5HDODQG,PDJLQHG7KH3HDNRI*ROGLQ+HLDQ-DSDQE\+HDWKHU%ODLU UHYLHZ 'DYLG4XLQWHU 7KH-RXUQDORI-DSDQHVH6WXGLHV9ROXPH1XPEHU6XPPHUSS  5HYLHZ 3XEOLVKHGE\6RFLHW\IRU-DSDQHVH6WXGLHV '2,MMV )RUDGGLWLRQDOLQIRUPDWLRQDERXWWKLVDUWLFOH KWWSVPXVHMKXHGXDUWLFOH Access provided by The University of Alberta (21 Aug 2016 05:48 GMT) Review Section 393 Better editing would have made for a tighter book. One of the most egregious flaws is the use of the word “secular” to describe a court, which, after all, made Buddhist rites the core of its legitimacy and politics (pp. 42, 118). As Sango carefully describes how “secular” constitutes a modern concept (p. x), this is most likely an editorial rather than a conceptual shortcoming. Some translations, like that of prime minister (p. 80), are likewise opaque, while others, such as “guardian palace monk” (p. 53) for protector monk (gojisō) prove misleading, for these monks protected above all a person and not a palace. Likewise, so many things are described as “systems” that the term becomes devoid of meaning. But these are minor flaws and do not detract greatly from this work. To conclude, scholars and students of Heian Japan will find much of interest in this monograph, which provides an excellent overview of the Misai-e Assembly. Although this constitutes a good book, more consideration of the importance of ritual in enacting change in the Heian period and beyond could have made it an excellent one. Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan. By Heather Blair. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Mass., 2015. xviii, 345 pages. $49.95. Reviewed by David Quinter University of Alberta Heather Blair’s Real and Imagined is a rich analysis of the devotional activities and cultural imaginary surrounding Mt. Kinpusen in the Ōmine range, south of Nara. Blair focuses on the discourses and practices shaping Kinpusen as a pilgrimage destination and cultic site in early medieval Japan. The study can be situated within a series of recent monographs by religious studies scholars on mountain sites in East Asia, including D. Max Moerman’s Localizing Paradise, on Kumano (2005); Barbara Ambros’s Emplacing a Pilgrimage, on Ōyama (2008); and James Robson’s Power of Place, on Nanyue (2009). (That all four monographs were published by Harvard University Asia Center is, for this reviewer, a coincidence—though perhaps not for Blair or the press.) All four scholars leverage their focus on place to transcend sectarian boundaries that delimit much scholarship on East Asian religions. All (including Robson on China) have been influenced by Allan Grapard’s emphasis on studying Japanese religions in situ and particular cultic sites. All use such threefold formulations of space as Henri Lefebvre’s “perceived, conceived, and lived space” and Michel Foucault’s “utopia, dystopia, and 394 Journal of Japanese Studies 42:2 (2016) heterotopia.” Blair finds inspiration especially in Edward Soja’s model of “real, imagined, and real-and-imagined,” which helps transcend binary oppositions between physical and imagined space (pp. 2–3). And similarly to Robson on “Buddho-Daoism,” Moerman’s, Ambros’s, and Blair’s spotlight on combinatory cults of Buddhist deities and kami (the latter often analyzed as Shintō) transcends oppositions between Buddhism and “native” religions. Blair’s monograph also belongs to recent work applying and reformulating Kuroda Toshio’s theories of the “power-bloc system” (kenmon taisei) characterizing medieval rule. Kuroda viewed medieval Japan as dominated by competing but interdependent blocs associated with the court, warrior houses, and religious establishments. Within this system, leading temples and shrines played key ideological roles but were also military and economic powers. One ramification of Kuroda’s theories has been to promote more-integrated studies of medieval political and religious history, taking close account of the social and ideological dynamics among the power blocs. Blair’s work can be read fruitfully alongside similarly positioned studies such as Mikael Adolphson’s The Gates of Power (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000). In many ways, Real and Imagined is an extended case study of Kuroda’s power-bloc theory, using Kinpusen and shifting relationships among Fujiwara regents, retired emperors, and the Fujiwara house temple Kōfukuji as exemplar. Blair focuses on the periods of rule by Fujiwara regents (mid-tenth to late eleventh century) and retired emperors (1086–1221), showing how pilgrimage to Kinpusen was both devotional and political. Divided into three parts, Real and Imagined devotes part 1 to Heianperiod (794–1185) representations of Kinpusen, or “the mountain imagined” (p. 13). Chapter 1 shows tenth-century lay pilgrims to Kinpusen subverting divisions between the mountains as alien realm and the capital as civilized center. Starting with Fujiwara no Kaneie (929–90), successive regents undertook carefully orchestrated pilgrimages from the Heian capital to Kinpusen, appropriating the otherworldly charisma of the mountain “and expanding the domain of the civilized center” (p. 13). However, as Blair’s analysis aptly suggests, this appropriation simultaneously depended on such conceptual binaries to “bring home” the boundary-crossing benefits of pilgrimage. Blair places Kinpusen’s longstanding ban on women in this context (pp. 48–56). She suggests that “pushing women into the role of the excluded other” enabled male pilgrims “to imagine themselves as a single group united by gender” (p. 49). I found this contextualization, including the interweaving of past precedent and modern circumstance, compelling. But given the author’s invocations of Kinpusen as the only Japanese mountain still maintaining the ban year-round, I longed for some explanation of how Kinpusen does so despite the ban’s illegality under the postwar constitution. Review Section 395 Chapter 2 analyzes the mountain’s pantheon. It centers on Kinpusen’s main deity, Zaō, and the combinatory logic informing the pantheon, that of honji suijaku. Blair uses “Play and Variability” to analyze this logic, which typically identifies local deities as “trace” manifestations with buddhas or bodhisattvas as their source. Blair’s analytic rubric helps her emphasize the flexibility of such combinations, including “reverse honji suijaku,” in which the local deity is understood as the source. I quibble, however, with her critique of previous scholars’ use of “paradigm” to characterize honji suijaku, which she argues implies a totalizing structure characterized by “regular, systematic relationships” between buddhas and kami (p. 74). But many works using this terminology, including Mark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli’s edited volume Buddhas and Kami in Japan (Routledge, 2003), do recognize the flexibility of the “paradigm.” Valuable in chapter 2 is Blair’s recognition of the limits of her sources, which largely reflect the perspectives of elites observing Kinpusen from afar or on temporary visits. Blair thus admits that her study attends less to the activities of locals than one might wish. However, she shows methodological subtlety in viewing activities at Kinpusen less as those “of a stable, geographically bounded community than [as] practices that emerged from social flows through a particular site.” From this perspective, it is apt “to characterize elite pilgrims as participants, not interlopers, in Kinpusen’s religious culture” (p. 61). Chapter 3 explores how Kinpusen related to the “ritual regimes” of elite Heian pilgrims. Blair argues that the ritual regimes employed by Heian elites were coercive but attractive to peers and rivals. Accordingly, they invited emulation and competition, including among successive regent pilgrims to Kinpusen and Retired Emperor Shirakawa (1053–1129). Ritual regimes comprised a three-part structure of “signature sites, rites, and texts” (p. 110). The most successful regimes, Blair suggests, used two constellations of these components, a metropolitan and a remote one. Her model is exemplified by the activities of Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027) at Hōjōji just outside the capital and Kinpusen (pp. 112–13) and by Shirakawa (pp. 121–24) at Hosshōji and Kumano. Although Shirakawa adapted the regents’ ritual script in his 1092 pilgrimage to Kinpusen, for his remote site he ultimately chose Kumano, south of Kinpusen. Subsequent retired emperors followed his lead, and Kumano soon eclipsed Kinpusen as a pilgrimage destination for ruling elites. These activities, however, still underscore the power of Kinpusen and other remote sites for those elites, their uses within the shifting power blocs of Heian Japan, and the strength of Blair’s model of ritual regimes—at least within those contexts. How far Blair’s model applies beyond these temporal and very