Observations on the Blurring of the Religious and the Secular in a Japanese Urban Setting

Porcu, Elisabetta

doi:10.1163/221183412x628398

Cited by 13 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Regardless of what people say about their lives, scholars call people's lives 'religious' when their practices fall into the broad scholarly definition of religion. In this light, the following paragraphs critically discuss Porcu's (2012) article 'Observations on the Blurring of the Religious and the Secular in a Japanese Urban Setting'. Porcu (2012, p. 83) explores the ways in which 'the borders between the religious and the secular are perceived, blurred and reinterpreted at the community level of Kyoto'.…”

Section: Imagining Religion In Contemporary Japanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Problems of ‘Religion’ in Japan: Part 1

Horii

2020

Religion Compass

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This article problematises the utilisation of the category 'religion' as an analytical concept in the Japanese context. For some decades, in religious studies, the idea of religion has been interrogated and the ideological function of the category 'religion' has become a subject of critical investigation. This kind of critical approach to 'religion' has been applied to many different contexts including Japan. Although there has been a significant development in the critical study of 'religion' in Japan, this article argues that the discourse of sui generis religion is still dominant in the academic subject area currently called 'Japanese religion(s)'. This article critically examines the category of religion in recent works of scholars who claim to study 'Japanese religion(s)' and suggests abandoning the term as a category of analysis. This will help scholars to re-imagine what they use to call 'religion', by enabling them to see what the idea of 'religion' has formerly prevented them from seeing. 1 | INTRODUCTION This article aims to be a modest progress report on the ongoing scholarly project to deconstruct the category 'religion' in the Japanese context. The first section discusses theoretical and methodological issues in the discursive study of religion. Here, I suggest that 'critical religion' should be regarded as a critical discourse analysis of 'religion' as a category of governance and identity. This will be followed by a discussion of specific theoretical and methodological concerns over the cross-cultural application of the critical discursive study of 'religion' to the Japanese context. My argument is further clarified in the third and fourth sections. When scholars study 'modern' or 'contemporary' Japan, in which the category of religion has already been institutionalised, 'religion' should be an object of analysis, rather than using it as an analytical category. In the 'premodern' context in which the concept of religion does not exist, scholars should drop the term 'religion' completely to facilitate a more nuanced understanding of the ways of life they study. The article concludes with some methodological suggestions.

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Section: Imagining Religion In Contemporary Japanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Problems of ‘Religion’ in Japan: Part 1

Horii

2020

Religion Compass

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“…4 By walking though and watching over the familiar neighbourhood streets as pilgrims, this innovative programme, called the 'Shūni O-Jizō -san Pilgrimage', 5 not only facilitated a local re-imagination of the moral landscape of civic and spiritual responsibility (cf. Robertson 1991;Kawano 2005;Porcu 2012), but it also created possibilities for experiencing new watchful subjectivities that diverged from pervading representations of older people as marginal, dependent and invisible (those needing to be watched over). As 'pilgrimage', practices of watching and walking constituted a staging ground for the creative embodiment of age, and the performance of moral, spiritual, and aesthetic practices -mapping, record-keeping, reporting, offering, chanting -flowing between regimes of value marked as sacred and profane, individual and community well-being.…”

Section: Walkingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ks˙itigarbha). O-Jizō -san (in local vernacular) is perhaps the most popularly revered Buddhist icon in Japan today (Chozen Bays 2001;Glassman 2011;Fujiwara 2012;Porcu 2012), and is usually represented as an itinerant Buddhist monk with a smooth, round head, dressed in simple robes and carrying a staff (Figure 1). Jizō -san is not only identified with boundless mobility and omnipresence, but he is also associated with the watching over children, travellers, and sometimes older people (Danely 2012b) as well as the salvation of children and foetuses suffering in the other world (La Fleur 1992;Moerman 2005: 132).…”

