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I stood in the shadow of that mountain with a sendōshi, an innkeeper and spiritual guide who leads pilgrims up Oyama. He was worried. It wasn’t that he was two years into treatment for Stage IV cancer and running out of options. And it wasn’t doubts whether his son—thirty-ninth in the family line – was ready to pick up the reins. No, Takeshi Satoh’s concern was that all the storage space in their modest inn was taken up by pilgrims’ wear left behind by groups long since disbanded.
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While a spiritual journey, the Oyama pilgrimage was also an excuse for travel and fun. Townspeople would organize into confraternities by neighborhood or occupation to make the pilgrimage together. Each group had a designated inn, a shukubō, to which they would return year in and year out. During their climb to the summit, each group wore matching pilgrims’ wear, an open jacket of homespun cotton called a gyōi. Jackets were stitched by hand and printed with the group’s name and stylish insignia. When the pilgrimage was over, they were left at the inn to be washed, dried, and stored for the next time.
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But fashions change and so do objects of faith.
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At the height of the pilgrimage’s popularity, there were 170 shukubō dotting the foothills of Mt. Oyama. By the end of the Meiji period, the number of inns had decreased by more than half. Today, there are barely 40 inns in Oyama serving pilgrims, yet that’s more than any other pilgrimage site in Japan.
No one can make a living anymore solely from the pilgrimage. A sendōshi has to have an outside job. Satoh-san worked as a high school teacher. Until he couldn’t.
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And now there were bundles of gyōi in his upstairs storeroom, untouched for fifty years. Some even longer. Stacks on the back stairs.
But who might take them off his hands?
“Me?” I said, not sure of a purpose but thinking I might make a quilt. Satoh-san sent me home with an armful of cotton and a headful of thoughts: of the association of neighbors in Hodogaya who had made the pilgrimage every year since 1877, but disbanded after the war; of the Yokosuka soba shops who set up a group in the 1940s, designing a snappy “Marumen” logo for their jackets, but who no longer make the pilgrimage; of innkeepers who washed and folded even as the flow of guests dwindled, and then stopped. I can’t sew more than a button. I had no idea how I’d get a quilt made. But there’s a Zen teaching, something I saw on a calligraphy scroll hung for a tea ceremony: mizu o kiku sureba, tsuki te ni ari (“Scoop up water, and the moon is in your hands.”) And indeed, the answer was within reach, closer than I might ever have imagined. By chance, I had an upcoming meeting with Mutsuko Yawatagaki, whom I had interviewed a few years earlier for a magazine piece. She’s one of Japan’s most accomplished quilters. I put a few jackets in my bag, thinking I’d ask for her advice. When we finished with what we met to discuss, I set the gyōi out on the table. She looked. She touched. And something in the cloth spoke to her. She asked if she might take them home, keep them for a while. A month later, Yawatagaki-san sent me a design, something far beyond my puff of an idea for a patchwork bedcover. And she offered to bring her design to life. I watched from afar, full of admiration, as she and a team of her students dedicated over a year to the project, cutting and joining tiny scraps of cotton and silk, needles slipping right to left and top to bottom, stitching together a story of the Oyama pilgrimage. Satoh-san left us before we finished, but he’s there, one memory, one thread, held fast in cotton and silk. All photos on this page by Michael Crommett
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Alice Gordenker is a writer and filmmaker who has lived in Japan for over twenty years. Over the course of many years she has explored the trails and history of Mt. Oyama, and in 2019 produced the documentary Horimono:Japan's Tattoo Pilgrimage. More recently, with a grant from the Toshiba International Foundation, she produced two shorts: Opening Mt. Oyama and Oyama, a Sacred Mountain of Japan. |
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