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Paper short abstract:

The concept of religion was indeed new to modern Japan, but the negotiations in digesting and making it into shukyo still need to be investigated. This paper examines the connection between early Meiji interpretations and later developments, referring to the influence of conventional learning.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will focus on the arguments on "religion" and religions by Japanese literates in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It has already been discussed that the term and the category shukyo were newly established or invented in modern Japan, mainly through translating the knowledge of the West. This paper takes it as a premise. However, what negotiations occurred in digesting religion and making it into shukyo still needed to be investigated further, and this paper will tackle this.

First, the early Meiji interactions between conventional knowledge and information from the West will be examined. The concept of religion was indeed new, but those who wrote about religion and religions equipped traditional knowledge, such as Chinese classics, Buddhism, and national learning, and utilized them in their attempts at translation and interpretation.

Through examining the writings of KURODA Yukimoto, who wrote a guidebook of world religions in 1875, such issues will be considered as a favor of Protestantism as a civilizing force under the influence of Dutch and German books, and the role of "heaven" in the Confucian sense in interpreting religion; the latter was also observed in NAKAMURA Masanao, a Confucian scholar who eventually received Christian baptism.

Second, these early Meiji arguments of religion emphasized the rational explanation and opened up some paths in the following period. One path led to the attempts at comparative religion in the 1890s and the development of religious studies in the 1900s. Another path could lead to the arguments of spiritualism, a supposedly rational explanation of the realm of the spirits, which appeared in Japanese literature around the turn of the century. TAKAHASHI Goro was an important figure who translated contemporary British literature on spiritualism and introduced the idea to Japanese readers. With a note on the influence of his Confucian understanding of the cosmos, TAKAHASHI's understanding of the relationship between religion and science will be examined.

In summary, this paper will investigate the connection between early Meiji attempts to interpret religion and the later development of various discourses, including the argument for spiritualism, referring to the influence of conventional learning.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to understand the Naha Confucius Temple lawsuit in relation to post-1972 Okinawan identity. The paper argues that the lawsuit was not simply concerned with legal interpretations of religion, but reflected a broader political debate over the relationship between Okinawa and Japan.

Paper long abstract:

In February of 2021, a ruling handed down by the Supreme Court settled a legal dispute over whether the recently rebuilt Confucius Temple (kōshibyō) in Naha on Okinawa should be understood as religious or not under the 1947 constitution. Disregarding the fact that the organization behind the temple was organized as a general corporate juridical person and not as a religious corporation, the justices of the Supreme Court agreed with the previous instance courts and ruled in favor of the plaintiff, concluding that the temple itself served a religious function as a site for carrying out religious activities. As such, it was ruled that by granting the temple lease-free use of land in a municipal park, the mayor of Naha had violated the principle of secularism in the constitution.

Since the justices chose to disregard the legal status of the concerned organizations and instead relied on their own normative understandings of what constitutes religion, the Naha Confucius Temple lawsuit serves as a good example of judicial religion-making in contemporary Japan. However, it is also interesting in that it reflects a larger struggle over Okinawan/Ryukyuan identity. The temple was granted certain boons from the local government in Naha because of its significance to the local population in Kume village, an area settled in the 14th century by immigrants from Ming Dynasty China. For the mayor and the local neighborhood association, the temple first and foremost reflected Okinawa’s history as an independent kingdom with cultural ties to China as well as to Japan.

This paper will explore the motivations and ideological positions of the actors involved in the Naha Confucius Temple lawsuit. It builds on my previous work on the lawsuit and on fieldwork that I will carry out in Naha in the spring of 2023. My aim is to show how this lawsuit is not only about the postwar relationship between state and religion in Japan, but is also – perhaps more than anything else – concerned with the question of how to understand Okinawa as a cultural and geographical entity after its 1972 return to Japan.