1

To appear in Kevin Schilbrack, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Religious Diversity (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).

Draft, Please do not cite without permission

Chapter: 18 Title: Japanese Accounts of Religion

Author: Jason Ānanda Josephson

Abstract: In contemporary sociological surveys, Japan presents an apparent paradox. Very few Japanese people describe religion as important, but they attend religious services with a degree of frequency that exceeds American yearly church attendance; and the average Japanese person belongs to at least two religions. Depending on one’s vantage point, Japan is either largely secular or highly religiously diverse. This chapter clarifies these ostensible contradictions by tracing the history of modern Japanese engagement with the Western concept of “religion” and the shifting meaning of religion and religions it consequently produced. In so doing, it challenges received assumptions about religious diversity. Word count: 7074 Keywords: Japan, religion, secularism, Shinto, Buddhism, sociology, hierarchical inclusion.

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CHAPTER 18

Japanese Accounts of Religion

Jason Ānanda Josephson

Probably the most surprising Japanese bestseller of 1996 was not Kyōgoku

Natsuhiko’s latest quasi-supernatural mystery (Tesso no Ori, The Cage of the Iron Rat),

but a short monograph written in a largely accessible style by Ama Toshimaro, a

professor of International Studies at Meiji Gakuin University, titled Why Are the

Japanese Non-Religious? (Nihonjin wa naze mushūkyō nanoka). This monograph had a

widespread appeal in Japan partially because it touched on a seeming paradox: that many

Japanese who claim to be “without religion” (mushūkyō) actually engage in activities --

Buddhist funerals, Christian weddings, Shinto festivals, prayer ceremonies at Shinto

shrines -- that seem to Ama and other observers to be profoundly religious (Ama 1996, 8-

10). This work presented a seeming contradiction between self-identified secularity and

popular religious activity. Moreover, as European scholars were quick to note, the very

Japanese citizens who claimed to lack religion attended multiple religious institutions

without seeming to experience any incongruity (e.g., Dähler 2002). Restated, Japan

seems to be a repository of paradoxical diversity in which each given “areligious” citizen

practices a plurality of religions.

What I want to do in this essay is to delineate clearly some seeming contradictions

and explain what they mean for Japanese accounts of religious diversity and religion in

general. In so doing, I want to address the questions posed to me by the volume: “How

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has ‘religion’ been understood in Japan? How were boundaries between traditions

recognized? To what extent is the concept an imposition of European thinkers and to

what extent has the meaning of the term changed since the contact with Europe or after

World War Two? Can Japanese views of other religions be classified in terms of

exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism that are popular in Christian ‘theology of

religions?’” By answering these questions, I would like to clear some ground by calling

into question received assumptions about religious diversity. I will do so by tracing the

shifting meaning of religion and religions in modern Japan. But first, I want to update

Ama’s account with more recent sociological work on Japan.

The Sociological Paradoxes of Contemporary Japanese Diversity

In research conducted since 1996, the seeming contradictions around Japanese

religiosity are even more pronounced. In 2008, the World Value Survey rated Japan as

the most “secular-rational” country in the world, exceeding even the famously atheistic

countries of Sweden and the Czech Republic (Inglehart and Welzel 2010, 554). This

claim was based in part on a study conducted in Japan in 2005, in which 80.5% of those

who responded said that religion (shūkyō) was either “Not very important” or “Not at all

important” in their lives (Yamazaki 2005). But only one year earlier, in 2004, according

to the U.S. Department of State’s International Religious Freedom Report, 213,826,661

Japanese citizens claimed they had a religion -- a number that, as the report’s author notes,

is nearly twice as large as Japan’s population.1 This statistic is roughly supported by the

Japanese government’s yearly surveys, which show not only that the total number of

religious adherents exceed the population of Japan, but also that the total number of

4

clergy (kyōshi) and religious adherents actually increased in the last year surveyed (Nihon

Tōkei Nenkan 2012, 753). This is not all. According to the CIA fact book of 2005, the

breakdown of Japanese religious demographics was as follows: Shintoism 83.9%,

Buddhism 71.4%, Christianity 2%, other 7.8%.2 That this exceeds 100% is further

evidence that Japanese citizens belong to more than one religion. Taken together, these

statistics describe a “secular-rational” Japanese population in which very few people

believe that religion is important and yet each person belongs to an average of two

religions.

