Paper short abstract:

This presentation analyzes the environmental aspect of modern Japanese Buddhist accounts of travel to India. Taking an ecocritical stance, it will argue for the reciprocal interaction of ideas and environment in conceptualizations of modernity, religion, and nature in a transnational context.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars have recently pointed out the importance of travel to South Asia and interaction with South Asian intellectuals in the construction of modern Japanese Buddhism (Jaffe 2004 and 2019, Auerback 2016, Okuyama 2016, Licha 2021), contributing to the broader revaluation of intra-Asian networks in defining non-Eurocentric views of modernity (Van der Veer 2013, Duara 2014, Ho 2017). Building on this scholarship, this presentation will add a fourth essential component to the interaction among Japanese, South Asian, and European intellectuals: the role of the environment. Using postcolonial theory in the analysis of modern Japanese Buddhist accounts of travel to India, it will point out how these travelers mobilized their Buddhist textual imaginary to frame Indian landscape, and how they made India both exotic and familiar to the Japanese readership, strategically deploying religious and scientific language. However, the presentation will also take an ecocritical stance by considering the natural environment of India not simply as a passive canvas on which the Japanese projected their nostalgia for ancient Buddhism, but as an agent in the construction of modern views on religion, nature, and civilization.

Travel to India, framed both as scientific exploration and religious pilgrimage, became an important experience for many Japanese Buddhists during the Meiji period. These travelers visited Buddhist sites, following the alleged steps of the historical Buddha. They looked for unexplored Buddhist texts in Sanskrit to respond to the criticism of European Orientalism against East Asian canonical traditions, and established important collaborations with South Asian religious reformers. As their Indological knowledge and the length of their stays in India expanded, their interest did not stop at texts and images, but it also included the exploration of the Indian environment that surrounded them, including plants, animals, and the natural setting of Buddhist sites. Focusing on the environmental aspect in travel accounts of Buddhist priest-scholars such as Nanjō Bun’yū and Izumi Hōkei and in articles on India by various authors in religious periodicals, this presentation will show the reciprocal impact of ideas and nature in the construction of the modern concept of Buddhism in a transnational setting.

Paper short abstract:

This talk shows how the modern constructs of nature, religion, and spirituality were both interwoven and under construction in the realm of mountaineering through literary evidence from three influential thinkers and climbers at the turn of Japan's twentieth century.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars and the general public tend to draw clear lines between mountain worship and modern mountaineering. In the Japanese humanities, these lines run deep. Mountain worship has been largely studied from a folk studies perspective (minzokugaku), aligned with tradition, austerity, piety, and cultural essentialism. In contrast, mountaineering and related activities (rock climbing, hiking, etc.) have been seen as modern, secular, recreational, and international. These assumptions are ripe for reappraisal. They misleadingly place either realm of activity into disassociation and competition, negate the possibility of historical intersections, and rely on a shaky foundation of a priori binaries and categories (traditional/modern, religion/sport, sacred/secular, spirituality, and nature). Indeed, a closer look at various types of evidence from the late Meiji and Taisho eras blurs those lines: networks comprising alpinists and communities devoted to mountain worship; a deep interest in Japan's history of worship of sacred peaks, as reflected in mountaineering literature by Japanese and foreign alpinists; and the active assemblage of novel intellectual categories (tradition, sport, religion, the secular, and nature) that we now take as given.

Within this variegated topography of mountaineering and mountain worship at the turn of Japan's twentieth century, this talk will explore evolving ideas about religion, spirituality, and the natural world that seem to have emerged out of incoming British (Anglican-infused) nineteenth-century concepts in tandem with changing domestic engagement and sentiments. As evidence, it will take up the writings of Walter Weston (1861-1940), Anglican missionary and celebrated forefather of modern Japanese alpinism, Shiga Shigetaka (1863-1927) on his theory of the Japanese landscape (Nihon fūkeiron, the title of his book, published in 1894), and alpinist/author Tanabe Jūji (1884-1972), who wrote about his relationship to the mountains in ways that interlaced 'nature' with the numen. As this talk will show, the writings of these figures demonstrate the need to fundamentally rethink the modern history of alpinism and mountain worship in ways that carry implications for our understanding of nature, religion, and spirituality in the modern era down to the present.

