A Shikoku-Henro glossary of pilgrimage and worship terms says, "as white clothes are burial outfits, it is as if pilgrims wearing white clothes were going along a road in another world (holy world)." That is the meaning of today's costume style of the Shikoku-Henro. The purpose of this report is to specify when its costume style was established, and to consider what meanings its style has. Among outfits for pilgrims in Shikoku serving as the mechanism for interpreting the pilgrims as the dead, the following three items are very important. The first item is the bamboo hat, Sugegasa, the second is white clothes or a piece of white cloth put on one's back, the Oizuru, and the third is the pilgrim's staff, the Kongo-Zue. The second item seems the most important for its mechanism. The pilgrim's staff, which has five letters of Sanskrit characters on its head, is said to have been "used as a grave marker when he died on his way". These five letters were carved on the gravestones and on five-layered small stone pagodas, which were memorials for the dead. But we cannot specify when the custom of carving the five letters on the staff head began. The bamboo hat for pilgrims has four lines of Chinese poetry, four Chinese characters meaning "Do Gyo Ni Nin" (one going with Kobo-Daishi), and a letter of Sanskrit characters representing Kobo-Daishi. The four lines of poetry had been used for funeral ceremonies of some sects of Buddhism in Japan. And "Do Gyo Ni Nin" is a commonly used word in the Shikoku-Henro, which appears already in the pilgrim's guidebook written in 1687. A letter meaning Kobo-Daishi has been written on the pilgrim's hat since around 1958, from which period the style of modern bamboo hat was established. The issue of white clothes or a piece of white cloth put on pilgrim' back is very interesting. In the Edo period (from 1600s to 1860s), there is no definite style of the costume of Shikoku-Henro, nor in the Meiji and Taisho periods (from 1860s to 1920s). Since about 1940 (the year Showa 15), white clothes began to be used, but during the Second World War the custom disappeared. About 1958 (the year Showa 33), the wearing of white clothes and a piece of white cloth reappeared among pilgrims in Shikoku and has become the common rule of the Shikoku pilgrimage since then. Consequently, the costume style of the Shikoku-Henro was established in the middle and the latter half of the 1950s. The Shikoku-Henro was popularized as a result of the motorization of Japanese society prompted by rapid economic growth in the postwar period. A great many pilgrims using sight-seeing buses should be imaged as one identical group of believers. I maintain that today's style of the pilgrimage is the important measure of that purpose. I will examine the meaning of such costume styles in the future.

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It is interesting to find that most Shikoku-Henro pilgrims are in their 60's. Among them, we find not a few people travel alone, who might be very devoted to the pilgrimage and might dare to try the difficult Henro pathway. To take an example, I encountered a 60 year-old man when I was once on the way of the Henro. When he discovered he had already finished visiting almost half the 88 temples on the 31th day from the start, he confessed he was not accustomed to writing down his age in the visitors' register of Henro lodgings as if he were reflecting on the meaning of his age of 60, when he might be already retired from his job. Another man of 68 decided to start the Henro pilgrimage after he retired from his job; he might want to lead a new life after retirement. In both cases, the Shikoku-Henro marks the turning point of a life passage and signifies an initiation to new life stage. 'Dogyo-Ninin', which means traveling with somebody throughout the Henro path, would change the relationship of the pilgrim and an the accompanying person, be the one Kobo Daishi, founder of the Shingon sect of Buddhism, a husband or a wife, a brother or a sister, a friend or even a deceased person. When we choose to travel with the deceased, we might walk the pathway mourning for the dead who might be the deceased parents or ancestor or the deceased son or daughter. When we choose to travel with the living, we could get a unique chance to reflect over our past, which might be the preparation for our own death.

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The Minidoka Pilgrimage is a journey taken by Japanese Americans to visit one of the World War II Japanese internment camps. I examine Minidoka Pilgrimages from a perspective that is critically informed by sociological and anthropological studies on the contemporary Shikoku pilgrimage involving a circuit of eighty-eight Buddhist temples. I focus on how Minidoka has come to be considered a sacred place, how the pilgrimages are conducted, and how the transformative effects of the pilgrimage resonate with the pilgrims. In Minidoka, the pilgrimage finds a symbolic sacred place of suffering for Japanese Americans and creates a space for the transmission to the next generation of internment camp experiences through the telling of stories. The pilgrimage is a community of story-telling characterized by its abundant orality and generativity. With the numbers of individuals with direct experience declining, Minidoka finds itself wavering somewhere between memory and history and engaged in a struggle to be historicized, making it an apt candidate for the oral history method.

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All three symposiasts have experienced pilgrimage. Having listened to the pilgrims' comments, I found generational differences and a common point in their comments. A historian pointed out changing periods as seen through the clothes of the pilgrims. A religious scholar pointed out that middle age and elderly pilgrims were carrying "equipment for death," and a sociologist stated that the movement of people in the generation following that which experienced the American internment camps can also be called a "narrator's collective." The presenters of this symposium share the common experience of participation in the Shikoku pilgrimage, and find differences between generations and age groups. Even if discussion of the pilgrimage starts from a different aspect, for example tourism, it is difficult to talk about the Shikoku Henro without dealing with the religiousness. An additional problem shared by the presenters is that of what can be spoken and what cannot. This is an issue of importance to any research question in the field of oral history.

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As has been indicated by Dr. Kobayashi in her report, my pilgrimage to the 88 temples in Shikoku in 1997 triggered a change in my view of life. The quiet prayers repeated in each temple and the inside dialogues with myself, as well as the silent messages heard from the thick silence led me to realize that silence, rather than spoken words, often bears an important meaning.

