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Paper short abstract

Through comparative analysis, we examine the persistence of and revisited meanings of magical practice and sacred spaces in Tokyo and Hong Kong. We suggest that the use of magic to gain control over the precarity of modern life challenges the binaries of “rational” and “non-rational” thinking.

Paper long abstract

Walking through the urban landscapes of Tokyo or Hong Kong, one is struck by the widespread presence of sacred spaces, shrines, temples, religious monuments and forms of spatial ritualistic design throughout these “modernized” and “secularized” cities. One might call them sites of worship and magic whose ubiquity within seemingly “disenchanted” spaces of metropolitan life appears incongruous. This “magical infrastructure” belies the vibrant presence of “non-rational” practices and beliefs that have emerged alongside Japan’s and Hong Kong’s modernization. This stands out starkly in Tokyo, where vast swathes of the urban fabric are knitted together with Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, and their gardens, cemeteries, and ritual infrastructure. In Hong Kong as well, despite being a city dominated by post-industrial, post-modern and increasingly neoliberal economic logic, the Taoist gods of wealth and protection are literally carved into the streetcorners and shops as tiny alcoves housing statues and plied with daily offerings of incense and food. In both cities, new construction sites are literally built around homegrown shrines to Buddhist and mythological deities that are tended by local residents, and the invisible forces of feng shui literally shape the design of buildings and timing of their construction.

How can one explain this apparently paradoxical phenomena? Are these “backward” beliefs and practices of magical “superstition” merely survivals that persist due to an incomplete or defective process of modernization, rationalization, and secularization in Asian societies? We argue that these urban spaces and the magical practices of control that shape them and take place within them can be seen as both reasonable and pragmatic ways of making sense of and gaining control over the uncertainties of modern life. It also enables us to revisit classic anthropological conceptions of magic as a practice and way of life, rooted in a lifeworld, that helps transcend rigid modern binaries. Through comparative ethnographic fieldwork from anthropological and cultural sociological perspectives, this presentation suggests that the resilience of these sacred urban spaces are windows into a more broadly experienced resilience and adaptation of human attempts to make sense and control the world, despite—and because of—the rapid transformations of modern life.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Kūkai (774–835), founder of the Shingon school of Buddhism, was reimagined in the 1970s–80s amid popular interest in the supernatural as a figure of “magical” authority, showing how such concerns became central to the construction of his image in late postwar culture.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyzes how Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi, 774–835), the historical founder of the Shingon school of Buddhism, was reinvented in late postwar Japan as a figure of “magical” authority. While Kūkai has long been venerated within Shingon as a preeminent esoteric master, and popularly as a “miracle-maker” through the many legends surrounding his figure, the paper argues that the cultural logic through which his authority was made intelligible shifted decisively in the 1970s–80s, when popular fascination with the “occult” and the “supernatural” became a major feature of mass culture. Focusing primarily on the decade after 1973, a year marked both by commemorations tied to the 1200th anniversary of his birth and by the beginning of the serialization of the novelist Shiba Ryōtarō’s widely read "Kūkai no fūkei," and extending through the 1980s, which saw the release by the Tōei Company of "Kūkai," a sectarian-backed blockbuster film centered on his life, the paper traces how the image of this founder circulated across overlapping fields, including mass media as well as academic and semi-academic commentary. In many of these settings, Kūkai was presented less as a sectarian founder or doctrinal transmitter than as an exemplary “adept,” credited with extraordinary powers and a form of hidden knowledge that could function as a critical counterpoint to the perceived limitations of the contemporary mechanistic worldview. The paper examines the narrative and visual strategies through which such “magical” capacities were foregrounded, and how they were made compatible with postwar expectations about science, the mind, and human potential. Rather than treating this “magical Kūkai” as a simple popular distortion of Buddhism, the paper approaches it as a historically specific reclassification of religious authority, arguing that “magic” here is not a timeless residue from the premodern past but a flexible category through which late postwar audiences and commentators negotiated boundaries between religion, science, and the paranormal. By following Kūkai’s movement through postwar media circuits, the paper concludes that the so-called “occult boom” of the 1970s–80s did not merely generate new content about Kūkai; it supplied a new grammar for explaining why he mattered.

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Paper short abstract

Analysing court cases on 'pseudo-science sales,' this presentation examines how Japanese scholarship criticising 'magical thinking' informed consumer protection law, revealing the reciprocal relationship between academic discourse and legal practice.