elite social parameters is an area for future research. Part 2 uses close reads of eleventh-century pilgrims’ journals and vo- 396 Journal of Japanese Studies 42:2 (2016) tive texts to show their contributions to Kinpusen’s development as a realand-imagined place. Chapter 4 scrupulously analyzes the itineraries of the regents Michinaga and Fujiwara no Moromichi (1062–99). The chapter takes readers through their ritual preparations, the shrines and temples they visited en route, and the affective traces they left in records of their journeys. Blair effectively demonstrates how their route to Kinpusen was at once ritual, textual, and territorial, as successive regents’ followed the ritual protocols and physical trails of predecessors detailed in the texts they bequeathed. Chapter 5 shifts from the regents’ journeys to the summit to their rites at the summit. This chapter valuably supplements earlier studies of the regents’ activities at Kinpusen, which focused on sutra burials while relatively neglecting their above-ground offerings. Blair’s analyses of the preliminary rites and the grand offering ceremony at the Zaō Hall reveal the liturgical sequence and social hierarchy of the rites and the much greater scale of the scriptures enshrined above ground. Here, Blair deftly avoids opposing the materiality and content of the regents’ textual offerings, arguing that their efforts were as much “hermeneutic” as “material and liturgical, for the regents chose their scriptures based on their content” (p. 171). Influenced especially by Charlotte Eubanks’s Miracles of Book and Body (University of California Press, 2011), however, Blair emphasizes the “corporeality of texts” in the ensuing section on sutra burials. Citing Eubanks’s argument that texts functioned “as bodies with their own agency, inclined toward symbiosis with their human copyists, reciters, and memorizers,” Blair suggests that the sutra burials were intended as textual body doubles to reside within the mountain for perpetuity (pp. 176–77). Blair’s emphasis on intertwined resonances “between text, body, and relic”—as well as between Zaō, the past buddha Śākyamuni, and the future buddha Maitreya—as rationales for the sutra burials challenges earlier scholars’ emphasis on fears of mappō (latter days of the dharma) as the primary motive (p. 186). Chapter 6 may demand the closest read to appreciate fully. But doing so affords intimate glimpses of power-bloc politics and their ties to the “exoteric-esoteric Buddhism” that Kuroda argued formed ritual and ideological linchpins for the medieval system of ruling elites. The chapter pivots on accounts of Shirakawa’s pilgrimage to Kinpusen in a journal fragment that Blair discovered during archival research. The fragment is likely an extended citation from the diary of Ōe no Masafusa (1041–1111), who accompanied Shirakawa, and it provides our most detailed record of their rites at the summit. The text shows Shirakawa overwriting the regents’ ritual protocol through more lavish scriptural donations during the offering ceremony (kuyō) and his addition of the esoteric rite rishu zanmai (Guiding Principle Samādhi). As Blair astutely observes, “The kuyō and the rishu zanmai thus created a classic exoteric-esoteric (kenmitsu) pair characterized by a divi- Review Section 397 sion of labor.” Although Masafusa and other members of Shirakawa’s retinue played significant roles in the offering ceremony, the rishu zanmai was performed solely by mountain monks (pp. 198–99). Most illuminating in this chapter was seeing how such exoteric-esoteric integration and personnel division featured in Shirakawa’s maneuvering among the differing interests of Kinpusen’s resident monks, Kōfukuji, and his own. In short, Shirakawa conducted detailed negotiations with a Kinpusen esoteric master over the mountain’s institutional position relative to Kōfukuji, and personnel appointments that Shirakawa favored, during the ritual space of the offering ceremony itself. The journal fragment is thus significant both for understanding power-bloc relationships and for reflecting on ritual more broadly. Part 3 turns to the aftermath of the eleventh-century boom in elite pilgrimage to Kinpusen. Chapter 7 illustrates how Shirakawa’s efforts to trump Kōfukuji and the Fujiwara regents—at Kinpusen and elsewhere—exacerbated tensions between Kōfukuji and Kinpusen, who battled in 1093–94. Until 1145, Kinpusen continued to