to comprehending the syncretic pluralism of Japanese
religions.
In these respects, the Japanese study of religion has
many things in common with the history of religions, a term
often used to describe a humanistic tradition within the
study of religion in the West. Nonetheless, most Japanese
scholars have never identified themselves as historians of reli-
gions in this sense. The reason for this may be largely institu-
tional. Since the study of religion has been a small field, it
has never become too compartmentalized; those researching
new religious movements, for example, worked closely with
field workers studying folk religions. 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, the Japanese study of religion
developed by embracing psychology, sociology, anthropolo-
gy, and other approaches to religion. In the process, Japanese
scholars readily adopted Western theories such as functional-
ism and structuralism, but they also found Christian influ-
ences in the Western study of religion and elaborated original
theories of religion from their point of view. To take a few
examples, whereas the Western study of religion used to em-
phasize 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)
presented a definition of religion as human relationships, in
sharp contrast to the monotheistic idea of religion.
The Japanese study of religion differs from its Western,
and particularly American, counterparts in a number of
other respects. The Japanese scholarly view of religion tends
to be ritual-centric rather than myth-centric. 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 origins 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 and shamanic practices is prevalent. It is also note-
worthy that the philosophy of religion has always been much
more existentialistic, as represented by the Kyoto School tra-
dition, than Anglo-American. In addition, the study of reli-
gion in Japan used to center more on modernization 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 discus-
sions in postwar Japan. Scholars first ascribed the problems
of the prewar political system to the immaturity of Japan as
a modern society. Long discussions followed as to whether
Japan had remained half feudalistic or had achieved modern-
ization in its own unique way. It was in this context that
Robert Bellah’s Tokugawa Religion, which analyzed the rela-
tionships between Japanese religious ethics and industrializa-
tion, attracted attention.
The debate on modernization was, in a sense, a question
of Japanese identity. The postwar quest for national identity
was satisfied on a popular level by Japanese studies (nihonjin-
ron/nihonbunkaron), which overly emphasized the unique-
ness of Japanese culture, including religion, based on the
stereotypical contrast of the Orient and the Occident. On
a more academic level, Japanese folklore studies, a neighbor-
ing field to religious studies founded by Kunio Yanagita
(1875–1962), has most often been charged with ethnocen-
trism. It is considered to have originated in the Kokugaku
(National Learning) movement, a nativistic movement based
on philological study of Norinaga Motoori (1730–1801), an
apologist for Shinto ̄. At the same time, the work of Yanagita,
who had been a private scholar, was reevaluated in the con-
text of the counter-culture movements in the late 1960s and
1970s as an alternative to the established modern sciences of
the universities.
The counterculture movements led to postmodernism
in the 1980s. The trend was best embodied by Shinichi
Nakazawa (b. 1950), a scholar of religion who had a Carlos
Castenada-like experience with a guru in Tibet and later
wrote books that combined his experiences with postmodern
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 equiva-
lent could 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 if it had a cer-
tain validity.
It was no accident, therefore, that the new religion Aum
Shinrikyo ̄ grew during the decade. Aum’s release of Sarin gas
in Tokyo subway stations in 1995 profoundly shocked Japa-
nese scholars of religion. The incident forced them to seri-
ously reconsider what the public role of the study of religion
should be. Despite the overall lack of interest in religion
among the Japanese public, new religious movements had
been active, and the study of new religious groups had be-
come quite popular in the postwar period. Scholars of reli-
gion treated new religions as Western historians of religions
were treating indigenous religions, reevaluating them on
their own merits instead of dismissing them as primitive. Ac-
cordingly, after Aum’s gas attack, they faced criticism for
having been standing on the side of new religions.
The postcolonial critique also raised the same question
about the social role of the study of religion. Scholars started
looking closely at diversity within the minor religious tradi-
tions, particularly in terms of gender and ethnicity, and pro-
blematizing the long neglect of oppressed minorities both by
society and by the academy. Japanese feminist and gender-
based studies of religion derive from the second wave of Japa-
nese feminism in the 1970s. Interest in these studies has been
high despite the twin difficulties of male domination of Japa-
nese religious traditions and the lack of interest in religion
within Japanese feminist movements.8778 STUDY OF RELIGION: THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION IN JAPAN