Jason Ananda Josephson
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The invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged boundary-drawing exercise that extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto.
Jason Ananda Josephson, Assistant Professor of Religion, Williams College (2007– present).
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4.9 4.9 out of 5 stars 20 ratings 4.2 on Goodreads 78 ratings
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Winner of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion: 2013 Distinguished Book Award
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 Ānanda 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.
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
A Note on Texts and Translations
Introduction
The Advent of Religion in Japan
Obscure Obstacles
Unlearning Shūkyō
Unlearning “Religion”
Overview of the Work
1. The Marks of Heresy: Organizing Difference in Premodern Japan
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
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"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
“Jason Ananda Josephson astutely analyzes how Japanese definitions of religion sought to contain Christian missionary agendas and to position Japan advantageously vis-à-vis Western nations while at the same time radically reconfiguring inherited traditions and articulating new ideological norms for Japanese citizens. His broad erudition allows him to place the case of Japan in transnational perspective and to offer persuasive theoretical insights into the mutually constitutive nature of religion, superstition, and the secular. This study is illuminating reading for anyone interested, not only in modern Japan, but in the complex interconnections of religion, modernity, and the politics of nation states.” (Jacqueline Stone, Princeton University)
“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 has used well-documented examples of the creation of various Japanese belief systems in the modern era to suggest a new model for understanding the colonial past of religious studies and to provide new tools and models for grappling with continuing change in religious studies theory. . . . 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.”- Will Hansen, H-Shukyo
“Josephson’s book is a highly insightful and ingenious application of the constructivist approach to religion—the method of reverse-engineering the clockwork that makes the concept tick in particular historical and cultural cases. . . . By putting the stress on invention, Josephson foregrounds this backstage business of making, and in doing so, he demonstrates, to brilliant effect, the novelty and power of the products that resulted. . . . Josephson’s book will no doubt be generating further exciting inventions for some time to come.” -Japan Review
“Jason Ananda Josephson’s book on the ‘invention of religion’ is an informative, well-argued, and stimulating discussion of an important topic that should be fascinating to anyone interested in religion in modern Japan or religion in any historical or cultural context.”-Paul L. Swanson | International Bulletin of Missionary Research
“Jason Josephson’s The Invention of Religion in Japan offers a creative theoretical apparatus that many students of Japanese religion and history will find immediately useful. . . . Josephson boasts a formidable linguistic skill set and a corresponding fluency with theoretical material; he puts both to extensive use in this wide-ranging book. . . . Josephson upends the familiar Saidian account of Europe’s masterful encounter with the passive ‘Orient,’ showing that Japanese interpreters played active roles in formulating European understandings of the new academic field of ‘Japanese religions.’”-Religious Studies in Japan
“Josephson admirably traces the development of ‘religion’ in Japan and the West, and he constantly reminds of how this invention was inextricably interwoven with international politics and diplomatic relationships. . . . Josephson presents a sophisticated analysis of the invention of religion in Japan by applying theoretically and empirically based explanations that rely on primary source data in multiple languages to contest previous notions of ‘religion’ and assumptions within the academic study of religion. In that respect, The Invention of Religion in Japan can help scholars of religions in Japan and elsewhere continue to refine and shape our understanding of ‘religion’ in modernity.”-Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
“This book is an advance in the literature. Tightly edited, it synthesizes a heavy mass of information and uses judicious combinations of primary, secondary, and theo retical literature to tell its story. The author’s linguistic abilities are exceptional, and he has done deep background research into varied European and Japanese literatures that help him address the various specific problems raised in his enterprise. Readers who are not Japan specialists will find the issues framed by interesting anecdotes and well-chosen historical information.”-Journal of Religion in Japan
