Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods: The Politics of a Pilgrimage Site in Japan, 1573-1912

"Like Watanabe’s book, this covers a long period, spanning the early to late modern divide. It also is very tightly focused on one particular site, a sacred mountain on Shikoku, the smallest of the four major islands of the archipelago. This is a book about the history of religion in Japanese life, but rather than focus on a particular doctrine, the focus on the history of a particular site enables it to cross boundaries separating different religious traditions as well as the boundary that tends to separate histories of religion from social or economic history. This mountain becomes an important site of pilgrimage in the early modern period. An important Buddhist temple is established there, and this temple is later converted into a Shinto shrine after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter A lot of travel guides mention that contemporary Japan is a really religiously pluralistic place. People might attend a Shinto ceremony when they’re a child, and then have a Christian wedding, and then a Buddhist funeral and so forth. There’s this assumption that there’s quite a bit of religious pluralism. This book does a great job of providing some historical background to this, telling us how it actually worked and changed over time. It also provides some great insights into economic changes that took place over the early modern period, connected with pilgrimage and with different networks and local associations that sponsor people going on a pilgrimage. This particular religious complex is associated with the protection of seafaring vessels for trade through the inland sea. It also plays an important role in mobilising people in support of Japan’s first modern war, the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895. So, although there’s a lot here on religion and this complex set of religious beliefs, it also provides a lot of insights into all these different aspects of Japanese society and its changing face across three-and-a-half centuries."