Adding Value (with Limits): Pilgrimage and Women’s Exclusion in Japan’s Sacred Mountains

Caleb Carter

doi:10.15239/hijbs.02.02.01

Abstract

Adding Value (with Limits): Pilgrimage and Women’s Exclusion in Japan’s Sacred Mountains

Highlights

Imagine for a moment that you were alive in eighteenth-century Japan, undertaking a journey to the famous site of Togakushi 戸隠, located in the northern peaks of Shinano 信濃 province
Resting outside of its thatch-roofed hut with a cup of tea, you gaze at an array of passersby: clerics of the mountain’s fifty-three cloisters, local rice and soba farmers, loggers, charcoal producers, and basket weavers
You turn left at a fork and ascend a road lined with temple cloisters, operated by the clerics and available for accommodations

Summary

State Support and Oversight

To understand the economic and institutional structure of Mount Togakushi in the early modern period, it is helpful to briefly recount events in the half century prior. Additional support came in the early seventeenth century under the new Tokugawa military government, from its founder Tokugawa Ieyasu 徳川家康 (1543–1616) and Ieyasu’s sixth son Matsudaira Tadateru 松平忠輝 (1592–1683) Through their patronage, the temples were bestowed one thousand units (koku 石) of arable land as well as the shogun’s vermillion seal, which placed the site beyond the jurisdiction of the provincial constable (shugo 守護).[12] In return, the temples became faithful stewards of the military government, using its capacity as a spiritually potent site to conduct prayers for the well-being of the state and hold regular memorial services for Ieyasu and subsequent deceased shoguns.[13]. The land-based income that was available remained relatively fixed, save for the incremental expansion of arable soil over the course of the Edo period These circumstances gave all members of the temple community, even those affiliated with Okunoin, incentive to develop new rituals, beliefs, and practices that would cultivate an expanded base of patronage for the site

Pilgrimage and Travel to Togakushi

The Introduction of Mountain Climbing

Purity versus the Purse

Primary Sources

Secondary Studies