On Understanding Japanese Religion

On Understanding Japanese Religion PDF Author: Joseph Mitsuo Kitagawa
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780069110223
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Joseph Kitagawa, one of the founders of the field of history of religions and an eminent scholar of the religions of Japan, published his classic book Religion in Japanese History in 1966. Since then, he has written a number of extremely influential essays that illustrate approaches to the study of Japanese religious phenomena. To date, these essays have remained scattered in various scholarly journals. This book makes available nineteen of these articles, important contributions to our understanding of Japan's intricate combination of indigenous Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism, the Yin-Yang School, Buddhism, and folk religion. In sections on prehistory, the historic development of Japanese religion, the Shinto tradition, the Buddhist tradition, and the modem phase of the Japanese religious tradition, the author develops a number of valuable methodological approaches. The volume also includes an appendix on Buddhism in America. Asserting that the study of Japanese religion is more than an umbrella term covering investigations of separate traditions, Professor Kitagawa approaches the subject from an interdisciplinary standpoint. Skillfully combining political, cultural, and social history, he depicts a Japan that seems a microcosm of the religious experience of humankind.

On Understanding Japanese Religion

On Understanding Japanese Religion PDF Author: Joseph Mitsuo Kitagawa
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691224234
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Joseph Kitagawa, one of the founders of the field of history of religions and an eminent scholar of the religions of Japan, published his classic book Religion in Japanese History in 1966. Since then, he has written a number of extremely influential essays that illustrate approaches to the study of Japanese religious phenomena. To date, these essays have remained scattered in various scholarly journals. This book makes available nineteen of these articles, important contributions to our understanding of Japan's intricate combination of indigenous Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism, the Yin-Yang School, Buddhism, and folk religion. In sections on prehistory, the historic development of Japanese religion, the Shinto tradition, the Buddhist tradition, and the modem phase of the Japanese religious tradition, the author develops a number of valuable methodological approaches. The volume also includes an appendix on Buddhism in America. Asserting that the study of Japanese religion is more than an umbrella term covering investigations of separate traditions, Professor Kitagawa approaches the subject from an interdisciplinary standpoint. Skillfully combining political, cultural, and social history, he depicts a Japan that seems a microcosm of the religious experience of humankind.

On Understanding Japanese Religion

On Understanding Japanese Religion PDF Author: Joseph Mitsuo Kitagawa
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780069110223
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Get Book

Book Description
Joseph Kitagawa, one of the founders of the field of history of religions and an eminent scholar of the religions of Japan, published his classic book Religion in Japanese History in 1966. Since then, he has written a number of extremely influential essays that illustrate approaches to the study of Japanese religious phenomena. To date, these essays have remained scattered in various scholarly journals. This book makes available nineteen of these articles, important contributions to our understanding of Japan's intricate combination of indigenous Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism, the Yin-Yang School, Buddhism, and folk religion. In sections on prehistory, the historic development of Japanese religion, the Shinto tradition, the Buddhist tradition, and the modem phase of the Japanese religious tradition, the author develops a number of valuable methodological approaches. The volume also includes an appendix on Buddhism in America. Asserting that the study of Japanese religion is more than an umbrella term covering investigations of separate traditions, Professor Kitagawa approaches the subject from an interdisciplinary standpoint. Skillfully combining political, cultural, and social history, he depicts a Japan that seems a microcosm of the religious experience of humankind.

The Invention of Religion in Japan

The Invention of Religion in Japan PDF Author: Jason Ānanda Josephson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226412342
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call “religion.” There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea. In this book, Jason Ananda Josephson reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed. More than a tale of oppression or hegemony, Josephson’s account demonstrates that the process of articulating religion offered the Japanese state a valuable opportunity. In addition to carving out space for belief in Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, Japanese officials excluded Shinto from the category. Instead, they enshrined it as a national ideology while relegating the popular practices of indigenous shamans and female mediums to the category of “superstitions”—and thus beyond the sphere of tolerance. Josephson argues that the invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion today. This ambitious and wide-ranging book contributes an important perspective to broader debates on the nature of religion, the secular, science, and superstition.

Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan

Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan PDF Author: Ian Reader
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113681941X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
The Tokyo subway attack in March 1995 was just one of a series of criminal activities including murder, kidnapping, extortion, and the illegal manufacture of arms and drugs carried out by the Japanese new religious movement Aum Shinrikyo, under the guidance of its leader Asahara Shoko. Reader looks at Aum's claims about itself and asks, why did a religious movement ostensibly focussed on yoga, meditation, asceticism and the pursuit of enlightenment become involved in violent activities? Reader discusses Aum's spiritual roots, placing it in the context of contemporary Japanese religious patterns. Asahara's teaching are examined from his earliest public pronouncements through to his sermons at the time of the attack, and statements he has made in court. In analysing how Aum not only manufactured nerve gases but constructed its own internal doctrinal justifications for using them Reader focuses on the formation of what made all this possible: Aum's internal thought-world, and on how this was developed. Reader argues that despite the horrors of this particular case, Aum should not be seen as unique, nor as solely a political or criminal terror group. Rather it can best be analysed within the context of religious violence, as an extreme example of a religious movement that has created friction with the wider world that escalated into violence.

Religion in Japanese History

Religion in Japanese History PDF Author: Joseph M. Kitagawa
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231515092
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
Tracing Japan's religions from the Hein Period through the middle ages and into modernity, this book explores the unique establishment of Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism in Japan, as well as the later influence of Roman Catholicism, and the problem of Restoration--both spiritual and material--following World War II.

Religion and Social Crisis in Japan

Religion and Social Crisis in Japan PDF Author: Mark R. Mullins
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780333772690
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
At the time Aum Shinrikyõ emerged, most Japanese assumed that they lived in one of the most well-ordered and safest societies, a model that had much to offer the chaotic Western world. This assumption was shaken on 20 March 1995 when the deadly nerve gas sarin was released on the Tokyo subway system. Since that incident, the 'Aum affair' has had widespread repercussions and shaken the Japanese psyche in a serious way. This volume provides a window onto contemporary Japanese society by considering the various reactions and responses to this crisis precipitated by this deviant religious movement.

Women in Japanese Religions

Women in Japanese Religions PDF Author: Barbara Ambros
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479827622
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
A comprehensive history of women in Japanese religious traditions Scholars have widely acknowledged the persistent ambivalence with which the Japanese religious traditions treat women. Much existing scholarship depicts Japan’s religious traditions as mere means of oppression. But this view raises a question: How have ambivalent and even misogynistic religious discourses on gender still come to inspire devotion and emulation among women? In Women in Japanese Religions, Barbara R. Ambros examines the roles that women have played in the religions of Japan. An important corrective to more common male-centered narratives of Japanese religious history, this text presents a synthetic long view of Japanese religions from a distinct angle that has typically been discounted in standard survey accounts of Japanese religions. Drawing on a diverse collection of writings by and about women, Ambros argues that ambivalent religious discourses in Japan have not simply subordinated women but also given them religious resources to pursue their own interests and agendas. Comprising nine chapters organized chronologically, the book begins with the archeological evidence of fertility cults and the early shamanic ruler Himiko in prehistoric Japan and ends with an examination of the influence of feminism and demographic changes on religious practices during the “lost decades” of the post-1990 era. By viewing Japanese religious history through the eyes of women, Women in Japanese Religions presents a new narrative that offers strikingly different vistas of Japan’s pluralistic traditions than the received accounts that foreground male religious figures and male-dominated institutions.

Japanese Religion

Japanese Religion PDF Author: H. Byron Earhart
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780822101239
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description


Introducing Japanese Religion

Introducing Japanese Religion PDF Author: Robert Ellwood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138958760
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Offers a portrait of traditional and contemporary Japanese culture, and a understanding of the history and practice of religions in Japan. Ellwood explores the spiritual heritage of this country, from the Ise Shrine and Nara to the present day. He gives special attention to the traditions of Shinto, the different forms of Buddhism in Japan, including Shingon and Tendai, and Confucianism. He also explores new Japanese religious movements, including Aum Shinrikyo. Each religion is clearly described in terms of its history, practice, sociology and organization, and Ellwood emphasizes how in practice Japanese religion interacts and intermingles. Finally, Ellwood discusses the influence of Japan on popular culture, including discussion of anime, and the transmission of Japanese spiritual, mythical and religious themes to the rest of the world. This edition features new material on folk and popular religion, including shamanism, festivals, and practices surrounding death and funerals. Ellwood also updates the text to discuss recent events, such as religious responses to the Fukushima disaster. --Adapted from publisher description.

Religion in Japanese Culture

Religion in Japanese Culture PDF Author: Noriyoshi Tamaru
Publisher: Kodansha
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Religion in Japanese Culture is a response to the relentless change of the last twenty-five years. Retaining but revising the earlier volume's comprehensive survey of Japan's major religions, this book also presents six new essays exploring religion and the state, religion and education, urbanization and depopulation, the rebirth of religion, internalization, and religious organizations and Japanese law. In addition, a new appendix presents an analysis of Qum Shinrikyo's 1995 gas attack on the Tokyo subway system.