violently resist Kōfukuji’s efforts to integrate the temple. But by the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, many Kinpusen monks adopted Kōfukuji’s interests as their own, even joining Kōfukuji in battles against other temples. Moreover, the integration had cultic ramifications, as Kinpusen deities were added to those at Kasuga, which formed a temple-shrine complex with Kōfukuji. Blair concludes that the integration ultimately expanded Kinpusen’s devotional reach (p. 244). Such twofold sensitivity to intertwined political and devotional issues is one of the book’s major strengths. Chapter 8 shows how Kinpusen’s newly subordinate status also inspired texts asserting Kinpusen’s distinctive religious identity. Examining our earliest body of engi (origin accounts) about Kinpusen and Ōmine (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), Blair argues that the compilers promoted pursuing the mountain range’s divine “traces” through both traversing its terrain and reading the engi, even while the texts’ dissemination depended on lowland power-bloc temples. This chapter fits well with a 2015 special issue of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies on engi (Vol. 42, No. 1), coedited by Blair and Kawasaki Tsuyoshi. The epilogue investigates the emergence of Shugendō in the late Kamakura period (1185–1333). Earlier scholars often treated Kinpusen and Ōmine as the cradle of Shugendō and traced the emergence of this “Way” of mountain asceticism to the Heian-period activities of yamabushi (mountain practitioners). Blair, however, locates the matrix for that emergence not in continuity with Heian practices but in twelfth-century and later ruptures caused by conflict among the power blocs. Following recent Japanese scholarship on Shugendō that dates its emergence as a distinct “Way” to around 1300, Blair argues that the tradition is better viewed “as an ana- 398 Journal of Japanese Studies 42:2 (2016) logue of other Kamakura- and Muromachi-period phenomena, such as sectarian movements in kami worship, the Nara revival, or new Buddhist schools” (p. 271). This argument is compelling. It becomes problematic, however, when Blair uses her elite Heian examples to challenge narratives of Shugendō’s “strong ties to Heian pilgrimage practices” (p. 286), because her own analysis shows earlier scholars such as Gorai Shigeru and Miyake Hitoshi highlighting instead Heian practices of yamabushi and anonymous holy men in the mountains. The contrast Blair draws between Shugendō practices and the pilgrimages by Heian ruling elites that she examines does not negate the possibility of continuity with different forms of pilgrimage or ascetic travel. That said, my quibbles, here and elsewhere, are indeed quibbles. Throughout, Real and Imagined offers carefully researched, nuanced arguments on the “place” of Kinpusen within broader ritual, political, and narrative contexts. Individual chapters would work well in advanced courses on Japanese religion, history, and literature. But the book exceeds the sum of its parts. It thus merits its place on the shelves and minds of diverse scholars of premodern Japan and East Asian religions. The close reads, like Blair’s own, will pay off. Imagining Exile in Heian Japan: Banishment in Law, Literature, and Cult. By Jonathan Stockdale. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2015. x, 179 pages. $42.00. Reviewed by Robert Borgen University of California, Davis, Emeritus I was pleased when I first saw an announcement of Jonathan Stockdale’s study. Since the title stated its focus on exile in Heian Japan, I guessed it ought to have something new to say about Sugawara no Michizane, the most famous of Heian exiles and the subject of my own, now aging, book. When I finally did get to see Imagining Exile in Heian Japan, I discovered that indeed it has a chapter on Michizane, which seems just about right: enough to add to our knowledge of the subject, not enough to drive my book out of print. Particularly in the study of Japan’s earlier periods, English-language scholarship is not abundant, and so the pioneering first book on a subject is likely to remain the last word on the subject for decades. As the author of one such book, I confess to benefiting from this phenomenon, for it means that my volume has stayed in print for many years and I receive an occasional, extremely small, royalty check. Having finished reading Stockdale’s