Other sociological investigations of Japanese accounts of “religious matters”

showed similar complications. According to a survey of “religious views” (shūkyōkan)

conducted by the Japanese Yomiuri Shimbun Newspaper in 2005, 75.4% of those

surveyed said that they lacked faith (shinjiteinai) in religion (shūkyō). But 80.7% said

that they attend a temple, shrine, or church at least once or twice a year (with 16.3%

saying they attend at least once a month) (Yomiuri Shinbun Sept 2, 2005, 17). By

comparison, according to a 2003 Harris Poll, only 55% of United States citizens attend a

“religious service” at least few times a year (with 36% saying they attend at least

monthly) (Taylor 2003). In the UK, according to a 2007 survey, only 25% of those who

responded had been to a church within the last year, with 18% saying they attend at least

once a month (Ashworth and Farthing 2007, 5-7). Combined statistics show that 75% of

British and 45% of Americans do not even set foot in a church yearly. This means that

average Japanese attendance at shrines, temples, and churches, while less frequent on a

monthly basis than the American and British examples, is actually more frequent on a

yearly basis.

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In an aggregate of surveys examined by Hayashi Fumi and Nikaido Kosuke in

2004, only 28% of Japanese surveyed professed to having a religion, but 72% reported

that having “religious sentiment” (shūkyōkan) was important. Hayashi and Nikaido

contrasted this finding with a survey of the United States in which 80% of Americans

reported they had a “religious faith,” while 76% reported that it was important to have a

“religious mind” (the authors’ translation for shūkyōkan) (Hayashi and Nikaido 2009,

174; see also Hayashi 2010). While I’m not sure how the average American would have

understood “religious mind,” it seems clear that religious sentiment in Japan and religious

faith in the United States were seen as almost comparably important. Finally, according

to the same aggregate survey, 81% of the Japanese population believed that God, Gods,

or Buddha either exist or may exist, a figure comparable to the 92% of Americans who

responded the same way (Hayashi and Nikaido 2009, 174).

In sum, by the conventional categories of Euro-American thought, Japanese have

more religious diversity than they have people, and they lack “religion” while frequently

attending religious institutions. So how do we account for this apparently contradictory

intersection of religion and secularism (no religion)? Ama Toshimaro’s explanation is

rooted in a strained distinction between “revealed religion” (sōshō shūkyō) and “natural

religion” (shizen shūkyo) (Ama 1996, 186-199). He argues that Japanese do not identify

with the term “religion” because they are deeply embedded in natural religion and have

no real understanding of revealed religion -- a failing that Ama attributes to the legacy of

the messy history of the Japanese importation of the concept of religion (shūkyō) in the

nineteenth century. While I disagree with Ama’s typology and find the idea of an innate

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Japanese connection to natural religion to be misleading, I agree with his impulse to look

at the history of the category “religion” in Japan to find some answers to this puzzle.

Japanese Accounts of Religion and Religions

On July 8, 1853, Toda Ujiyoshi, the Japanese magistrate of the city of Uraga,

heard reports that warships from an unrecognized foreign nation had dropped anchor in

his harbor and refused to depart.3 As he soon discovered, the ships were led by an envoy

from the United States of America who was refusing to leave the bay unless his

government’s demands were met. Although trade was in some ways the ostensible

rationale for the American expedition, its leaders saw the encounter in the more prosaic

terms of the Christian mission. Christianity, however, was at that time illegal in Japan.

The term “religion” occurs twice in the official letters brought by the Americans.

This put the Japanese head translator -- Hori Tatsunosuke (1823-1894) -- in a bind. No

word then existed in the Japanese language that was equivalent to the English “religion”

or that covered anything close to the same range of meanings. This resulted in a

proliferation of potential translation terms at the outset, and official Japanese translations

of the American materials render “religion” with three significantly different Japanese

words.4 When Hori ultimately produced the first English-Japanese dictionary ever printed

in Japan, he made different choices, while the first English-Japanese dictionary printed

abroad made others.5 All these possible terms were substantively different in meaning,

producing different possible “religions.” It seemed that “religion” could be anything from

a type of politics, to a publically encouraged morality, to a kind of systematic knowledge,

to a direct synonym for Christianity. This was only the beginning. As I demonstrate in

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The Invention of Religion in Japan (2012), the problem of defining ‘religion’ gained

national prominence over the next thirty years, giving rise to a broad debate at several

levels of Japanese society and inspiring a host of different possible translations for

religion, each of which implied a different conception of religion and a different set of

institutions.

Furthermore, although almost everyone involved agreed that for European and

American diplomats Christianity was the primary religion at stake, it was not

immediately clear what Japanese traditions, if any, might be considered “religions.” On

the one extreme there was the possibility (described by some Japanese intellectuals) that

there were no Japanese religions, merely the archaic vestiges of failed politics or

backward superstitions (Josephson 2012, 192-223). On the other extreme, the Japanese

landscape could have been partitioned into a significant plurality of different religions.

