Pilgrimage in the Marketplace

Ian Reader

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134625963
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

The study of pilgrimage often centres itself around miracles and spontaneous populist activities. While some of these activities and stories may play an important role in the emergence of potential pilgrimage sites and in helping create wider interest in them, this book demonstrates that the dynamics of the marketplace, including marketing and promotional activities by priests and secular interest groups, create the very consumerist markets through which pilgrimages become established and successful – and through which the 'sacred' as a category can be sustained.

By drawing on examples from several contexts, including Japan, India, China, Vietnam, Europe, and the Muslim world, author Ian Reader evaluates how pilgrimages may be invented, shaped, and promoted by various interest groups. In so doing he draws attention to the competitive nature of the pilgrimage market, revealing that there are rivalries, borrowed ideas, and alliances with commercial and civil agencies to promote pilgrimages. The importance of consumerism is demonstrated, both in terms of consumer goods/souvenirs and pilgrimage site selection, rather than the usual depictions of consumerism as tawdry disjunctions on the 'sacred.' As such this book reorients studies of pilgrimage by highlighting not just the pilgrims who so often dominate the literature, but also the various other interest groups and agencies without whom pilgrimage as a phenomenon would not exist.

1
Pilgrimages in Department Stores and Airport Malls

Modernity, Commerce and the Marketplace

Introduction: A Pilgrimage in a Department Store

During 1987 the Saikoku Reijōkai—the association of temples that together form one of Japan’s oldest and most popular pilgrimages, the Saikoku junrei¹ or pilgrimage to the thirty-three temples of Saikoku—commemorated the 1,000th anniversary of the founding of their pilgrimage. In reality, what they commemorated was the anniversary of its legendary founding in 987, when the retired² emperor Kazan, who had withdrawn from court life to take the Buddhist tonsure, is said to have set out on a pilgrimage to thirty-three temples enshrining Kannon, the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy. The temples were all in the Saikoku (western Japan) region that includes the ancient capitals of Nara and Kyoto, as well as Kumano, a region with deep connections to Japanese founding myths and religious traditions. Kazan’s pilgrimage, according to this story, replicated an earlier legendary journey by the eighth century Buddhist priest Tokudō, who had a vision in which he was taken on a tour of the Buddhist hells by Enma, the Buddhist guardian of the hells, who showed him how sinners suffered in the afterlife. Enma then took Tokudō on a visionary pilgrimage to thirty-three Saikoku temples and informed him that through the pilgrimage one could eradicate bad karma and avoid such hellish fates. Such stories and their message that doing the pilgrimage could eradicate one’s sins and ensure a better rebirth became a central attraction of the Saikoku pilgrimage for generations of pilgrims (Hayami 1983, Foard 1981: 236).

However, neither Tokudō’s visionary journey pilgrimage nor Kazan’s later pilgrimage are historically valid. Kazan did visit a number of pilgrimage sites in 986 (Hayami 1983: 235, MacWilliams 2004: 42), but there is no record of him doing the Saikoku pilgrimage. Indeed, not all of Saikoku’s thirty-three were extant in 986 (Hayami 1980: 268). Likewise, there is no record of Tokudō making such a journey in the eighth century, when fewer still of the Saikoku temples existed (Satō 2004: 23–24). The earliest realistic documentation of the Saikoku pilgrimage comes from 1161, when a priest from the prominent Buddhist temple Onjōji (popularly known as Miidera) is recorded as having made a pilgrimage to thirty-three temples dedicated to Kannon (Hayami 1983: 281).

Historical accuracy, however, is not necessarily the most pressing concern of those who oversee and publicise pilgrimage sites or of those who visit them. Legends redolent with miraculous promises of liberation in the afterlife and that link the pilgrimage to retired emperors and Buddhist guardians of the underworld are far more conducive to making the pilgrimage attractive than are mere historical narratives. Such legendary histories have certainly been a prominent means through which the Saikoku temples have promoted themselves over the ages. The 1,000th anniversary of Kazan’s (legendary) pilgrimage was used to this end by the Saikoku temples during 1987 with an extensive publicity campaign involving ceremonies, rituals, public displays of normally secret icons, and exhibitions of the temples’ art treasures. This campaign and its related exhibitions were supported and cosponsored by various commercial concerns and interest groups including national and private railway companies that serviced the areas through which the pilgrimage ran, media agencies (including newspapers and broadcasters), and department stores. The campaign was successful in that, although the 1980s were a period of general pilgrimage growth for the Saikoku temples, 1987 proved to be its apex, with pilgrim numbers reaching a peak never reached since (Satō 2004: 142–143).

