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The Chinese and Japanese stories of capturing yaoguai or yōkai and obtaining treasures in haunted houses share a common origin from 'Xì Yāo' narratives. The core motif chain remains largely consistent, despite distinct differences in the treatment of yaoguai. In China, these beings are often expelled or even killed, whereas in Japan they are usually appeased and revered. The underlying reasons can be largely attributed to the influence of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism in China, which perceive yaoguai as ominous and associate them with calamities. In contrast, the integration of Buddhism and Shintoism in Japan has created a cultural landscape that offers a pathway for yōkai to ascend to the status of deities. The dissemination of similar stories primarily relies on the stability of the motif chain, while variations beyond it serve as essential conditions for the acceptance and dissemination of these stories across regions, ethnicities, and even nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to better understand Christian nationalism by investigating the cases of Uchimura Kanzō and Nitobe Inazō, two well-known Christians of Meiji Japan. In Meiji Japan, Christianity was a recently re-introduced and foreign faith which was not aligned with the Japanese way of life. However, both Uchimura and Nitobe converted to Christianity in their youth and dedicated their life to the development of Japan. The article investigates what made this possible. It pays particular attention to the relationship between politics and religion and the Meiji government's attempts to adopt the western view of the relationship to the nascent Japanese state. It argues that the invention of state Shintō as a non-religion but an indispensable part of the Japanese polity by the Meiji government created space where Christian faith and Japanese nationalism could co-exist, the space which was increasingly squeezed as Meiji turned to Taishō and then to Shōwa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The God Strategy, David Domke and Kevin Coe introduced the concepts of God talk and faith talk to distinguish between explicit and implicit references to religion in American political discourse. Although God talk is perhaps more prevalent in nations where allusions to religion are commonplace in political language, faith talk – speaking to adherents through the use of “cues” that are often imperceptible to outsiders – is more likely to be used by politicians in states such as Japan, where secular legislation restricts the political discourse. In this paper I will illustrate how faith talk is used as a rhetorical strategy in the discourse of politicians representing Japan’s conservative right, with a particular focus on the rhetoric and public image of Abe Shinzō. Abe fostered an image of himself as a self-proclaimed nationalist and devoted “Shintoist,” and he retained close ties to many of the organizations that together form the postwar “Shinto establishment,” including the Association of Shinto Shrines (Jinja Honchō, NASS). Although Abe was rarely as explicit as U.S. presidents tend to be, through his words and actions he disseminated the image of Japan as a “Shinto” nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The video game Ōkami encourages players to immerse themselves in a digital gamescape that incorporates Japanese aesthetics, stories, and religious philosophies. The designers have gamified Shintō holographic reasoning, Confucian virtues, and Buddhist metaphors of fighting demons of the mind to create a world modeled after a mythological retelling of medieval Japan. A significant portion of the player's gameplay involves purifying pollutants from the environment, which improves the player character and the Japanesque world's citizens. The game acts as a playable metaphor that teaches the player about Japanese religion and culture by allowing them to enact an interpretation of it interactively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the career of ethno-nationalist leader Kageyama Masaharu, who was active during the greater part of the Showa era. It argues that though the notion of 'Showa Restoration' is typically understood in terms of the bloody coup d'état attempts of the prewar era, the postwar career of its participants necessitates a broader understanding of the term. Kageyama is best known as a conspirator in the failed terrorist attack known as the Shimpeitai Incident of 1933, but he also played a major role in nationalist politics in the postwar era. His activities ranged from lobbying for the recuperation and repair of physical and temporal institutions related to the imperial house, such as rituals at Ise Shrine and National Establishment Day, to the nurturing of young ethno-nationalists at his Great East Institute. The ideas and platforms of Showa Restorationists like Kageyama survived the US Occupation and the Cold War era in the form of ethno-nationalist (minzokuha) activists and lobbyists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the concept of covenantal pluralism in a context of postwar Japan, with a focus on the legal framework separating the state from religion and guaranteeing the rights of religious minorities. The article argues that while there are relatively few instances of sectarian strife, the lack of agreement on how to interpret the category of religion, in particular in relation to Shrine Shinto, continues