For example, in Japan: An Account (1852), a compendium of Western knowledge on

Japan used by members of the Perry expedition, Charles MacFarlane summarizes other

scholarly accounts of Japanese religion in the period and ultimately concludes that the

Japanese religious landscape consists of Buddhism and as many as thirty-four other

religions or sects (MacFarlane 1852, 230). While other accounts were more succinct, the

taxonomy of Japanese religions was a problem not only for MacFarlane, but also for

Japanese and Euro-American scholars over the whole course of the late nineteenth

century. For understandable reasons, this issue also matters for our account of diversity,

because depending on how one divides up the Japanese cultural landscape it seems to be

either incredibly homogenous religiously or the site of an overwhelming diversity of

religions.

8

Oshie: Diversity before Religion?

The official translator of the 1853 American mission -- Samuel Wells Williams --

had his own translation term in mind for “religion,” preferring the Sino-Japanese term 教

(Japanese oshie, kyō, Chinese jiao) (Williams 1844, 235). Pegging religion to this term

effectively portrayed Japan as a religiously diverse country with three dominant oshie or

religions. This was not without precedent and indeed represented an old European

schema for describing Japanese religions (Josephson 2011). It relied on a Chinese

expression evoking “the unity of the three teachings” (sanjiao heyi, Jpn. sankyō gōitsu).

Although far from a stable list, in China the three teachings were often Confucianism

(rujiao), Buddhism (fojiao), and Daoism (daojiao). Much later, the same expression was

used in Japan to describe Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shinto. So it sounds promising

as a term for religion, and today if you consult a historical survey of “Japanese religions”

or “Chinese religions,” it is often claimed that this term represented the pre-modern

equivalent to religion. Yet, late nineteenth century Japanese translators explicitly

rejected oshie as a translation for religion time and time again. I too would reject oshie as

an analogue for the modern concept of religion.

In broadest terms, even if this list seems to name commonly accepted “religions,”

the unifying term “oshie” does not map well onto the intrinsic or extrinsic features of the

contemporary category “religion.”6 Today, the term oshie is broader in its reference than

“religion.” By itself it can function as a verb meaning to teach, instruct, or inform. The

character also occurs in contemporary terms for education (kyōiku), culture (bunkyō), and

even professor (kyōju). While in both English and Japanese we can refer to “religious

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instruction,” it would be a radical mistake to assume that all pedagogy as such is

“religious.” Moreover, in the pre-modern period, the “three teachings” functioned far

more differently than the concept of “religion” would suggest, just as the concept of

“teachings” in the pre-modern West included politics, science, education, economics, and

ethics. Indeed, we have to actively forget the general meanings of the word “oshie” both

in pre-modern Japan and at present to even talk about it as a synonym for religion.

There is a further problem with treating oshie as a pre-modern synonym for

religion -- the three teachings did not represent separate bounded religions in the Euro-

American sense. In Japan before the seventeenth century, Buddhism, Confucianism, and

Shinto were not fully separate institutions, nor were they fully autonomous discourses.

The very language of sanjiao gōitsu is an attempt to emphasize the common core of the

three systems of knowledge. Indeed, Buddhist priests were largely the ones teaching and

commenting on Confucian and Daoist texts and performing the rituals of Shinto. The

pantheon of deities was also often shared. The Sōtō Zen Buddhist temple of Myogonji,

for example, was dedicated to the “Shinto” god Toyokawa Inari. Looked at this way,

oshie does not seem to get us three “religions.”

On an institutional level, as well, it is hard to argue that the primary function of

oshie was “religious” or “spiritual” as opposed to “secular.” For example, in the pre-

modern period, the Tendai Buddhist temple of Enryakuji controlled eighty percent of

sake brewers in the city of Kyoto as well as a similarly large percentage of money-

lending institutions in the area (McMullin 1984, 31-32; Gay 2001).7 Enryakuji was

therefore more than a Buddhist temple; it was also the largest banking institution in the

imperial capital and functioned in many ways like a modern mercantile company. It had

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vast landholdings from which it collected taxes and oversaw a number of important

cotton manufacturing guilds and commercial market centers. It even sold its own

branded material goods. Enryakuji was also politically and militarily active and even had

its own standing army. This was not unusual. Some Buddhist temples functioned as the

local police force, while others had regional dominions in which they administered all the

laws almost as states-within-a-state (McMullin 1984, 26).8 Moreover, instead of

presenting a uniform “religion,” individual schools of Buddhism had little unity either

institutionally or doctrinally. Sub-temples of the “same” school of Buddhism even went

to war with each other (McMullin 1984, 58). Hence, it does not make sense to think of

oshie as involving dividing lines either between different religions or between the

religious and the secular.