One of the 1987 events was an exhibition cosponsored by the pilgrimage temples in conjunction with NHK, the Japanese national television and media broadcasting corporation; two newspapers, the Kyoto Shinbun and the Nihon Keizai Shinbun; and commercial firms including the Kintetsu private railway company and department store conglomerate. The Saikoku exhibition took place during August and September 1987 at several Kintetsu department stores in cities in the Saikoku region such as Osaka, Kyoto and Gifu. I attended the event held at Kintetsu’s Abenobashi department store in Osaka; the publicity materials I acquired from the Kyoto and Gifu exhibitions indicate that the same pattern occurred at each location.

The exhibition, which took up one whole floor of the store, consisted of three parts. One was a junrei ichi (‘pilgrimage market’) consisting of stalls manned by workers dressed as market vendors from the Tokugawa (1603–1867) era and decorated with banners and selling ‘traditional’ Japanese foodstuffs and artefacts special, as signs informed visitors, to the Saikoku region. The second was an exhibition of paintings by the artist Maruyama Iwane, depicting the Kannon images of the Saikoku temples. The third was a sunafumi (literally, ‘stepping on the soil’) miniature version of the Saikoku pilgrimage in which statues representing each of the thirty-three temples had been ranged around the floor in a circuit. On the ground before each icon was a sack of soil taken from the courtyard of the temple; by stepping on the soil of each temple in turn and praying before each icon, participants could do the pilgrimage in microcosm.

Alongside this miniature pilgrimage were two nōkyōjo (temple offices for the stamping of pilgrimage scrolls and books), each representing one of the temples on the route; pilgrims in Saikoku, as on other multisite Japanese pilgrimages, normally carry either special books or scrolls that are stamped at each temple they visit. Although pilgrims have to visit each site to complete

Figure 1.1 Sunafumi Saikoku pilgrimage at a department store in Osaka, September 1987.

such multisite pilgrimages, they need not do so in any fixed order, and it is common for them to do such pilgrimages in stages, over an extended time, rather in one go, and in any order they choose (Reader and Swanson 1997: 238–242). The completed book or scroll is not just evidence that one has completed the pilgrimage. It also serves as a commemoration and souvenir of the journey (see the following and Chapter 6), as a ritual object in memorial services for the spirits of the dead and, in popular pilgrimage lore, as a ‘passport’ to the Buddhist Pure Land and as a sign that one has avoided the hells visualised by Enma and Tokudō (Shinno 1980: 52). During the exhibition, five temples, including some of the most distant and least readily accessed from Osaka, were represented in this way. As a result, people could conveniently ‘visit’ at least two (and as many as five if they came every day) of the temples on the route and thus complete part of the Saikoku pilgrimage while enjoying the exhibition and doing some shopping. Many were clearly happy to take advantage of this ready-made access to distant temples, as was evident by the lines of those with books and scrolls to be stamped. People also had the opportunity to start their pilgrimages at the exhibition, for blank pilgrims’ books and scrolls were on sale and several people took advantage of this to buy them and then ‘visit’ the temples represented there. Priests associated with the pilgrimage with whom I spoke emphasised that one aim of the event was to encourage people to ‘sign up’ as pilgrims in such ways.

It was by no means a singular event. Japanese pilgrimage temples have a long history of publicity and marketing campaigns that include exhibitions

Figure 1.2 People getting scrolls and books stamped at the temporary temple office for the Saikoku temple Enkyōji in Kintetsu department store (Osaka, September 1987).

and public displays in order to heighten their profiles and attract pilgrims. The practice of kaichō (‘opening the curtain’) in which normally secret and hidden Buddhist icons (kept from public view because they are believed to be endowed with esoteric powers and are seen as especially powerful because they are hidden) are temporarily or periodically opened to public view, has for centuries been a stratagem used by many Buddhist temples to attract crowds of worshippers and to raise funds via the offerings and donations made at such events.³ A variant form of such displays, known as degaichō, in which icons and images of specific temples or pilgrimage routes are put on display at distant places to draw attention to the sites concerned and to drum up custom, has been widely used to similar ends (McCallum 1994: 170–171, 191–192, Yamanoi 1987: 240–246). Satō Hisamitsu (2004) has shown how such events have commonly been successful, by focusing on the Chichibu pilgrimage, a thirty-four temple route centred on Kannon,⁴ that is readily accessible from Tokyo and that has long drawn its clientele mainly from the Tokyo region. During the Tokugawa era, the Chichibu temples organised numerous campaigns to attract pilgrims from Edo (present day Tokyo), including both kaichō campaigns and degaichō events held in the city itself, that helped boost pilgrim numbers in Chichibu on a regular basis (Satō 2004: 135, 148). Such degaichō events were normally in Tokugawa Japan held in the grounds of Buddhist temples such as Ekōin, which hosted 166 such events in Edo (Tokyo) between 1676 and the mid-nineteenth century; in all, some 741 degaichō and 841 kaichō events were held in the city between 1650 and 1850, largely to raise funds for temple restorations and to attract new devotees and pilgrims. Such events were not simply centred on icons and reverence but were infused with street entertainment, souvenirs and all manner of visual diversion (Kornicki 1994: 178–179). They were part of a wider development of popular entertainment and tourism, and during these events, temple grounds

