The counterculture movements led to postmodernism in the 1980s. The trend
was best embodied in Shinichi Nakazawa (b. 1950), a scholar of religion who
had a Carlos Castaneda-like experience with a guru in Tibet and later wrote
books that combined his experiences with poststructuralist thought like that
of Julia Kristeva. Whereas the Western postmodern study of religion tended to
be critical of religion from a Freudian or a Marxist perspective, its Japanese
equivalent tended to slide into Buddhist supremacism. This echo of wartime
ideology resurrected a tough question as to whether the idea of the triumph of
Eastern thought over Western thought was a mere reversal of Orientalism or
whether it had a certain validity.
It was no accident, therefore, that the new religion Aum Shinrikyÿgrew
during the decade. Aum’s release of sarin gas in Tokyo subway stations in
1995 profoundly shocked Japanese scholars of religion. The incident forced
them seriously to reconsider what the public role of religious studies should
be. Scholars of religion had been treating Japanese new religions the same as
Western historians of religions had been treating indigenous religions, re-
evaluating them on their own merits instead of dismissing them as primitive.
Accordingly, after Aum’s gas attack, they faced criticism for having stood on
the side of new religions.^22
The post-colonial critique also raised questions about the social role of
religious studies. Scholars started looking closely at diversity within minor
religious traditions, particularly in terms of gender and ethnicity, and pro-
blematizing the long neglect of the oppressed minorities by both society and
the academy. The Japanese feminist and gender-based studies of religion derive
from the second wave of Japanese feminism in the 1970s. Interest in these
studies has been increasing despite the twin difficulties of male domination of
Japanese religious traditions and the lack of interest in religion within Japanese
feminist movements.
Key thinkers and texts
Hideo Kishimoto was a son of Nobuta Kishimoto, who studied at Harvard as
well and chaired the Department of Religious Studies at Tokyo University.
Absorbing American pragmatism, behavioral sciences, and psychology of
religion, he defined religion as a cultural phenomenon based on the human
endeavor to cope with ultimate problems of life (Kishimoto 1961a). Following
Anesaki, he attempted to secure the position of religious studies as an
independent field in Shkyÿgaku (Religious Studies) (1961b), and also
empirically investigated mysticism in Shkyÿshinpishugi(Religious Mysticism)
(1958). Under Kishimoto, religious studies at Tokyo University became more
and more empirical. Even those who were interested in philosophy sought for
approaches different from the Kyoto School, whose tradition was handed down
to Shizuteru Ueda (b. 1926) and ShÿtÿHase (b. 1937) (e.g., Ueda 1965). To
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JAPAN
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