When a concept of religion was finally established in late nineteenth century

Japan, not all of the three teachings were equally considered “religions.” In this period,

only one of the three – Buddhism -- was widely recognized as a religion. Confucianism,

while being the paradigmatic “teaching,” was excluded from the category of religion

basically on the grounds that it was a philosophy or a kind of politics. What is more, a

number of Japanese intellectuals, policymakers, and even Buddhist priests of the period

bifurcated Shinto into religious and secular forms, arguing that Shrine Shinto (Jinja

Shintō) simply did not qualify as a religion (Josephson 2012, 94-7). It was instead often

described as either a body of knowledge, a public morality, the forum for the

performance of state ritual, the essence of what it meant to be Japanese, or the

ceremonies of the Imperial family. While there were some contrary voices, by and large

Shrine Shinto was not considered a religion. The three original oshie did not transpose

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fully into the modern list of “religions.” Since oshie did not work as a translation for the

European concept of religion, the Japanese needed to find alternatives.

Shinkyō, Shūkyō, and the Modern Concept of Religion

In broad brushstrokes: in the nineteenth century, the pressure from foreign powers

on the Japanese to formulate a modern constitution that included provisions for religious

freedom gave increasing urgency to the need for a translation of the Euro-American word

“religion” in the 1870s and 1880s, which created widespread debates within several

stratums of Japanese society. The result was the standardization of two different

Japanese neologisms as translations for “religion”: one basically legal in nature and the

other basically anthropological. In both cases, however, I want to emphasize that the

concept of religion was not simply a passive imposition by Western powers, but was the

product of contestation that permitted Japanese elites to formulate various meanings of

religion that would tactically meet the needs of domestic and international concerns.

First, after years of debate, on February 11, 1889, the Japanese emperor formally

promulgated Dai-Nippon Teikoku Kenpō (the Constitution of the Empire of Japan).

Article 28 stated: “Japanese subjects shall, within limits not prejudicial to peace and order,

and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects, enjoy freedom of religion.” The term

used to denote religious freedom here was “shinkyō” (literally, “belief in the teachings”).

This neologism, which had been formulated in the context of earlier debates in the 1870s,

was used to mean something like “religious conviction.” Under the influence of German

legal advisors on the Japanese Constitutional Committee, precedents were found in

Article 12 of the revised Constitution of Prussia (Verfassungsurkunde für den

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Preußischen Staat) of 1850.9 Shinkyō can be seen as a functional translation of “religious

confession” (religiösen Bekenntnisses). As further elaborated in official commentaries

and other legal precedents, the term shinkyō came to be seen as a narrowly circumscribed

set of private beliefs and rituals, the profession and practice of which were guaranteed by

the new Constitution assuming that they were of a generally recognized type and that

they did not conflict with the public duties of a Japanese imperial subject. Restated,

religion was legally construed to be an almost completely private affair that was

connected – paradoxically -- to an officially recognized religious organization, such as an

accepted Christian denomination. In this way, shinkyō was not dissimilar from other

legally embodied Protestant conceptions of religion such as those found in the Prussian

and American constitutions from the period. But this was not the only term for “religion”

the period produced.

Although there were significant degrees of semantic slippage between the terms, a

second neologism for “religion” was also formulated at roughly the same time. Starting

in the 1870s, the term “shūkyō” (literally “sect teachings”) entered common parlance as

an anthropological category understood largely as an umbrella term to connect a list of

generally accepted “religions,” including Christianity and Buddhism.10 While shinkyō

faded into the background as an almost exclusively legal term, shūkyō globalized and

formed the bases of Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese terms for “religion” (Ch. zongjiao;

Korean chonggyo; Vietnamese tôngiáo).