were transformed into a pleasure district crowded with vendors and attractions of all sorts, even including freak shows … performances by strong men and female horseback riders were extremely popular. (Ishimori 1995: 15)

In more recent times, however, degaichō have often taken place not in temple courtyards but in seemingly more ‘secular’ locations such as the department store mentioned earlier. In part, this is because department stores in Japan have, since their development in the nineteenth century, assumed a prominent role as settings for public displays and cultural exhibitions and because, located in the centres of cities, they can readily draw in large crowds of people (Young 1999, Mori 2005: 19–20). Such secular settings also facilitate the representation of pilgrimage as a cultural and artistic phenomenon while often downplaying any overt religious connections to broaden their appeal. This is especially so in the contemporary Japanese context, where secularising tendencies are evident, religious affiliation is declining (Reader 2012a) and where Buddhist temples have been struggling to sustain themselves as a result (Reader 2011a, Nelson 2012). This has led them to seek out new ways of engaging with the public, a point that was made to me in 2008 by the representative of a public relations agency that had been retained by a leading Buddhist pilgrimage temple to publicise it via a series of exhibitions similar to the Saikoku event described previously. With increasing competition from elsewhere—not just other pilgrimages but from tourist places nationally and internationally—Japanese pilgrimage sites, he said, had to market themselves in such ways if they were going to be still attract visitors.⁵

Kaichō and such exhibitions thus remain important strategies for pilgrimage temples today. The Saikoku pilgrimage temples held a new kaichō campaign from September 2008 until summer 2010 in which each temple displayed, for a limited period, their hidden icons, some of which had not been seen for more than a century and many of which are normally only put on display at very lengthy intervals, but which on this occasion were displayed far ahead of their normal display schedules.⁶ The Chichibu pilgrimage temples also held an out-of-sequence kaichō in 2008. Normally the Chichibu icons are displayed every twelve years, but this event happened just five years after the previous kaichō in 2003. Many other exhibitions with pilgrimage themes also occurred around the same time, including an exhibition of Saikoku pilgrimage temple treasures at the national museum in the ancient capital, Nara, cosponsored by the temples, NHK, the Yomiuri newspaper company and a number of Shikoku-pilgrimage-related exhibitions and events were also sponsored in part by NHK (Reader 2007a). Other pilgrimage routes also have used this strategy in recent years, including the temples on the thirty-three-stage Mogami Kannon pilgrimage route in Yamagata prefecture, which also held a kaichō for similar reasons in 2008.

The Saikoku and Chichibu kaichō of 2008 and the 1987 Saikoku department store exhibition are aspects of this same phenomenon, of displays and events intended to publicise pilgrimages and increase their clientele. They also indicate a point central to this book: that pilgrimages cannot rely on a continual flow of pilgrims and that those who oversee them need to engage in publicity activities in order to ensure that their sites continue to attract pilgrims and flourish. They also underline another important aspect of pilgrimage: that pilgrimages can wax and wane in popularity over the ages. The Saikoku and Chichibu cases confirm this. The 1987 event cited above occurred at a time when there was widespread talk of a ‘pilgrimage boom’ (junrei būmu⁷) in Japan. Satō’s aforementioned study indicates that pilgrim numbers were rising in Saikoku and buoyant in Chichibu at the time. By the early 2000s, pilgrim numbers in Saikoku and Chichibu were falling significantly, down to about 22,000 in Chichibu in 2002. In the kaichō year of 2003, however, and testament to how such events could boost pilgrimages, Chichibu numbers rose dramatically to over 78,000 (Satō 2004: 143–154). The following years, according to temple officials in Chichibu, saw a sharp decline again; Saikoku priests also said much the same. The irregular kaichō events the pilgrimage temples put on in that year, which included displaying icons that, if the normal schedule of display had been followed, would not have been seen for many years or in the lifetime of many people, were specifically designed to boost flagging numbers.⁸