“The book is a linguistic and textual tour de force that challenges many preconceptions about the development of studies of religion in Japan as well as about religion as a defined, or definable, category in Japanese contexts. Its thesis, that “religion” as a conceptual category did not exist prior to Western incursions into Meiji Japan and that it thus needed to be invented by the Japanese, is argued convincingly and will make many who have held alternative viewpoints think again. Josephson also offers some new insights into the contentious terminology of the religious and the secular by focusing on Japanese concerns with heresy and “superstition,” which were critical definitional categories through which the “religious” and the “secular” were framed. . . . One hopes very much that people outside of religious studies do not look at Josephson’s title and think this is a book solely about religion. Indeed, it would not have been amiss to have titled the book “Politics, Diplomacy, and the Invention of Religion,” for it is as much of relevance to students of politics, diplomacy, international relations, and law as it is to those of religious studies.”-Ian Reader | Monumenta Nipponica
“Theoretically sophisticated and intellectually ambitious, Josephson’s book challenges the long-held assumption that religion is a universal component of human experience….Josephson’s work is a skillful exercise in semiotic analysis, drawing on sources in Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Spanish, and Italian, and it illuminates the role of the Japanese as observers of the West, not merely as objects of Western observation….In this way, Josephson uses the transnational approach not only to revise a long-standing problem in Japanese historiography but also to deconstruct hegemonic Western concepts.”-Cross-Currents “Josephson weaves together a fresh narrative of Japanese nation-building in its relation to religion. . . . Sophisticated yet highly readable, The Invention of Religion in Japan will be edifying reading for general readers and students as much as for specialists.”-Jeff Schroeder | The Eastern Buddhist
“[C]onvincingly describe[es] the reception of the term ‘religion’ in Japan not as an ‘imposition’ and thus passive reception of a foreign concept but as an active and deliberate acquisition. . . . [Josephson] does a brilliant job in showing how ‘religion’ was used by state officials, scientists, and other protagonists in late 19th-century Japan as exactly what it is: a free-floating signifier with a strong discursive force that can be of great use for different processes of negotiation and naturalization.”-Inken Prohl | Religion
"This is an important book. . . . It requires us to rethink how we understand and classify Shinto, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity in both premodern and modern settings. . . . [Josephson's] analysis of Japan is Foucauldian in virtually every dimension—not only of its religion, but also of its use of knowledge as power and of the 'disciplining of bodies' by authorities through regimens on hygiene, mental illness, sexual deviance, and imprisonment."-Journal of Japanese Studies
“The book brilliantly weaves two genealogies of scholarship, making it deeply interesting to students of either one: studies examining the construction of State Shinto in the Meiji period as a nonreligious expression of modern Japanese identity with a generation of critical scholarship on the academic study of religion. . . . [Josephson] has produced an elegant argument that religion (including its co-products, the secular and the superstitious) was not so much imposed on Japan, but rather, in the discursive gap created by Western missionary and diplomatic incursions, invented in Japan by the Japanese to serve the late nineteenth-century modernization project. In short, the book describes, in far-ranging discussions, how religion became the first modern manufactured product with the origin label ‘Made in Japan.’”-Journal of Asian Studies
“Presents an exciting challenge to the field of Japanese religious studies. . . . Josephson sheds much light on how the Western category of religion was adapted, interpreted, and transformed in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century. . . . A powerful addition to the field and a must-read.”-Mark W. MacWilliams | Numen
“An important contribution. . . . Studies such as Josephson’s . . . that examine classification as a collaborative, situationally-specific exercise linked not just to ideas but to social interests, legal systems, and administrative structures . . . are an important corrective to those who understand situations of contact as merely involving the passive vanquished simply doing the bidding of invading conquerors.”-Russell T. McCutcheon | Numen
“Josephson’s investigation of the category of religion as it developed in modern Japan is a helpful addition to the field, and, to be honest, I have already begun assigning it in seminars. . . . This book [will be] useful in comparative and theoretical courses on religion and will no doubt appeal to anyone studying Japanese religions and Japanese history. . . . One of his most useful contributions is the use of the trinary model of ‘real,’ ‘superstition,’ and ‘religion’ to understand how the modern worldview is enacted and created. Moreover, his consideration of diplomacy and domestic law as key factors in the construction and negotiation of conceptual categories will be of interest to scholars in many fields. I highly recommend this book.”-Journal of Religion
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About the Author
Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm is Chair and Associate professor of religion at Williams College.
