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- Convenor:
-
Kikuko Hirafuji
(Kokugakuin University)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Emily Anderson
(Japanese American National Museum)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Religion and Religious Thought
- Location:
- Lokaal 0.1
- Sessions:
- Sunday 20 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
Shinto served as a critical vehicle to understand foreign religious traditions in expansionist Imperial Japan. This panel discusses ways in which foreign cultures, from Korean myths, Judaism, Islam to monotheism and global history, were read through a Shinto lens.
Long Abstract:
From the time that Japan embarked on the path of modernisation after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, an increasing number of Japanese went abroad while foreigners visited Japan. This exchange led to greater exposure to foreign cultures and traditions. Christianity had a major educational and cultural impact on Japan but other monotheistic religions were also introduced through Japanese encounters, particularly with Jews and Muslims in and outside Japan. They were indeed present in Japanese colonies. As Japan made territorial gains (Taiwan in 1895, Korea in 1910, and Manchuria, China and Southeast Asia since 1931), the Empire of Japan became increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-religious state. Following the Manchurian Incident in 1931 and the subsequent rise of Japanese nationalism, Shinto was used as a framework to unite the rich and diverse religious traditions, many of which were quite foreign to the Japanese, of these acquired territories.
This panel examines various approaches where the Japanese, now living in a multi-religious colonial state, viewed foreign traditions through a lens of Shinto during the interwar and wartime periods when nationalism was at its hight. Through exploring the ways that Shinto offered a framework in understanding other traditions, such as Korean religion, Judaism, Islam, monotheism and world civilisations in general, the panel also addresses ways in which the knowledge and perspectives of the Other were formed.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Sunday 20 August, 2023, -Kikuko Hirafuji (Kokugakuin University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the Japanese mythologists during the imperial period who claimed that Japan, as a country of polytheistic Shinto, was better suited to dominate Asia than the European powers which were perceived to be based on the monotheistic Christian culture.
Paper long abstract:
The study of Japanese mythology began in the Meiji period. From the outset, the mythologists sought to explore the origins of Japanese culture by comparing and contrasting its mythology with that of neighbouring regions, such as India and Polynesia. As Japan expanded its territory, however, the gaze on the tradition of the occupied areas became charged by the colonialist ideology. The mythologist Mishina Shoei, for example, characterised Japanese myths as ‘developed’ while Korean ones as ‘underdeveloped’.
This paper discusses the way in which Shinto mythologists viewed the myths of other regions during the imperial period, focusing on the argument around the relationship between the religion of the ruler and that of the ruled. The Japanese colonial endeavour started late compared to that of imperial European countries, and the justification for its rule was different in various aspects. The territories occupied by Europeans in Asia were geographically far away from Europe and had often developed outside the direct Christian area of influence. A stark contrast in religiosity therefore emerged between the monotheistic colonisers and the non-monotheistic subjects in the occupied area. The Japanese case was, however, different. The Japanese colonies, including Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria, were neighbours in Asia and both the ruling and ruled sides shared similar poly- and/or pantheistic traditions. This paper analyses the way in which Japanese mythologists justified Japanese colonial ambition based on their comparative study of the myths in Japan and its neighbouring countries. It focuses on scholars such as Matsumoto Nobuhiro, and the way in which Matsumoto claimed the shared non-monotheistic culture as the reason why Japan should dominate Asia.
Erik Christopher Schicketanz (Kokugakuin University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the spiritual geopolitics of Fujisawa Chikao from the 1920s until the end of World War II. Fujisawa’s vision was an attempt to turn Shinto into a truly universal project that could provide the ideological underpinnings not just of the Japanese Empire, but of a new global order.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will focus on the political thought of Fujisawa Chikao (1893-1962). Known for his shift from liberal internationalism to an extreme form of imperialist Japanism during the 1920s, Fujisawa serves as an excellent conduit to explore attempts at imagining Shinto empire in interwar Asia. As a figure deeply involved with propaganda work and the propaganda war during the late 1930s and 1940s, Fujisawa deserves more attention than he has received so far. After serving in an official post at the League of Nations in the early 1920s, Fujisawa returned to Japan to take up a teaching position at Kyushu Imperial University. The 1920s saw him increasingly repudiate his original internationalist leanings. He began to search for alternatives that would allow the international community to overcome the structural pitfalls of the nation state system. As part of these attempts his attention turned increasingly to Shinto, and during the 1930s, Fujisawa began to read political events through the lens of Shinto mythology. Pivotal in this intellectual shift were the ideas of the legal scholar Kakei Katsuhiko (1872-1961), in whose thought Fujisawa rooted his vision of a new international order. To lay the intellectual foundations for this new Japan-centered order, Fujisawa transformed Shinto from a national tradition into a universal truth. To do so, however, he needed to expand the scope of Shinto mythology and integrate global history into this new framework. The paper will examine the intellectual resources Fujisawa mobilized to construct his vision and how Fujisawa located other religious and civilizational traditions within it.
