T
HE TASK OF TELLING THE HISTORY of religious studies in Japan to
international readers requires that I first explain the country’s general
religious background.^1 Whereas Japan has a variety of religious traditions, a
large number of Japanese people identify themselves as ‘non-religious’. Opinion
polls show that no more than 30 percent of respondents have particular
religious faiths, which is low compared with other nations. Whether it is
appropriate to say in an academic context that Japanese are a-religious is itself
a highly debated question. Many of them do not deny the existence of gods
and are at times engaged in religious practices, such as visiting temples.^2 Some
scholars, such as Toshimaro Ami (1996), therefore argue that Japanese are
religious in their own way, and that they appear a-religious only when the
Western concept of ‘religion’ is applied to them.
Yet, it is safe at least to say that many Japanese feel distant from
religion as an organization, that is, religion as a group with a leader and
indoctrination. They call those who voluntarily belong to certain religious
organizations ‘religious’,shkyÿ, while describing themselves as ‘non-religious’,
mushkyÿ, even if they visit shrines on New Year’s Day every year. They
profess little interest in religion in that sense, and sometimes show fear by
associating it with fanaticism. Even in the pre-war period, when more Japanese
perhaps recognized themselves as religious, skepticism about existing religions
as organizations was clearly discernible, particularly among intellectuals.^3
Considering such general disinterest in religion, it must be a puzzling fact
that Japanese started modern religious studies quite early in comparative
terms. The first department of religious studies at a nonconfessional university
was established in 1905, and the first academy of religion in 1930. Moreover,
the 9th World Congress of the International Association for the History of
Religions took place in Japan in 1958, which was the first Congress held outside
Western countries.
Broadly speaking, religious studies in this ‘non-religious’ country had three
main motivations: apologetic, rationalistic, and a concern with under-
standing.^4 First, scholars with religious affiliations, who were, therefore, social
minorities, attempted to defend religion against ongoing modernization by
claiming that religion was worthy of serious academic investigation. Second,
rationalist scholars took interest not in religion as religion but as traditional
philosophy—that is to say, not as Buddhist thought but as ‘Indian philosophy’,
or not as Confucian or Daoist thought but as ‘Chinese philosophy’—from
which to learn about their cultural heritage. Third, some secular-minded
scholars felt it necessary to investigate religious people in a manner of
intercultural studies because they were cultural ‘others’ both to themselves and
to the non-religious public, which was prejudiced against religion—‘others’
whose values and views they sought to understand from within. A variation
on this approach was to help members of the public realize that they were in
fact ‘religious’ in some way or other and that they were not much different192
SATOKO FUJIWARA