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Paper short abstract:

This paper shows a competing vision of human progress against war, gender inequality, and other products of state-led civilisation in early 20th-century Japan. Arai Ōsui’s forgotten religion posits a new epistemological idea of the divisible yet indivisible universe, ensuring equality of all beings.

Paper long abstract:

Progress is neither masculine nor feminine. This conception informed the intellectual and religious thinker, Arai Ōsui, about rectifying the course of human progress in early 20th-century Japan. While the environmental and political activist, Tanaka Shōzō, has been well-studied, his mentor Ōsui, the main protagonist of this paper, and his religion of Mother-Father God have been largely forgotten in historiography.

Religion was one of the most disputed fields of socio-political and intellectual discussion on the course of making a new moral and ethical construct for new modern Japan, directly tied to different visions of progress. Despite different positions taken over religiosity and morality, however, many of the contemporary ideas, studied extensively in historiography, fundamentally come down to the shared framework of the state-centred Western modern view of civilisational progress. These narratives assume that to become powerful economically, militarily, and technologically in the competitive international order dominated by Western imperial powers – what is traditionally characterised as ‘masculine’ civilisation and modernisation – was the way to vouch for the life and happiness of Japanese nationals. This included Japanese Christian thinkers, many of whom, according to historiography, not only avoided their clash with this state imperial ideology but rather actively supported it.

Challenging the given state-centric civilisation discourse in historiography, Ōsui’s religion was non-imperial and non-nationalistic. This paper shows how Ōsui criticised such a civilisation ideology, which incurred war, imperialism, and the class, national, and gender hierarchy, through his claim of non-war and gender equality in the Russo-Japanese War context. This paper does so by examining his religion of Mother-Father God that gives both new moral subjectivity and responsibility to every human being on the planet to take part in rectifying injustice and inequality in state-led civilisation. Unlike the state-centred masculine modernisation, progress in Ōsui’s thoughts, emerging from the perception of God as both male and female in one, was neither masculine nor feminine but was an equal blending of both in one. Ōsui’s new epistemological idea of the universe, founded on the Mother-Father God, was divisible yet fundamentally and simultaneously indivisible, interdependent, and symbiotic and ensured equal relationality of all beings.