Paper short abstract:

This paper spotlights "women's exclusion from sacred sites" (nyonin kinsei), exposing its double identity as an emblem of national-cultural continuity and an anachronistic and discriminatory custom. What can an exclusionary practice and its attendant discourse reveal about national self-image(s)?

Paper long abstract:

Featured in this paper is a rarefied religious tradition in modern Japan: women's exclusion from sacred sites (nyonin kinsei, nyonin kekkai), and the implications of this practice for the formation and functioning of national-cultural-religious unity. Many sacred sites once banned women's access as a condition of religious tradition, and a handful of places still do so. UNESCO recognizes two of Japan's remaining male-only sacred sites as World (Cultural) Heritage: the island Okinoshima (Fukuoka prefecture) and the Sanjōgatake Peak of Mt. Ōmine (Nara prefecture). Proponents of the ban at both sites claim legitimacy from ancient sources and regard exclusion as a non-negotiable element of their sacredness. At the same time, World Heritage documentation written by Japanese authorities erases or marginalizes the fact that women are excluded from these sites. Sketching the modern trajectory of nyonin kinsei in reverse, from the present day to the late nineteenth century, this paper lays bare its double identity within shifting social and political discourses on "Japan" and "Japaneseness." At the 41st Session of the World Heritage Committee in 2017, Ambassador Satō Kuni, the sole female member of Japan's Permanent Delegation to UNESCO, defended women's exclusion from Okinoshima as "a matter of principle" and "tradition." Almost 150 years earlier, in 1872, the Meiji government legally abolished the practice as "a decisive reformation from the standpoint of modern civilization." The floating character of nyonin kinsei, I argue, stems from two distinct yet overlapping mobilizations of the past that inhere in modern and contemporary Japan. First, the past denotes that against which the modern (or anything after the past) is measured: for Meiji bureaucrats and contemporary activists, women's exclusion was and is an anachronistic and discriminatory custom. Second, certain cultural practices become regarded as all-important bearers of a nation's cultural continuity: women's exclusion represents a unique and unquestionable Japanese tradition. This latter position is taken by many religious and political authorities, Japanese ethnologists, and the United Nations. These Janus-faced cultural images of nyonin kinsei reveal the doubleness or double identity generated by Japan's modernization—what Yoshioka (1995) terms the "self-colonization of the Japanese mind."