Search

The modern Japanese nation-state that was established from 1868 onwards was marked by a strong tendency towards the separation of state and religion: religions were protected as a private matter, but the public sphere was resolutely kept free of them. This was mainly done so that competing religions would not get in the way of state-sanctioned emperor worship. The latter, although imbued with elements from Shinto, was carefully defined as non-religious, so that emperor worship could be prescribed without harm to the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion. This secularist approach to policing religions was broadly shared among Japanese elites—but it did not remain unopposed.From around the turn of the twentieth century, dissatisfaction with the separation of the religious and the secular spheres began to be voiced, especially by pan-Asianist activists, who sought to combine the spiritual unity of Asia with the political liberation of Asian countries from Western colonialism and imperialism. Although Japanese pan-Asianism has conventionally been seen as a purely political movement, one cannot explain it fully without taking into account its spiritual dimension, which up to the 1920s drew its primary inspiration from India. This article will show how pan-Asianist activists in Japan opposed mainstream secularism and discuss what their vision for a unified Asia was. In doing so, it will focus on the Japanese reception of the Frenchman Paul Richard, an important political activist-cum-spiritual seeker who was a central node in the network of Indian and Japanese pan-Asianists in the early twentieth century.

When Japanese Buddhists faced the challenge of materialistic natural sciences in the last decades of the nineteenth century, their responses were not uniform. Some advocated a unity of science and religion in the sense that Buddhism was thought to be substantially compatible with the findings of modern natural science, while others argued for a separation of domains, salvaging for religion a sphere of life that would remain unaffected by modern rationalist forms of critique. Yet, both sides already argued from within a logic of the secular/non-secular, thus showing that, next to political demands, the challenges posed by modern science were an important catalyst for the emergence of expressions of secularity in modern Japan. This article attempts to make sense of the diverse Buddhist self-articulations vis-à-vis modern science by differentiating chronologically, by sect, and by addressee, thus seeking out patterns to explain the contemporaneity of opposing positions within Japanese Buddhism.

Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of Islam for prewar Japanese pan-Asianists. Yet, by considering Islam solely as a political factor, this strand of scholarship has largely overlooked the religious dimension of Japanese pan-Asianism. The existence of six different complete translations of the Qur'ān into Japanese, however, amply bespeaks a genuinely religious interest in Islam, an impression that is corroborated by a look at the sociopolitical contexts of the translations and the biographical backgrounds of the translators. While explicitly anti-modern, anti-Western, and anti-Christian notions were at work in these broadly pan-Asianist Japanese appropriations of Islam, an analysis of the terminology used in the translations shows that, ironically, Christian precedents were not easily overcome.

Although Japan since the 1920s witnessed unemployment, no system of unemployment insurance existed in Japan until after the end of World War II. Historians of welfare and labor have taken this to mean that the prewar Japanese government deviated from international standards of welfare policy, an argument that ties into notions of Japan as a liberal welfare state in the literature on varieties of capitalism and welfare-state regimes. The present paper confronts this type of argument from two angles. First, the type of unemployment that Japanese society faced in the 1920s was substantially different from that the advanced industrialized countries in Europe, North America, and Oceania had to deal with, as can be shown by analyses of the structure of the work force. Second, the main problem actually posed by unemployment in Japan, i.e. the situation of day laborers, was addressed, albeit not by the central state, but by municipal governments who installed local relief associations. If one acknowledges the potential of historical studies to contribute to social science typologies, the results of the present paper show that the claim that Japan is a liberal welfare state regime is difficult to sustain.

In volume 3 of his bestselling series Sensōron (“On War”), published in 2003, the popular Japanese right-wing cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori devotes the first two pages of a chapter entitled “A Wor...

Education reforms during the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952) have traditionally been perceived as having been strongly shaped by U.S. American influence. The occupation bureaucracy, as the dominant element of a triangle of power together with the Ministry of Education and the Japanese Education Reform Committee, has been seen as the main author of the most important reforms. The influence of the U.S. side, however, hardly reached beyond the point of passing laws. Implementation, in contrast, was effected by the schools themselves. This is particularly true for higher education, where universities had a relatively strong standing and influenced the outcome of reform to no small degree. The weight of the universities and their members was especially visible in the failed attempt to institute a reform of university administration. Opposition by manifold actors on the Japanese side prevented this reform, which had been initiated by members of the Civil Information and Education Section of the Occupation. An analysis of the negotiation processes at work in the discussion about administration reform shows how influence on the outcome of reforms was balanced between the U.S. occupation authorities and the various Japanese actors.

This paper examines the dismissals of allegedly Communist teaching staff at Japanese universities between 1948 and 1950 (‘red purge’) as one example of developments usually attributed to a ‘reverse course’ in occupation policy. It argues that the red purge came about less as a result of a change in US policy than through Japanese initiative. Based on primary source material, this paper shows that anti-Communism had been an integral part of the thinking of the Occupation’s education administrators since 1946.They were, however, careful not to translate this thinking into victimizing action. Rather, a quantitative analysis indicates that, in bringing about an individual’s dismissal, factors such as low academic standing were more decisive than political involvement, implying that the purges were not simply ordered from above.Two case studies of purgees, one a philosophy lecturer from Hirosaki Higher School and the other a professor of anatomy at Kyoto Prefectural School of Medicine, serve to corroborate these findings. Assumptions about a reverse course have led to false conceptions about the respective contribution of US and Japanese administrators to late occupation policies. An accurate assessment of the occupation period requires that historians take into account lower-level events and decisions in order to gauge better Japan’s role in shaping occupation policy.

In this chapter, the author focuses less on actual policies than on the conceptual matrix of a non-European society and, by stressing the historical semantics of secularization, to analyze secularization as a concept we use to structure historical and actual experience, rather than as an objectified and quantifiable phenomenon. The way he intends to do this is by highlighting a specific twentieth century application of the trope of secularization to Japanese history and by attempting to establish a genealogy of discovering secularization abroad and at home in modern Japan. In doing so, he stresses a different layer of the secularization paradigm than studies concentrating on the actual relationship of state and religion(s). Keywords:modern Japan; non-European society; religion; secularization; state; twentieth century application

International audience