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This book documents a sense of what is happening on the front lines as a growing number of Buddhist priests try to reboot their roles and traditions to gain greater significance in Japanese society. It profiles innovative as well as controversial responses to the challenges facing Buddhist priests. From traditional activities (conducting memorial rituals; supporting residences for the elderly and infirm; providing relief for victims of natural disasters) to more creative ones (collaborating in suicide prevention efforts; holding symposia and concerts on temple precincts; speaking out against nuclear power following Japan’s 2011 earthquake; opening cafés, storefront temples, and pubs; even staging fashion shows with priests on the runway) more progressive members of Japan’s Buddhist clergy are trying to navigate a path leading towards renewed relevance in society. An additional challenge is to avoid alienating older patrons while trying to attract younger ones vital to the future of their temples. The work’s central theme of “experimental Buddhism” provides a fresh perspective to understand how priests and other individuals employ Buddhist traditions in selective and pragmatic ways. Using these inventive approaches during a time of crisis and transition for Japanese temple Buddhism, priests and practitioners from all denominations seek solutions that not only can revitalize their religious traditions but also influence society and their fellow citizens in positive ways.

Religion is at the heart of ongoing political debates in Japan such as the constitutionality of official government visits to Yasukuni Shrine, yet the categories that frame these debates, religion and the secular, entered the Japanese language less than 150 years ago. This book shows that 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 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. Indigenous tradition, politics, and Western influence came together to set the course the reconception of religion would take in Japan. The book traces the history of the modern Japanese term for religion, shūkyō, and its components and explores 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. The book offers an account of Shimaji's intellectual dealings with the West as well as clarifies the ramifications of these encounters for Shimaji's own thinking. It historicizes Japanese appropriations of secularization from medieval times to the twentieth century and discusses the meaning of the reconception of religion in modern Japan.