more, shortly after the war, new religious movements started developing out
of drastic social changes in Japan. Although numerous new groups were born
at that time, a time named ‘the rush hour of gods’ by H. Neill McFarland,
they remained socially marginal and were viewed with antipathy by the majority
of non-religious Japanese. For scientifically trained scholars of religion, the
members of such new religious groups became ‘others’ to understand in two
senses: they were ‘religious’; and they generally belonged to the lower classes.^20
In these respects, Japanese religious studies has many things in common
with ‘the history of religions’, a term often used to describe a humanistic
tradition within religious studies in the West. Nonetheless, most Japanese
scholars have never identified themselves as historians of religions in this sense.
The reason for this may be largely institutional. Religious studies has never
been a large field at Japanese universities, and because of its small size, it has
never become too compartmentalized. Those researching new religious
movements, for example, worked closely with folklorists and anthropologists
of religion. Also, students belonging to the departments of religious studies
had opportunities to take fieldwork courses on village festivals or new religious
groups even if they were going to major in the ancient history of religion. In
addition, Japanese scholars in other departments, such as sociology, used to
pay little attention to religion, due to the pervasive indifference to religion in
Japan. Rivalry with those scholars also helped to unite the field.
Because of these factors, Japanese religious studies developed by embrac-
ing psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other approaches to religion. In
the process, Japanese scholars readily adopted Western theories such as
functionalism and structuralism, but they also found Christian influences in
the Western study of religion and elaborated original theories of religion from
their point of view. For example, whereas the Western study of religion used
to emphasize the mind or the mind–body dichotomy in religion, Kishimoto
rehabilitated the aspect of the body in religion as seen in ascetic practices, and
Keiichi Yanagawa (1926–1990), another leading post-war scholar of religion,
presented a definition of religion in terms of human relationships, in sharp
contrast to the monotheistic idea of religion. In addition, a group of sociologists
of religion criticized the traditional Western dichotomy between magic and
religion, after observing that magical practices performed by Japanese new
religious groups did not hinder but rather enabled ethical innovations as a
condition for modernization (Tsushima et al. 1979). Likewise, against the
concept of the sacred and the profane, TokutarÿSakurai (b. 1917) and others
advocated applying a trichotomy of hare(extraordinariness or the sacred), ke
(ordinariness or life power), and kegare(pollution) to Japanese folk religions
instead.
There are other aspects in which Japanese religious studies differs from its
Western counterpart. Although post-war Japanese scholars have accepted
much from Anglo-American scholarship, their study of religion has acquired
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3111
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35
6
7
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9
40111
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JAPAN
203
