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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.