In formulating shūkyō, Japanese intellectuals located it within a set of distinctions

that are common to global modernity. This led to a change in the meaning of oshie

(teachings). To recap, before the modern period, oshie covered a combination of what

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we might refer to today as education, politics, religion, science, and ethics. Via the

ruptures and transformations of an encounter with the world-system of transnational

modernity, oshie became differentiated and new terms (like shūkyō or kyōiku) took on

some of its old meaning. These terms were defined in opposition to each other, for

example, shūkyō was effectively what was left over from oshie after politics, education,

and science had been excised (Josephson 2012, 258). Oshie was fractured into a range of

different meanings, each located in new discourse and linked up to the world-system in

different ways. For example, Japanese religion was put into dialogue with Christianity

and Islam, while Japanese philosophy confronted Hegel, and Japanese politics was

reformulated according to the precedents of international law. Furthermore, the three

teachings were differentiated from each other in new ways. The separation of Buddhism

and Shinto, and the attempted differentiation of Shinto and Confucianism serve as cases

in point. Not only was the “present” altered, but the “past” was also, in that new

concerns in the historiography were projected backward into the historical material along

with these new divisions. Some historical Japanese intellectuals became (retroactively)

scientists, politicians, or religious leaders; Buddhists, Confucians, or Shintoists, and were

understood in those terms. A diversity was retroactively read into the Japanese past that

obscured historical conflicts and presented false unities, while more presently oshie was

turned inward on itself and consequently produced internal antagonisms as a whole host

of new oppositions were put into place between religion and the secular, and between

science and superstition.

From a legal perspective, Shinto was bifurcated into religious and secular aspects.

An officially secular form of Shinto (hereafter, “the Shinto secular”) was lodged in the

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public sphere as a matter of morality and state ritual. The Shinto secular was officially

distinguished from religion and made a cardinal site for the construction of Japanese

identity. It was in fact argued that being Japanese and practicing Shinto were nearly

coterminous. Japanese sovereignty too was remolded to rest on claims of an unbroken

line of emperors whose distant progenitor was the Sun Goddess. But this was not all.

Indeed the very outward form of Japanese politics -- from the calendar of national

holidays to national history textbooks to the content of public political speeches -- was

phrased in the vocabulary of Shinto. Contemporary scholars have mistakenly tended to

refer to this phenomenon as the rise of a Shinto theocracy or state religion. I think this is

a mistake, as those labels fit the historical struggles poorly. Shinto did not attempt to

establish confessional unity or a powerful majority church. In any case, it was repeatedly

argued that performing Shinto rituals was fully compatible with membership in any

religion; there was no question of conversion or exclusivity, as there were no exclusive

“Shintoists.” Indeed as Japanese ministers from the period like Ebina Danjo made clear,

you could be a practicing Christian and still do Shinto.11 Notably, by distinguishing the

Shinto secular from religion, it was argued that participation in Shinto was fully

compatible with religious freedom. Accordingly, I think it is more helpful to think of the

Shinto secular in terms of the folkloric invention of German tradition and national

symbolism that defined the nineteenth century, or perhaps as a parallel to the construction

of U.S. civil religion that includes embedding Christian symbols (e.g., oaths sworn on the

Bible, references to God on the dollar bill) on the side of the “secular” state (Bellah 1967).

Regardless, as the Japanese ramped up its imperial project, the symbols of Shinto became

increasingly important.

15

New Religions in Imperial Japan (1889-1945)

Against the backdrop of Shinto nationalism and the standardization of

terminology for religion, there was a boom in so-called new religious movements

(shinshūkyō) in late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century Japan. Many of these groups

formed around charismatic leaders who reformulated older symbols to meet the cultural

instabilities of the period. To take one for an example, Ōmotokyō (literally, the Teaching

of the Great Source) was officially founded in 1892 by Deguchi Nao (1836-1918), the

wife of a poor carpenter, who claimed that in that year she had been possessed by a deity

named Ushitora no Konjin who commanded her to heal the sick and preach world

renewal (yonaoshi) (Stalker 2008; Staemmler 2011, 123-133). It was her son-in-law

Deguchi Onisaburō (1871-1948), however, who took advantage of the new media of the

period to turn her teachings into a mass movement. Although Ōmotokyō borrowed from

Buddhist doctrine, local folk cults, and the newly formulating national Shinto, it was in

many ways a modern movement.

According to some accounts, the rise of the new religions in nineteenth century

Japan resulted in an increase in the country’s religious diversity. Depending on one’s

perspective, however, it is also possible to see these as merely new developments within

the Buddhist or Shinto institutions. Indeed some of the groups now identified as new

religions were officially recognized by the state as Shinto sects. Moreover, this religious

proliferation happened against the backdrop of the Shinto secular, which demanded that

all Japanese citizens recognize a few basic presuppositions of Shinto discourse, including,

of course, the claim that the Emperor was divinely descended from the Sun Goddess. If

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you read the Shinto secular as a religion (which, to reiterate, I think would be a mistake),

then you would likely be forced to conclude that Japan had only one religion in the period.

