What Isn't Shinto?

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

As we mark the 70th anniversary of the close of the Pacific War and witness unprecedented legislative reinterpretations of Japan’s postwar constitution, we see journalists, politicians, and academics mobilizing the term “Shinto” as a way of explaining Japan’s past and envisioning its future. The influential position Shinto occupies in Japanese sociopolitical life and East Asian international politics is clear, but the term “Shinto” is not. Depending on who one asks, Shinto is either the indigenous religion of the Japanese archipelago, the irreducible core of Japanese culture, a tiny subset of Japanese Buddhism, an oppressive political ideology linked to the emperor system, an environmentalist ethic, or some combination of these.

In this context, reductive narratives of neo-nationalist Shinto “resurgence” and romantic idealizations of kami worship as a venerable vestige of Japan’s premodern past have limited explanatory power. The basic premise of the proposed paper session is that determining what Shinto actually is becomes much easier when the boundaries around the category can be sharply drawn. Our session therefore brings together historians, anthropologists, and scholars of religion to address a simple question with a complicated answer: “What isn’t Shinto?”

Each paper elucidates the nature of modern Shinto by showing how different interest groups have attempted to define the tradition in relationship to something else, situating Shinto vis-à-vis other religions, militarist ethics, subject formation, and humanitarian agendas. In lieu of a discussant, panelists will briefly respond to each other’s work in a focused “roundtable” format before opening up the floor for discussion.

Area of Study

• Japan

Session Organizer

• Jolyon Thomas, University of Pennsylvania

Chair

• Jolyon Thomas, University of Pennsylvania

Individual Presentations

• Shinto or Bushido? Moral Discourse in Prewar Japan - Sarah Thal, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Shinto and Islam in Interwar Japan - Noriko Kanahara, University of Chicago

• The Sacred Spaces and Secular Subjects of the Postwar Japanese Public School - Jolyon Thomas, University of Pennsylvania

• “Shinto Ecology” for Development Aid: Making the Particular Universal, and the Universal Particular - Chika Watanabe, University of Manchester