Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 2001 28/3-4 Localized Religious Specialists in Early Modern Japan The Development of the Oyama Oshi System

This paper discusses the emergence of oshi, lay religious specialists who contributed to the spread of regional pilgrimage cults in the Tokugawa period, by focusing on the example of Oyama, Sagami Province. Over the course of the seventeenth century, Oyama，s oshi developed gradually as successors of shugenja and shrine priests who had lost much of their authority to the Shingon temples on the mountain in the first decade of the seventeenth century. In the second half of the seventeenth century the tradi tion of mountain asceticism largely disappeared from Oyama. The former mountain ascetics of Oyama needed new means of income, forcing them to run inns and develop parishes throughout the Kanto region. These parishes, from which most of Oyama’s pilgrims came, became the single most impor tant source of income for Oyama. The system spread from areas near Oyama across the entire Kanto region. It was these oshi who sustained the bonds between parishioners and the mountain by making annual visits to their parishes and providing accommodations for pilgrims. Despite thei