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3.0 out of 5 stars
Why is this sold as religious studies??, March 6, 2010
This review is from: Shinto and the State, 1868-1988 (Studies in Church & State) (Paperback)
I got a nit to pick with this book. The research itself was extremely well done, but the theory is moronic. Why is this part of a series called "Studies in Church and State", when the only institutional actor in this book is the State? You heard me right-- this is a book on "Studies in State and State". There is no conflict to be discussed. Come to think of it, why does such a series like this even exist, since a minimal amount of critical thinking will reveal that "The Church" is a Christian technical term (a holdover from the bad old days of established churches, actually) with no international parallel? Does anyone REALLY think this will help history students understand the differences between cultures?!
It's not like Helen Hardacre isn't aware of this foolishness. For example, she correctly states in the Introduction that "in pre-Meiji Japan there existed no concept of religion as a general phenomenon" (18) and that "there has been much discussion of whether it is appropriate to consider Shinto a religion" (10). But THEN, in the SAME short section, she claims that pre-Meiji visitors "could take in the secular delights of Ise ... not all [of the Jingu's attractions] were of a religious nature" (referring to brothels). (16) In doing so, she takes up two ideological positions. First, she makes an accusation about the nature of Ise's brothels, for there is of course no rule in sociology or anthropology that brothels cannot be religious. Moreover the Jingu's staff could not have defended themselves against such an accusation, for there was no concept of religion at the time. Secondly, she contradicts the supposed neutrality of even this short introduction, for now the Jingu is a primarily "religious" attraction--simply one that was in the past dirtied by Japan's barbaric mixture of the sacred and the profane.
We find this contradiction as well in more important statements about the invention of State Shinto. Again, "when ideas about religion originating in Europe and Asia came to Japan, they entered a society that had no equivalent concept or term, no idea of a distinct sphere of life that could be called religious ... the Japanese found it necessary to develop their own term for the various Western-language words for religion." (63) However, for some reason this functions the beginning rather than the end of Hardacre's concern with "religion" as a category, and the end rather than the beginning of her complaint with it. Just a few pages later she cleverly rewrites the Occupation assertion of State Shinto's religiousness into an apparent non-assertion, stating that "in the Meiji period, for the first time in Japanese religious history, shrine affiliations became ... defined as nonreligious in character." (83; emphasis added) According to what she stated herself before, Japan did not have a religious history, so why is it being brought up here? A parallel statement may put the ideological grounding of this sentence into perspective: "Following evangelical Christian objections, for the first time in the religious history of aikido, bowing to one's sensei became defined as nonreligious in character." Merely by referencing the category as if it was there all along--unnecessarily, in my opinion--the claim of Shinto's secular nature is negated.
Hardacre again masquerades assertions as statements while discussing the introduction of religious freedom: "The status of Shinto remained ambiguous, with a growing tendency to separate it from the sphere of religion and to align it instead with custom and patriotism." (120) First of all, has there ever been any doubt that visits to shrines are a Japanese custom? If not, then what is the meaning of the suggestion that it became "aligned with" custom, and why does it start its journey towards custom in the "sphere of religion"--a sphere that Hardacre has already twice acknowledged did not exist in Japan before Western involvement? What she may have meant here is that State Shinto was a patriotic, or national, custom, and similarly public customs in the West do not involve references to kami. But to rewrite the sentence in this way would actually change its meaning. State Shinto never left the sphere of kami, and it was always in the sphere of custom, so there is no ambiguity on this subject whatsoever except for its conflict with our own categories. The real ambiguity for most Japanese was that it was implemented as an invented custom, a bottom-up popular tradition that was reinvented by the state as patriotism and recommunicated from the top down.
Hardacre concludes this section with the statement that "we have seen ... that much of Japanese religiosity, especially shrine life, was in essence liturgical and communal in character." (121) It is hard to say what the word "religiosity" and its accompanying generalization adds to this discussion. It waters down her claim and unnecessarily injects an assertion about religiousness with no small ideological implications. If this sentence were written "we have seen that Japanese shrine life was communal in character", it would be both more specific and more accurate.
All in all, the theory in this book serves to mystify and confuse the readers. I hope a better book will be written shortly to edify American academics about the invention of the Japanese state.
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