Submit to Religions Review for Religions Propose a Special Issue

Journal Menu

Journal Browser

Critical Approaches to 'Religion' in Japan: Case Studies and Redescriptions

Print Special Issue Flyer
Special Issue Editors
Special Issue Information
Keywords
Published Papers

A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444). This special issue belongs to the section "Religions and Humanities/Philosophies".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2021) | Viewed by 24082

Share This Special Issue

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Mitsutoshi Horii

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Shumei University, Yachiyo 276-0003, Japan
Interests: cultural studies; sociology; Japanese studies; cultural sociology; religious studies; Japanese cross cultural studies

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Religions welcomes contributions that problematize the concept “religion” in Japanese contexts, and disaggregate and redescribe what is denoted as “religion” in Japan without invoking the sui generis idea of religion. The category of religion, and its imagined conceptual distinction from the idea of ostensibly non-religious secularity, has been critically deconstructed in Religious Studies for some decades. After deconstructing “religion”, there seem to be at least two innovative ways that have been put forward by this critical approach to “religion” or so-called “critical religion”. First, the critical deconstruction of “religion” enables scholars to effectively analyze the ways in which individuals, groups and institutions negotiate with the term “religion”. Here, the objects of analysis are norms and imperatives that govern specific utilizations of the term “religion”. Second, given the fact that “religion” is a modern concept, this approach invites scholars to imagine no “religion” in pre-modern or non-modern worlds in order to reimagine human communities and ways of living in these contexts. This line of thinking poses a serious question for projection upon pre-modern or non-modern contexts, not only of “religion” but also other related modern generic categories. This Special Issue calls for papers that take at least one of these two innovative directions in the context of Japan.

Recent years have witnessed an important development in the critical approach to “religion” in Japanese contexts. For example, major works on “religion” in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Japan include Jun’ichi Isomae’s Religious Discourse in Modern Japan (Isomae 2014), Jason Josephson’s Invention of Religion in Japan (Josephson 2012), and Trent Maxey’s The “Great Problem”: Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan (Maxey 2014). In addition, Jolyon Thomas’ Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (Thomas 2019) extended the scope of analysis up to 1952, whereas my own The Category of “Religion” in Contemporary Japan (Horii 2018) analyses “religion” in twenty-first-century Japan. Built on these works, the theme of this Special Issue stems from my most recent publications: “Problems of ‘Religion’ in Japan” Parts 1 and 2 (Horii 2020) and “‘Religion’ and ‘Politics’: A Japanese Case” (Horii 2019).

Given this theoretical thread, this Special Issue particularly welcomes contributions that explore one of the following two areas. The first is cases of negotiations over contested meanings and definitions of “religion” from the Meiji era to the present in relation to a variety of individual and institutional interests and identity claims. This also includes the colonial context of the Japanese Empire. The second area consists of historical investigations that attempt to disaggregate what has been assumed to be “religion” in pre-Meiji Japan, where the idea of religion did not exist, and then to reassemble and redescribe its components in more nuanced ways. The subjects of disaggregation in this area include not only the anachronistic projection of the religious-secular distinction, but also that of other related binaries such as religion/politics, sacred/profane, immanent/transcendent, and the like. This Special Issue wishes to reimagine Japan by imagining no sui generis religion in both contemporary and historical contexts.

Deadline for abstracts: 30 April 2021.

Word Limit: As for the length of the full paper for submission, we recommend 8,000 - 10,000 words including abstract, keywords, main text, and reference. However, we would accept up to 20,000 words. As for the abstract, we recommend 200 – 300 words, but we would accept up to 500 words.

References:

Horii, Mitsutoshi. 2018. The Category of ‘Religion’in Contemporary Japan: Shūkyō and Temple Buddhism. London: Palgrave Macmillian.

Horii, Mitsutoshi. 2020. Problems of “Religion” in Japan: Part 1 and 2. Religion Compass 14: 1–10.

Horii, Mitsutoshi. 2019. “Religion” and “Politics”: A Japanese Case. Implicit Religion 22: 413–28.

Isomae, Jun’ichi. 2014. Religious discourse in modern Japan: Religion, state, and Shintō. Leiden: BRILL.

Josephson, Jason. 2012. The Invention of Religion in Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Maxey, Trent. 2014. The “Great Problem”: Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.

