Director’s Statement

There is a chant you will hear several times if you watch this film. It’s “Rokkon shojo, ” which can be translated as “Purify the six roots of perception.” This I believe summarizes the intention of the film “Shugendō Now.”I believe we are living in times of over-saturated media. Be it intense reality television shows caked with advertising or the billions of internet videos that showcase anything about everything or apocalyptic movies on the big screen that turn sacred knowledge to popcorn. Everywhere are attempts to divert get our attention to the next incredible whatever. I find this to be exciting and frightful at the same time. What are the opportunities to learn within this buzz of information? How do we integrate it all into our beings?

With this film we hope to offer something different. A film experience that cleanses the sensorial palate. Stories about individuals, families and institutions that highlight the extraordinary in the mundane. Through an esoteric tradition, we explore the universal and fundamental connection we all have with Nature. Like Henry David Thoreau once said: “All of Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist her.”

We present to you a film that doesn’t explain it but embodies it. Although many ideas are shared by the participants in the film, for us the most important is the heart connection we want to establish with the viewer. We want people to come out with a sense of peace and an open heart, with a desire to bathe in a waterfall, walk on a mountain or cook a good meal with friends. It brings us pleasure to present a film that doesn’t shock people with terrible news about our World, but a film that inspires the viewer to appreciate and be connected with the World that we’re terribly destroying, despite ourselves.

I thank you for your interest and hope you get a chance to view this film.

Jean-Marc Abela
Director

Producer’s Statement: Taking responsibility for your representation

I have long been concerned about the ethical dimensions of representing other cultures. An anthropology professor named Robert Ascher introduced me to what he called “cameraless filmmaking” and gave a gripping introduction to classic and experimental ethnographic films. Since then I have been haunted by those creaky 16mm reels in his basement film lab: Under the Men’s Tree (J. & D. MacDougall, 1970) was a revelation. As were Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (T. Moffatt, 1989), and Couple in a Cage (P. Heredia, 1989). Professor Ascher’s work involved a painstaking process of hand drawing individual film cells to produce provocative and beautiful ethnographic films. In his view, simply bringing a camera into another culture is an act of violence. I’m inclined to agree with him but do know examples where it need not necessarily be so.

You could say these deep ethical concerns were simmering as I moved through increasingly arcane though fascinating coursework and language study in graduate school. This was during the revelation of the Abu Ghraib torture images in 2003. Seeing Iraqi bodies distorted into a gruesome billboard for everything that had gone wrong during the US Occupation shocked and seared in my psyche the brutal domination of a people by the American military industrial complex. Research into Japan’s past felt self-indulgent and disconnected, but activist and writing projects juxtaposing the Japanese cases with ruptures closer to home helped keep what I was doing accessible, relevant, and in rare instances, transformative.

I had my first taste of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan in the summers of 2002 and 2003. It was during these initial encounters that I met several of the ascetic priests and lay people who appear in this film. I can remember asking, quite naively, at the reception desk of Kimpusen-ji temple,

“Are there any more real mountain ascetics (yamabushi) around here?”

In fact, there were. Many. Two hundred or so arrived the following day in their full regalia for the annual Frog Hop festival. It is a tribute to their unfailing generosity and kindness that they invited me to join them on the Lotus Ascent of Mount Ômine depicted in the film. I also met Tateishi Kōshō and spent a week at his rural training center The Forest of Mountain Learning. His creative reinvention of the tradition and environmental and social activism impressed me immensely. This encounter helped clarify for me what I had long hoped for: solid scholarship and activist engagement could coexist. In Kōshō’s company I learned to stop asking so many questions and instead simply walk the mountains, weed the rice fields, scrub the toilet. To listen and observe. I made a few rolls of slide film, took some field notes, drank a lot of sake, bathed daily in a waterfall, and continued to let all these thoughts and ideas simmer. It was wonderful. But it could also be dangerous at times—physically, emotionally, and politically—in the company of these powerful and charismatic practitioners.

