Session 126: Mountains in the Remaking: Sacred Peaks in Twentieth-Century Japan

Organizer: Andrew Bernstein, Lewis and Clark College

Chair and Discussant: Kären Wigen, Stanford University

The twentieth century in Japan, as elsewhere, saw the unprecedented remaking of sacred geography on scales both sweeping and intimate. Centralization of the nation-state, industrialization, and other modernizing forces radically altered the literal anal figurative space in which worship occurred. Especially visible targets of change were sacred mountains, which loomed large in the physical and imaginative landscape of Japan. Prominent by nature, these peaks had been augmented by centuries-long associations with powerful deities, political figures, and cultural heroes, making them valuable assets to those who could control them amidst the forces continually transforming the nation and the world.

Focusing on three sacred mountains—Takachiho in Kyushu, Konpira in Shikoku, and Fuji in Honshu—this panel examines how priests, pilgrims, mountaineers, bureaucrats, politicians, and businessmen pursued goals both complementary and conflicting on ground considered divine. Some of these goals, such as bolstering imperial charisma and celebrating military expansion, were confined to the decades before World War II, while others, such as the encouragement of tourism and sports, traversed the war. Still others—for example, the dismantling of State Shinto—were particular to postwar Japan. Together, these papers seek to advance a dialogue among scholars of religion, geography, and modernity about the twentieth-century reworking of sacred lands not only in Japan, but also throughout Asia and beyond.

Whose Fuji? Religion, Region, and State in the Fight for a National Symbol

Andrew Bernstein, Lewis and Clark College

On February 6, 1953, commuters passing through the plaza at Tokyo’s Shinbashi station encountered a remarkable sight: a portable shrine, shaped like Mount Fuji, whose three-and-a-half tons had been conveyed from a town in Yamanashi prefecture at the volcano’s northern edge. A huge crowd surrounded it, facing a stage supporting politicians, pundits, and policymakers who loudly condemned the "privatization" of Fuji, the "symbol of the Japanese people." Several months earlier, a committee of bureaucrats, clerics, and academics appointed by the Finance Ministry had determined the peak of Fuji to be the sacred, "inner" precinct of a Shinto shrine located to the south of the mountain, in Shizuoka prefecture. Protestors argued that the summit should instead be designated public, state-owned land.

The committee’s decision and the subsequent protest initiated a battle fought for twenty years in the Diet and the courts. On one level, this was just the latest episode in a centuries-long territorial battle between those living to the mountain’s north and those to its south. But the conflict over Fuji, an embodiment of national identity that had long been a destination for pilgrims and an inspiration to writers and artists, was more than a regional spat. Nationwide groups ranging from the Japan National Tourist Organization to the Association of Shinto Shrines joined the contest, turning this clash over physical boundaries into a high-stakes fight to define the legal and conceptual boundaries of religion, the state, and national identity in postwar Japan. Drawing on Diet records, court documents, and newspaper columns, my paper examines the motivations and consequences of this fight.

Resisting Acceleration: Designing the Climb to Konpira

Sarah E. Thal, Rice University

The shrine to Konpira on Mt. Zôzu has long been one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations in Japan. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, priests and donors carefully positioned images, buildings, gates and lanterns on the approach up the mountain, developing an impressive, esoteric worship complex that would attract increased pilgrimage, and thus income, to the shrine. The result was a winding climb through the mountain precincts that architectural scholars now consider a classic example of the principle of oku (interiority) in landscape design.

In the twentieth century, however, as local residents and investors sought to exploit the sacred and scenic "capital" of Mt. Zôzu to enhance tourism in the area, both the beauty and the difficulty of the long approach inspired development plans to bypass it: first (in 1910, then again in 1927 and 1931) by constructing a cable car up the mountain, then (in 1962) by building a scenic drive from the main gate up to the inner shrine. The controversies that ensued both invoked long-standing economic arguments and raised intellectual concerns more distinctive to the twentieth century: What is faith? Why bother with pilgrimage?

Such contestation over both change and continuity accentuates the delicate position occupied by mountain shrines such as Konpira, in which priests and donors, local shopkeepers and outside investors, town councils and national ministries, negotiated and continue to negotiate amid the competing interests of the economy, the environment, and Shinto, the oft-invoked "faith of Japan."

Takachiho in the Making of Imperial Tourism

Kenneth J. Ruoff, Portland State University

Domestic tourism within the Japanese empire boomed throughout the 1930s and indeed until 1942, and yet the story of tourism during the purported "dark valley" of the 1930s goes largely untold. The sanctification and commodification of historical sites had been ongoing since even before the Meiji Restoration, but during the 1930s, an "imperial history" travel boom provided localities with sacred imperial sites a special advantage in attracting tourists.

This travel boom caused a festering dispute about the location of Takachiho (site of the imperial ancestors’ descent to earth) to boil over. One of the two candidates, Mt. Takachiho, borders Miyazaki and Kagoshima prefectures. The other, Takachiho Village, is located 100 miles to the north, squarely in Miyazaki Prefecture. In the late 1930s, Kagoshima authorities endeavored to prove the authenticity of the peak easily accessed from their prefecture. Local notables in the mountain village of Takachiho responded with their own publicity campaign trumpeting the hallowed nature of their village’s location. Both sites drew tourists to Miyazaki Prefecture, so Miyazaki officials concentrated on branding their entire prefecture as the imperial heartland and thus a must-visit destination. Even when a Ministry of Education committee ruled on the authenticity of other imperial sites (e.g., the place where the Golden Kite landed on Emperor Jimmu’s bow) in 1940, no ruling on Takachiho was provided, and both areas continued to benefit from the influx of tourists.

An analysis of the dynamics that shaped this influx foregrounds the close relationship between the sanctification of Imperial Japan’s topography and the massification of tourism.