Thomas, Jolyon. 2019. Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Prof. Mitsutoshi Horii

[email protected]

Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

critical religion
sui generis religion
religious–secular distinction
Japan
discourse
redescription

Published Papers (9 papers)

Download All Papers

Editorial

Jump to: Research

9 pages, 209 KiB

Open AccessEditorial

Introduction: Critical Approaches to ‘Religion’ in Japan: Case Studies and Redescriptions

by Mitsutoshi Horii

Religions 2022, 13(8), 763; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13080763 - 21 Aug 2022

Viewed by 1460

Abstract

This Special Issue of the online open access journal Religions is entitled “Critical Approaches to ‘Religion’ in Japan: Case Studies and Redescriptions” [...] Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Approaches to 'Religion' in Japan: Case Studies and Redescriptions)

Research

Jump to: Editorial

36 pages, 423 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Japan, Religion, History, Nation

by Timothy Fitzgerald

Religions 2022, 13(6), 490; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13060490 - 27 May 2022

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3374

Abstract

I connect the invention of Japanese ‘religion’ since the Meiji era (1868–1912) with the invention of other modern imaginaries, particularly the Japanese Nation State and Japanese History. The invention of these powerful fictions in Japan was a specific, localised example of a global process. The real significance of this idea that religion has always existed in all times and places is that it normalises the idea of the non-religious secular as the arena of universal reason and progress. The invention of Japanese ‘religion’ had—and still has—a significant function in the wider, global context of colonial capital and the continual search for new ‘investment’ opportunities. Meiji Japan illustrates, in fascinating detail, a process of cognitive hegemony, and the way a globalising discourse on ‘progress’ transformed the plunder of colonial sites into a civilising mission. The idea that there is a universal type of practice, belief or institution called ‘religion’ as distinct from government, ‘politics’ or ‘science’ was not only new to Japan. It hardly existed in England or more widely in Protestant Europe and North America until the eighteenth or even 19th century. The idea of a secular constitutional nation state was only emergent in the late 18th century with the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Most of Europe—including the colonial powers England and France—were still Christian confessional church states through most of the 19th century. The franchise was granted only to Christian men of substantial property, and denied to women, servants, wage labour, colonised subjects, and slaves. This critical, deconstructive narrative helps us to see more clearly the ideological function of the generic category of religion in the wider configuration of modern secular categories such as constitutional nation state, political economy, nature, history, and science. I also discuss the relation between History as a secular academic science, and the invention of ‘the Past’ in universal Time. I argue here that the invention of the Past by professional Historians has a significant role in transforming modern inventions such as ‘religion’ and the secular categories into the inherent and universal order of things, as though they have always been everywhere. I reveal this on-going process of ideological reproduction by close readings of some recent ‘histories of Japan’ and the way they uncritically construct ‘the Past’ in the terms of contemporary configurations. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Approaches to 'Religion' in Japan: Case Studies and Redescriptions)

21 pages, 422 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Excavating the Hall of Dreams: The Inventions of “Fine Art” and “Religion” in Japan

by Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm

Religions 2022, 13(4), 313; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13040313 - 01 Apr 2022

Viewed by 1803

Abstract

Setting out from Okakura Kakuzō and Ernest Fenollosa’s famous “discovery” of the Yumedono Kannon, this article will trace the contested construction of the categories of “religion” (shūkyō) and “fine art” (bijutsu) in Meiji Japan. In religious studies circles, it has become commonplace to think of “religion” as the only disciplinary master category with issues. However, not only was “religion” invented in Japan, but “fine art” was invented there too. Indeed, categories from “culture” to “society” to “politics” have similar issues. Attending to these will help refocus crucial debates away from an obsession with translation and onto more fundamental issues about “cultural categories” as such. This paper will advance the debate by explaining the attendant constructions of “religion” and “fine art” as process social kinds. In doing so, it will showcase the museum and the temple as central sites of materialized disputation over global categories and their local instantiation. It will show how assimilation to the world-system in the long nineteenth century was a complex multi-generational process of negotiation and contestation, producing new hybrid spaces, returns, transformations, and innovations that then reflected back on global systems, changing them in subtle but profound ways. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Approaches to 'Religion' in Japan: Case Studies and Redescriptions)

18 pages, 626 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Getting Away from ‘Religion’ in Medieval Japan

by Philip Garrett

Religions 2022, 13(4), 288; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13040288 - 26 Mar 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1995

