Carmen Blacker

The Religious Traveller in the Edo Period

A curious and as yet little discussed phenomenon of the Edo period is the immense increase among ordinary lay people in journeys of pilgrimage. From the middle of the seventeenth century people of all classes, alone and in groups, began to make their way in ever larger throngs to the Ise Shrines, to Kōyasan, to Zenkōji, to Fujisan, and to the various circuits of thirty-three places dedicated to Kannon and the eighty-eight places dedicated to Kōbō Daishi.

Minakata Kumagusu: A Neglected Japanese Genius

In Japan everyone knows that it was Yanagita Kunio and Origuchi Shinobu who were the giant pioneers of folklore studies. Everyone recognises that it was due to their prodigious efforts in tramping the countryside to collect tales and legends, to observe rituals in remote mountain villages, to note holy trees and tombs with curious names, that the disciplined study of folklore came into existence. These were the two men who by seeing connections between scattered legends, rites and symbols which before had gone unremarked, and who by meticulously recording and classifying their findings, showed us what riches were to be discovered in the Japanese tradition. Both these men led lives which conformed by and large with the expected image of the scholar in Japan, and both left behind them lineages of students who perpetuate their names and accord them the honours their achievements deserve.

The Catalpa Bow. A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan

The bridge the sacred beings witch animals the other world Ascesis the ancient Sibyl the living goddess the blind medium the ascetics initiation the visionary journey the symbolic journey the ascetics power village oracles mountain oracles exorcism conclusion.