Problems of ‘Religion’ in Japan: Part 1

Abstract

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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“…Hal ini terkait dengan klaim yang sering terdengar bahwa studi agama berbeda dengan disiplin ilmu lain karena tidak memiliki metode penelitian sendiri; Atau dengan kata lain, menurut Stausberg dan Engler, studi agama ditantang untuk berhadapan dengan isu di mana agama tidak memiliki metode sui generis (Stausberg & Engler, 2011, hlm. 4); meskipun kenyataannya, klaim tersebut sudah cukup lama diperdebatkan (Dawson, 1990;Driscoll & Miller, 2018;Emanuelsson, 2014;Gonzalez-Lesser, 2020;Horii, 2020;Pals, 1987).…”

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“…The decade since the publication of The Invention of Religion in Japan has a seen a wealth of scholarship in English on the process of constructing the category of "religion" in Japan (including : Hoshino 2012;Isomae 2014;Maxey 2014;Krämer 2015;Horii 2018;Thomas 2019). Although the topic is controversial, scholars in the subfield have increasingly come to recognize that "religion" is not a universal part of human nature, but is a culturally specific category that initially took shape in Western Christendom at the end of the seventeenth century and was then radically transformed through a globalization process connected to European colonialism over the course of the long nineteenth century, producing both "world religions" and discourses around "religion" as an autonomous domain of human experience.…”