to provoke.

The tumulus of Masakado remains standing in Ōtemachi, the financial district of Tokyo, a few steps from the Imperial Palace and on one of the most expensive soils on the planet, intact among skyscrapers. Its fame as cursed comes from concrete and documented facts. After the great Kantō earthquake of 1923, which devastated the area, the Ministry of Finance erected provisional offices on the cleared land of the tumulus; in less than two years the minister and more than a dozen officials fell ill and died, and accidents multiplied, all attributed to Masakado. In 1940, exactly one thousand years after his death, a lightning bolt set fire to the ministry buildings. An attempt by the occupation forces to raze the mound with excavators ended in a fatal accident. Since then the companies in the surroundings care for the place and render ceremonies to it. Venerated also as one of the three deities of the Kanda Myōjin shrine, protector of Tokyo, Masakado is feared and honored at the same time, and figures among the three great onryō of Japan.