The Category of ‘Religion’ in Contemporary Japan

291 Pages·2018·2.664 MB·English

by  Mitsutoshi Horii

Mitsutoshi Horii
The
Category
of
‘Religion’
in Contemporary
Japan
Shūkyō &
Temple Buddhism
The Category of ‘Religion’ in
Contemporary Japan
Mitsutoshi Horii
The Category of
‘Religion’ in
Contemporary Japan
Shūkyō and Temple Buddhism
Mitsutoshi Horii
Shumei University
Chiba, Japan
ISBN 978-3-319-73569-6 ISBN 978-3-319-73570-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73570-2
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Foreword
Dr Mitsutoshi Horii is one of the pioneers of ‘critical religion’, which
challenges the disguised ideological deployments of ‘religion’ and related
categories in the normalization of liberal doctrines and the invention of
the modern secular nation state. As an academic who is as fluent in English
as he is in his native Japanese, he has a grip on the historical contexts in
which the literate elites of Meiji Japan, and those who have followed, were
pressured by colonial powers to become ‘civilized’ and ‘progressive’ by
adopting a written constitution guaranteeing ‘freedom of religion’. This
led to a long and problematic debate in the late nineteenth century about
how to translate ‘religion’ into Japanese. It was not at all self-evident to
many Japanese people that they had ‘religion’ (or wanted it, or needed it).
This debate raised issues about what should be included as ‘religion’, and
therefore what should be excluded. The question about how to translate
religion was therefore also a question about what constitutes the supposed
non-religious secularity of the modern state and its agencies.
There have been other pioneering scholars – such as Toshio Kuroda,
Helen Hardacre, Jun’ichi Isomae, and Jason Ānanda Josephson, to mention
a few – who have seriously questioned categories such as ‘Shinto’, ‘religion’,
or ‘Buddhism’ in the context of Japanese history. The present work by
Mitsutoshi Horii builds on their work and gives it a significantly original
impetus. He shows that when we problematise the modern c ategory ‘reli-
gion’ and its plural forms, we are also logically and inevitably problematis-
v
vi Foreword
ing all our presuppositions about what is supposed not to be religion, such
as ‘politics’, ‘economics’, ‘trade’, ‘finance’, ‘education’ and ‘law’.
His own research among Buddhist Temple priests in contemporary
Japan shows how highly problematic this constitutional religion-secular
binary is, and how it clashes with the priests’ own indigenous categories
(the academic English-language obligation to name them as ‘priests’ and
their institutions as ‘temples’ is a case in point). By revealing to us the
struggles of temple priests and temple organizations to make the consti-
tutional requirements consistent with their actual practice, Horii shows
that this binary is a powerful discursive formation that has had the effect
of making liberal capitalism, and the doctrines that are deployed to legiti-
mate the underlying presuppositions, appear as a universal inevitability.
The experiences and viewpoints of the temple priests prove an effective
way to unsettle these presumptions.
It should be stressed that this critical deconstruction of liberal secular
ideology is not a tacit idealisation of some Golden pre-modern Japan, as
though the rulers of Edo were benign and everyone was perfectly free
before the nasty western colonialists arrived in Edo Bay in the form of the
kurofune in 1853. Nor does it exclude the significant point that some
classes of people – kakure kirishitan come quickly to mind, but so do
burakumin – gained important freedoms (in principle if not always in
practice) that were previously denied to them. This is not the point. There
have been a number of studies of the ambiguous freedoms offered under
secular laws of religious toleration in different colonial sites around the
world.1 The kind of analysis given by Horii in this book only implies that
we are free to question what motivated the imposition of these modern
categories, to look in a wider context at what they do and whose interests
they serve, and by implication ask ourselves whether or not these appar-
ent freedoms cannot be achieved more effectively, in more democratic
ways that reflect what Japanese people hold most dear and special to their
own way of life.
Speaking personally, I lived and worked in Japan for several years, am
married to Noriko Katayama who is Japanese, and my two children Taro
1 I have been associated with two of them, viz (ed.) T. Fitzgerald, Religion and the Secular: historical
and colonial formations (Equinox, 2007); and (eds.) T. Stack, N. Goldenberg and T. Fitzgerald,
Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty (Brill, 2016).
Forewor d vii
and Mari are still bilingual at the age of around 30. I worked hard on
Japanese language but did not become sufficiently fluent to be counted a
Japanologist. However, I have worked in academic institutions, I have
good friends who are temple priests, I have participated in many festivals,