As scholars like Sheldon Garon have noted, in the interwar years new religions

became the largest and fasting growing popular movement in Japan, gaining as much as

several million adherents by about 1935 (Garon 1986). With the consolidation of

Japanese state power and the rise of militarism in the same period, Japanese officials

began to worry about the influence commanded by these new religions, or, as they

referred to them, “pseudo-religions” (ruiji shūkyō) or even heresies (jakyō). In 1935, the

police even launched an official campaign to “eradicate heresy” (jakyō semmetsu),

directed at suppressing those new religions that seemed to represent a destabilizing

influence. Ōmotokyō in particular had its headquarters raided on December 8, 1935 and

hundreds of its members were arrested (Garron 1986, 273-274). Yet, in the same period,

Japanese leaders sought to enroll leaders of the three established religions (now

understood as Buddhism, Sect Shinto, and Christianity) as opponents to Communism

(Garron 1986, 280-282). In this we can see that despite the importance of the Shinto

secular, the Japanese state did not see it as incompatible with religions like Buddhism and

Christianity.

The Status of Religion After 1945

Over the course of Japan’s imperialist expansion, the state further consolidated its

fusion of Shinto and nationalist discourse. Government-issued texts such as the 1944

Jinja Hongi (the Underlying Principle of Shinto Shrines) attempted to define the essence

of the Japanese nation-state as one great family originating in the Sun Goddess and

17

headed by her descendant the Japanese emperor (Murakami 1970, 141). While I in no

way want to apologize for Shinto’s role in Japanese imperialism, this wartime discourse

in some ways paralleled British calls to serve God and King.12 After all, though the

British monarch was not considered to be of divine descent, he was both the official head

of the Church of England and widely regarded in Britain as the standard bearer of

“Christian civilization” (see also Bradford 1989, 309). Nevertheless, the Allied

leadership came to regard State Shinto and its relationship to the emperor as a major

contributing factor in Japanese militarism (Dower 1999, 308-9). Moreover, they

diagnosed what I have been calling the Shinto secular as a state religion. In the

“Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender” of July 26, 1945, Western powers

again called on Japan to guarantee freedom of religion.

Following Japan’s defeat in World War II, the Occupation Powers made it part of

their business to displace Shinto as the fulcrum of Japanese national identity. In this

context, the Allied Forces made it one of their early orders of business to produce the so-

called “Shinto Directive” issued on December 15, 1945 and titled “Abolition of

Governmental Sponsorship, support, perpetuation, control and dissemination of State

Shinto.” Given the novelty of the English noun “State Shinto,” the directive required the

popularization of the neologism “Kokka Shintō” (literally nation-state Shinto) (Woodard

1972, 54-74) and the explicit identification of Kokka Shinto with the more common Jinja

Shintō (literally “Shrine Shinto”). This directive not only radically eliminated public

funding for Shinto monuments and other institutions, but it also expunged Shinto

symbols from public buildings and censured passages on Shinto themes from national

18

textbooks. This directive can thus be seen as an effort to completely efface the Shinto

political institution (Woodard 1972, 71).

The Supreme Commander for the Allied Forces (SCAP) required the Japanese

emperor to issue the famous New Year statement on January 1, 1946 popularly known as

the Humanity Declaration (Tennō no Ningen Sengen) (Dower 1999, 308-315). Although

there is not space here to fully articulate the Allied rationale for this move, it was broadly

rooted in a sense that the Japanese were engaged in “emperor worship” and that this was

at least partially responsible for the evils of Japanese nationalism (Dower 1999, 308-9).

This statement was intended to repudiate the “false conception that the Emperor is divine,”

and this is how it reads in the official English translation. Japanese leaders, however,

attempted to strategically mitigate this claim and used intentionally archaic terminology

that had the emperor deny that he was an “akitsumikami” (incarnation of a deity), which

was not in fact the way that the Emperor was then understood. This left in place the

claim to imperial descent from the Sun Goddess, which was actually more important and

which the Emperor continued to maintain amongst his closest advisors (Bix 2000, 182;

Dower 1999, 313-6; Ishikawa 2007, 179-18). Nevertheless, in this issue we can see a

disconnect between the Western occupiers who believed they were attempting to

eliminate a Shinto theocracy and Japanese leaders who were trying to preserve the central

features of their Shinto politics.

