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Overview
Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call “religion.” There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea. In this book, Jason Ananda Josephson reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed.
More than a tale of oppression or hegemony, Josephson’s account demonstrates that the process of articulating religion offered the Japanese state a valuable opportunity. In addition to carving out space for belief in Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, Japanese officials excluded Shinto from the category. Instead, they enshrined it as a national ideology while relegating the popular practices of indigenous shamans and female mediums to the category of “superstitions” —and thus beyond the sphere of tolerance. Josephson argues that the invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion today. This ambitious and wide-ranging book contributes an important perspective to broader debates on the nature of religion, the secular, science, and superstition.
Praise for The Invention of Religion in Japan
“The Invention of Religion in Japan is truly revolutionary. Original, well researched, and engrossing, it overturns basic assumptions in the study of Japanese thought, religion, science, and history. . . . This book will absolutely reshape the field.” —Sarah Thal, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Written with remarkable clarity, this book makes an excellent contribution to the study of the interface of traditional Japanese religions and politics. Highly recommended.” —Choice
“The range of Japanese primary sources consulted in his book is prodigious, as is his familiarity and usage of multidisciplinary theoretical works. . . . Josephson’s book is erudite, informative, and interesting. It should be a worthwhile read for Japan scholars as well as scholars and students interested in religious studies theory and history.” —H-Shukyo
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226412351 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 537 |
| Sales rank: | 700,863 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Invention of Religion in Japan
By Jason Ananda Josephson
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2012 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-41235-1
CHAPTER 1
The Marks of Heresy: Organizing Difference in Premodern Japan
All Southern Barbarians and Westerners, not only the English, practice the heresy [jakyo] that is prohibited in our country. Henceforth, whenever a foreign ship is sighted approaching any point on our coast, all persons on hand should fire on it and drive it off. TOKUGAWA OFFICIAL DECREE, 1825
On March 24, 1860, the Great Councilor Ii Naosuke was ambushed outside the gates of Edo Castle and brutally assassinated. Alongside his decapitated body, his killers left a note accusing him of various crimes, which included allowing "heretical temples" (jakyodera) into Japan. While the larger political circumstances that led to this bloody confrontation have been extensively studied, a scholar might be drawn to the seemingly miniscule details of the wording of the assassins' manifesto. Such a scholar might wonder about the nature of this "heresy": was it, for example, an unorthodox form of Japanese religion, as the language might seem to imply? On learning that these "heretical temples" were Christian churches, previous scholars have generally interpreted this expression as nothing more than a xenophobic outburst and moved on.
And yet, this term for heresy, jakyo, and related semantic variants (including jashumon, jasetsu, and jaho) are not merely found in one isolated instance. They permeate Edo and Meiji-period Japan in ritual manuals, doctrinal debates, geographies, and newspapers. This language also shaped policy debates, diplomatic exchanges, manifestos, and laws; it provided the unifying rationale behind acts of violence including the burning of books, torture, mass executions, and murders. The word "heresy" itself did not kill but clearly inspired the hermeneutic configuration that attempted to inscribe these massacres with meaning. We cannot make sense of the councilor's assassination, for example, without examining this terminology in detail. To call it xenophobic is not enough. To say that these assassins hated Christianity is not enough. On the contrary, to call Christianity a heresy is precisely to deny its foreignness, to fail to acknowledge its true difference. The key to this seeming contradiction is to understand what it meant to think of Christianity as a heresy.
The Great Councilor's crime, referred to in this section of the assassins' manifesto as permitting the incursion of "heretical temples," was his signature of a treaty guaranteeing that "Americans in Japan shall be allowed the free exercise of their religion, and for this purpose shall have the right to erect suitable places of worship." The men who murdered Ii Naosuke tried to justify their acts with this document, and it is tempting to say that they were opposing freedom of religion. But why then did the killers not refer to Christianity as a religion, or anywhere mention religion directly in their manifesto? The answer lies in the fact that in some important sense, the concept "religion" was not available to them.
