Emplacing a Pilgrimage: The Ōyama Cult and Regional Religion in Early Modern Japan (review)

On his way to Ōyama in 1680, the samurai Jijūken Ikkishi had a frightening experience: “Before our eyes were glimpses of peaks and plains, clouds and fog, flashes of lightning; in our ears, the roar of thunder and [the howl of] frigid winds. Our hands and feet were soaked from passing showers, our hearts awestruck and shrinking with fear of the thunders' tremors.” What did Ikkishi make of such an apocalyptic spectacle? He simply accepted it, acknowledging that “these are Fudō's true colors” (kore Fudō no shōtai nari).¹

As Barbara Ambros argues in Emplacing a Pilgrimage, at the time of Ikkishi's journey, the Ōyama cult was indeed anchored in the notion that the peak was the inaccessible realm of frightening and volatile deities—none more frightening and volatile than Fudō. Shugendō (mountain asceticism) overtones ran deep in this “potent landscape” (p. 37). However, Ambros continues, economic considerations eventually prompted the local clergy to tone down the rhetoric of inaccessibility and to promote mass pilgrimages; Ōyama thus made the transition from realm of the vengeful and the immortals to a welcoming travel destination. The transition was virtually completed by the second half of the Tokugawa period. By the time another samurai, Ikegawa Shunsui, visited the peak in 1768, he could not help but remark that the local clergy “covets money to a great extent”; by the mid-nineteenth century Ōyama was such a popular destination that a female visitor noticed “countless pilgrims from near and far.”²

For all its purported otherworldliness, in short, Ōyama (like most sacred mountains of early modern Japan) ended up becoming well grounded in the mundane. Emplacing a Pilgrimage follows just such a trajectory from secluded to welcoming, from awe-striking to accommodating, all the while engaging the reader with the story of a complex landscape and its many connotations.

Why Ōyama? Ambros offers two compelling reasons. The first is that, given the “highly combinatory nature of premodern Japanese religions” (p. 2), it is more useful to examine a specific site/place than a “tradition,” for it is by “emplacing” a cult that we become able to dig more efficiently through its various layers of meaning and to contextualize it within a web of social, economic, and political interests. In this respect, Ambros's approach is inspired by previous scholarship, as she herself points out: Allan Grapard's monograph on Kasuga and, more recently, Helen Hardacre's work on the southern Kantō region, Sarah Thal's study of Konpira, and Nam-lin Hur's examination of Asakusa Sensōji have all emphasized the importance of place over sectarian affiliation. The second reason is that Ōyama grants us access to “the socio-economic landscape of the Kantō-Tōkai region” and provides us with “a lens through which to view the early modern Japanese religious landscape” as a whole (p. 3). While the latter claim may strike some readers as slightly hyperbolic, Ambros does not necessarily overstate her case: while she does contend that “[t]he pilgrimage to Ōyama is emblematic of early modern society” (p. 174), she also points out that this particular mountain benefited from site- and institution-specific advantages that other sites of cult did not have (proximity to Edo, presence of oshi pilgrim leaders, and a solid network of confraternities, to name a few).

Ambros begins by tracing the complex's history and mapping the ways in which Ōyama's “landscape was inhabited, traversed, and interpreted” (p. 19) from the medieval to the early modern periods (introduction and chapter 1). Through an examination of its foundation records (engi), she follows Ōyama's transformation from remote to popular, a development linked in turn to important changes in patronage, from bakufu-based to dependent on the general population. This evolution required, among other things, more openness and, consequently, an adjustment of the rules against pollution originally enforced on the peak. By the late eighteenth...