In the end, SCAP forced a new Constitution on Japan that was promulgated on

November 3, 1946. In the build-up to the English draft of this constitution, the occupiers

described political Shinto as a failure to produce a separation between church and state

(Hellegers 2002, 1:165, 188, 232). Accordingly, the occupation government worked to

19

dismantle the Shinto political institution under the guise of just such a separation. They

also drafted a constitutional article (Article 20) reframing the issue of freedom of religion,

which read in the official English translation:

Freedom of religion is guaranteed to all. No religious organization shall

receive any privileges from the State, nor exercise any political authority.

No person shall be compelled to take part in any religious act, celebration,

rite or practice. The State and its organs shall refrain from religious

education or any other religious activity.

In Japanese, Article 20 uses both of the discussed neologisms for religion,

“shinkyō” and “shūkyō.” Translated, “freedom of religion” (shinkyō no jiyū) guarantees

the private and inward religious confession charted by the Meiji Constitution. By

contrast, “religious organization” is rendered with the more anthropological shūkyō

dantai. Again, space prohibits a full discussion, but suffice it to say that combined, the

Occupation policies produced in Japan a separation of church and state more rigorous in

its application than the American case.13 Moreover, by locating Shinto completely on the

side of the “religious” they both foreclosed the possibility of the Shinto secular and

produced new Shinto religious sects, which then had to compete with each other (as well

as Christianity and Buddhism) in the religious marketplace. This competition intensified

when General Douglas MacArthur issued a public call to Christian missionaries to

contribute to the creation of a new Japan, leading to over fifteen hundred new

missionaries arriving in Japan in the space of less than four years (1949-1953) (Mullins

2006, 118).

20

One consequence of the changing political and cultural terrain of the post-war

period and the influx of Christian missionaries was the birth of a fresh set of Japanese

new religions, some of which had distinctly Christian influences (see Shimazono 2004,

Dorman 2012). While the vast majority of new religions were benign, surely the most

infamous was Aum Shinrikyō. Founded in 1984 by Asahara Shoko (1955-present), Aum

brought together yoga practices, early Buddhist philosophy, Nostradamus, and Christian

messianism, culminating in the claim that Asahara was a newly-risen Christ come to

prepare the world for Armageddon (Reader 2000, esp. 169-172). By the early 1990s,

Asahara’s teachings had taken on an increasingly paranoid tone and they had begun to

arm themselves, including the purchase AK-74s in Russia and experimentation with

biological weapons. In this period, members of Asahara’s inner circle began a series of

murders targeting those who criticized or threatened to expose the group. This obsession

culminated in Aum’s 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, which led to 13

people dead and several hundred injured.

As Inoue Nobutaka has argued, one of the direct consequences of the Aum affaire

has been an increasing distrust on the part of Japanese youth -- not only with new

religions but also with religion in general (Inoue 1999, 33; Inoue 2009). This has led

toward a boom in groups and activities defining themselves as “spiritual” (supirichuaru)

as opposed to religious (Gaitanidis 2011). This shift in terminology has not escaped the

attention of the Japanese press, and a recent set of surveys by Yomiuri Shimbun

newspaper noted that spirituality has become an increasingly important buzzword in

modern Japan.14 In sum, the post-Aum critique of religion (shūkyō) and constitutional

safeguards preventing funding of religious organizations have effectively encouraged

21

Japanese religions to sell themselves in terms of “spirituality” and “culture” rather than

the more contentious “religion.”

Conclusion: Hierarchical Pluralism

What does this account of the history of Japanese notions of religion and religious

diversity tell us? First and foremost, it shows that the concepts of religion and

perceptions of the diversity of the Japanese cultural landscape have been deeply

intertwined. At different moments in history, new coalitions were formed while others

were dissolved, and the result was a radical reconfiguration of Japanese traditions.

Second, even after its importation into Japan, many of the extrinsic features of the

European conception of “religion” -- including ideas of exclusivity, conversion, and even

religious identity -- appear only incompletely and inconsistently. This is not a failure to

grasp the concept of religion on the Japanese part, but evidence that the Christian

contours of the modern concept of religion have only a limited applicability to non-

European cultures, even those that have legally produced a category for religion in the

modern mold.

Although this is far from a complete explanation, Japanese citizens have a

disincentive to identify with a single religion. This is especially true in a post-Aum world

in which excessive investment in religion has taken on even more negative associations.

This does not stop Japanese people from going to Buddhist shrines or temples, but does

seem to encourage them to participate multiply. This poses a challenge for scholars,

because it calls into question received assumptions about the boundaries of religions (see

in this volume: John Thatamanil “Multiple Religious Participation”). It is difficult to

22

articulate discourses of pluralism or religious diversity when a given individual may be

part of multiple religions at once and may not distinguish which of his or her conceptions

are associated with which religion. Indeed a given object or ritual might be read as

Shinto, Buddhist, Confucian, or even Christian depending on the context and the observer.

