IN ONE DIMENSION

Numbers, in the dimension of space, can be used in two ways. The first is to name, and implicitly to order, recognised points, the second is to measure the distance between them. The first use is of ordinal, the second, of cardinal numbers. These alternative uses suggest an analogy with time, where points, jiten, are separated by periods, jidai. The analogy is, however, imperfect. It implies that the properties of space, or sora, are comparable to those of time, or toki. Noting the on reading, k*, corresponding to the kun reading, sora, one would expect some conceptualisation of space in terms of k*ten and k*dai, but in fact these words do not exist.

Nor are there any other Japanese words which convey the meaning sought after. True there is chiten, literally a ‘land-point’, but this depends upon space reduced to two dimensions. This is the nub of the whole problem. Space, as such, is too inchoate to support any sort of order, whether or not it is numerical.¹ The ordered movement of the celestial bodies, which is critical for the measurement and definition of time, is a meagre basis for organising space at terrestial level.

The problem has both a static and a dynamic aspect. The former is apparent in the domain of architecture, in which numerical considerations govern the design and location of buildings. The problems which arise are two- or three- dimensional. The dynamic aspect, defined by movement, is essentially one-dimensional, and this being the simpler case, it will be considered first.

The numerical organisation of one-dimensional space reduces, at an elementary level, to assigning numbers to points on a line. The question is then, which line? In contrast to time, experience of nature or the cosmos indicates no single line on which such points must occur, nor any means for identifying their location. The choice, in both aspects, is

left to man—in other words, it is a matter for the local culture, to be studied in relation to human geography. Nor is it a question of one single line: there can be any number that are culturally significant, and this is certainly true of Japan. Viewed topographically, the lines occur in a two-dimensional space, but this only becomes significant when points of intersection have to be dealt with. In the history of almost any culture this is rather a refined case, typical of the interchanges in a modern transport system, but much less important in the traditional culture.²

From this perspective there are essentially only two cases: the line between two points, and the line which closes a circle.³ In the latter case there may be the additional problem of choosing a point on the circle as a starting point. In both cases it is movement along, or around the line, which makes it culturally significant. There is therefore a why as well as a which question to be answered.

Historically the best-known Japanese case of a line joining two points is the famous T)kaid), or ‘East-west road’, originally joining Tokyo to Kyoto, but later extended to Osaka. Numerically this is interesting for the fifty-three tsugi, or ‘post-station towns’, which offered services to travellers. The woodblock prints of Hiroshige, and other works of art and literature, made these so well known as to define the meaning of ‘fifty-three’ in Japanese culture. There is no evidence that the number was deliberately chosen. The road followed a natural route along, or close to the Pacific coast, and the tsugi were merely located at convenient intervals.

The road is a particular case of a line between two points. More generally, such a line is equivalent to the Japanese sen , such as occurs in the familiar shinkansen (literally ‘new trunk line’) used for high-speed trains running between the larger cities. The two cases (introduced in the last paragraph but one), of a line between two points and a closed circuit, can be modelled on two actual instances: the first is the modern Kyoto chikatetsu, or ‘underground railway’, in its original form consisting of a single line with eight stations; the second is the much older Osaka kanj)sen, or ‘circle line’, with seventeen stations.⁴

The numerical ordering of the systems is for those who travel by them far more important than their actual length. Who is Kyoto knows that the chikatetsu is 6.6 kilometers long, or in Osaka, that a complete circuit of the kanj)sen is 21.7 kilometers?⁵ Much more useful is the knowledge that the former operates on a shuttle lasting fifteen minutes in each direction, and the latter of a circuit repeated every forty minutes. The disordered realm of space has been reduced to the ordered

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realm of time. The points in space are not even numbered according to the ordinary Japanese numerals, although the names of the successive stations can be seen as a system of meta-numbers such as I describe in chapter 3.⁶ In the case of the Osaka kanj)sen this has the advantage of avoiding the necessity to identify one particular station as the starting point.⁷

