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

The densely wooded mountain of Ōyama in the Tanzawa-Ōyama Quasi National Park is a popular hiking destination whose summit offers clear views of Mt. Fuji. The modest early twentieth-century temple and shrine buildings on its slopes and its few remaining premodern monuments and icons offer little hint of its status as an important regional religious center during the early modern period. Barbara Ambros has brought this history to life in a lucid and illuminating book that also explicates the complex institutional structure of religious institutions of that era. The copious sources uncovered by Ambros’s scrupulous detective work reveal this book’s genesis in her doctoral dissertation, which she has transformed into a tightly woven, elegantly written narrative.

Ambros’s choice of Ōyama is intriguing because the site was not significant in the ancient and medieval eras, was not located in an old imperial capital, and was not a nationally famous pilgrimage site patronized by elites. It was, however, long recognized as a sacred mountain whose summit shrines were founded in 890, according to its earliest mention in the Engi shiki compiled by Emperor Daigō (r. 897–930). However, its Ōyamadera engi, written in the late thirteenth century (whose oldest version dates to 1532), proposes an eighth-century origin and identification with a famous monk (Rōben) as founder. Because most surviving records date to the early modern period, when it flourished as both a regional training center for Buddhist monks (Kogi Shingon sect affiliated with Mount Kōya) and a popular pilgrimage destination of Kanto-region residents, Ambros uses the site as an exemplar of the religious life of that era. She also addresses its transformation into a Sect Shintō organization in the Meiji period.

Ambros’s study joins a growing body of recent scholarship in English that reconsiders early modern Japanese religion. Previous scholarship was dominated by writings about its intellectual history centering on Neo-Confucianism, nativism, and important Zen monks. These new studies assess the social, economic, political, and artistic dimensions of religious practice and institutions of this period for citizens from all walks of life.¹ Many focus on one particular religious tradition, but Ambros, citing Herman Ooms,² notes “this obscures the plurality of the religious landscape” in that it does not address the “highly combinatory nature of premodern Japanese religions” (p. 2). To highlight this important issue, Ambros examines broader trends through the lens of a single religious complex, as several others have done.

Ambros’s book is distinguished from other site-specific studies by its aim of demonstrating that “location or place, an aspect of a religious site that is often ignored, constitutes a central force in shaping religion” (p. 17). Her approach is indebted to that of Allan Grapard,³ who proposed that premodern Japanese religion developed at specific sites in ways particular to these sites, where they combined elements of both Shintō and Buddhism in accordance with local social and economic conditions (p. 3). Ambros also drew inspiration from Helen Hardacre’s study of religious activities in the Kanto region.⁴ But her perspective differs from Hardacre’s, in that she places “a specific site, Ōyama, into regional, sectarian, parishioner, and pilgrimage networks” (p. 238), using Ōyama as a vantage point from which to draw conclusions about religious institutions of the early modern period which “occupied a middle ground that was neither at the center of political power nor at the margins of society” (p. 18). Her research draws upon a wealth of regional and local documents, including gazetteers and the pioneering efforts of local historians (p. 13). The complex and convoluted development of the institutions that managed Ōyama and their interactions with the mountain’s devotees are carefully plotted in her book’s seven chapters, each organized around discrete but overlapping themes.

In chapter 1, “From a Mountain Retreat to a Pilgrimage Center,” Ambros considers the mythic origins...