rituals, and celebrations, not only in Japanese temples, but also ‘shinto’
shrines and civic and academic contexts. These experiences and activities
long ago upset my Anglo-European presuppositions, and I published sev-
eral attempts to question terminology such as ‘Japanese religions’ and the
‘lived religious experience of the Japanese’. These publications have been
largely ignored by other academics. This does not mean that I accept the
nihonjinron or Japanese uniqueness ideology, but nor do most Japanese
people, at least not in my experience. What it does do is allow for the
creative possibilities of difference; that different self-identifying peoples
with their own languages, institutions and forms of life can do things in
their own way, and do not have to be imposed with the faux-universality
of European categories.
Nor does Mitsutoshi Horii believe in the uniqueness theory. His mono-
graph is a powerfully theorised historical and contemporary analysis at the
level of discourse and institutionalised practice, and he does this better than
I was able to. I am excited by his work and grateful for his insights and clari-
fications. This is an important contribution not only to Japanese Studies
and Religious Studies, but also to a wider understanding of the colonial and
neocolonial imperatives to rebuild the world in the image of Euro-American
capital as a globalising power-formation. I strongly recommend his work,
and hope others will build on it.
Velez-Malaga, Spain Timothy Fitzgerald
Acknowledgement
I completed my Ph.D. in Sociology in 2005 at the University of Kent.
My thesis was on Buddhist priests in contemporary Japan. This book is
evolved from my thesis written more than a decade ago. However, the
theoretical foundation of my study has been fundamentally transformed
since the time when I was writing my Ph.D. thesis. This is largely due to
my encounter to Timothy Fitzgerald’s The Ideology of Religious Studies in
2005. Although I successfully obtained my Ph.D. in sociology, Fitzgerald’s
book forced me to reflect in a fundamental way upon the category of
‘religion’ which I had taken for granted until that point. Since then, I
studied seriously the works of Fitzgerald and other like-minded scholars,
who problematised the idea of ‘religion.’ Writings of these critical schol-
ars have inspired me profoundly, and this book is built upon my post- -
Ph.D. reflections on ‘religion.’
Now I recall that after I read The Ideology of Religious Studies, although
I did not know the author of the book personally at all, I decided to send
an email to him to express my interest to his study. I was positively sur-
prised to receive a kind reply from Tim, to whom I was a complete
stranger. Since then, we have exchanged emails a number of times, we
met several times, and I received from him intellectual guidance which I
treasure. Tim has nurtured me under his wings. I would like to thank
Tim for his genuine kindness and friendship.
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x Acknowledgement
In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to the Shumei
Foundation, especially, the Chairman, Professor Koki Kawashima, for his
enduring support and trust in me. And, most importantly, I would like
to thank my family – my wife Celeste, our children, Iona and Thomas –
for sharing life with me in the UK, as well as my mother, Ayano, my
father, Takashi, and my brother, Koyoshi, who are always thinking about
me in Japan.
Finally, I would like to note that significant portions of my previous
works have been reused in this book. Chapters “A ‘Critical Religion’
Approach to Japanese ‘Religion(s)’”, “Critical Reflections on the Category
‘Religion’ in Japan”, and “‘Religion’ in the Popular Discourse” contain a
large part from ‘Critical Reflections on the Religious-Secular Dichotomy
in Japan,’ which was originally published in Making Religion: Theory and
Practice in the Discursive Study of Religion (Brill, 2016), edited by Kocku
von Stuckrad and Frans Wijsen. I would like to thank Brill for having
given me a permission to reuse the material. Chapter “Temple Buddhism
and the Japanese Social Classification: A Brief Historical Overview” con-
tains a large portion from my ‘Deprofessionalisation of Buddhist Priests in
Contemporary Japan’ which appeared in Researching Twenty-first Century
Japan: New Directions and Approaches for the Electronic Age (Lexington
Books, 2012), edited by Timothy Iles and Peter Matanle. I would like to
thank Lexington Books for allow me to reuse part from this work.
Contents
Introduction 1
A ‘Critical Religion’ Approach to Japanese ‘Religion(s)’ 23
Critical Reflections on the Category ‘Religion’ in Japan 53
‘Religion’ in the Popular Discourse 87
Temple Buddhism and the Japanese Social Classification:
A Brief Historical Overview 123
The Construction of Shūkyōka 145
Life Stories and Identities of Nichiren-s hū Priests 171
Negotiating with ‘Shūkyō’ in the Context of the ‘Religious
Corporation’ 201
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