Religious Discourse in Modern Japan PDF Download

Author: Jun'ichi Isomae
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004272682
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
Religious Discourse in Modern Japan explores the transportation of the Western concept of “religion” in in the modern era; the emergence of discourse on Shinto, philosophy, and Buddhism; and the evolution of the academic discipline of religious studies in Japan.

Author: Hans Martin Krämer
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824857216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Religion is at the heart of such ongoing political debates in Japan as the constitutionality of official government visits to Yasukuni Shrine, yet the very categories that frame these debates, namely religion and the secular, entered the Japanese language less than 150 years ago. To think of religion as a Western imposition, as something alien to Japanese reality, however, would be simplistic. As this in-depth study shows for the first time, religion and the secular were critically reconceived in Japan by Japanese who had their own interests and traditions as well as those received in their encounters with the West. It argues convincingly that by the mid-nineteenth century developments outside of Europe and North America were already part of a global process of rethinking religion. The Buddhist priest Shimaji Mokurai (1838–1911) was the first Japanese to discuss the modern concept of religion in some depth in the early 1870s. In his person, indigenous tradition, politics, and Western influence came together to set the course the reconception of religion would take in Japan. The volume begins by tracing the history of the modern Japanese term for religion, shūkyō, and its components and exploring the significance of Shimaji’s sectarian background as a True Pure Land Buddhist. Shimaji went on to shape the early Meiji government’s religious policy and was essential in redefining the locus of Buddhism in modernity and indirectly that of Shinto, which led to its definition as nonreligious and in time to the creation of State Shinto. Finally, the work offers an extensive account of Shimaji’s intellectual dealings with the West (he was one of the first Buddhists to travel to Europe) as well as clarifying the ramifications of these encounters for Shimaji’s own thinking. Concluding chapters historicize Japanese appropriations of secularization from medieval times to the twentieth century and discuss the meaning of the reconception of religion in modern Japan. Highly original and informed, Shimaji Mokurai and the Reconception of Religion and the Secular in Modern Japan not only emphasizes the agency of Asian actors in colonial and semicolonial situations, but also hints at the function of the concept of religion in modern society: a secularist conception of religion was the only way to ensure the survival of religion as we know it today. In this respect, the Japanese reconception of religion and the secular closely parallels similar developments in the West.

Author: Mitsutoshi Horii
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319735705
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This book critically examines the term ‘religion’ (shūkyō) as a social category within the sociological context of contemporary Japan. Whereas the nineteenth-century construction of shūkyō has been critically studied by many, the same critical approach has not been extended to the contemporary context of the Japanese-language discourse on shūkyō and Temple Buddhism. This work aims to unveil the norms and imperatives which govern the utilization of the term shūkyō in the specific context of modern day Japan, with a particular focus upon Temple Buddhism. The author draws on a number of popular publications in Japanese, many of which have been written by Buddhist priests. In addition, the book offers rich interview material from conversations with Buddhist priests. Readers will gain insights into the critical deconstruction, the historicization, and the study of social classification system of ‘religion’, in terms of its cross-cultural application to the contemporary Japanese context. The book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including Japanese Studies, Buddhology, Religious Studies, Social Anthropology, and Sociology.

Author: Mark Mullins
Publisher: Jain Publishing Company
ISBN: 0895819368
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Designed for classroom study, this anthology provides the students with interpretations and perspectives on the significance of religion in modern Japan. Emphasis is placed on the sociocultural expressions of religion in everyday life, rather than on religious texts or traditions. A particular strength of this collection is the combination of current Japanese and Western scholarship.

Author: Ikuo Higashibaba
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004122901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This volume provides a new history of Christianity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japan by depicting the world of ordinary Japanese Christians. It examines their religious expressions, as well as textual expositions given to them, within the context of Japanese religious culture.

