Articles

This article argues that secularism is not an exclusively modern phenomenon, but is rather a recurring pattern which arises throughout different periods of premodern and modern history. I begin with a longue durée overview of Japanese history as a case study, proposing a regime of such historical cycles over a 1,200-year period. I then focus on changes in religiouspolitical relations which occurred in one specific, important cycle, through the transition from the late medieval into the early modern period. I argue that this period ushered in a new form of political-religious relations where Neo-Confucianism, instead of Buddhism, for the first time represented the religious element in Japanese politics. I demonstrate how this early modern regime of political-religious interaction supported by Neo-Confucianism was particularly stable and functioned to support public discourse. In conclusion, the article notes the destruction of this early modern form of political-religious relations during East Asian modernization, and suggests that the continuing lack of a stable regime of political-religious relations in both contemporary China and Japan can be seen as an ongoing legacy of that destruction. This article seeks to add to our understanding of the boundary drawing between religious and secular spheres in nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Japan in two ways. First, I argue that we must guard against overemphasizing discontinuity between pre-Meiji ways of dealing with “faith” and post-Meiji policies dealing with “religion.” Only by recognizing discursive continuities can we analyze the process of negotiating new conceptual models in the light of older values and worldviews. Second, institutional realities frustrated the implementation of new religious policies. The ways temples and shrines functioned in society set limits to the ambitions of ideologues, and created contradictions that impacted on the boundary-drawing process. In the early Meiji period, Japanese Buddhists had to come to terms with a number of profound changes. The prime challenge for the clerical elite was the radically new religious policy of the Meiji government, no longer favoring Buddhism in the framework of the early modern temple registration system, but rather privileging Shinto in its attempts to find a suitable place for Japanese religions in the modern Japanese nation state. Institutionally, Buddhism was faced with the Great Promulgation Campaign initiated under the auspices of the Ministry of Edification from 1872 onwards. Anyone who wanted to continue religious teaching needed to join the campaign; at the same time, Buddhists were prohibited from engaging in sectarian proselytization while teaching under the campaign’s umbrella. Priests of the Jōdo Shinshū were active in overcoming this impasse, and among them Shimaji Mokurai of the sect’s Honganji branch was particularly effective. As a member of the first group of Japanese Buddhists to travel to Europe in 1872, he combined the traditional scholarship of a Buddhist priest with modern Western knowledge gleaned in France, Great Britain, and Germany. Drawing on premodern Japanese terminological precedents, Shimaji first conceptualized the separation of the spheres of politics and religion and, slightly later, that of “religious and secular teaching.” Out of this separation, a concept of “religion” first appeared in Japan. Shimaji’s intellectual move to separate a sphere of “religion” in order to free Buddhism from the restraints of early Meiji religious policy has structural parallels with the political ideology of secularism as described by Talal Asad. Contrary to Asad’s assumptions, however, secularism clearly is not purely a Western project. The case of Shimaji shows how Japanese thinkers and political actors drew upon their local tradition as well as new Western knowledge to come up with their own solutions to specific political problems that arose in the transition of Japan to the modern era. The secularization thesis, rooted in the idea that “modernity” brings with it the destruction—or, at least, the ruthless privatization—of religion, is clearly grounded in specific, often oversimplified, interpretations of Western historical developments since the eighteenth century. In this article, I use the case of the New Buddhist Fellowship (Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai) of the Meiji period (1868–1912) to query the category of the secular in the context of Japanese modernity. I argue that the New Buddhists, drawing on elements of classical and East Asian Buddhism as well as modern Western thought, promoted a resolutely social and this-worldly Buddhism that collapses—or preempts—the conceptual and practical boundaries between religion and the secular. In short, the New Buddhists sought a lived Buddhism rooted in a decidedly “immanent frame” (Taylor), even while rejecting the “vulgar materialism” of secular radicalism. Prewar government policy concerning the relationship between religion and education presented Christian-affiliated schools with two intersecting but different challenges. On the one hand, the state adopted a stance that in several regards resembles what Ahmet T. Kuru terms “assertive secularism.” As reflected in Ministry of Education Instruction 12 (1899), the government declared that state-accredited schools, private as well as public, should not offer religious instruction or conduct religious ceremonies. On the other hand, from the 1910s on, the government increasingly promoted the offering of reverence by schoolchildren and students at shrines and comparable demonstrations of reverence to the emperor and nation on school grounds. In the face of objections from Christian and other groups, the government held that such activities were not “religious,” but, taking what Kuru would call a position of “passive secularism,” many Christian school leaders resisted participating in activities of this sort. The history of Sophia University (Jōchi Daigaku) illustrates one way these issues played out in the prewar period. Founded by the Society of Jesus in 1913, Jōchi was of later origin than its Protestant peers, and from the start its leaders chose to adapt to the state’s assertively secularist educational policy. Regarding shrine reverence and state ceremonial, the Jesuits were initially far less accommodating. In the wake of the Yasukuni Shrine incident of 1932, however, Jōchi’s leaders moved away from passive secularist resistance to the government’s promotion of such activities and came to affirm them as “civil” expressions of patriotism and thus compatible with Catholic belief and practice. Japanese new religions (shinshūkyō) have