Organizer: Sarah E. Thal, Columbia University
Chair and Discussant: James Ketelaar, University of Chicago
The transformations of the Meiji period did not herald a secular Japan. Instead, they resituated elements of prior religious belief and practice, in the process opening up expanded or altered religious spaces. Although the land-based economic and political power of shrines and temples may have declined precipitously with the demise of the Tokugawa regime, other developments such as the postal service, modern publishing, industrial organization, and the waging of major wars both reinvigorated old ways of relating to the kami and buddhas and inspired new ones. Also, innovations in public communications, religious organization, and ritual props coincided with arguments among the elite about the proper relation of "sacred" religion to "mundane" life. From this confluence of ideological debate and material change grew new sites of religious practice, both physical and conceptual, public and private.
The papers in this panel examine modern religious change through the creative actions of the clergy, lay practitioners, and government officials. Placing the work of these individuals and groups in the larger historical context, the papers demonstrate that the decline of earlier religious structures in Meiji did not leave a vacuum of secularism, but instead a field of opportunity for religious entrepreneurs. By drawing out the common, cross-sectarian changes in religious life in Meiji Japan per se, instead of treating the period as an afterword to Tokugawa history, this panel hopes to emphasize the continuing importance of religious ideas, language, and practice in Japan’s modern period.
Sarah Thal, Columbia University
In Meiji Japan, as in the modern nation-states of Europe and America, religious and national symbols merged to embed the nation in the public consciousness. Through the maneuvering of politicians, priests, and pilgrims, the popular, miraculous center of Kompira gradually incorporated symbols and practices of the emerging state, creating at the sacred site a religious-national culture of worship that surrounded even casual visitors to the mountain.
By changing the material accouterments of shrine visiting—the images seen, the amulets received, the offerings given—people of all walks of life contributed to a recreation of the meaning of pilgrimage to Kompira. In early Meiji, Kompira was officially redefined as a "Shinto" deity and linked to the newly promoted national creation myth. Then, in line with the Meiji abolition of the Tokugawa status system, the shrine developed its own system of privilege, using the allure of a new kind of amulet to transform thousands of independent pilgrimage confraternities into membership groups vowing allegiance to emperor and kami. Finally, as the wartime concerns of worshippers coincided with the ambitions of the nation, slogans, flags, and special prayer ceremonies blended to create at Kompira a concentrated site of national religious fervor. Kompira and other shrines had become sites of kami and nation linked together: whether through language, ritual, or shrine design, worship to Kompira became for many a tacit affirmation of the congruence of personal and national aspirations.
Galen Amstutz, Harvard University
Between ca. 1850 and ca. 1950, Japan changed from a country with a plethora of live Buddhist preaching and traditional printed religious books to a country with a plethora of modern Buddhist journalism. In the case of the Shin school, which was the largest of the traditional Buddhist organizations, these changes were actively supported by the leadership, which actually tried to discourage traditional preaching. The modern scholar Sekiyama Kazuo, the leading writer on traditional Buddhist preaching, has lamented the loss of this "folk art." However, the modern journalistic style was clearly more in tune with modernizing social and political conditions such as urbanization, centralized communication, and the modern nation-state. Thus, marked by this communications shift, in important respects the quality of Japanese Buddhist life changed after Meiji. However, the productivity of this modern journalism calls into question any simplistic assumption that Buddhist religiosity as a whole declined in Japan in the pre-WWII period. The paper will conclude by inquiring into the theoretical implications of this data for understanding the educational and social restructuring of post-Meiji Japan and the rationalizing processes in modernization.
Andrew Bernstein, Columbia University
The cremation rate in Japan today is virtually 100 percent, but at the start of the Meiji period, the majority of Japanese were still buried whole, and cremation was the subject of fierce public debate. Confucian and Shinto ideologues reviled the Buddhist practice as "the most unfilial of acts," and used their power in the restoration government to implement a nationwide ban on all cremations in July 1873. Vigorously attacked by Buddhist temples and the public at large, the short-lived ban was lifted in May 1875, but the controversy which gave rise to it, and the responses it produced, were critical in shaping the infrastructure of modern Japanese death ritual.
Most importantly, the ban opened the door to unprecedented state control over the deaths of ordinary Japanese, a development which was, ironically, a prerequisite for the universal diffusion of cremation in the twentieth century. The state did not act with a single will, however, Reflecting divisions in society as a whole, ministries and local governments struggled to balance competing ideological and material aims, ranging from the promotion of ancestor worship to the protection of public health and finances. An analysis of this struggle contributes to a richer understanding of the interplay between religion, politics, and popular opinion in early Meiji, and explains the origin of those institutions, such as municipal graveyards and crematoria, which constitute the landscape of death management in present-day Japan.
Richard Jaffe, North Carolina State University
The end to state enforcement of the rules governing Buddhist clerical life, although a blow to those clerics advocating the centrality of celibate monastic practice, provided an opportunity for Buddhist intellectuals to reconfigure their tradition. In the wake of the radical changes in religious policies at the start of the Meiji period, Buddhists who hoped to create a more family-centered, world-affirming Buddhism that addressed the needs of the modern Japanese state wrote didactic texts and created new ceremonies intended to nurture "Buddhist couples" and "Buddhist families." The ex-Nichiren cleric Tanaka Chigaku, for example, decrying the deep-seated association of Buddhism with death, created the first Buddhist wedding ceremony for his followers and wrote such family-centered texts as "An Essay on the Buddhist Couple" and "The Japanese Woman." Although at first these texts and ceremonies came from the margins of established Buddhism, within several decades clerics within even such monastic-oriented denominations as Soutou Zen, Shingon, and Joudo created their own wedding liturgies and published such works as "Essentials of Women’s Virtue" and "Instructions for the Buddhist Family."
In my paper I will examine the creation of Buddhist wedding ceremonies and analyze the growing concern with families, women, and marriage among the Buddhist elite. Although the "domestic turn" in Buddhism appears to be an instance of the further restriction of religious life to the private sphere, the new focus on domestic issues must also be understood as a move by some Buddhists to reforge connections with state authorities increasingly concerned with the management of domestic morality.