Dei treni e dei riti. Politiche ferroviarie e memoria estetico-rituale nella Tokyo contemporanea

This article deals with the relationship between marketing, space and ritual memory in contemporary Japanese religions, through the analysis of an urban pilgrimage in the environs of Tokyo, just outside the central area of the capital. This pilgrimage was created in spring 2007, with the name of Yururi Sansaku, Shitetsu Ensen – Hana to jisha meguri (“Taking a Leisurely Walk, on the Private Railway Lines – A Pilgrimage to Flowers, Temples and Shrines”). Promoted by six major private railways of Tokyo, it was based on the combined visit of twelve cultic sites – Shinto and Buddhist – and twelve botanical gardens, located next to particular railway lines outside the main routes. In this article I follow the traces left by the visitors themselves along the different paths/discourses enunciated by them, by analysing the relationship between space and identity on three different levels of subjectivity described by Bertrand (1995) as enunciative, narrative, and discursive subjectivity. I start from topological and axiological analyses of maps, shifting then to narrative and ideological processes concerning the journey on train-actors. I then focus on the proxemics of the ritual interactions with divine actors in the cultic centres, as well as on the aesthetic interactions with vegetal actors taking place in the botanical gardens. I try, in particular, to cast light on the contractual and fiduciary nature of the latter two modes of interaction, based on affective mechanisms which transform the identity of the visitors themselves. Finally, I demonstrate that, from the total set of pilgrimages enunciated by all the participants – in a mosaic of thousands of postcards stamped and collected by the visitors and different routes taken – a sensory or “aesthesic” identity of the private railways also seems to emerge, as one of the active components involved in the policies of territorial negotiation.