Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan by Heather Blair (review)

Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan. By Heather Blair. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Mass., 2015. xviii, 345 pages. $49.95.

Heather Blair’s Real and Imagined is a rich analysis of the devotional activities and cultural imaginary surrounding Mt. Kinpusen in the Ōmine range, south of Nara. Blair focuses on the discourses and practices shaping Kinpusen as a pilgrimage destination and cultic site in early medieval Japan. The study can be situated within a series of recent monographs by religious studies scholars on mountain sites in East Asia, including D. Max Moerman’s Localizing Paradise, on Kumano (2005); Barbara Ambros’s Emplacing a Pilgrimage, on Ōyama (2008); and James Robson’s Power of Place, on Nanyue (2009). (That all four monographs were published by Harvard University Asia Center is, for this reviewer, a coincidence—though perhaps not for Blair or the press.)

All four scholars leverage their focus on place to transcend sectarian boundaries that delimit much scholarship on East Asian religions. All (including Robson on China) have been influenced by Allan Grapard’s emphasis on studying Japanese religions in situ and particular cultic sites. All use such threefold formulations of space as Henri Lefebvre’s “perceived, conceived, and lived space” and Michel Foucault’s “utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia.” Blair finds inspiration especially in Edward Soja’s model of “real, imagined, and real-and-imagined,” which helps transcend binary oppositions between physical and imagined space (pp. 2–3). And similarly to Robson on “Buddho-Daoism,” Moerman’s, Ambros’s, and Blair’s spotlight on combinatory cults of Buddhist deities and kami (the latter often analyzed as Shintō) transcends oppositions between Buddhism and “native” religions.

Blair’s monograph also belongs to recent work applying and reformulating Kuroda Toshio’s theories of the “power-bloc system” (kenmon taisei) characterizing medieval rule. Kuroda viewed medieval Japan as dominated by competing but interdependent blocs associated with the court, warrior houses, and religious establishments. Within this system, leading temples and shrines played key ideological roles but were also military and economic powers. One ramification of Kuroda’s theories has been to promote more-integrated studies of medieval political and religious history, taking close account of the social and ideological dynamics among the power blocs. Blair’s work can be read fruitfully alongside similarly positioned studies such as Mikael Adolphson’s The Gates of Power (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000). In many ways, Real and Imagined is an extended case study of Kuroda’s power-bloc theory, using Kinpusen and shifting relationships among Fujiwara regents, retired emperors, and the Fujiwara house temple Kōfukuji as exemplar. Blair focuses on the periods of rule by Fujiwara regents (mid-tenth to late eleventh century) and retired emperors (1086–1221), showing how pilgrimage to Kinpusen was both devotional and political.

Divided into three parts, Real and Imagined devotes part 1 to Heianperiod (794–1185) representations of Kinpusen, or “the mountain imagined” (p. 13). Chapter 1 shows tenth-century lay pilgrims to Kinpusen subverting divisions between the mountains as alien realm and the capital as civilized center. Starting with Fujiwara no Kaneie (929–90), successive regents undertook carefully orchestrated pilgrimages from the Heian capital to Kinpusen, appropriating the otherworldly charisma of the mountain “and expanding the domain of the civilized center” (p. 13). However, as Blair’s analysis aptly suggests, this appropriation simultaneously depended on such conceptual binaries to “bring home” the boundary-crossing benefits of pilgrimage. Blair places Kinpusen’s longstanding ban on women in this context (pp. 48–56). She suggests that “pushing women into the role of the excluded other” enabled male pilgrims “to imagine themselves as a single group united by gender” (p. 49). I found this contextualization, including the interweaving of past precedent and modern circumstance, compelling. But given the author’s invocations of Kinpusen as the only Japanese mountain still maintaining the ban year-round, I longed for some explanation of how Kinpusen does so despite the ban’s illegality under the postwar constitution.

Chapter 2 analyzes the mountain’s pantheon. It centers on...