Holy strollers: Shikoku's popular pilgrimages bridge the gap between Buddhism and tourism. But can the rest of the moribund tourism industry succeed in selling the spiritual?

Japan, Inc., Sept, 2003 by Tony McNicol

THE DOMESTIC JAPANESE TOURISM industry might be experiencing some turbulence at the moment, but one particular sector is soaring smoothly. The famous Shikoku island pilgrimage is only one of hundreds of sacred routes on the archipelago. According to the Shikoku Holy Places Association, an estimated 150,000 tourists completed the island's 88-temple pilgrimage in 2002, up 50,000 from just five years ago. Is this the portent of a new passion for religious tourism in Japan?

Kinki Nihon Tourism has a section in its brochure called kokoro no tabi (journeys of the heart). Its tours follow ancient pilgrimage routes to temples and shrines across Japan. The tour company, one of Japan's largest, seems to have a found a ray of heavenly (and potentially profitable) light breaking through the dark clouds of the economy.

According to Eiko Sato, a spokeswoman for the company, customers who buy "journeys of the heart" tours are seeking a unique experience. "There is a very clear goal to their trips. Regular tourists just go to a place and see lots of things. But these trips aren't like that. They are about coming into contact with Buddhism."

The company's shortest and cheapest packages are day trips from Tokyo, while the longest is the Shikoku 88-temple pilgrimage. According to Sato, most customers tend towards the silver haired end of the Japanese population, probably because younger people with jobs and families can't take the time off. Customers on the popular Shikoku tours are mostly in their 70s and 80s, although trips from Tokyo to temples and shrines in the suburbs attract younger pilgrims. The 11-day Shikoku trips are an important money maker for the company. Last year alone, Kinki Nihon Tourist sold nearly 5,000 [yen] 425,000 Shikoku pilgrimage tours.

On busy spring and autumn days in Shikoku (high season for the pilgrimage), Zentsu-ji temple's courtyards bustle with white-robed pilgrims. Holy place number 75 on the Shikoku pilgrimage, the temple is one of the island's busiest and biggest. Like many of the 88, Zentsu-ji provides accommodation and food for pilgrims. The temple says that around 1,600 of the 150,000 pilgrims that pass through its grounds yearly pay the [yen] 5,775 fee to stay a night at the temple.

Virtually all of the pilgrims will pay [yen] 500 at the temple office for a priest to stamp souvenir scrolls or books with a crimson seal and inscribe the brush-written temple name. With 88 temples to visit in 10 or 12 days, pilgrims have to hustle. There's rarely much time to do more than perform the prescribed prayers and pay for the stamps.

Close to the Zentsu-ji is the birthplace of the pilgrimage's founder, the monk Kukai--better know as Daishi Kobo. In addition to founding the 88-temple pilgrimage, this charismatic polymath taught Buddhism, built dams and reportedly invented kana. The teaching he introduced developed into the modern Shingon sect, a branch of the religion with some of the flavor of Thai and Tibetan Buddhism. The pilgrimage traces the route that Kukai is believed to have walked on a solitary journey towards enlightenment. There are countless folk tales and special sites in Shikoku and other parts of Japan associated with the priest, one of the most popular saints in Japanese Buddhism. Most devotees carry a staff bearing the words "we two walk together," a proxy for the first pilgrim.

Koichi Osada is a Waseda university sociologist and a member of a research group involved in a 10-year project on the pilgrimage. He says that the skyrocketing number of pilgrims is partly due to improvements in the island's transport system. There are now three bridges linking Shikoku to the mainland. The last of them--the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, the world's longest suspension bridge--was constructed five years ago, making day trips from Osaka possible and creating a boon for the city's tour companies. Likewise, intensive Tokyo funded road construction programs in Shikoku (though often attacked as unnecessary and environmentally destructive) have made the 88 temples more accessible.

"One reason why the numbers of Shikoku pilgrims [has increased] is that people always wanted to go, hut for whatever reason couldn't. Now it has become easy," says Osada.

Improved roads have encouraged bus tours and drivers from the mainland. All the same, more roads and bridges haven't helped the rest of the domestic tourism industry much. According to the Japanese Tourism Association, the total number of domestic sightseeing trips has declined 5 percent since 1996. Japanese have been shunning domestic travel and heading overseas. Critics of Japanese government policy towards tourism, like the writer Alex Kerr, hardly find that a surprise. "Tourism [in Japan] has been a conspicuous failure," Kerr writes. "It was redressed in the belief that jobs in these areas detracted from real value producing jobs on the factory floor."

In his most recent book Dogs and Demons, Kerr deplores the government's funding of rural road-building and construction. He argues that what the author Alan Booth called "state sponsored vandalism" hardly makes the countryside more attractive to tourists. In any case, the government's belated realization that service industries (and tourism in particular) matter has yet to show in domestic tourism figures.