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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