The conquest of space seen in terms of time is a characteristic of the restless modern age, when travellers in their millions must cover so many points along a sen simply to perform the duties of their daily life. In the urban culture of modern Japan, travel has become profane, and its ideal component is speed, the factor which reduces space to time.⁸ It is not for nothing that the only instrument on the wall of the buffet-car of the shinkansen is a speedometer, which as it measures an almost constant speed of more than 200 km.p.h.

reassures the impatient sarar(man that he will not be late for his appointment. In the same mode, the departure time of the train becomes effectively its name, once more an instance of numbers being used for metonymy.⁹

In the rural culture of traditional Japan travel outside the domain of the village was not part of daily life. Those engaged in non-agrarian occupations which required travel from one place to another for the performance of the services offered have long been regarded as having special status, whether they be religious ascetics engaged in continuous pilgrimage (Blacker 1986:167), craftsmen or simply entertainers.¹⁰ The world they inhabit is soto, or ‘outside’, in contrast to the inside, or uchi,¹¹ realm of the ordinary villager (Berque 1987:12). This is also the world of the yama, or mountains,¹² where the kami dwell, so that on certain prescribed days of the year the people may proceed in pilgrimage to the top of the sacred mountain above their village. There they will find a shrine, where the appropriate Shinto rites will be carried out.

The pilgrimages may go much further afield to such sacred mountains as Fuji, Haguro or Ontake. The routes to the summit of the holy mountains are divided into ten stages, separated by points known as g)me, where the climber will find a hut for rest and refreshment. For a small fee the guardian will also brand the pilgrim’s staff with the symbol for the stage completed, so that in the end the climber who, completing the tenth stage, reaches the top of the mountain, will have a record of his achievement.¹³

Covering the ten stages is likely to be a walk up-hill helped by occasional flights of steps when the route would otherwise be too steep.

This is a reification of the principle implicit in the word ‘dan’, with all

that it means for achieving merit by means of ascent to progressively higher levels. Dan imports numerical ordering. The advantage of a mountain pilgrimage is that anyone, with sufficient energy, can reach the highest level in a fixed number of steps, and in Japan, at least, very few give up on the way.

At the same time the summit represents the centre, or the core (la) of the mandala. The mountain itself is taken as a natural symbol of the Holy Mount Sumeru, which is the ideal image of the mandala.

Although there may only be one recognised route to the summit,¹⁴ this does not detract from the image. In the case of Fuji the centre, geographically, is the core of the extinct volcano. Climbers often circle the entire rim—a distance of a mile or two—as if this had some ritual significance,¹⁵ but there are no stations marking out the circuit.

In addition to mountain pilgrimages, which require going to and returning from a fixed point—the top of the mountain—pilgrimages which require completing a circuit of a fixed number of points are equally well known in Japan.¹⁶ In such a case the pilgrimage can be joined at any point, and although it is customary then to proceed in a clockwise direction, this is not obligatory (Reader 1988:52).

Two such pilgrimages are particularly well known. The sanj*sankasho, starts at the temple of Seiganto on Mount Nachi in Wakayama prefecture, to make a broad circuit round Kyoto, including a number of temples in and around the city itself. The name means

‘thirty-three places’, and this is the number of temples, all dedicated to the Kannon Buddha, to be visited. It was believed that the pilgrim who visited them all would be safe from hell. The number 33 is chosen for the same reason as it is in the Kyoto temple of Sanj*sangend), which I consider in the following section. This, then, is the basis of the so-called Saikoku, or ‘west country’, pilgrimages. The hachij*hakkasho works on much the same principle, with visits to Shingon Buddhist temples in ‘eighty-eight places’ along a circuit around the island of Shikoku.¹⁷ The idea is that K)b) Daishi,¹⁸ the founder of the Shingon sect in the eighth century, accompanies every pilgrim (Reader 1988:53).¹⁹ In this case the reason for the number 88 is unknown.²⁰

The interesting thing about the Shikoku (and to a lesser extent the Saikoku) pilgrimage is that it provides a model basis for other pilgrimages, in which the focus and symbolism, as well as the number of stages, are the same (Reader 1988:58). As far as the mathematics is concerned it is the topology, based on the number 88, which is preserved, while the scale is much reduced,²¹ although in one or two cases an attempt is made to maintain relative distances.

