Pilgrimage is a practice shared by cultures and societies worldwide. It has allowed people from diverse social classes and races an opportunity for contact with culturally-specific concepts of divinity, empowerment, easement, and salvation, all of which are embodied at specific sites. Among the world's most famous sites of pilgrimage--Lourdes (France), Jerusalem (Israel/Palestine), Mount Kailasa (Tibet), Varanassi (India) and so on--must be added the eighty-eight temples of Shikoku in Japan.
We are fortunate to have a video that deals with the complex phenomena of the Shikoku pilgrimage in contemporary Japan. Though this practice is but a few centuries old, the tradition of visiting sacred sites in order to achieve this-worldly and future benefits (called riyaku in Japanese) goes back to the earliest regimes. Japanese emperors and their consorts of the seventh century left the safety and comfort of their palaces to travel to distant waterfalls, mountains, and hot springs--all for the purpose of accessing (both through priestly intermediaries and direct experience) the beneficial power of those sites. In later centuries, both elite and commoners made oftentimes hazardous journeys to climb Mount Fuji, visit the shrines at Ise (where, in 1705, an estimated 3,620,000 individuals visited), or attend other famous temples and shrines.
Between Two Worlds attempts to show the people, settings, motivations and practices comprising a modern-day pilgrimage to the Shikoku temples. It skillfully juxtaposes what the narrator calls "old and new images" of the pilgrimage event, from urban bustle, neon signs, and youthful ignorance of pilgrimage in general to elderly white-clad pilgrims visiting serene mountain temples shrouded in mist. We learn and see early on the crew making the video, as well as a couple key questions motivating their own quest: Can they convey adequately the complexity of pilgrimage to western audiences? Is this "real" pilgrimage or only sight-seeing on the part of the so-called "pilgrims" themselves?
To answer these questions, the film is divided into four components of pilgrimage: the determination to go, the practice involved, the attainment of wisdom, and completion of the journey. Each category (as well as an answer to the question of whether this is truly pilgrimage or only sight-seeing) is advanced through a number of interviews with priests and participants (including a young man who thinks he might be a "hippy"). The narrator suggests that the reasons motivating a pilgrimage are the same as in the past (personal loss, impending death, search for meaning of life and self, dealing with a health problem) but the means of going have changed. While a few walk and extol the benefits of the traditional approach, most do not have the time required and so take sight-seeing buses or private cars from site to site. Even so, we learn that most of these people are seriously committed to the pilgrimage, are very glad they came, and expect to take lasting benefits away from the experience.
Throughout this obviously well-financed and professional production that, we are told, traveled 1000 miles and resulted in eighteen hours of tape, the camera and sound quality is first-rate. For audiences with little experience of Japan, the images, narrative, and structure of the video provide easy access to the topic. Even for more sophisticated university audiences, the film will be useful for its portrayal and evocation of contemporary pilgrimage, which can then be supplemented with work by contemporary scholars on Japanese pilgrimage, such as Ian Reader, Joseph Kitagawa, or George Tanabe. My only qualification (besides the absence of maps) is that the film's title not be seen as restricting discussion of pilgrimage into easy dichotomies between "old" and "new" or "secular" and "sacred." Part of what keeps pilgrimage vital, especially in Japan, is the interplay and complementarity of old and new. Modern pilgrims are not "between" two worlds but are actively engaged at all times in the multiple worlds of religion, commerce, tourism, and the continuing practice of forming and affirming their cultural identity.
