Sacred Mountain Off-Limits to Women

Mt. Omine in Japan is sacred to followers of the Shugendo religion and has a Buddhist temple at the summit. It's also barred to all women, despite an 1872 law eliminating gender-based bans on Japanese mountains. That's why people are upset that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has declared it a World Heritage site, effectively endorsing this ban.

The LA Times reports:

The ban's logic is rooted in sex. The yamabushi and, later, trainee Buddhist priests on the mountain were supposed to be engaged in a test of strict self-denial — at least until they came down to avail themselves of the numerous brothels awaiting them at the bottom. Women on the mountain would be a distraction. "We still believe this, that the mountain is only for men," says Kosho Okada, a 34-year-old Buddhist monk who is deputy to the chief priest at the Ominesanji Temple that crowns the mountain. "We have been protecting this mountain for some time now, and we are going to defend its tradition."

The U.N. says that the sacred sites and pilgrimage routes across the mountain range reflect Japan's fusion of Shinto and Buddhist spirituality, and that universal access is not a requirement for World Heritage status. The decision dismayed Japanese women's groups that had lobbied the government and the U.N. against enshrining what they see as discrimination on Mt. Omine. "UNESCO didn't even seem to think this was an issue," says Junko Minamoto, 57, of the Institute of Human Rights Studies at Kansai University. Minamoto says her interest in the mountain was stirred by her academic study of Buddhism, which alerted her to what she saw as the religion's enduring bias against women and its tenets requiring women to obey men.

Perhaps it was appropriate that the UN has included a site of prejudice, bigotry, and discrimination as a World Heritage site. After all, those "traditions" are part of humanity's heritage as well. Maybe we should have little enclaves of bigotry to remind us of where we came from in the past and of how much we have gained in the present.

Read More:

• Religion 101
• Theism 101
• Religion and Sex