ABSTRACT
Japan has both a highly developed network of pilgrimages and a rich academic tradition of studying them. Throughout the country there are hundreds of pilgrimages of different types, along with a complex set of vocabularies to describe them. Pilgrimage has also played a significant role in the expansion and development of Buddhism, Shinto and the Japanese new religions, all of which have constructed sacred geographies as a way of expanding their clienteles and public standings. Pilgrimage and associated practices are deeply embedded in the religious and folklore structures of Japan. The first is that Japanese studies of pilgrimage have been somewhat insular and have focussed very much on Japan, with studies of non-Japanese pilgrimages carried out by Japanese academics being comparatively rare. The folklore specialist and historian Shinno Toshikazu has argued that pilgrimage was one of the main pillars of Japanese religion. Japanese scholars have developed some broad definitional/theoretical typologies for analysing pilgrimage in Japan.