Section: O-jizō -San and Being A Watchful Presencementioning

confidence: 99%

A Watchful Presence: Aesthetics of Well-Being in a Japanese Pilgrimage

Danely

2015

Ethnos

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This article examines practices of watching and walking as aesthetic staging grounds for the embodiment of social values, well-being, and aged subjectivities. Using a small, grassroots neighbourhood-watch 'pilgrimage' created by and for older adults in Kyoto, Japan as my primary case study, I describe how the sacred meanings of pilgrimage come to inhabit spaces of civic social engagement (and vice versa) and elder subjectivity through practices of mapping, record-keeping, and ritual. I argue that following these practices with the older adult pilgrims leads us beyond what Coleman [2002. Do You Believe in Pilgrimage?: From Communitas to Contestation and Beyond. Anthropological Theory, 2(3):355-68] referred to as a theoretical 'pilgrimage ghetto', and creates openings to engage with multiple registers of intersubjective practice: watching and being watched over; grounding and transcending. Watching and walking also contest the marginality, dependence, and precarious invisibility that dominate popular discourse on ageing in contemporary Japan.

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“… The hozonkai became formally independent from chōnaikai as the organizing bodies of the yamaboko procession after World War II, after some troubles arose with regard to the authority and responsibility in the creation of the decorative altar within the assembly house (Ochi 2008: 6).  I discussed these activities and the chōnaikai in more details in Porcu 2012. Neighborhood associations, many of which are linked to a Shintō shrine in what is known as the ujiko-ujigami system,⁶ have been considered sub-groups of this system. Their religious involvement in the activities of the ujigami shrine has been highlighted (Sonoda 1975: 123).…”

Section: Religion and Community In Kyoto: Festivals And Neighborhood mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They were abolished by the Meiji government (1868 -1912) in its efforts to modernize Japan.  For more details on this topic see also Porcu 2012.  However, we should consider that the separation of religion as linked to the private sphere, and the secular sphere of morality linked to the public sphere, was a product of the Japanese government's policy that started in the Meiji period.…”

Section: The Religious-secular Divide Within Neighborhood Associationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Religious-Secular Divide at the Community Level in Contemporary Japan

Porcu¹

2015

Multiple Secularities Beyond the West

Self Cite

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The first gathering of the year of the neighborhood association in downtown Kyoto (where I live) took place in January 2014. About twenty members of the association (chōnaikai) were present and participated in the Atagokō ritual, which was held at the association's assembly house (chōya). Here, we received religious-related objects including sacred sake (miki) and rice and an amulet (mamori fuda) from the Atago Shrine.¹ It was as if we had paid a ritual visit (sanpai) to the shrine without ever leaving the neighborhood. The ritual was followed by the customary shinnenkai, or New Year's party, in a restaurant in the vicinity. Such a mixture of secular and religious elements in the activities of neighborhood associations seems to be at odds with the common self-description of Japanese people as "non religious" (mushūkyō). As a matter of fact, there is a high degree of participation in Japan in certain rituals and religious events, such as visiting temples and shrines at New Year's, ancestor veneration, taking care of the neighborhood's street votive shrine, and organizing festivals.² In this chapter, I analyze how the borders between the secular and the religious are perceived and blurred at the community level in Kyoto. What emerges from the fieldwork I conducted in the city from 2004 to 2010, and more recently, since September 2013, is the ambiguous attitude of Japanese people towards the articulation of the secular at the local level, despite, or perhaps also because of, their self-description as "non-religious."In this chapter, I will focus on how the religious-secular divide manifests itself and how its boundaries blur at the community level in a highly urbanized environment such as that of downtown Kyoto. In particular, I will focus on the major festival in Kyoto, the Gion matsuri, which attracts crowds of tourists from all over Japan, as well as from abroad. The Gion matsuri provides an opportunity to analyze the intermingling of religion and tourism, religion and local government, and the shifting borders between the religious and the secular in  The shrine is located on Mt. Atago, in the northwest part of Kyoto. It is linked to the deity known as Atago Daigongen, or Shōgun Jizō, and it is the site of the well-known sennichi mairi pilgrimage that takes place on the night of July 31st for protection against fire (see Bouchy 1987: 255).

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Observations on the Blurring of the Religious and the Secular in a Japanese Urban Setting

Cited by 13 publications

References 15 publications

Problems of ‘Religion’ in Japan: Part 1

Problems of ‘Religion’ in Japan: Part 1

A Watchful Presence: Aesthetics of Well-Being in a Japanese Pilgrimage

The Religious-Secular Divide at the Community Level in Contemporary Japan

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