That is not say that there are no boundaries between religions in Japan, but that

historically there has been more fluidity than a classical model of religious difference

would suggest (and of course, the history of Christianity, Judaism and Islam in the

Mediterranean historically shows similar exchanges). The existence of this fluidity also

did not indicate harmony, but rather created the possibility that nearly any symbol could

be the site of ideological contestation.

Japanese conceptions of religious diversity may also have something to say to

contemporary debates in Christian theology. The Christian “theology of religions” is

normally read in terms of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. In brief, there is a

debate between theologians of various denominations about whether one can receive

salvation only within the Christian church (exclusivism), in other religions via the

intercession of Christ (inclusivism), or whether salvation is possible in all religions

(pluralism). While there is far from one stance on this issue in Japan, “salvation”

(outside of the Christian community) is largely an alien concept. Issues about whether

practitioners of different religions can be saved would seem to be out of place. This does

not mean that we should close off the conversation completely.

Instead, I think the Japanese case can point toward a descriptive assessment of

these discourses of salvation in Christian theology and even the attitude toward religion

held by the modern “secular” scholars in America and Western Europe. To do so, I’d

23

like to introduce a pre-modern Japanese mode for reconciling difference that I call

“hierarchical inclusion” (Josephson 2012, 27-8).15 By hierarchical inclusion, I mean an

operation for dealing with alterity that works by subordinating marks of difference into a

totalizing ideology while still preserving their external signs. It is thus a procedure which

moves beyond the Manichean binary of identity or difference. According to this

combinatory paradigm, local deities could be emanations or even something like the

legible signs of universal buddhas and bodhisattvas. Prime examples might be the claim

that the Christian God is just an incarnation of, or another name for, the Japanese Cosmic

Buddha.

I do not believe hierarchical inclusion was limited to pre-modern Japan. For

example, one may also think of the method of comparison referred to by Roman scholars

such as Tacitus as interpretatio Romana, which described an attempt to identify the true

Roman identities of “barbarian” deities (Josephson 2012, 26). I also see it at work in the

seemingly ecumenical claim that all religions worship the Supreme Being in their own

way, which suggests that only the Christian God is genuine and other religion’s deities

are mere approximations. Following this thread, I see Christian theologies of inclusivism

and some versions of pluralism as different forms of hierarchical inclusion. The logic of

these positions relies on the use of Christianity as an interpretive vantage point, and

asserts that other religions are merely provisional manifestations or expressions of the

impulse toward the Christian deity.

Without stretching the idea of hierarchical inclusion too far, it is possible to see

the logics of even some allegedly secular scholars as obeying a variant of this syntax for

reconciling difference. To see all religions as expressions of a single principle such as

24

the transcendent or the sacred (terms that are the mere shadow of the Christian God) is to

see religions in effect as nothing but provisional manifestations of an ideal religion,

which is often a barely disguised Christianity. The category religion itself then functions

as a kind of hierarchical inclusion, merely masquerading as neutrality.

Endnotes

1 http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2006/71342.htm

2 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ja.html

3 Discussed in detail in Josephson 2012.

4 These were seirei, kyōhō seiji, oshie, and shūshi kyōhō.

5 shūshi, shinkyō (Hori 1869, n.p.). By contrast, the Medhurst dictionary available to the

expedition translated “religion” as osihe [sic] (Medhurst 1830, 49).

6 For competing modern conceptions of “religion,” see Josephson 2012, 8-11.

7 This had changed by the Tokugawa period.

8 Parallels to medieval Europe are clear.

9 For more detail see Josephson 2012, esp 231-3.

10 Although “shū” and “kyō” had occurred together in the pre-modern period, for all

intents and purposes prior usages seem to have been unrecognized by the Japanese

intellectuals who promulgated shūkyō as a translation for religion.

11 For a discussion of this in greater detail see Josephson 2012.

12 For British wartime religious rhetoric, one might think of Churchill’s famous “Be ye

men of valor speech,” broadcast in 1940 and its concluding lines: “It is better for us to

25

perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of

God is in Heaven, even so let it be.”

13 See also Article 89, “No public money or other property shall be expended or

appropriated for the use, benefit or maintenance of any religious (shūkyō) institution...”

14 As Yomiuri Shinbun observed, 27% of Japanese women describe themselves as “drawn

to spirituality” (Yomiuri Shinbun 2008).

15 Historically a version of this was referred to as honji suijaku, “original foundation,

manifest traces.”

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