As an ascetic exercise a short walk around a small-scale pilgrimage

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route, sometimes capable of being completed within an hour, is hardly comparable to a complete circuit of the hachij*hakkasho,²² but then the modern pilgrim will most likely travel this as a member of a guided bus-tour.²³ The apotheosis of this process is to be found in the numerous guided tours organised by railways and bus companies to shrines and temples in the locality dedicated to one or other of the shichi-fuku-jin, known in English as ‘the seven gods of good fortune’.

As noted by Reader, this is a heterogeneous ‘collection of Japanese, Indian and Chinese deities with roots in Shinto, Buddhism and Taoism who have merged with Japanese folk belief (Reader 1987a:6). In this case the pilgrimages, if such they may be called, have no ascetic background whatever. It is not for nothing that Reader’s article appeared in Kansai Time Out. In modern Japan, transformed into a fully literate urban society, religion becomes recreation.

The transformation is worth looking at in greater detail, particularly for its implications for the role of numbers in Japanese popular culture.

The traditional position, in pre-modern Japan, is aptly described by Turner:

As the pilgrim moves away from his structural involvements at home his route becomes increasingly sacralized at one level and increasingly secularized at another. He meets with more shrines and sacred objects as he advances, but he also…has to pay attention to the need to survive and often to earn money for transportation, and he comes across markets and fairs, especially at the end of his quest, where the shrine is flanked by the bazaar and the fun fair. (Turner 1974:182)

The world of money in traditional Japan was that of the lowest rank, that of merchants, in the social hierarchy. This was the world of the abacus, which enabled numerical calculations to be carried out to serve the practical demands of commerce. At this stage of cultural evolution, Turner sees pilgrimage as essentially liminal, ‘the ordered anti-structure of patrimonial feudal systems. It is infused with voluntariness though by no means independent of structural obligatoriness’ (ibid.: 182), and is ‘an amplified symbol of the dilemma of choice versus obligation in the midst of a social order where status prevails’ (ibid.: 177).

All this occurs in a world in which

Daily, relatively sedentary life in village, town, city, and fields is lived at one pole; the rare bout of nomadism that is the pilgrimage

journey over many roads and hills constitutes the other pole… the optimal conditions for flourishing pilgrimage systems of this type are societies based mainly on agriculture, but with a fairly advanced degree of craft labor, with patrimonial or feudal political regimes, with a well-marked urban-rural division but with, at the most, only a limited development of modern industry. (ibid.: 171) That puts pre-modern Japan in a nutshell.²⁴ For contemporary Japanese, it is another world. Modern city life is anything but sedentary, and nomadism has become almost obsessional. Massive political support is necessary to ensure the survival of agriculture in a society with the world’s technologically most advanced industry. Yet in a world where number-crunching computers operate twenty-four hours a day, it is still important not to miss out on a single one of the eighty-eight temples of the hachij*hakkasho. Indeed, modern technology assists the process with instant cameras which record the date of every picture,²⁵ so that the principle of the official seal, or ho¯in, is becoming almost otiose for the purposes of the record.

The explanation for all this is to be found in a sort of cultural regression: participating in an instant pilgrimage puts numbers back in their proper place. The individual who has completed the hachij*hakkasho has established, to use Turner’s word, communitas with his fellow travellers, because they share the number 88 in common. The pilgrimage has somehow reinstated the symbolic power of the number, which, for the Japanese participants is almost beyond value.