Abstract

The concept of ‘religion’ as modern, European-derived, and therefore problematic in premodern and Asian contexts is well established, but leaves us with a problem: if the church/state sacred/secular dynamic is a modern misconception even in England, as Fitzgerald argued, then how should we go about examining the central place of specific institutions, behaviour, and belief in the workings of medieval Japanese society that have formerly been classified or understood as ‘religious’? Abandoning ‘religion’ as a separate field of study from the ‘secular’ in Japanese history has the paradoxical effect of drawing attention to the pervasive centrality of activity, performance, mentality, and observance to every aspect of medieval life. Elements of practice, performance, and the sacred were essential, core, components of the functioning of public and private governance from the imperial system to local landholding. The great temple shrine complexes of the medieval period were centres of organisation, authority, and legitimacy, which are best understood not as ‘religious’ complexes which were also ‘economic’ and ‘political’ powers, but as institutions whose authority cannot be separated out into separate (modern) categories of ‘economic’, ‘judicial’, or ‘religious’ authority. Such distinctions cut across the deeply interconnected nature of law, landholding, family, lineage, place, and belief in the period, the networks and systems by which medieval life was ordered, but they also cut across the way that they were perceived by those living within them: the ways in which people thought, behaved, and interacted with each other. In order to understand the workings of what we think of as medieval Japanese society, we must understand these connected systems as composed of elements that might look ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ to modern eyes, but which were complementary, indivisible, even, in the period. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Approaches to 'Religion' in Japan: Case Studies and Redescriptions)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

22 pages, 425 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Roots of Ambivalence: Makiguchi Tsunesaburō’s Heterodox Discourse and Praxis of “Religion”

by Andrew Gebert

Religions 2022, 13(3), 260; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13030260 - 18 Mar 2022

Viewed by 2421

Abstract

In the post-World War II era, Sōka Gakkai has deployed the terminology and concept of “religion” (shūkyō 宗教) in a variety of contexts and to a variety of ends. Do these positions simply reflect a post-war strategic stance? Do they have deeper historical and philosophical roots? A careful reading of key texts by founding president Makiguchi Tsunesaburō 牧口常三郎 (1871–1944) suggests that, from its inception as the Value-Creating Education Society (Sōka Kyōiku Gakkai 創価教育学会) in the 1930s, the movement has occupied an ambiguous space, relative to the conceptualization and practice of “religion”, as these were imported at the start of the Meiji Era (1868–1912), adopted and indigenized to respond to the cultural, social and political exigencies of modernizing Japan. Examples of Makiguchi’s heterodoxy, relative to the established understanding of “religion” and its role, include: the rejection of specific ideas of “religion”, in relation to education and science, as represented in the writings of such intellectuals as Inoue Tetsujirō 井上哲次郎 and Ishiwara Atsushi 石原純; refusal to accept the official definition of Shintō as non-religion; positing an essential continuity between faith/trust among human subjects and faith directed at ideas and objects typically considered “religious”; promoting the idea of worldly benefit, as a result of faith in and practice of “religion”. A careful reading of Makiguchi’s complex, and often heterodox, discourse, relative to the conceptual category of “religion”, can frame a more nuanced interpretation of his ultimate heterodoxy—his rejection of the Ise Shrine amulet, an act for which he was arrested and confined to prison in July 1943. It can also clarify the basis for the Sōka Gakkai’s post-war deployments of the concept of religion, and create a more flexible and expansive interpretative space for considering the organization’s discourse and praxis in the post-war era. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Approaches to 'Religion' in Japan: Case Studies and Redescriptions)

13 pages, 269 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Critical Visual Religion Approach: When Ethnographic Filmmaking Blends with the Critical Approach to Religion, a Japanese Case Study

by Ilaria Vecchi

Religions 2022, 13(3), 255; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13030255 - 17 Mar 2022

Viewed by 1528

Abstract

This article draws on the research and practice developed during my doctorate and fieldwork in Japan. In this work, I consider the implication of using the critical religion approach and the visual ethnographic methodology for critically investigating what is commonly labelled as religion and its representation as observed in Japan with particular reference to my fieldwork in Tohoku. I begin by reviewing the concept of religion in Japan, in particular the character of the idea and the use of the critical religion approach. I continue with an analysis of ethnographic filmmaking, focusing on cases that inspired my visual ethnographic filmic approach. I discuss how the two methods informed each other, creating a visual ethnographic technique founded on the critical religion approach as well as sensory, participatory and creative ethnographic filmmaking methods I developed and applied to my documentary, Tohoku Monogatari—A Story from the Northeast of Japan. With this article, I contend the necessity of a critical approach to the representation of religions which could be achieved with what I named the critical visual religion approach. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Approaches to 'Religion' in Japan: Case Studies and Redescriptions)

