ABSTRACT
The island is small, remote, and uninhabited, save for a single male priest of Munakata Grand Shrine, yet it occupies a central node in representations of Japan’s cultural and religious heritage. In other forums unrelated to the World Heritage effort, the shrine’s access policies gained steady attention from July 2015, when Okinoshima’s tentative World Heritage status was publicly announced. The signatures were sent along with a petition to review the legality of women’s exclusion to various national, prefectural, and local parties engaged in the World Heritage effort, as well as to the World Heritage Centre. In July 2017, the World Heritage Committee decided to inscribe “Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites in the Munakata Region” on the World Heritage List. In contrast, a wealth of scholarship in Japanese addresses the technical aspects of tangible heritage objects—often religious in nature—such as buildings, statues, and paintings within fields like archaeology and architectural conservation.
