Sacred Places, Pilgrimage, and Tourism - Geography of Religion in Japan: Religious Space, Landscape, and Behavior - page 173

collapse. Many people associated with the church encourage tourism to help seek
fi nancial support from the national and local governments and to preserve precious
religious facilities (Hosoda 2008 ). However, some individual Christians fear their
churches and sacred sites will become a mere tourism resource. Kimura ( 2007a )
reports expressions of concern such as “Isn't our place of faith being overrun by
tourists nowadays? Hasn't the faith that we inherited from our ancestors become
merely a showpiece?” Similarly, we cannot deny that the religious spaces that were
originally made for prayer may change if the movement to make the Church Group
a tourism resource succeeds.
Three points should be considered in discussions of commodifi cation of rural
spaces in Nagasaki. First, commodifi cation packages rural places and displays them
for customers (Urry 1995 ). Those packaged places simplify consumption by urban
customers. In this context, the rural landscape becomes the realm of sign-
consumption (Baudrillard 1998 ). Second, Christianity as an honorable identity may
be enhanced and strengthened through the reconstruction of public local memory
encouraged by signifi cant actors. Christianity in Nagasaki has not always been rep-
resented in a positive way. Although a history of Nagasaki Christianity represents a
universally valuable history in the world with a rise of the World Heritage registra-
tion movement (Kimura 2007b ; Yamanaka 2007a ), this reconstruction of history
may conceal historical discrimination against Christians and hidden Christians.
Third, the production of a new locality to simplify consumption of rural places has
become easier with the development of the Internet. Various localities have been
produced, and disappeared after a short period, which is the danger of easy produc-
tion of locality.
The phenomenon of turning sacred places into commercial tourist spots has been
classically observed. Sacred places may be created and given new meaning by peo-
ple with a variety of (social and economic, political, cultural, or religious) objec-
tives, and confl icts may arise. The Catholic churches in Nagasaki are sacred spaces
to a community of Christians based in villages. Villages became parishes, and each
church was originally independent of the others. What will be the effect on the
churches and martyrdom sites, when these become a tourism resource connected by
an orderly pilgrimage tour?
When religion provided a sacred canopy and moral standard for society (Berger
1967 ), the sacred world had more functions than now. Waves of rationality have
swept over the world in a special time and space. Modern Western thought has pen-
etrated all aspects of life and sacred spaces have been exchanged for new useful,
safe, and comfortable spaces. Some people thought that irrational places such as
sacred sites would vanish, but although society has globalized, standardized, and
homogenized, sacred places remain in the spotlight as unique entities. The creation
of sacred places also represents the act of searching for a place (Relph 1976 ).
Originally, many sacred places were created and became standardized and used. We
need to be careful about this aspect.
The registration of a local religious culture as a heritage site adds religious value
to something that has the secular values of history and tradition. A World Heritage
site may be considered to have universal value for humans, but have nothing to do