Japan's Nationalism and The Age of the Gods: Challenges to Scholarship (original) (raw)

Patriotism, Secularism, and State Shintō: D.C. Holtom’s Representations of Japan

Wittenberg University East Asian Studies Journal, 2011

This paper explores the ideology of religious studies with respect to early 20th century studies of Japan. Since 1945, “State Shintō” has been defined in academicliterature as a state religion which was enforced by the Japanese government froman undetermined date after the Meiji Restoration until it was disestablished by theAllied Occupation. In fact, the Japanese government took concrete steps to separatetheir patriotic ceremonies from religion. Our current definition of the term “State Shintō” was produced by the religious scholar D.C. Holtom.

Kami Ways in Nationalist Territory: Shinto Studies in Prewar Japan and the West.

Bernhard Scheid, Kate Wildman Nakai (eds.), Kami Ways in Nationalist Territory: Shinto Studies in Prewar Japan and the West. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2013

Shinto, literally the way of the kami (gods), is often regarded as Japan’s indigenous religion retaining archaic elements of animism and nature worship. At the same time, Shinto is sometimes seen as nothing else than a nationalistic political ideology. After all, in 1868 Japan turned into a modern nation state and worship at Shinto shrines became a national cult. This so-called State Shinto was eventually abolished under the Allied Occupation in 1946 but the historical links between Shinto and Japanese nationalism led to an ambivalent attitude towards Shinto not only at the popular level but also at the level of scientific research. The present volume comprises eight essays by leading experts of Japanese intellectual history from Japan, Europe, and the USA who tackle this issue from the point of view of research history: What is the impact of State Shinto on Shinto research before and after the Second World War? How did Japanese and international scholars contribute and/or react to the ideological framework of Japanese nationalism? How did nationalist discourses of other countries (in particular German National Socialism) influence the conception of Shinto? As each essay addresses these issues from a specific angle, it becomes clear that there never was just one ideology of State Shinto. Moreover, from the 1880s onward the political authorities emphasized shrine ritual at the cost of Shinto theology. This so-called nonreligious-shrine doctrine also weakened the significance of academic research of Shinto as a tool of propaganda. Regarding the concept of Shinto proper, the impact of modern, “westernized” religious studies seems at least as important as traditional, “nativist” approaches. Table of contents * Introduction: Shinto Studies and the Nonreligious-Shrine Doctrine (Bernhard Scheid) * Religion, Secularity, and the Articulation of the “Indigenous” in Modernizing Japan (Isomae Jun’ichi) * Nationalism and the Humanities in Modern Japan: Religious, Buddhist, Shinto, and Oriental Studies (Hayashi Makoto) * Colonial Empire and Mythology Studies: Research on Japanese Myth in the Early Shōwa Period (Hirafuji Kikuko) * Coming to Terms with “Reverence at Shrines”: The 1932 Sophia University–Yasukuni Shrine Incident (Kate Wildman Nakai) * Shinto Research and Administration in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: The Case of Miyaji Naokazu (Endō Jun) * The Ethnographer, the Scholar, and the Missionary: French Studies on Shinto at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (Jean-Pierre Berthon) * “A Living Past as the Nation’s Personality”: Jinnō Shōtōki, Early Shōwa Nationalism, and Das Dritte Reich (Michael Wachutka) * In Search of Lost Essence: Nationalist Projections in German Shinto Studies (Bernhard Scheid)

Religious nationalism and the making of the modern Japanese state

2008

This article explores the role of religious nationalism in the making of the modern Japanese state. We describe a process of adaptation featuring bricolage, as an alternative to imitation accounts of non-Western state formation that privilege Western culture. The Meiji state, finding it could not impose Shintô as a state religion, selectively drew from religio-nationalist currents and Western models for over two decades before institutionalizing State Shintô. Although we see some similarities to Europe, distinctive features of the Japanese case suggest a different path to modernity: a lack of separation between state and religion, an emphasis on ritual and a late (and historically condensed) development of popular religious nationalism, which was anchored by State Shintô disciplinary devices including school rituals and shrines deifying the war dead. Tôru Kondô, a high school teacher in Tokyo, was recently forced to take a retraining course, lectured on his conduct, and asked to do a written self-examination. He was one of 244 educators punished for refusing to comply with a new Tokyo Board of Education regulation: teachers were to stand, face the flag and sing the national anthem during enrollment and graduation ceremonies; another 67 teachers were warned because they failed to instruct their students to do so. While Tokyo school officials take down the names of teachers who fail to stand and sing, in Fukuoka Prefecture they keep track of how loud students sing the anthem (each school is classified as high, medium, or low). Backers of the rule, who want to expand it nationwide, argue that it is a step in making Japan a "normal" country that can have patriotic pride. However, the teachers object that the government is using the anthem

