Ian Reader is Professor Emeritus, University of Manchester. He has held several previous posts at other universities, including the University of Lancaster, UK, the Nordic Institute for Asian Studies, Denmark, the University of Hawaii, USA, and Kansai Gaidai University, Japan. He has published several books and numerous articles on Japanese religious dynamics and practices, including Making Pilgrimages: Meaning and Practice in Shikoku (University of Hawaii Press, 2005), Pilgrimage in the Marketplace (Routledge, 2013), an edited volume Pilgrimage in the Japanese Tradition (with Paul L. Swanson, as a special edition of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 1997), and several journal articles and book chapters.