From the author: My interest in the Pilgrimage to the Eighty-eight Sacred Places of Shikoku dates from my first visit to Shikoku, in 1961. I first performed the 1000-mile circular pilgrimage in 1968. From 1969-1971 I lived on Shikoku in the city of Matsuyama in order to study and perform the pilgrimage, and in 1971 made the entire pilgrimage again. In 1973 I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship which permitted me to undertake a book about the pilgrimage. Japanese Pilgrimage was published in May 1983 by William Morrow & Company.
During the Japanese Academic year 1980-81, I was a visiting professor at Kobe College (Kobe Jogakuin), the old and prestigious women's college now located in Nishinomiya. During this year in Japan I worked with a Matsuyama film maker, Ueda Masakazu, to make an 8-mm film about the pilgrimage; the film was first shown at the 1983 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in San Francisco."