Saeko Yazaki (University of Glasgow)
Paper short abstract:
Japanese imperial interest in Judaism and Islam was at its height during the interwar period when their similarities to, or even sameness with, Shinto were claimed. This paper explores the role of education in moulding such perceptions through an examination of their depiction in school textbooks.
Paper long abstract:
During the Meiji era Japanese interest in Judaism and Islam began to develop to such an extent that in the 1920s a pastor Oyabe Zen’ichiro claimed that Shinto and Judaism had common origins, and a Muslim convert Tanaka Ippei announced the identical nature of Shinto and Islam. How did such beliefs arise, when Jews and Muslims were almost unknown to the pre-Meiji Japanese? This paper examines the role of state education in generating Japanese perceptions of Judaism and Islam, and explores the relations between the Japanese imperialist agenda and public discourse. The existing scholarship highlights the political importance of collaboration with both religious communities for Japanese pan-Asian expansionist ambition, partly due to the perceived Jewish dominance of Western finance, and partly the significant presence of Muslims in Asia as potential subjects or allies in competing with the Western/Christian bloc. Rather than focusing on strategic engagement with one or other of the two groups, this paper considers it more productive to link them as the Japanese government did as a related issue, and public interest in them grew according to the growth of expansionist ambition.
Meiji Japan emphasised the value of education in pursuing its programme of modernisation and its reconfiguration of the national character. In an effort to produce future generations who would support the restored imperial regime, it used Shinto mythology to explain the historical origins of Japan in history textbooks. In a comparable way, some Western histories also begin with Biblical stories. This paper examines the role of Shinto in presenting the world of Judaism and Islam in Japanese state school textbooks of the interwar period on history, foreign affairs and religious traditions, such as Shiryaku, Bankokushiryaku, Seiyojijo, Seiyoshi. Through an analysis of the depiction of Jews and Muslims in these textbooks, it will chart the relationship between the expansionist political agenda and public discourse. This little-studied area will contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms of knowledge formation in imperial Japan in respect of religious faiths, specifically the interplay between politics, education and public discourse.
David Weiss (Kyushu University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the role of Shintō in justifying Japanese colonial rule in Korea. Special emphasis is placed on discourses of cultural affinity between colonizer and colonized and the question of whether in this context polytheistic Shintō served as a technique of intercultural translation.
Paper long abstract:
The Egyptologist Jan Assmann characterizes the polytheisms of antiquity as “techniques of translation” that helped to overcome the ethnocentrism of earlier ages. According to this hypothesis, deities of different polytheistic pantheons might have been called by different names and honored through different rituals, but their functions were so similar that one culture’s deity could easily be “translated” into another one’s. This paper tests Assmann’s hypothesis by discussing modern political Shintō and its function in legitimizing Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1910–1945). A special focus will be placed on the so-called “theory of common ancestry of Japanese and Koreans” (Nissen dōsoron). This theory, which claimed that in antiquity Japan and Korea had formed a unified cultural, political, and ethnic entity, was widely disseminated in Japanese media in the weeks before and after the annexation of Korea and actively promoted by the government-general in Korea after the March First Independence Movement of 1919. The ancient Japanese myths recorded in the sacred scriptures of Shintō, Kojiki (712) and Nihon shoki (720), served as important “historical” precedents in this context. Proponents of the theory, for instance, equated the Shintō deity Susanoo with Tan’gun, the mythological founder of the oldest Korean state, thus incorporating the latter into the Shintō pantheon. Subsequently, a controversial discussion erupted between Shintō activists and politicians in the metropole and the colony about whether it was appropriate to enshrine “Korean” deities such as Tan’gun in Shintō shrines. Based on this case study, the paper discusses how a polytheistic culture legitimizes the colonization of another polytheistic culture. In this way, the paper attempts to gain a deeper understanding of Japanese colonialism and its ideological justification. Japan’s exceptionality as an Asian imperialist power colonizing other neighboring Asian countries has often been juxtaposed with European powers colonizing countries that were far removed geographically and culturally from their metropoles. The role of Christian proselytization in Western imperialism is well researched. This paper tries to answer the question of how polytheistic Shintō’s role in modern imperialism differs from that of monotheistic Christianity.