Paper long abstract

In April 2019, Consumer Law News, Japan’s flagship magazine for consumer issues and regulations, featured a special issue on "pseudo-science" (nise-kagaku) sales. Among several short articles dealing with vitamin treatments alleging to cure cancer or magnetic water purifiers with no scientifically proven effects, Fukuyori Naoshi, a staff member at a regional consumer affairs centre and Nichiren Buddhist priest, argued that "piety may be non-'intellectualist' (chiseishugi), but it is not 'anti-intellectualist'” (Fukuyori 2019, 43). Concerned about potential restrictive regulations that might infringe on freedoms of faith or expression, Fukuyori was calling for the government to acknowledge diverse consumer motivations while protecting vulnerable individuals. In fact, a few months later, in June 2019, a new Consumer Contract Law provision (Paragraph 8, Article 4, Section 3) began targeting transactions involving sales talk deemed to exploit fear through "spiritual" (reikan) or other difficult-to-demonstrate information (chiken), a development that culminated decades of efforts by lawyers who had dealt with fraudulent schemes they considered to exploit consumers' 'magical thinking.'

Scholarly research on such scams often employs the concept of "occult economies," linking pyramid schemes to neoliberal capitalism's spirit: "the allure of accruing wealth from nothing" (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001, 22). This framework connects novel religious motivations embracing neoliberal entrepreneurial ethics (such as West African Pentecostalism) with fraudulent schemes that, absent adequate legislation, exploit consumer trust. However, this approach problematically reduces scheme participants to thoughtless consumers driven by "despair that comes from being left out of the promise of prosperity" (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001, 25). In Japan, this framework also led scholars to associate economic fraud with supposedly "typical" Japanese magical thinking. For example, folklorist Miyata Noboru and psychiatrist Noda Masaaki, writing in the early 1990s, identified such thinking as a Japanese illness of modernity, and subsequently influenced how lawyers conceptualise fraud and evidentiary standards in trials.

By analysing court cases and lawyer statements concerning "pseudo-science sales" at the turn of the twenty-first century, this presentation examines how scholarship criticising the survival of "magic" in contemporary Japan both informed and was influenced by ongoing monetary scams, revealing the reciprocal relationship between academic discourse and legal practice.

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Paper short abstract

Focusing on I∴O∴S∴ and OTO Japan, this study examines the rise and decline of Western ritual magic groups in Japan (1970s-1990s) and their influence on contemporary Japanese conceptions of magic.

Paper long abstract

Western ritual magic refers to a body of practical knowledge centered on symbolism, meditation, and other ritual practices that was formulated and systematized in Western Europe in the late nineteenth century, by influential figures and organizations, such as Éliphas Lévi (1810–1875) and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888–1901). It subsequently exerted a significant influence on the formation and development of modern occultism, often associated with Aleister Crowley (1875-1947).

In the early 1970s, Western ritual magic began to be introduced to Japan. By the 1980s, this knowledge had spread widely through popular literary media, including translationed works, occult magazines, and instructional manuals. At the same time, there began to appear an increasing number of groups aimed at the study and practice of ritual magic.

I∴O∴S∴ was one of the earliest and most prominent groups among them. Established by Akiba Tsutomu (born c. 1958) in 1986, this group operated mainly in the Kantō region and Osaka and remained active until the late 1990s. The group offered regular instructional courses, conducted group rituals, and established its own official organ. In 1994, Akiba was interviewed by Mu, one of Japan’s most popular occult magazines, which also reported on and disseminated scenes of the group’s equinox ritual held that year.

Around the same period, another prominent magic group was also founded and became active in Japan: the Order of the Oriental Templars (Tōhō Seidō Kishidan), the Japanese branch of Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), an international magical organization focused on the instruction of the magical–religious system formulated by Aleister Crowley. These OTO branches, also mainly located in the Kantō region and Osaka, underwent repeated establishment and dissolution throughout the 1990s.

Focusing on these two groups, and drawing on their official documents, magazine reports, as well as direct interviews with former members, this presentation reveals the emergence, development, and decline of Western ritual magic groups in Japan during the last two decades of the twentieth century. By investigaing how these groups interpreted "magic", it resonsiders how the concept of magic in Japan today was historically influenced through the introduction and popularization of Western ritual magic.