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This article is my report on current A-bomb issues and the current social conditions of the hibakusha's life. It is made up of two sections. In the first section, I explain the current issues in the field by showing one recent movement of the hibakusha groups, the action of which I am concerned with. That is, recently it is becoming easier to undertake dialogue with hibakusha. Although it is necessary for us to foster activity that conveys hibakushas' experiences of the bombs to subsequent generations, and promote the construction of a "New Narrative" about them, there is an important problem we must consider. Next, in the second section, I describe my research experiences and future subjects. We need to take account of our research posture in order to have a dialogue with them. Recalling research experiences and considering interactions with subjects are the same task, and it is important to describe and look carefully at them. Furthermore, I refer in this essay to the social significance and meaning of academic research.

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The aim of this paper is to consider how can we establish oral history studies as an academic discipline without eliminating the richness in the original achievement from various types of oral historical practices in post-war Japan. I focus on the case of the Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage, founded in 2002, as a type of "foothold" in oral historical practices and war memory studies. The Center has a hybrid character, composed of a specialized professional institute and museum that also carries on a people's campaign of recording air raid experiences. The development of such types of "places" asks us to rethink the self-sufficient image of the existing academic system, that is, originally what is "knowledge," or what is the indigenous role of the university?

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As a student of the history of women, I have been, for more than 10 years, attempting to reconstruct the historical perspective of the Occupation period of Japan, utilizing a standpoint of gender equality and a methodology of oral history. Re-examining the period through the life experiences of women of the occupied country exposes completely different aspects of the occupation period of Japan from the so-called "good occupation" described by hitherto mainstream historians. Among them, it is especially important to look into the experiences of prostitutes, recruited at RAA (Recreation and Amusement Association) sexual "comfort" facilities created by the Japanese authorities for the Occupation forces, and of street girls, called "Pan Pan," dealing with US soldiers. This time, after conducting a field survey of RAA and the "red-light districts" constructed at that time by the authorities in Atami, I have reported my finding that at present these women are unable to disclose their experiences. I have frankly asked the participants at the conference what kind of oral history methodology to use in this situation, in order to break the barrier between the past and present. I have obtained various useful suggestions from diverse standpoints.

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Is "dialogue" a possibly effective method to understand and show the inner realities constantly changing in relation with other people? In this paper, I describe a methodological development behind the presentation for the Oral History Forum, showing my experiences between educational practice fields and research practice fields. Observations in the former tell that the process of "recovering energy" for the students is related to some "dialogues" between interpersonal and intertemporal realities, which led them to a new perspective. The key to develop "dialogues" is their "stubborn question" based on their own experiences. I adopt this method to analyze and interpret the narratives of a mother and her daughter who have experiences as victims of political violence in Spain. This has illuminated a history of the women though three generations.

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The method of articulating experience, especially its style and resolutions, varies from person to person. That diversity is influenced not only by cultural and historical factors, but also by personal cognitive-behavioral characteristics. Thus, the cognitive minority do not fit into the basic level of articulation style that is shared by the same cultural sphere, to be suffering from lack of a lexicon which is indispensable to share one's own experience with others. Tojisha-Kenkyu (person-centered, peer supported research) is a method to borrow and update a language that is designed for the cognitive majority, creating an original minority language system with which those in the minority can describe their own experience. Tojisha-Kenkyu is a technique to survive with others who share the same language. It is impossible to ignore as a challenge to the existing paradigm of science.

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The aim of Tojisha-Kenkyu is to verbalize one's own experience that occur inside ourselves but is never given any words, through the dialogue with peers in the place where one is not interfered with by other members and experts. A new word born in this practice can appeal to the society about important needs, which in turn will change the social structure little by little. However, the lessons I learned in struggling to facilitate Tojisha-Kenkyu were "Don't hurry the results, never stick to success, rather, try to continue to share the problem." and "Keep a watchful-waiting policy, start to deal only after the problem really happens." In addition, to maintain the openness and creativity of the word, it is also important to keep a network with the outside world. Challenges of the future are how to arbitrate both the safety of dialogue and the creativity of knowledge.

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The purpose of this paper is to discover a constructive means for young people to understand and appreciate a survivor's memory of the ordeal from the perspective of the A-bomb survivor, and the sharing of this testimony as a co-construction process involving the survivor and an interviewer, as well as five young people. The interview survey clarified four points. (1) We found that the survivor we interviewed built two identities; one as a 'survivor' and the other as a 'woman'. (2) The plurality of identity was derived via a co-constructing process involving the survivor, the interviewer, and the young people. (3) The plurality of identity captured the young people's attention because it was 'real' to them. (4) Despite the potential for mutual understanding, there remained a 'gap' between the survivor and the young people.

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The purpose of this article is to examine the internal migration of a person burnt out by an urban air raid. With the expansion of air raids on Japan's urban centers during the war, a large number of civilians were burnt out of their homes. Therefore, the government pushed forward a plan to have such people emigrate to farm villages. However, such people have so far not been studied in historical research. We carried out an interview investigation in a farm village in Hokkaido to which such people migrated. Therefore, in this report, we want to consider the local emigration of a person burnt out by an urban air raid based on interview data.

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Women working as nursery teachers subsequent to World War II - from the pioneering period of day-care centers through the recovery and growth periods - faced the following difficulties in their work: 1) personal relationships, 2) problems as pioneers in the area of establishing day-care centers, 3) lack of skills and specialization, 4) low social standing and poor treatment, 5) difficulties in balancing work and home life, and 6) problems stemming from social change caused by the war. Personal relationships were a particular source of stress for these women, who had entered the profession of nursery teacher precisely because they valued such relationships so highly. The issues of low social standing/poor treatment and balancing work/home life were closely related to the aspect of gender.

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