Author Affiliation

Miyake Hitoshi, Professor Emeritus of Keio University and lecturer at Kokugakuin University, is a leading scholar of Japanese religion, especially of Shugendo and folk religion. He is currently president of the Association for the Study of Japanese Mountaion Religion and Shugendo, and is a former president of the Japanese Association for Religious Studies. He is also a member of the Science Council of Japan. His publications span four decades. His groundbreaking studies, particularly his monumental three-volume study on Shugendo ritual, thought and organization (1970-1996), have made an immense contribution to Japanese religious studies. He has also made a systematic study of folk religion, and his work Shukyo minzokugaku (Religious Folklore) is highly regarded. His most recent work in English is Shugendo - Essays on the Structure of Japanese Folk Religion (Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2001), a collection of essays concerning the beliefs and practices of Shugendo and Japanese folk religion.

Gaynor Sekimori is a specialist in the history of Japanese religion, with a particular interest in Shugendo. She is also a long-term practitioner at Hagurosan, and has written extensively about its history and ritual. Her doctorial dissertation for the University of Cambridge studied the effects of legislation to separate kami and buddha worship (shinbutsu bunri) on Haguro Shugendo. She is presently an associate professor at the Institute of Oriental Culture at the University of Tokyo, where she also acts as the Managing Editor of the International Journal of Asian Studies (Cambridge University Press). Forthcoming publications include a chapter on the history of the Autumn Peak ritual at Hagurosan in Sennen no shugen, Hagurosan mineiri (Shinjuku shobo, 2005) and a study of star rituals in Nikko Shugendo in Culture and Cosmos.

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