to lead to struggles between different camps. The article also questions the feasibility of covenantal pluralism as an ideal in a country where national identity is so closely linked to ideas of social homogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an exploration of taxonomy, discontinuity, culture, lost knowledge, planning the semantic Web, and how pre-network concepts such as libraries and knowledge management fit into a linked and searchable networked environment. It will examine how we capture, re-purpose, and make available what is important in a complicated world-a world in which our database can tell us both how to manufacture toothpaste and who is likely to buy it, but not what life forms exist on earth, or even what the chances are that your job will exist five years from now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Shinto shrines and kamidana (Shinto family altars) were a fixture in the lives of Japanese immigrants and their communities in the United States. However, after Pearl Harbor, Japanese-Americans, their communities and their religion were considered a threat to national security and as a result thousands of Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps and their religion was targeted, which at the extreme involved the destruction of Shinto shrines. As a result, the practice of Shinto in the United States survived the war as a shadow of its former self. This study examines what happened to the Shinto shrines, artifacts, and practices within the Japanese-American communities on the West Coast and Hawaii and to what extent they disappeared due to intense pressure from the stigma, hate, and misperception surrounding them. This ethnographic research has involved extensive interviews with Nisei (second-generation) Japanese-Americans who directly experienced these events and their Sansei (third-generation) children. This research found several factors that influenced the degree to which Shinto survived the war. These include the varying experiences of internment, the loss of property and dispersal of the community, experiences of stigma and discrimination, and the integration of Shinto-based rituals and community events into Buddhist practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines some Confucian-trained Tokugawa Japanese scholars who were concerned about the deleterious impact of Buddhism on native Shinto thought and practice. Several leading Confucian-trained scholars appealed to Zhu Xi's thought in various ways to reinforce and preserve Shintoism and its original spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ise sankei mandara (Ise Pilgrimage Mandalas) depict Ise’s shrines and temples, the roads leading to them, and local attractions. While the three versions under investigation appear to be based on a common model, close study reveals slight differences in detail and emphasis. These variations provide clues to the struggle for power and authority among Ise’s Buddhist temples and allow for discussion of such issues as patronage and meaning. More generally, these differences show that sankei mandara are not static, generic representations but, rather, historically specific paintings that articulate changing institutional claims in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article resents a deconstructive ecofeminist reading of the fiction works of writer Sylvia Watanabe, focusing on her short-story collection titled "Talking to the Dead and Other Stories". Topics discussed include Watanabe's writing blending Japan's native religion Shinto, with Confucianism, and the authors view that this Asian philosophy can be effectively merged with deconstructive eco-feminist concepts including mutual self and ethics of care.

In which the author, a historian of the modern West, goes to Japan to teach on a Fulbright and finds that his year abroad leads him to a historical topic so different from his past efforts and so close to his own experience that it takes him more than a decade to figure out an innovative way of writing the past that can express his, and he hopes that of others as well, contemporary literary sensibility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study is concerned with two examples of religious re-interpretation of the origins of a ‘nation' legitimated by a text, respectively a ‘corpus' of material of allegedly ancient origin. The first examples are the JapaneseTakeuchi monjo(‘Takeuchi texts'), which propose an extended and amended variant of the official ‘State Shintō' and its version of history and became the centre of a small ultra-nationalistic religious movement at the beginning of the 20th century. The second example is a text which was once labelled ‘Himmler's bible', the so-calledOera Linda BoekorUra Linda Chronik, as it was introduced by its main German interpreter and exegete Herman Wirth in the 1930s. In both cases the texts overturn the view of history and mankind through insights into a so-far undetected prehistory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on Japanese votive paintings and their display at ema halls. Topics discussed include ema from Itsukushima Shrine in Hiroshima Bay depicting the legend of samurai Minamoto no Yoshitsune receiving training in swordsmanship; presence of ema in Shinto and Buddhist contexts provides physical evidence for the complicated synchronism between Shinto and Buddhism; and displaying ema at two ema halls at Naritasan Shinshôji Temple in Chiba Prefecture, Japan.

