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Paper short abstract

The goal of the paper is to shed light on how mountains traditionally perceived as a sacred space were secularized and commodified during Taishō and early Shōwa periods, and how the mountain guidebooks as a specific literary subgenre fostered the exploitation of mountain regions in postwar Japan.

Paper long abstract

In Japan, mountains have filled the space between heaven and earth since ancient times, connecting the profane basis of human life with its sacred dimension, and therefore became a pilgrimage destination for emperors, monks, poets and even ordinary people. Although each of them was driven by different motivations, they all focused their attention on mountains as places of religions practice and spiritual purification.

Modernization and industrialization of the country in late 19th century, closely related to the growing tendency towards mass consumption brought the urgent need to mobilize all aspects of social life and to incorporate them into the officially approved and generally championed policy of catching-up and empire building. However, since mountains per se were not seen as a potential source of economic growth and prosperity, and were largely neglected by both policymakers and private business in early stage of modernization, it was not until the Taishō and early Shōwa periods that mountains landscape and indigenous mountain traditions became the target of mass consumption and one of the embedded aspects of modern Japanese society.

The paper does not intend to analyze the whole process of conceptualization of mountains in modern Japanese society, rather than that it focuses on the specific literary tool (i.e. mountain guidebooks), that made mountains accessible to the public and accelerated the process of commodification of mountains particularly in postwar Japan.