Paper short abstract:

Focusing on ritual practices and worship sites associated with whales, this paper compares ways in which local, "popular religious" practices in Japan and Vietnam have been reinvented as national religious heritage to serve strategic interests on the part of state and corporate actors.

Paper long abstract:

What happens when small-scale "local" ritual practices acquire new significance as "national culture"? What happens when "folk beliefs" or "superstitions" are reclassified as national or even universal "heritage"? How, and by whom, are seemingly peripheral traditions employed and deployed in the context of present-day nation-making? Addressing these and other questions, this paper compares several coastal ritual traditions and their recent reconceptualisation in academic and media discourse. In particular, it focuses on practices associated with whales (memorial rituals, whaling matsuri, and whale god temples) that are acquiring new significance as part of an imagined national "maritime heritage."

In modern Japanese ideology and scholarship, coastal areas have often been portrayed and perceived as peripheral and remote backwaters, rather than as historic centres of trade and intellectual exchange. As Fabio Rambelli argued in the introduction to his edited volume The Sea and the Sacred in Japan (2018), modern constructions of "Japanese religion" emphasise the land —rice cultivation, sacred mountains, and forests—and tend to overlook the historical importance of the sea. The same observation, interestingly, applies to other East Asian countries—including Vietnam, where modern nationalist ideologies similarly imagine the nation as a land of "rice farmers," and where coastal and maritime cultural traditions such as whale god rituals are currently being refashioned as "national heritage." Maritime territorial conflicts, anxieties about natural resources, changing livelihoods, and various environmental crises all contribute to this renewed awareness of the sea as something not peripheral but central to present-day nation-making practices.

By juxtaposing "Japanese" cases with examples from present-day Vietnam, this paper seeks to comparatively and ethnographically analyse nation-making processes as they take place locally—at coastal temples, around whale tombs, and in fishing villages. The examples show how coastal regions and practices that were considered peripheral in modern nationalist ideologies are currently acquiring new significance, and how local actors respond to this change. Thus, a transnational comparison will shed new light on the processes and actors that give shape to, enact, and negotiate "the nation" on the ground.

Paper short abstract:

This paper spotlights "women's exclusion from sacred sites" (nyonin kinsei), exposing its double identity as an emblem of national-cultural continuity and an anachronistic and discriminatory custom. What can an exclusionary practice and its attendant discourse reveal about national self-image(s)?

Paper long abstract:

Featured in this paper is a rarefied religious tradition in modern Japan: women's exclusion from sacred sites (nyonin kinsei, nyonin kekkai), and the implications of this practice for the formation and functioning of national-cultural-religious unity. Many sacred sites once banned women's access as a condition of religious tradition, and a handful of places still do so. UNESCO recognizes two of Japan's remaining male-only sacred sites as World (Cultural) Heritage: the island Okinoshima (Fukuoka prefecture) and the Sanjōgatake Peak of Mt. Ōmine (Nara prefecture). Proponents of the ban at both sites claim legitimacy from ancient sources and regard exclusion as a non-negotiable element of their sacredness. At the same time, World Heritage documentation written by Japanese authorities erases or marginalizes the fact that women are excluded from these sites. Sketching the modern trajectory of nyonin kinsei in reverse, from the present day to the late nineteenth century, this paper lays bare its double identity within shifting social and political discourses on "Japan" and "Japaneseness." At the 41st Session of the World Heritage Committee in 2017, Ambassador Satō Kuni, the sole female member of Japan's Permanent Delegation to UNESCO, defended women's exclusion from Okinoshima as "a matter of principle" and "tradition." Almost 150 years earlier, in 1872, the Meiji government legally abolished the practice as "a decisive reformation from the standpoint of modern civilization." The floating character of nyonin kinsei, I argue, stems from two distinct yet overlapping mobilizations of the past that inhere in modern and contemporary Japan. First, the past denotes that against which the modern (or anything after the past) is measured: for Meiji bureaucrats and contemporary activists, women's exclusion was and is an anachronistic and discriminatory custom. Second, certain cultural practices become regarded as all-important bearers of a nation's cultural continuity: women's exclusion represents a unique and unquestionable Japanese tradition. This latter position is taken by many religious and political authorities, Japanese ethnologists, and the United Nations. These Janus-faced cultural images of nyonin kinsei reveal the doubleness or double identity generated by Japan's modernization—what Yoshioka (1995) terms the "self-colonization of the Japanese mind."

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the history of the field of supirichuariti studies in Japan and shows how local scholarship both reacted to and was influenced by wider trends in religious studies while constructing a distinctly "Japanese" spirituality as a new site of religious innovation.

Paper long abstract:

It has been argued that one of the effects of the Aum affair was to push scholars out of the study of New Religious Movements (NRMs) and into an evaluative continuum that contrasts positive "spirituality" (supirichuariti) with a negative "cult issue" (karuto mondai). This paper attempts to qualify and complicate this argument by tracing the history of supirichuariti studies in Japan and by placing this relatively recently developed field alongside other trends regarding the study of religion within and outside of Japanese academia.

This paper develops three lines of thought. The first considers the harnessing of the concept of "spirituality" to internationalize the New Age movement by accentuating its Japanese import. In other words, I argue that some scholars have proceeded on the assumption, or wish, that the New Age movement of the Anglo-Saxon West was only a façade of a global shift which they could comfortably reformulate as a movement that in Japan bore a "distinctly" Japanese form and essence.

Secondly, supirichuariti was then conceived as a new phenomenon, a new site where religious innovation could be "safely" observed and studied, and where religion's value as social capital was extracted and protected from the pejorative imagery associated with criminal cases involving religious organizations. In this endeavor, scholarly arguments in Japan followed global trends of the last twenty-five years, such as the progressive focus on "lived religion" and the shift towards deconstructionist and historical examinations of the concept of "religion" itself.

Thirdly, circumstances in Japan, such as the temporary popularity of media personalities who associated themselves with "spirituality," together with heightened scholarly and media discourse surrounding post-3.11 religious activism, exacerbated the promise that "spirituality" could serve as an alternative to "religion." This resulted in further fragmentation of the discourse surrounding the concept, and a "new" category of "bad spirituality" came to the fore to complement existing notions of "bad religion." This emphasized again the allegedly distinct "Japaneseness" of the now "failing" concept of supirichuariti in contemporary Japan.