The assassins, like their contemporaries, understood Christianity according to the legacy of European missionary activity in the sixteenth century. As a result of these encounters, Japanese intellectuals classified Christianity in terms of the preexisting category of heresy. Put differently, they described Christianity not as a foreign religion but as a deviant version of Japanese practices. Christianity's place in the horizon of categories was clear: the bloodstained manifesto grouped Christianity with forbidden Buddhist sects, and this classification was the norm in Tokugawa Japan, not the exception. Although the word "religion," did appear in the Harris Treaty (1858), Japanese translators seem to have understood the term mostly as a polite euphemism for an evil Euro-American cult. In their interpretation, American religion and the Japanese jakyo (heresy) were initially synonymous.
As discussed in the introduction, the main features of the concept of "religion" were not formulated in Europe until the seventeenth century. Indeed, it was the early encounter between cultures lacking a concept of religion that laid the groundwork for the development of the concept in both cultures. In Japan a modern concept of religion developed in the nineteenth century, only somewhat behind America and Europe, and was absent in preceding periods. This chapter traces the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century encounters between Europe and Japan, focusing on the language of heresy. I sketch out two interconnected rubrics for negotiating cultural difference before religion. I identify one as hierarchical inclusion, a set of discursive practices that organize difference under a totalizing framework to bridge apparent difference, and thus effectively deny difference. The second rubric I call exclusive similarity, which I use to describe those acts of othering that work by excluding on the basis of reputed similarity, not difference. In this later mode, difference is also disqualified, but in this case by representing divergent positions as aberrant imitations. I argue that between these two modes, Japanese thinkers already had in place sophisticated strategies for the interpretation of difference before formulating a modern concept of religion. Put differently, I demonstrate that despite the presence of Christianity it was not necessary to formulate a new concept of religion, because preexisting language of Buddhist deviance was ready at hand.
Difference Denied: Hierarchical Inclusion
And when they heard our cause, which seemed to the [Japanese] priests [Pg., bonzos]to be in accordance with the divine attributes of their "Dainichi," they said to the Padre that although we have different terminology, [different] languages and habits, the essence of the law professed by them and the Padre was identical. LUÍS FRÓIS, HISTORIA DE JAPAM, 1593
In 1551, Ouchi Yoshitaka (1507–1551), the daimyo of Suo, donated a Buddhist temple to a group of foreigners. Stating that he approved of the "monks who have come from the western regions [India] to spread the Dharma of the Buddha [Buppo]," Yoshitaka forbade his subjects from taking any action to harm the foreigners; he even suggested that he might reciprocate by sending his own Buddhist monks as ambassadors to India (Tenjiku).
At first glance we might think, as Yoshitaka did, that this diplomatic moment had the potential to mark the beginning of an Indo-Japanese exchange united in pan-Buddhist fraternity. After all, the Rinzai Zen priest who served as Yoshitaka's advisor had concluded from his interview with these Indian monks that they not only came from the holy land of the Buddha's birth, but that they were also proponents of a well-recognized sect of Japanese tantric Buddhism, the Shingon school. This opinion was confirmed when monks of the Shingon sect met with the Indians and recognized their common cause.
The Indians also seemed to share the Shingon sect's primary object of devotion. The Indian monks themselves reinforced this interpretation, as according to their Japanese translator, they had come to Japan on a mission to promote reverence for the Cosmic Buddha (Dainichi Nyorai). Having been granted permission to preach in the daimyo's capital city, the leader of the foreigners summoned people to worship by calling out a newly learned Japanese phrase "Dainichi o ogami are!" (Pray to the Cosmic Buddha!)
Initially, all seemed to go well. But only a short time later, the foreigners changed their message. They began shouting "Do not pray to the Cosmic Buddha!" And they started preaching that "Dainichi should not be honored as God, and that the Shingon sect, like all the others, was a fraudulent law and an invention of the devil." From this time forward, the foreigners repeatedly asserted that they were not members of a Buddhist sect and that the subject of their rites was not the Cosmic Buddha, but something or someone called Deus whose name and essence were fundamentally unique and untranslatable.
The foreigners were not in fact Indian Buddhists. Their leader was the Basque cofounder of the Jesuit order, Francis Xavier (1506–1552), and he was from India only in the sense that he had recently passed through the Portuguese Indian colony of Goa. He had come not from the land of the Buddha's birth, but from the European kingdom of Navarre, and his message was that of Roman Catholicism, not tantric Buddhism.