Paper short abstract:

This paper complicates the simplistic assumption that prewar overseas shrines were merely sites of assimilation by looking at the centrality of the local landscape in the foundation of overseas shrines.

Paper long abstract:

Shinto shrines are often described as one of the most important ways the Japanese empire assimilated its colonial subjects. But in the late 19th century, the theology underpinning the model overseas shrine was rooted in the local land. This model pattern was first set by Sapporo Jinja, founded in 1869 and dedicated to the Three Pioneer Kami. The first of these three was O-kunitama, described as the spirit of the land itself. It became typical for shrines to be located on conceptually virgin land, and official shrines were required to have extensive grounds planted with trees, including native varieties. In short, the model overseas Shinto shrine constructed as a part of Japan's development (kaitaku) of its colonies (shokumin-chi) included literally breaking ground (taku) and planting (shoku) trees.

Although this land-oriented model of shrine began as typical, two other trends in the prewar establishment of Shinto shrines overseas developed. First, there was a shift in focus towards transforming people rather than land. This included a move away from venerating Kunitama and a trend towards converting indigenous ritual sites into Shinto sites. Second, Japanese diasporic communities, especially outside of Japan’s formal empire, shored up their liminal position as migrants by recreating their old hometown shrines. This linked shrines to specific locations in mainland Japan. These overseas shrines sometimes venerated local historical figures and/or deities, but they were more likely to venerate Amaterasu than Kunitama. Postwar, Shinto shrines founded overseas have utilized and adapted these prewar trends. While some postwar shrines are still located on mountainous “virgin” land and enshrine Kunitama, other overseas “shrines” lack a building or even physical site.

This paper complicates the simplistic assumption that prewar overseas shrines were merely sites of assimilation. It looks at the centrality of the local landscape in the foundation of overseas shrines and how that shifted towards a focus on people in the mid 20th century. It ends by suggesting some ways these prewar trends have been adapted or rejected by shrines founded overseas postwar.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes postwar Japanese pilgrimages to battlefields of the Asia-Pacific War. It shows how practices, such as the recovery of remains and memorial services, are shaped by religious ceremonies, battlefield environments, and interactions with local residents and former enemies.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation analyzes the development of transnational pilgrimages to Asia-Pacific war sites, using examples from Southeast and South Asia, the Pacific Islands region, and with a specific focus on the sea element, in relation to connected cases in Japan. It will introduce the perspective of “War-Phase Environment Complex” in order to shed light on the islands and sea components which defined the environment of war contexts and battlefields.

Since the 1950s, Japanese religious figures, bereaved families, and soldiers started to visit sites of the Asia-Pacific war battlefields as a form of pilgrimage. While involved in the intensive collection of remains as a government project from 1953 to the early 1970s, these visitors’ activities were not limited to this government mission, as they developed various forms of pilgrimage and memorial practices. After restrictions on overseas travel for civilians were lifted in 1964, Buddhist sects and New Religions, as well as veterans associations, organized pilgrimage groups. Even before that, some Buddhist priests practiced war memorials when participating in the World Buddhist Congress or going on pilgrimage to Buddhist sites. In addition to erecting cenotaphs and holding memorial services in former battlefields, they also held religious memorialization ceremonies at sea, for example using floating papers printed with Buddha images at sites of naval battles and where ships had been sunk by torpedo attacks.

This presentation will argue that, in order to consider the postwar memorials for Japan's war dead, it is necessary not only to focus on the Yasukuni Shrine, which has attracted attention as a political battleground, but also to consider these battlefield memorials. The analysis of these memorials can shed light not only on the environmental element defining the former battlefields, but also on the interactions with local inhabitants and other pilgrims from former enemy countries.