What’s at Stake in Designating Japan’s Sacred Mountains as unesco World Heritage Sites? Shugendo Practices in the Kii Peninsula

Abstract

In this article I assess the social and environmental impact of UNESCO (United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organization) World Heritage designation on a mountain, Mount Omine in Japan's Kii Peninsula (Mie, Wakayama, and Nara prefectures), paying special attention to a community of male ascetics who direct their principal energies toward performing austerities in the surrounding environment. Though situated in an isolated location, this place and these practices became the subject of great regional, national, and global interest after World Heritage designation by UNESCO in June 2004. The ascetic training grounds and lush forests make the Kii Peninsula an ideal candidate for UNESCO's landscape category of World Heritage. Since 1992 UNESCO has recognized sites that combine its two prior categories of natural and properties as cultural landscapes.Keywords: UNESCO-Shugendo-Mount Omine-World Heritage sites(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Increasingly, organizations such as unesco and the World Wildlife Fund are realizing that the majority of the world's surviving healthy forests and mountain landscapes are those considered sacred by inhabitants. This has impressed upon these organizations the importance of cultural factors in land conservation.1 Their recent efforts to protect sites can be seen against a larger background of sustainability advocates collaborating with leaders of world religious traditions. Such partnerships combine strong roots in science and a concrete vision for a sustainable future with a broad grassroots presence to help shape the world views and lifestyles of large segments of the earth's population (Gardner 2002, 5). unesco has mobilized this sacredness-culture-biodiversity triptypch (Hay-Edie 2000, 10) in its promotion of projects such as the Man [sic] and the Biosphere Program, Proclamations of the Oral and Intangible Masterpieces of Humanity (Unesco 2001; 2002) and the cultural landscapes category of World Heritage. In this article I focus on cultural landscapes in a discussion of austerities per- formed in the envi- ronment of a Japanese mountain.2During three summers of fieldwork as a participant- observer (2002, 2003, and 2007) and producer of a feature documentary film on contem- porary Shugendo practitioners in the Kii mountains (Abela and McGuire 2009), I tried to understand how unesco's idea of World Heritage inter- acts and sometimes collides with local and national Japa- nese understandings of self- identity, environmentalism, heritage preservation, and tourism. After giving a brief introduction to Shugendo mountain training in Japan's peaks, I provide an overview of unesco's activi- ties since its declaration of the World Heritage Convention in 1972. I argue that unesco World Heritage designation practices in Japan can be best understood as systems bestowing elite cultural prizes to stimulate sluggish tourist markets during the period of recession, zero growth, and social despair known as the lost decade(s) (1990s-present). This is in opposition to unesco's stated goals of protecting and safeguarding the cultural and patrimony of humanity. In important ways the ironies and contradictions of unesco designation in Japan mirror well-documented gaps between stated ideals and the legislative, political, budgetary, and human resource realities of Japan's national parks, national trea- sures, and cultural properties. As scholars have demonstrated, since the Meiji period Japan's national park policy has had a strong tendency toward tourism promotion and development over stewardship and conservation (Oyadomari 1985; Knight 2004, 2007, 2010; McCormack 2001; Kingston 2005), and the national treasure and cultural property system has prioritized the creation of an orthodox culture over safeguarding cultural assets and performance traditions (Law 1997; Thornbury 1997; Hafstein 2004; Oakes 2009; Loo 2007). …