In asserting that Deus could not be translated, Xavier seemingly closed off possibilities for Buddhist-Christian synthesis. He further alienated many of his Buddhist allies with his fierce criticism of the Shingon sect. Nevertheless, the question remains: how could Catholicism have been mistaken for Buddhism in the first place? Xavier's Japanese companion Anjiro often gets the blame in ways that call to mind the Italian expression "traduttore, tradittore" (translator-traitor). For it was Anjiro, a native of Kagoshima and occasional pirate, who, after fleeing a murder charge and finding himself in Malacca, joined the Jesuit mission and served as their interpreter. In his translations, Anjiro equated heaven with the Buddhist pure land (jodo), hell with the Buddhist underworld (jigoku), angels with the deities of the Brahma-Heaven (tennin), and, most problematically, God with the Cosmic Buddha (Dainichi).
More than a hundred years of mission history has, in general, faulted Anjiro for his ignorance and his "failures" as a translator. Granted, Anjiro's illiteracy and his truncated understanding of both Buddhism and Christianity limited what he could do. Yet, Anjiro's translations were not hermeneutically arbitrary or naïve. We do not know how much Anjiro understood of his original Shingon Buddhist sect. Nevertheless, his untutored renderings are strikingly in keeping with Shingon interpretative strategies and one can see evidence of this in his reading of Christianity. After all, it was the founder of the Japanese Shingon sect, Kukai (774–835), who wrote the following:
Mañjusri asked the Buddha: "Bhagavat, by how many names have you turned the wheel of Dharma in our world?" The Buddha said: "I have called myself empty, being, suchness, dharmata, permanence, impermanence, god, demon, mantra, and great mantra. In such a way, by means of hundreds and thousands of kotis of names, I have benefited living beings." When the meaning of this is fully grasped, how can there be discord between [different] schools [of thought]?
The position articulated here represents a mode of reconciling difference similar to that advocated by Anjiro. It suggests that translation can bridge divergence. Any conceptual or ideological position can be reconciled through a hermeneutic reduction to an incarnation of the Buddha; that is, God could be just another name for the Cosmic Buddha.
I want to emphasize that this is not naïve synthesis, nor is it the production of some kind of harmonious compromise. Instead, this model suggests an asymmetrical technique for reconciling difference that I call hierarchical inclusion, by which I mean an operation for dealing with alterity that works by subordinating marks of difference into a totalizing ideology, while still preserving their external signs. It is thus a procedure, which moves beyond the Manichean binary of identity or difference. Hierarchical inclusion is not limited to the writings of Kukai or the translations of Anjiro; rather, it represents the central hermeneutic of Japanese tantric Buddhism and is a common mode in general for reconciling cultural differences. One may also think of the method of comparison referred to by Roman scholars such as Tacitus (ca. 56–ca. 117 CE) as interpretatio Romana, which described an attempt to identify the true Roman identities of "barbarian" deities.
Scholars writing about Japan have historically referred to what I call hierarchical inclusion as "syncretism." Syncretism is a misleading term for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is used pejoratively to describe an illicit mixture of religions resulting from the putative ignorance of non-European peoples. Implicit in "syncretism" is the idea of two pure religious essences that are diluted through synthesis. What this assumption misses is that there are no pure religious essences, nor is hierarchical inclusion the result of naïveté; rather it results from conscious strategies to reconcile and interpret difference.
Alternately, one could use the term assimilation. While this is closer to the process I want to describe, etymologically "assimilation" means to render similar or same. Hence, assimilation describes a simultaneous incorporation and homogenization. While hierarchical inclusion is a type of assimilation, it incorporates while preserving external, and supposedly superficial, difference. It does not attempt to fully homogenize. Hierarchical inclusion results in a remainder that can be recouped in moments of creative recombination. Despite the fact that no form of assimilation is ever complete, as a type of assimilation, hierarchical inclusion needs to be distinguished from those modes that aim to produce homogeneity.
An old Sino-Japanese slogan from at least the ninth century, is the most conspicuous example of hierarchical inclusion in Japanese history and appears in many different contexts. One might translate it as "original foundation, manifest traces" (honji suijaku). According to the combinatory paradigm embodied in this slogan, local deities are emanations or even something like the legible signs of universal buddhas and bodhisattvas. For example, both the Shinto god Tenjin and the Hindu deity Ga[??]esa could be read as incarnations of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, thereby integrating these deities into Buddhism, while simultaneously preserving their external marks of difference. This assimilation proceeds by asserting a fundamental translatability. Local deities are nothing more than different names of (or forms of) buddhas and bodhisattvas. Thus, any god, demon, spirit, historical individual, or even text could be stripped of its original cultic context and incorporated into a Buddhist framework.