attempted to enter a wide range of secular domains, such as politics, education, and welfare, in order to offer alternative models to mainstream systems. This paper will discuss the importance placed by new religions on political and educational activities. In particular, it focuses on the activities of several new religions in the field of education, and their ideas on how the education system should be reformed to reflect the groups’ teachings and ideologies. Following a general discussion of this topic, the paper addresses the case of Kōfuku no Kagaku, a new religion founded in the 1980s, which applied for permission to establish a new university in 2014. Kōfuku no Kagaku’s response to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s (Monbukagakushō) rejection of this application provides a pertinent case study to investigate the group’s definition of learning and its vision of the role of education in society. This article draws on ethnographic research with a Japanese new religious organization to examine the interconnection between the processes of globalization and contemporary formations of religion and secularity in Japan. By tracing the development of new religions in modern Japan and examining a case study of a Japanese new religion pursuing a globalizing strategy, this article analyzes how leaders are attempting to transform the structure and image of their organization, the responses by members to these changes, and the larger implications of these changes regarding the dynamics of religious globalization and secularization. In line with recent comparative approaches to the secular, it reveals how religious globalization can become a vector for global growth and self-conscious institutional change, which draw simultaneously from global and local notions of religion and secularity. Ultimately, the article suggests that the “formations of the secular” in contemporary Japan are inextricably enmeshed with the processes of globalization, which resonate with broader social changes in Japanese society, and which are refracted through the selective yet dynamic interplay of both religion and secularity on local and global levels. This article analyzes contemporary Shinto ideology in the light of recent theories on the formation of the category “secular” and on secularization. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s discussion of the original meaning of the categories “religious” and “secular,” as well as the work of Kuroda Toshio and others, it suggests that premodern shrine worship may have been perceived as the “immanent,” “this-worldly” counterpart of a more transcendentally oriented monastic Buddhism. In the Meiji period, Shinto developed into a modern Japanese “immanent frame” (or “Shinto secular,” as Josephson has called it)—a public, collective, non-optional frame of reference— while Buddhism, Christianity, and “new religions” were configured as “religious,” that is, private and optional. Contemporary Shinto leaders such as Tanaka Tsunekiyo and Sonoda Minoru draw upon such Meiji-period understandings of Shinto as the immanent, foundational framework by which Japanese culture and society are shaped and conditioned. According to them, Shinto should not be subject to the same legal restrictions as other religions, as it is an essentially public tradition uniting communities (kyōdōtai) around their shared sacred center, the shrine grove (chinju no mori). As this article demonstrates, these authors actively contribute to Shinto’s discursive secularization: they seek to dissociate Shinto from “religion,” instead framing it as Japan’s underlying “traditional culture” (dentō bunka). Rather than challenging the postwar legal state apparatus and separation of religion and state, therefore, they seek to renegotiate Shinto’s position within this apparatus, asserting its role as a “secular” worship tradition concerned with the common good of the nation as a whole. Contrary to what sometimes has been suggested, contemporary Japanese society is no exception to the rule that the more a society modernizes, the more its individuals become secular. Simultaneously, however, since the end of the 1990s the political sphere in Japan has seen a return of religious elements. This phenomenon is particularly noticeable in the case of nationalist circles. State Shinto, which was imposed in the prewar period by the authorities of imperial Japan, constitutes the ideological foundation for these circles. More specifically, the emperor cult and the cult of the war dead at Yasukuni Shrine are the two main components of this ideology. This article argues that is unlikely that the ideology and activities of nationalist circles in Japan will acquire a more secular character, given the fundamentally religious character of their vision of the national community. Nippon Kaigi, a large confederation of political and religious movements, occupies a central place in this nationalist revival. Many politicians of the first rank are involved with this organization. As this article demonstrates, the ideological positions of its members are placed on a continuum, ranging from a religious nationalism close to historical State Shinto to more moderate statements suggesting the existence of a type of Japanese civil religion. Ultimately, members and sympathizers of nationalist movements in Japan are all motivated, to varying degrees, by nostalgia for a golden age of the nation. Since early January 2016 Jinja Honchō has participated in a campaign led by Nippon Kaigi to establish popular support for constitutional reform. In this essay, I seek to understand Jinja Honchō’s involvement in this campaign through a reading of the postwar Supreme Court cases related to the separation of religion from the state. I argue that amendment of Articles 20 and 89 was never considered a priority for most of this period, since the prevalent paradigm in the Supreme Court was that Shinto was something other than a religion; but following the break with this paradigm in the Ehime Tamagushiryō case in 1997, and the subsequent confirmation of the validity of this precedent through the ruling on the Sunagawa I case in 2010, those seeking a closer relationship between the Shinto establishment and the state have had to find new routes. The rise of Nippon Kaigi as one of Japan’s largest conservative lobby groups coincides with this development in the Supreme Court, and the organization’s focus on constitutional reform can therefore partly be understood in this light. Should Nippon Kaigi eventually produce a draft for their vision of a new constitution, it is likely that the idea of Shinto as something other than a religion will be reflected in this draft.