from the religious ‘others’. Whereas for Western scholars of the third type such
‘others’ have been religious people in the non-West, for Japanese counterparts,
particularly in the post-war period, these ‘others’ have often been members of
new religious groups within Japan. (New religious movements rapidly
developed in the post-war period, which is another puzzling fact about this
‘non-religious’ country.)
By contrast, Western scholars have tended to represent Japanese people,
including academics, as ‘mystical others’, which has at times frustrated Japanese
scholars. To take an instance, the 9th IAHR Congress in Japan made a strong
impression on its Western participants, which was summarized in a report
informed by the Orientalistic dichotomy of ‘irrational (intuitive, religious)’ and
‘rational (inductive, scientific)’:
On the one hand the oriental student is inclined to contend that the very
heart of religion can best be reached by intuition and that the ultimate
result of the study of religious phenomena must be a deeper insight in [sic]
the actual value of religion. On the other hand the western student of the
history of religions is convinced that his sole task consists of a painstaking
study of greater or minor segments of a certain religion in order to
understand their religious meaning in a tentative way and that he has to
refrain from pronouncing any kind of value judgments.
(Bleeker 1960: 226)
This report seems to have shocked a number of the Japanese scholars who had
organized the Congress. They believed that they had learned and were using
inductive methods just as Western scholars did. Some of them even regarded
religious studies in Japan as more scientific and neutral than in the West due
to the lack of the influence of Christian theology.^5 Although they did not refute
the report at the time of its release, two of the Japanese organizers later analyzed
how the impression resulted from an Orientalistic imagination, without,
however, using Said’s term (Gotÿand Tamaru 1980: 26–27).
This article is an attempt to fill in the gap between the self-understanding
of religious studies in Japan and its Western representation. In the process I
will employ the above-mentioned classification of three approaches, apologetic,
rationalistic and those approaches oriented to understanding. Although the
three approaches, especially the first and the third, are in reality blended at
times, the classification will be useful in analyzing the history of religious studies
in Japan.
Prehistory
It is commonly accepted that modern religious studies, shkyÿgaku, started in
the Meiji era (1868–1912), after Japan opened its doors to the Western world.
1111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1011
1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
20111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
30111
1
2
3
4
35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
3
411
JAPAN
193
