This paper makes a bibliography of geography of religion in Japan on the basis of Bibliography of Geography edited by the Human Geographical Society of Japan and attempts to analyze it statistically, so that it examines the research trend in the geography of religion in postwar Japan.
Bibliography of Geography appeared ten times every five years after the Second World War. It covers extensively most of the geographical literature published in Japan. The number of books and articles related to the geography of religion collected from Bibliography amounts to 390, of which more than 360 items are written by geographers.
Main points obtained through the analysis are as follows:
1. The volume of the items has increased steadily after the war.
2. In the second and the third stage (1957-1976) Ogoshi and Uchida wrote many papers. In the fourth stage (1977-1986) Nagano and Iwahana were productive, and in the fifth stage (1987-1996) other geographers such as T. Tanaka, Sekiguchi, Oda and Nakagawa were also active.
3. It is geographers born in the 1950s who published more works than any other. On the contrary there are somehow few scholars in the immediately earlier generations born in the 1930s and 1940s.
4. Mountain religion has often been studied by geographers in spite of its small number of believers and temples, whereas so-called new religions have received little attention.
5. Popular research subjects include religious city and settlement, pilgrimage, cemetery, distribution of religion, rural religious organization, pictorial map, and mountain sacred area. Many of them attract more interest recently, but the literature related to the religious city and settlement has decreased in number.