The “Famous Places” of Japanese Buddhism: Representations of Urban Temple Life in Early Modern Guidebooks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the commercial and recreational cultures of the urban Buddhist temple during Japan’s Edo or early modern period (1603–1868) as depicted in popular guidebooks to famous places ( meisho ki). Encouraged by advances in travel and communication, and a vibrant bourgeois culture, meisho guidebooks presented religious sites to the common public not as static, immobile spaces catering only to otherworldly spiritual concerns, but as open and elastic geographies simultaneously offering immediate material rewards and leisurely and commercial attractions to visitors. As unique media of local religion, guidebooks reflect how the reputation and allure of popular Buddhist temples among the general public were driven by the commodification of local legends and objects of worship, as well as material pleasures of religious spaces. This paper argues the importance of guidebooks in the production of public knowledge and expectation about religious sites in early modern Japan. These guides reveal material concerns and entertainment not as having been antithetical to the operation of Buddhist institutions, but rather as supports for the spread of Buddhist teachings and popularization of deity worship among the urban populace.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".