centered, that is, oriented to subjective experience.^14 For example, in ‘The
Skeleton of a Philosophy of Religion’, an essay in English distributed to
attendees at the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893,
Manshi Kiyozawa (1863–1903), a philosopher of religion with a Jÿdo Buddhist
background, defined religion in English as ‘a mental faculty or disposition which... enables man to apprehend the Infinite’ (Kiyozawa 2002: 143). Furthermore,
many of the Japanese scholars, even those with religious affiliations, regarded
the divine being as a projection of human feelings, desires, or life forces.
Interestingly, they did not think that such views would undermine religion.
They were in fact optimistic about religion, believing in its evolution. Although
these tendencies were distinct, it is difficult to discern how many of them were
derived from contemporary Western thought and how many from the
indigenous tradition of meditative Buddhism or animistic Shintÿ. Suffice it to
say that the psycho-centered, de-politicized view of religion does not solely
derive from Protestant legacies or modern Western liberalism, as recent critics
of the concept of religion often assume, and further comparative work is needed
regarding this point.^15
Following the question of the essence and origin of religion, scholars of
religion also pondered what qualifies a scholar to study religion, for example,
whether or not a scholar of religion must personally have a religious experience
in order to understand religion properly. While such basic questions were
widely shared, the interests of early scholars of religion were so diverse that
they eventually focused upon particular religious traditions individually. That
is to say, although, as shown in Table 1, there were courses in the sociology
and in the psychology of religion, none of the first generation of scholars,
including Anesaki, identified himself as a sociologist or a psychologist of
religion. While keeping comparative interests, they became scholars of
Buddhism, of Christianity, and so on, and their choice of traditions was often
affected by their own personal religious backgrounds. From around the 1920s
the sociology and the psychology of religion became far more popular, but
scholars were mostly engaged in translating and introducing major Western
works in those fields, such as the works of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Ernst
Troeltsch, and William James.^16
The early development of religious studies in Japan coincided with the time
of Japanese imperialism. Japan began to expand its colonies from Korea to
other parts of Asia. In a parallel to Western scholarship, Japanese scholars
started ethnographic studies based on fieldwork in the new colonies in Asia
(e.g. Uno 1942), aware that studying the religions of diverse ethnic groups
would serve Japan’s colonial policy (Takenaka 1983: 30). That was the first
clear case of the ‘understanding others’ type of approach to religion.^17
In the years leading up to World War II, many scholars of religion found
their freedom of research being increasingly restricted. It is often pointed out
that the Kyoto School, the well-known group of religious philosophers from
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SATOKO FUJIWARA