This paper rethinks the article of religious freedom of the Meiji Constitution of 1889 and calls into question the liberalist paradigm employed to understand the Constitution and modern Japanese history. In this liberalist framework, the Constitution manifests the peculiar and authoritarian nature of the pre-war Japanese state. In particular, the 28th article, which provides for the conditional freedom of religious belief, is seen as no more than a cover for social control by the state. This paper examines the histories of the ideas of religion and freedom, and the religious freedom article, and argues that the most appropriate task is not to measure how much religious freedom the Meiji Constitution failed to guarantee against a de-historicised liberalism, but rather to consider the function of the very inclusion of religious freedom in the Constitution. I argue that the inclusion of religious freedom as a generic type of liberty in the Meiji Constitution was instrumental in the creation of the private modern individual as a subject-citizen. It is through this private individual citizen that the modern state as a public, secular authority was created. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The mizuko kuyo is a Japanese (Buddhist, Shinto, New Religious, other) memorial service for infants or young children who have died through some misfortune, including disease, miscarriage, and, increasingly, elective abortion. Indeed, abortion is the predominant form of contraception for many Japanese families. Here we consider, in Weberian terms of the rationalization of institutions, how Internet accessibility and its created virtual reality of the mizuko kuyo has driven its popularity along the dimensions of privatization, bureaucratization, and commodification in decisions to perform the ritual by Internet. We utilize a sample of Tokyo mizuko kuyo Web sites and the contexts of their advertisements and available services for mizuko kuyo, including fee structures and other advertising "lures," to analyze this merging of traditional and modern technological paths of spirituality along Weberian theoretical lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today Japan is in many ways more religiously free than most Western nations, although levels of religiosity are also comparatively quite low. Key areas for research freedom related research include: the historical causes of Japan's astonishingly rapid turnaround post-World War II from a nation that actively discriminated against minority religious groups to one that supports religious freedom; religious freedom conditions in Japan's prisons and detention facilities; challenges of cultural integration of immigrants bringing greater religious diversity to Japan; faith-based charity and disaster relief; and the small but still worrisome faction of nationalist Japanese who are seeking to reestablish state-sponsored Shintoism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an English translation of 'Shinkoku no yukue' (神国の行方 'Where to next for Shinkoku thought?'), the final chapter of Shinkoku Nihon (神国日本'Japan, Land of the Gods') by Satō Hirō. In this chapter, Satō traces the history of the controversial notion of Japan as 'shinkoku' - a divine 'land of the gods' - that is often associated with ultranationalism in Japan. Taking issue with what he sees as the common misunderstanding of shinkoku thought in contemporary Japan, Satō argues for the way it ought to be conceptualized and studied in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, hundreds of studies have addressed connections between religious beliefs and behaviours and individual well-being in Europe and the US. There are only a handful of publications that examine these important links in Japan, however. In this paper, I rely on participant observation and in-depth interviews with some of the leaders of Kyoto's Gion Festival to illustrate associations between public ritual involvement and sense of self. Specifically, this paper is a sociological exploration of relationships between annual participation in the Gion Festival and self-esteem. In Japan, as in other cultures, self-esteem is an important component of well-being, and this study reveals that the men who are heavily involved in the rites, parades and other events of the Gion Festival have a positive sense of individual and collective self-worth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines how the Grand Shrine of Ise has successfully distanced itself from its prewar and wartime associations with Japanese imperialism and nationalism to become an untroubling site of Japanese cultural identity. Building on Jonathan Reynolds' essay which traces Ise's transformation to become a sign of Japanese aesthetics, this essay extends the examination of Ise's rehabilitation to two other trajectories. First, it examines SCAP's attempts to dismantle State Shintō and suggests that while Occupation authorities were successful in separating Shintō from the state, they left Ise Shrine uninterrogated, which allowed it to escape censure and continue into the postwar period relatively intact. The second trajectory is Japan's involvement in the preservation of World Heritage, which I suggest provides a new, international stage that furthers Ise Shrine's rehabilitation in entirely new ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the processes by which AIDS has been "domesticated," and Japanese women stigmatized as vectors of HIV/AIDS, once regarded as a "foreign" disease in Japan. Women are associated with ritual pollution and impurity in the Shinto tradition. At the same time, Japanese women are blamed for eschewing marriage and motherhood in favor of material pursuits. As a sequel to the "AIDS panic" of the 1980s, which centered on "foreign women" and women who dated foreigners, in the late 1990s, the Japanese media incited widespread