" Another" Patriotism In Early Showa Japan (1930–-1945)

Journal of the History of Ideas, 2010

In current debates on “constitutional” and “republican” patriotisms, the relationship between religion and patriotism is underappreciated while alternative forms of patriotism in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy have escaped scholarly attention. The present essay explores “another” patriotism in wartime Japan by comparing and contrasting the patriotism of two Protestant thinkers: Tsukamoto Toraji and Yanaihara Tadao. A close analysis of Yanaihara’s patriotism in particular shows that there was an alternative form of patriotism which, from a Christian perspective, combated militaristic nationalism which was anchored in State Shintō, thereby suggesting a significant link between religion and patriotism. This paper is now reprinted in Critical Readings on Christianity in Japan, ed. Mark R. Mullins, 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2015), vol. 3.

The Irony of Secularist Nation-Building in Japanese Modernity : Inoue Kowashi and Fukuzawa Yukichi

2016

Japan seems to face the issue of "religion and politics" again, as movements towards religious nationalism under the Abe government attract attention (Japan Times 2014). These movements allegedly aim at "return to prewar Japan" (Shimazono 2014; Yamazaki 2015; Sugano 2016). Underlying such observation is an assumption that such return to prewar Japan is nothing but a return to religious nationalism, which culminated in the fanatic militarism of wartime Japan. This assumption is based on a conventional view of Japanese political modernity. According to this view, political leaders of the Meiji era endeavored to build a modern state, that is, the Meiji regime, in which a state religion called State Shinto played a significant role. For example, Mark Juergensmeyer (1993: 199) categorizes Japan as a case of "religious nationalism"-a type of nationalism in which "religion has a role to play in defining a nation and in stating its basic values." Such religious view of Japanese nationalism, often coupled with the implication of a deviant case from the normal course of modernization, has been widely shared among scholars of Japan studies. 1 Yet, important questions about the nature of the Meiji regime arise. Did political and intellectual leaders of Meiji Japan intend to establish a modern state based on religious nationalism? How could most oligarchs of the Meiji government, often characterized as Machiavellian, be theocrats? Were intellectuals of the early years of the Meiji period not engaged in the task of enlightening and hence modernizing Japanese society to hastily catch up Western

Kokugaku and an alternative account of the emergence of nationalism of Japan

Nations and Nationalist, 2019

Out of a concern with the often implicit western-centricity of theories of nationalism which are currently dominant, the article proposes to shift the focus of analysis onto the working of human agency in our understanding of nations and nationalism. Drawing from insights from the history of ideas, it argues that, contrary to the modernist account, the rise of nationalism of Japan can be traced back to the rise of Kokugaku in the eighteenth century when westernisation/modernisation had not yet reached Japan. Kokugaku scholars were engaged with intense collective self-reflection and proposed answers to the question who the Japanese were and what Japan should be without adopting the formula of national imagination generated in the West. The article suggests that a focus on human agency has the potential to free inquires into non-western parts of the world from the deeply embedded western-centricity of conventional social theories, thus enriching our understanding of the world.

The 'Folk Discourse' on Religion in Japan as a Function from Religion to National Identity

In Japan, it seems that people perform various religious behaviours in a space saturated with associated paraphernalia with what looks like religious reverence, but they do not identify themselves as religious. At the same time, religion in Japan is said to be unique along any number of dimensions. Yet, along none of these dimensions, separately or together, is religion in Japan actually unique. I argue the reasons for the first position lies in Japan's history and the management of a stigmatised relation between religion and national identity. This relation still functions today and is managed by a discourse that disassociates religion with identity and associates it with qualities like syncretism and pluralism. These associations are modernist and this is shown by reference to Kant's writings on religion. This also allows us to classify religion in Japan as a modern civil religion in opposition to Bellah. The reason for the second position is to reduce the modernist identity to an authentic Japanese identity. This, though, as we shall see, is problematic.