Product details
Publisher : University of Chicago Press (October 3, 2012)
Language : English
Paperback : 387 pages
Customer Reviews: 4.9 4.9 out of 5 stars 20 ratings
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Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College. He received his PhD from Stanford University, his MTS from Harvard University, and has held visiting positions at Princeton University, École Française d'Extrême-Orient, Paris, Ruhr Universität and Universität Leipzig, Germany.
He is the author of
- "The Invention of Religion in Japan" (2012, winner of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion- Distinguished Book of the Year Award),
- "The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences" (2017), and
- "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory" (2021), all published by the University of Chicago Press.
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From the United States
Bookwyrm
4.0 out of 5 stars How Religion Came to Be Defined in Japan
Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2019
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I like to consider myself a casual scholar (meaning I’m not a professional and it is not my career) of religion and religion in Japan (and I don’t mean necessarily how they affect each other, I mean as topics and areas of study). The Invention of Religion in Japan is both a look at history itself, and how religion fits into it. It discussed how the Japanese had their set of beliefs, like folk beliefs that later became categorized with Shinto, and Buddhism, but, because they were a part of life, they were not defined as a “religion”, so when the Japanese encountered Christianity, they struggled to define their beliefs. Christianity was originally seen as a heretical form of Buddhism.
I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in religious studies, the history of Japan, or Japan in general.
2 people found this helpful
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JS
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent academic overview
Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2017
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I skimmed this book at the bookstore when it came out and found that it mostly overlapped with research I have already done. At last, I am writing on this subject again so I decided I had to own a copy. I just wanted to affirm that this is a very well-researched book which introduces an important topic which remains trendy in religious studies. It is backed up very strongly by Japanese and Western academic consensus, but it also contains plenty of stuff that was new for me. I highly recommend this book to undergrads considering a religion major, as well as people who want a summary of various topics related to the formation of the religious category in Japan.
4 people found this helpful
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David Henry
5.0 out of 5 stars A challenging read--in more ways than one.
Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2018
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Incredible not only as an introduction to a fascinating period in Japanese history, but also as an examination of the concept of "religion" and the assumptions that underlie our idea of a modern, secular, free society. My only mistake was getting the kindle edition--buy a hard copy to share with friends.
Fair warning, though, this is not a popular-level history. It is academic. Share it with your friends, but share it with your *nerd* friends.
4 people found this helpful
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Jeremy Bellay
5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read with profound implications
Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2012
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Josephson makes a profound argument about the nature of the category of religion through a detailed examination of how that category was formulated in Japan following Japan's encounter with The West. The implications of this work spill well beyond the bounds of Japanese religions, and "The Invention of Religion in Japan" can be read as a study of how a new shared concept comes into being. However, unlike many books making arguments about that nature of human culture, Josephson supports his arguments with a detailed historical narrative. I found the book to be extremely readable and many of the stories of early Japan-Western interaction are downright entertaining. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in religion, Japan, or the formation of shared conceptual categories.
18 people found this helpful
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cbest
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing book!
Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2013
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Written by a friend from high school, The Invention of Religion in Japan was a requested Christmas gift for my son. Sixty pages into the book he called me to say that the book is amazing. He told me that it opens new territory in the understanding of the development of Buddhism in Japan and the effects of the intersection with Christianity on both the Japanese and Europeans who brought Christianity to Japan. Included are old Japanese documents and accounts that the author translated into English.
11 people found this helpful
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David K Groff
5.0 out of 5 stars This is an excellent overview of the history of State Shinto and its ...
Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2017
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This is an excellent overview of the history of State Shinto and its development as a tool both for control and for adaptation to international assumptions about religion.
3 people found this helpful
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Calvin
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful dissection of what is science
Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2016
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Wonderful dissection of what is science, religion, and how they interweave. A must for any student of Japanese religion
One person found this helpful
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Justin Stein
5.0 out of 5 stars A Modern Classic in the Field
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2022
Essential reading for those interested in the development of modern Japanese religion. As other reviewers have said, this is an academic text, not a popular history, and there is some theory about how historical actors made sense of religious difference as well as the relationship between religion, superstition, and science, but it is all relatively accessible. I've read it several times and it's always a treat.
One person found this helpful
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From other countries Ana Flowers
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 19, 2015
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very good book if you want to learn more about history of Japan.
One person found this helpful
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