In the summer of 2006 I met Jean-Marc on a rooftop garden in Montréal. I had recently begun teaching courses on documentary film at a public college there and volunteering at the garden. We began to discuss how it might make an interesting film to bring together his camera and cinematic storytelling skills and my Japanese language ability and experiences living and doing research in Japan. So in the summer of 2007 we met in Japan and got down to work. It has been a beautiful exchange and aside from my relationships with my partner and children, one of the most meaningful and fruitful learning experiences and collaborations I’ve had. Compared with academic research and writing, which can be solitary, even monastic experiences, filmmaking as we have experienced it has been interactive, collaborative and joyful.

Jean-Marc taught me to record sound and we simply got down to it, allowing the natural world of Southwestern Japan to become the star of the film. We wanted to present the raw experience of the climb from the perspective of the everyday man. This meant we had to try to make a film while doing everything the pilgrims were doing, without breaking ranks or getting in anyone’s way. Or worse, tumbling off the side of the mountain, which is a real danger and what I feared Jean-Marc would do while courageously climbing with his Steady Cam. We then retreated for three weeks at Tateishi Kōshō’s training center in Kumano to observe and document his daily activities. Here the word engagement seems more appropriate than retreat. Each evening Jean-Marc sat down to capture and select footage while I catalogued and summarized the audio recordings. The idea was to begin editing while the sounds and images were fresh; where we could still hear the roar of the cicadas and feel the relentless and bone-tiring humidity of Japan’s rainy season. Our fellow pilgrims and guides could also give feedback and let us know what they thought of what we had captured; whether we got it right or missed things entirely. Given that we worked well into the evening and arose most mornings at five for daily meditation, sleep came at a premium. Jean-Marc, as far as I could see, slept only during head-knocking car rides to the bee appeasements and prayer offerings.

I plunged into the project with the confidence of having a professional filmmaker, artist and friend at my side and a basic agreement with the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz that sooner or later you’ve got to stop the scholarly hand wringing and begin taking responsibility for your representation. Though with great reluctance and many concerns about not harming anyone or ourselves in the process, I eventually waded in, ponied up, and got down to work “making things out” (Geertz), hoping not to do too much “making things up.” Certainly we made and continue to make many mistakes. That which we have misconstrued and miscommunicated during the project has been impressive. I learned that being scolded by Gojô-san, the head abbott of Tonai-In in Yoshino, before 120 fellow pilgrims meant we were taken seriously and included.

I have struggled with trying to figure out just what we are doing with this film. Is it the work of a scholar? Artist? Activist? Cultural imperialist? Probably a little of each. Aren’t we supposed to be objective? Disinterested? Dispassionate? But if that’s true, then what do we do when we love the practices and places we study and the people we have met. If they inspire and challenge us on profound levels? Or worse, when we despise them or they us? (That happens far less, by the way.) I’m impressed by ascetic standouts Tanaka Riten, Gojō Ryōki, Hisagishi Shinsei, Tateishi Kōshō and the vibrant lives of engagement they lead. I want to share their work and ideas with as many as possible. Can there be room for appreciation and exuberance in this kind of filmmaking? Though mindful of the risks of doing what might be called poetic ethnography, we feel justified in our approach given how high the stakes are in this age of crisis and possibility: when each day a new batch of horrors and delights arrives on the front doorstep; when very few seem to be taking any responsibility at all for the state of our natural world, political, economic and social lives.

Jean-Marc and I are gratified audiences savor moments where we slide with co-participants toward rebirth down a waterfall imagined as the Tantric Womb. It was one of the most fun and meaningful moments for us, too. We hope viewers see that Shugendô practitioners do ritual ascetic practices in the 21st Century not because they are “superstitious,” or “group-oriented,” nor out of love of nation or emperor. They do them because it is enjoyable, challenging, and keeps them connected and human.

We hope you enjoy the film and companion discussion guide. Share it widely.

Mark Patrick McGuire
, Producer
Humanities / Campus Sustainability Initiative
John Abbott College