Pilgrimage in an Airport Mall

Twenty years after the apparent Japanese pilgrimage ‘boom’ of the 1980s, pilgrim numbers had, by the early 2000s, fallen on many routes in Japan. Priests in Saikoku and Chichibu were not the only ones to feel perturbed by this fluctuation, as numerous events designed to rectify the situation occurred throughout Japan. One such event took place from August 27 through 31, 2008, in the shopping mall at Centrair, the recently developed international airport outside Nagoya in Japan. This involved replicas of three of Japan’s better-known regional pilgrimage routes—the Sasaguri, Chita Hantō and Shōdoshima eighty-eight-stage pilgrimages, all of which are modelled on perhaps Japan’s best-known pilgrimage, the eighty-eight-temple Shikoku pilgrimage. It involved a sunafumi replication of the three routes, using soil from each of the sites to construct a miniature version of the pilgrimages, and local products from all three areas were on sale along with exhibits highlighting the attractions of the areas involved. The event was organised by the Sasaguri, Chita Hantō and Shōdoshima pilgrimage temple associations along with the Centrair airport authorities. Similar to the Saikoku exhibition cited earlier, it was also supported by commercial and media agencies, in this case including the Chūnichi newspaper company based in Nagoya and the tourist branch of Meitetsu, a major private rail company in the Chūbu area that, like the aforementioned Kintetsu company, also owns department stores and travel agencies.

Similar to the 2008 Saikoku and Chichibu kaichō, this event was spurred by the worries of priests on the Sasaguri, Shōdoshima and Chita Hantō routes that pilgrim numbers were declining; in Shōdoshima alone, for example, they had fallen regularly through the 1990s and 2000s, from about 32,000 in the late 1980s to just 12,500 in 2007, and falling by about 1,500 per year in the 2000s.⁹ The priests, worried that such decline could threaten the very existence of their routes, felt that new modes of publicity were needed to rectify the situation. Whereas they had previously relied on pamphlets, posters and guidebooks, along with word of mouth, to publicise their pilgrimages, they had, by 2008, realised this alone was not enough; they had to heighten their profile by taking the pilgrimage to the people by putting on exhibitions in contemporary public gathering places. On this occasion, they chose not a temple or even a department store for the event but one of the most common, consumerist, transient and ‘secular’ of gathering places, a shopping mall in an airport. According to priests involved in the event, people are no longer visiting temples and shrines in their leisure time, but instead are going to other, consumer-oriented attractions such as shopping malls. If temples wanted to make people aware of their existence what they have to offer, they had to go into such places themselves, rather than waiting and hoping that people would come to them.¹⁰

The exhibition also fitted with the agenda of the Centrair authorities, who were seeking to attract visitors to the airport and to make it into a competitor for Japan’s major air hubs (Narita and Kansai International). Their plans involved making it into a major visitor attraction, in which (in a manner successfully used in Japan by department stores) its extensive shopping malls could be projected both as consumer centres and as cultural entrepôts holding exhibitions and related events. They saw the pilgrimage exhibition as one such means of doing this, and various shops within the mall also joined the act by selling special commemorative bentō (lunches) and other such goods for participants. The event thus allowed participants to perform the pilgrimage in miniature while enjoying a day out shopping and eating at the mall (or while waiting for their flight). This combination of consumerism and pilgrimage proved remarkably successful in that around 50,000 people took part in the event over the five-day period, with long queues of people to perform the miniature pilgrimages, giving the priests hope that their pilgrimages might benefit as a result. This encouraged them to plan future publicity exhibitions, the next of which was held in Fukuoka (the largest city of southern Japan, and near to Sasaguri) in 2011. According to the head of the Shōdoshima pilgrimage temples, there was a slight increase in pilgrims there in the aftermath of the event, which he attributed to the interest and publicity generated by the airport exhibition.¹¹

An Invented Pilgrimage in Korea

In 2008, the same year as the Centair airport event and the Saikoku and Chichibu out-of-normal-sequence displays of their hidden icons, a new thirty-three-stage Kannon pilgrimage route was inaugurated in Korea. It had been developed through cooperation between the Korean National Tourist Office and Korea’s main Buddhist secta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Conventions
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Pilgrimages in Department Stores and Airport Malls: Modernity, Commerce and the Marketplace
• 2 Of Swans, Lakes and Constructions of the Sacred
• 3 Religious Authorities and the Promotion of Pilgrimages
• 4 Merchants, Transport, Guidebooks and the Democratisation of Pilgrimage
• 5 Pilgrims in the Marketplace: Shaping, Producing and Consuming Pilgrimage
• 6 Scrolls, Singing Toilet-Paper Roll Holders, Martin Luther’s Socks and Other Sacred Goods of the Marketplace
• 7 Strawberries, Camel Coolers and Luxury Hotels: Heritage, Hiking, Holidays and the Consumer Rebranding of Pilgrimage
• 8 Concluding Comments
• Notes
• References
• Index