Author: Ian Reader
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113681941X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
The Tokyo subway attack in March 1995 was just one of a series of criminal activities including murder, kidnapping, extortion, and the illegal manufacture of arms and drugs carried out by the Japanese new religious movement Aum Shinrikyo, under the guidance of its leader Asahara Shoko. Reader looks at Aum's claims about itself and asks, why did a religious movement ostensibly focussed on yoga, meditation, asceticism and the pursuit of enlightenment become involved in violent activities? Reader discusses Aum's spiritual roots, placing it in the context of contemporary Japanese religious patterns. Asahara's teaching are examined from his earliest public pronouncements through to his sermons at the time of the attack, and statements he has made in court. In analysing how Aum not only manufactured nerve gases but constructed its own internal doctrinal justifications for using them Reader focuses on the formation of what made all this possible: Aum's internal thought-world, and on how this was developed. Reader argues that despite the horrors of this particular case, Aum should not be seen as unique, nor as solely a political or criminal terror group. Rather it can best be analysed within the context of religious violence, as an extreme example of a religious movement that has created friction with the wider world that escalated into violence.

Author: Kiri Paramore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134067658
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Ideology and Christianity in Japan shows the major role played by Christian-related discourse in the formation of early-modern and modern Japanese political ideology. The book traces a history development of anti-Christian ideas in Japan from the banning of Christianity by the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 1600s, to the use of Christian and anti-Christian ideology in the construction of modern Japanese state institutions at the end of the 1800s. Kiri Paramore recasts the history of Christian-related discourse in Japan in a new paradigm showing its influence on modern thought and politics and demonstrates the direct links between the development of ideology in the modern Japanese state, and the construction of political thought in the early Tokugawa shogunate. Demonstrating hitherto ignored links in Japanese history between modern and early-modern, and between religious and political elements this book will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese history, religion and politics.

Author: R. Starrs
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023033668X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Written by leading scholars in the field, this book provides new insights, based on original research, into the full spectrum of modern Japanese political-religious activity: from the prewar uses of Shinto in shaping the modern imperial nation-state to the postwar 'new religions' that have challenged the power of the political establishment.

Author: Richard King
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231518242
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
Religion, Theory, Critique is an essential tool for learning about theory and method in the study of religion. Leading experts engage with contemporary and classical theories as well as non-Western cultural contexts. Unlike other collections, this anthology emphasizes the dynamic relationship between "religion" as an object of study and different methodological approaches and openly addresses the question of the manifold ways in which "religion," "secular," and "culture" are imagined within different disciplinary horizons. This volume is the first textbook which seeks to engage discussion of classical approaches with contemporary cultural and critical theories. Contributors write on the influence of the natural sciences in the study of religion; the role of European Christianity in modeling theories of religion; religious experience and the interface with cognitive science; the structure and function of religious language; the social-scientific study of religion; ritual in religion; the phenomenology of religion; critical theory and religion; embodiment and religion; the impact of colonialism and modernity; theorizing religion in terms of race and ethnicity; links among religion, nationalism, and globalization; the interplay of gender, sex, and religion; and religion and the environment. Each chapter introduces the topic, identifies key theorists and issues, and respects the pluralistic nature of the scholarship in the field. Altogether, this collection scrutinizes the explicit and implicit assumptions theorists make about religion as an object of analysis.

Author: Jason Ānanda Josephson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226412342
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call “religion.” There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea. In this book, Jason Ananda Josephson reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed. More than a tale of oppression or hegemony, Josephson’s account demonstrates that the process of articulating religion offered the Japanese state a valuable opportunity. In addition to carving out space for belief in Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, Japanese officials excluded Shinto from the category. Instead, they enshrined it as a national ideology while relegating the popular practices of indigenous shamans and female mediums to the category of “superstitions”—and thus beyond the sphere of tolerance. Josephson argues that the invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion today. This ambitious and wide-ranging book contributes an important perspective to broader debates on the nature of religion, the secular, science, and superstition.