Kawabe 33 Kannon Pilgrimage

     Kawabe 33 Kannon Pilgrimage was organized either at the end of the 17th century or at the beginning of the 18th century.  Those years are generally considered to be the Golden Age of the Edo Period.  The previous hundred years of peace and seclusion in Japan had created relative economic stability.  Additional rice fields were newly developed, and monetary economies grew to make merchants wealthy and affluent.  The arts and architecture flourished, especially in the surrounding areas of Osaka and Kyoto.

     In legendary times, Okinagatarashi, a legendary empress, was said to have made a military expedition to Silla in the Korean Peninsula.  A historical record of the Three Kingdoms of Korea (Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla) recorded 14 organized piracies by Wa, the Japanese kingdom, by the end of the 4th century.  Okinagatarashi’s expedition to Silla might have been one of those piracies.  For her expedition, Okinagatarashi counted on the arts of shipbuilding and of navigation possessed by the people living along the north coast of today’s Osaka Bay. When she was going to leave Japan, she followed the suggestion of the local people living around today’s Amagasaki City and built warships with Japanese cedars in the upper reaches of today’s Ina River.  So, it was the people having lived and the ceder tress having grown in the Kawabe-33-Kannon-Pilgrimage area that Okinagatarashi had relied on.