To Hell with Devotion: Buddhism in Senjafuda

This article concerns nōsatsu, also known in Japanese as senjafuda and generally known as “votive slips” in English. Nōsatsu emerged in the 18th century out of popular practices related to pilgrimage in the city of Edo. Nōsatsu practitioners who visited Buddhist temples or Shinto shrines would paste votive slips on walls or other surfaces in the belief that the pasted slip would function as a proxy for the pilgrim, continuing in prayer vigil after the pilgrim had left. Practitioners persisted in their pasting activities in the face of opposition from temples and shrines. Later, nōsatsu evolved into full-color pictorial woodblock prints meant for exchanging and collecting, rather than pasting, but the early history of pilgrimage, proxy devotion, and institutional resistance remained in both the memories of the practitioners and the iconography of the slips themselves. Through close visual analysis of several slips depicting Buddhist themes, this article will describe the attitude of transgressive devotion that characterizes nōsatsu culture.