Religious Studies: A Global View

18 The first lecture titled ‘Religious Studies (shkyÿgaku)’ was offered by a Buddhist

philosopher EnryÿInoue (1858–1919) at a private institute, Tetsugakukan, later

TÿyÿUniversity, as early as 1887.

19 Ekai Kawaguchi (1866–1945), a Buddhist scholar and the first Japanese who

entered Tibet and wrote about his experience in Three Years in Tibet(1909, in

English), taught at this university.

20 New religious groups had once boomed in mid-nineteenth-century Japan. Pre-

war scholars also took a certain interest in them, but they never investigated

them substantially.

21 Related to this point is the fact that present Japanese, especially young people,

are likely to assume myths to have nothing to do with ‘religion’. While being

daily exposed to animation, video games, and other media which are often rich

in mythical motifs, they are cautious about the word ‘religion’.

22 A similar debate arose among American scholars of religions when the Branch

Davidian tragedy took place in Waco, Texas, in 1993.

23 Scholars of Islam who stand closer to the mainstream of religious studies are

KÿjirÿNakamura (b. 1936), a former chair of the program of Islamic studies

in the Department of Religious Studies at Tokyo University, Shigeru Kamata (b.

1951) at the Institute of Oriental Culture in Tokyo University, and Yoshiko Oda

(b. 1948), who studied at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, to

name a few.

24 Japanese does have different words for religious studies in the narrow sense

and in a wider sense. Those with strong identity comparable to ‘Historian of

Religions’ or ‘Religionswissenschaftler’ in the West call themselves sh-

kyÿgakusha; others are called shkyÿkenkysha. Likewise, religious studies is

shkyÿgakuand, more broadly, shkyÿkenky.

25 Results reported in Fujiwara 2005. In this survey a ‘course in religion’ means a

course whose major theme is related to religion. I picked every course which

discusses religion in some way or other for at least one-third of the entire course.

26 In addition, one Buddhism-based new religious college and one Shintÿ-based

new religious college are included.

27 In 2002 the number of all four-year colleges in Japan was 698. Among them,

584 were non-religious, 77 were Christian, 29 Buddhist, 4 Confucian, 2 Shintÿ,

and 2 associated with new religions.

28 Kÿgakukan University was closed in 1946 and re-established in 1962.

29 This does not mean that Shintÿis never mentioned in college classes. It is often

treated substantially in ‘Japanese studies/ethnology’ (L) courses, which are quite

popular both at religious and non-religious colleges. The problem with such

courses is discussed in Fujiwara 2007.

30 To be precise, Tokyo Imperial University had an ‘office’ of ‘Shintÿstudies’ (Shintÿ

Kenkyshitsu) while other universities had its equivalent under different names.

REFERENCES

Primary sources

Anesaki, Masaharu 1900, Shkyÿgaku gairon (An Introduction to the Study of

Religion), Tokyo: Tokyosenmongakkÿ.

—— 1904, Fukkatsu no shokÿ(The Aurora of Revival). Tokyo: Yuhokan.

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SATOKO FUJIWARA