anxiety over a phenomenon known as enjo kosai, or "compensated dating," in which Japanese teenage girls are said to exchange favors (sometimes sexual) for money with older Japanese men. After describing the social and political conditions making the link between young girls, consumption, and AIDS appear natural in late 1990s Japan, I draw on material from some interviews with HIV-positive women to show how these women are marginalized by narratives that fail to take the particularity and the heterogeneity of their experiences into account. While these women resist the stigma that goes along with being labeled a "sex worker," their stories are drowned out by larger stories that speak of the body politic and national concerns over generation divides, demographic shifts, and gender relations in times of rapid social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although inter‐religious conflicts have not yet surfaced as major social problems in Japan, religious education for peace and tolerance is needed in the country as much as in other countries. This article aims to disclose that, in light of political contexts, supposedly neutral ‘teaching about religion’ can be as problematic as history education is in Japan. The central problem lies in how to represent the nationalistic aspects of Shinto to the ‘non‐religious’ majority of Japanese. While each nation has its own variety of ‘civil religion’, Shinto, being an ethnic religion, can be entangled with nationalism more than other kinds of religion. I will begin by explaining the prejudice of ‘non‐religious’ Japanese people against religion as a background to the discussion of religious education in Japan. I will then take an example from a recent children's book and critique the politics of teaching about religion, in particular, Shinto in contrast with other religions. By employing my own survey data, I will also show how small the presence of Shinto is in Japanese education, even in higher education, where religious education is conducted most freely. I will further explain historically why this is so and what kind of problems the issue has been causing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion plays a powerful role in the formation of scientific theories. By comparing the goals and practice of robotics and artificial intelligence in the US and Japan, differences between the two countries can be traced to their religious environments. Christian expectations of cosmic purpose and hope for salvation in purified, unearthly bodies leads to US researchers' preference for artificial intelligence over humanoid robots, a desire to see cosmic meaning in the development of that intelligence, and salvation of human minds in virtual, non-biological bodies. In Japan, robots, which have been the subjects of ritual consecrations and religious transcendence, participate in a fundamental sanctity of the natural world. A positive outlook on being human promotes a preference for humanoid robots and a future in which robots serve human beings, who do not forsake their bodies for virtual lives. Divergent scientific strategies cannot be separated from the religious worlds of their practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of multi-variant practices and beliefs as being characteristic of the shrines associated with Japanese popular religion is explored through an examination of four shrines in Kyushu and Okinawa. None of these shrines, even those which are formally associated with the Association of Shinto Shrines, evinces the characteristics of ‘Shinto’ practice which the Association claims is typical of Shinto. How are we to account for these differences? Insight is provided through an examination of the original function and subsequent history of these four ‘non-mainstream’ shrines. Comparison of the history and practice of these shrines with similar shrines in Korea illustrates the importance of researching both locally and comparatively to draw out the unique features of each shrine. Before scholars can accept broad generalizations about popular Japanese religious practice, or about ‘Shinto’, anthropological research – in addition to historical and textual research – should be carried out on the practices and traditions of individual, local shrines. Examination of empirical data drawn from numerous case studies will enable scholars to have a clearer idea of actual religious practice in Japan, regional variations, and similarities and differences with practices in neighbouring nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the treatment of religion in Japanese education in the post-World War Two period. During the Allied Military Occupation, Japan adopted the principle of the separation of state and religion as a means to democratize the totalitarian, ethno-nationalis tic education system of pre-1945. The case of Germany is also dealt with here for a comparison to explore how the similar purpose fitted in with the reform debates on the German education system during the Occupation. The purpose of this article is to trace the geneses of the current treatment of religion in Japan education. Thus, the prime interest of this article is not to discuss the argument that the demise of religious instruction might have created a basis for the decline of morality among children. Nor does the article address a question whether nor not emphasis on instruction in religion might cultivate a sense of national identity among the youth. Instead, this article tries to investigate historical backgrounds which, I argue, have helped taboo such discussions about the values and roles of religious education of these kinds in post-war Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides a perspective on religion in Japan. Practice of traditional religion; Influence of Chinese religion and Buddhism; Arrival of Zen Buddhism; Different parts of Shinto in Japan.