22 pages, 519 KiB

Open AccessArticle

“Cutting Up a Chicken with a Cow-Cleaver”—Confucianism as a Religion in Japan’s Courts of Law

by Ernils Larsson

Religions 2022, 13(3), 247; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13030247 - 12 Mar 2022

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2730

Abstract

This paper explores the Naha Confucius Temple case, resolved by the Supreme Court in February 2021, in light of postwar decisions on Articles 20 and 89 of the Japanese constitution. Religion is a contested category in Japanese legislation, appearing both in the constitution and in laws regulating the freedoms and restrictions of legally registered religious organizations. While the organization behind the Confucius Temple in Naha was registered as a general corporate juridical person, the majority opinion sided with the plaintiffs’ argument that the free lease granted to the temple by the municipality of Naha constituted a violence of the ban on public sponsorship of religious institutions and activities. In order to reach their decision, the Supreme Court and the lower courts not only had to decide on whether Confucianism was a religion or not, but also on whether the organization behind the temple—a group dedicated to the history and memory of the Chinese immigrant community in Naha—should in fact be considered a religious organization. The outcome of the case is a good example of religion-making in courts of law, with a central institution of power employing notions of sui generis religion to regulate and define civil actors. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Approaches to 'Religion' in Japan: Case Studies and Redescriptions)

27 pages, 549 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Soka Gakkai Practice of Buppō and the Discourse on Religion in Japan

by Anne Mette Fisker-Nielsen

Religions 2022, 13(2), 167; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13020167 - 14 Feb 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3372

Abstract

This paper investigates the Japanese Nichiren Buddhist organization, Soka Gakkai (SG), whose members have supported the political party known as Kōmeitō, or Clean Government Party, in Japan for over half a century. SG members have often been criticized as ‘impure’ political actors, undergoing frequent public questioning of their motivations for engaging in electoral politics in light of their ‘religious’ status. The paper shows how the SG members’ support for Kōmeitō at a qualitative level indeed transcends the typical demarcations of the ‘secular-religious’ binary system. However, they also simultaneously challenge the term ‘religion’ that has functioned as an ideology in the creation of statecraft and in their competition for legitimacy. The current paper is based on long-term fieldwork, extensive interviews, and doctrinal analyses that highlight how socially productive this discourse on religion has been. It also shows how a counter-episteme, rooted in Nichiren’s theory of the Risshō Ankoku Ron and the idea of kōsen-rufu, sought to bring a ‘Buddha’ consciousness to bear on individual and collective action as a model for alternative ‘politics’. Contrary to many claims, this did not entail contesting the modern institutional separation of ‘church’ and ‘state’, but is rather an attempt to find legitimacy for participating in ‘Japan-making’ in ways that cannot easily be understood or confined to explanations framed within the ‘religious-secular’ binary system. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Approaches to 'Religion' in Japan: Case Studies and Redescriptions)

19 pages, 617 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Do You See What I See? ‘Religion’ and Acculturation in Filipino–Japanese International Families

by Alec R. LeMay

Religions 2022, 13(2), 93; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/rel13020093 - 19 Jan 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3034

Abstract

Catholicism prides itself on being a ‘global religion’. However, just how this ‘religion’ is contextualized into a specific culture has led to intercultural and intergenerational problems. In Japan, the Filipino–Japanese struggle to fit into a society that sees, in their Catholic upbringing, ‘religious’ activity that it deems un-Japanese. The concept of ‘religion’ (shūkyō) in Japan has been largely associated with congregational activity, an aspect that neither Shinto nor Buddhism stress. As a result, the Japanese people label acts such as the purchasing of lucky charms, temple and shrine pilgrimages, visits to power spots, and performing birth or death rituals as ‘non-religious’ (mushūkyō). On the other hand, they label similar Christian acts as ‘religious’. Associating Christianity with ‘religion’ has had consequences for Japan’s Filipino residents and their international families. This paper considers the role the concept of ‘religion’ plays in the acculturation of Filipino–Japanese children into Japanese society. Through qualitative interviews of four Filipino–Japanese young adults, it delineates, in eight sections, how the discourse of ‘religion’ isolates Filipino mothers from their ‘non-religious’ children and husbands. This begins at adolescence and culminates with the children’s absence from the Roman Catholic Church of Japan. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Critical Approaches to 'Religion' in Japan: Case Studies and Redescriptions)

► Show Figures