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.