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.