Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan (review)

What is Kumano? To this question, D. Max Moerman answers: it is "a place at once real and imaginary" (p. 2). Kumano, registered as a World Heritage site since 2004, was historically one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in Japan. Located in the southern part of the Kii peninsula, in a marvelous landscape of mountains, dense forests, and sea, Kumano was far away from the centers of population of premodern Japan (for pilgrims from Kyoto, it was some seven hundred kilometers round trip, and making the pilgrimage could require from twenty to thirty days of travel). Its name appears for the first time in the classic mythology of the Nihon shoki (720) as the place of the tomb of Izanami, the mother goddess who created Japan with her spouse, Izanagi; it was thus identified as a land of death from the early stages of Japanese history. It was famous already in the early Heian period, since there is a tale in Nihon ryōiki (compiled late eighth-early ninth century) about an ascetic who continued to recite the Lotus Sutra even after he died in the Kumano mountains. But Kumano became truly popular in the Insei period, when abdicated emperors from Shirakawa to Go-Toba undertook many pilgrimages to its shrines. From the end of the eleventh century until the first quarter of the thirteenth century, four abdicated emperors made almost one hundred pilgrimages to Kumano. The golden age of the Kumano cult, this period saw the establishment of its institutional, economic, and religious foundations on a firm footing. The Kumano cult and pilgrimage continued to develop throughout medieval times, so that, in the seventeenth century, we find a popular phrase likening the pilgrims to Kumano to a trail of ants (ari no Kumano mōde).

In response to Allan Grapard's call to "study Japanese religious phenomena in situ, starting from the basic territorial unit and community in which they developed rather than from the more traditional focus on sects or major thinkers" (p. 3), Moerman takes as the subject of his book the totality of the cultural history and landscape of Kumano. But although focused on Kumano, Moerman's project also has a more ambitious scope; by describing Kumano "as an object of narrative and visual attention, as well as a center of ritual practice" (p. 5), he seeks to shed light on some of the main aspects of the Japanese medieval religious world in all its complexity and reality. Thus he writes:

The topics of this study—the combining of Buddha and kami cults, the ritualization of death, the political significance of religious practices, and the religious construction of gender—are in no sense unique to Kumano. It is my contention, however, that studying the ways in which these issues informed Kumano's particular religious landscape can increase our understanding of the larger, common religious landscape of premodern Japan.

(p. 5)

The book is divided into five chapters: chapter 1, "Situating Kumano"; chapter 2, "Emplacements"; chapter 3, "Mortuary Practices"; chapter 4, "The Theater of State"; chapter 5, "A Woman's Place"; and a conclusion, "An Ambivalent Utopia." These chapters are followed by a bibliography, character list, and index.

Reading this book is like experiencing oneself a picture recitation (etoki) of the Kumano pilgrimage site by a devoted and thoughtful performer. Moerman takes as the guiding framework for his discussion an iconographic document known as Nachi sankei mandara. This so-called mandala, dating from the sixteenth century, represented different scenes at the Nachi shrine. Kumano bikuni, itinerant female religious specialists who traveled all over the country to attract pilgrims and funds to Kumano, used the mandala as a prop in the etoki that they performed for this purpose.

Chapter 2 guides the reader through the layers of Kumano's religious landscape from its beginnings in classical mythology through the honji-suijaku combinatory system of the middle ages, when the three shrines...