different characteristics. First, the Japanese scholarly view of religion tends to
center on ritual rather than myths.^21 Studying myth is relatively unpopular
partly because of the sensitive nature of Japanese mythology, which was once
believed to be the historical truth about the origin of the imperial family, and
partly because of the lack of a strong tradition of Greco-Roman classical
studies. Instead, the study of rituals such as festivals, ancestor worship, and
shamanic practices is prevalent.
Second, the philosophy of religion in Japan has always been much more
existentialistic, as represented by the Kyoto School, than Anglo-American.
Closely related to this is the teaching style of undergraduate/graduate classes.
It is common that students read a classic work page by page under the guidance
of their teacher. Such intensive reading is especially popular in philosophy of
religion classes, but it is not confined to them. It is not unusual to spend a
whole semester reading The Elementary Forms of Religious Lifeor The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Some say that the style is modeled
after German pedagogy; others say that it derived from premodern Confucian
studies; still others that it is widely shared in Asia, where master–disciple
relationships have been common.
Third, religious studies in Japan used to concentrate more on moderniza-
tion than secularization. Although secularization did become a central theme
in the sociology of religion, it was the problem of modernization that evoked
lively cross-disciplinary discussions in post-war Japan. Scholars first ascribed
the problems of the pre-war political system to the immaturity of Japan as a
modern society. Long discussion followed as to whether Japan had remained
half feudalistic or had achieved modernization in its own unique way. In this
context, Robert Bellah’s Tokugawa Religion(1957), which analyzed the
relationships between Japanese religious ethics and industrialization, attracted
special attention.
The debate on modernization was, in a sense, a question of Japanese identity.
The post-war quest for national identity was satisfied on a popular level by
Japanese studies (nihonjinron, nihonbunkaron), which overly emphasized the
uniqueness of Japanese culture, including religion, based on the stereotypical
contrast of the Orient and the Occident. As a result, in Japan the homogenizing
power of the category ‘Japanese (culture)’, which assumes that Japanese are all
alike, is more problematic than that of the universal category of ‘religion’. On
a more academic level, Japanese folklore studies, a neighboring field to religious
studies, has most often been charged with ethnocentrism. It is considered to
have originated in the Kokugaku(National Learning) movement, a nativistic
movement based on the philological study of Norinaga Motoori (1730–1801),
an apologist for Shintÿ. At the same time, the work of Kunio Yanagita (e.g.,
1975), the founder and private scholar of Japanese folklore, was re-evaluated
in the context of the counterculture movements in the late 1960s and 1970s as
an alternative to the established modern sciences of universities.204
SATOKO FUJIWARA