Hans Martin Krämer
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824851538
- eISBN:
- 9780824868079
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824851538.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