This mode of assimilation was fundamentally hierarchical, as it privileged one interpretive frame over another: the Buddhist name was always the true name of a given deity. Therefore, the "discovery" of a deity's Buddhist identity reassigned that deity within a Buddhist hierarchy. The preservation of the outward signs of cultural difference thus actually reinforced Buddhist claims to universality and further enriched Buddhist symbols.
This process was creatively unstable. For example, the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara could be incarnated as the deity Mahesvara, who was in turn identified with the god Tenjin, read as a manifestation of the deity Shoten, ad infinitum. The goal of this type of discourse was not the production of a single reading or meaning, but instead a proliferation of signs in creative combinations. Even so, in most tantric Buddhist discourse, all of these signs ultimately reduced to the Cosmic Buddha, Dainichi, whose body was the universe itself. The reading of a foreign god such as Deus as another name for Dainichi, therefore, had plenty of precedents.
Broadly understood, hierarchical inclusion was not limited to Buddhist scholasticism. Confucian thinkers such as Hayashi Razan (1583–1657) argued that Shinto was merely a provisional manifestation of the Confucian Way of Kings (odo), thereby reducing the entirety of shrine rituals to a component of Confucian governance. The founder of Yuiitsu Shinto, Yoshida Kanetomo (1435–1511), inverted the honji suijaku paradigm to argue that buddhas were manifestations of Shinto deities. As these examples illustrate, hierarchical inclusion was not some sort of harmonious synthesis or unconscious appropriation, but was instead a sophisticated mode of exercising discourse power.
Premodern Japanese intellectual debates turned less on the exclusion of competing ideologies and practices than on conflict over which system would serve as the primary hermeneutical lens for the other. By declining Anjiro's translation, Xavier refused to accept the subordination of Catholicism to the Shingon Buddhism. He further asserted the limits of language by suggesting that certain Christian terms were not capable of being translated into Japanese equivalents. Xavier also instructed his successors in the Jesuit mission to actively refute a potential convert's original sect and to encourage exclusive loyalty to the Catholic Church. These policies put Xavier in direct conflict with the Shingon sect and the reputation of the Jesuits was further damaged by reports of European colonial activity abroad.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Invention of Religion in Japan by Jason Ananda Josephson. Copyright © 2012 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface and AcknowledgmentsA Note on Texts and Translations
Introduction
The Advent of Religion in Japan
Obscure Obstacles
Unlearning Shukyo
Unlearning “Religion”
Overview of the Work
1. The Marks of Heresy
Difference Denied: Hierarchical Inclusion
Strange Aberrations: Exclusive Similarity
Hunting Heretics
2. Heretical Anthropology
Contested Silences: Two Versions of the Acts of the Saints
Demonic Dharma
Japanese Heretics and Pagans
3. The Arrival of Religion
Negotiating “Religion”
Taxonomy and Translation: Category in the Webs of Meaning
Unreasonable Demands
4. The Science of the Gods
Shinto as a “Nonreligion”
The Way of the Gods
Celestial Archeology: The Advent of European Science in Japan
The Science of the Gods: Philology and Cosmology
Ritual Therapeutics for the Body of the Nation
The Gods of Science
From Miraculous Revolution to Mechanistic Cosmos
5. Formations of the Shinto Secular
Secularism Revisited
Hygienic Modernity and the World of Reality
Secular Apotheosis
6. Taming Demons
The Demons of Modernity
Restraining the Wild
Monstrous Gods
Evil Cults
Disciplining Buddhism, Expelling Christianity
7. Inventing Japanese Religion
Religion in Japanese International Missions
Controlling the Heart: Debating the Role of Religion in the Modern State
Inventing “Japanese Religions”
8. Religion within the Limits
Internal Convictions
External Controls
The Birth of Religious Studies in Japan
Conclusion
The Invention of Superstition
The Invention of the Secular
The Invention of Religion
The Third Term
Postscript Appendix. Religion Explained Notes
Character Glossary
References
Index