Religion is at the heart of such ongoing political debates in Japan as the constitutionality of official government visits to Yasukuni Shrine, yet the very categories that frame these debates, namely religion and the secular, entered the Japanese language less than 150 years ago. To think of religion as a Western imposition, as something alien to Japanese reality, however, would be simplistic. As this in-depth study shows for the first time, religion and the secular were critically reconceived in Japan by Japanese who had their own interests and traditions as well as those received in their encounters with the West. It argues convincingly that by the mid-nineteenth century developments outside of Europe and North America were already part of a global process of rethinking religion. The Buddhist priest Shimaji Mokurai (1838–1911) was the first Japanese to discuss the modern concept of religion in some depth in the early 1870s. In his person, indigenous tradition, politics, and Western influence came together to set the course the reconception of religion would take in Japan. The volume begins by tracing the history of the modern Japanese term for religion, shūkyō, and its components and exploring the significance of Shimaji’s sectarian background as a True Pure Land Buddhist. Shimaji went on to shape the early Meiji government’s religious policy and was essential in redefining the locus of Buddhism in modernity and indirectly that of Shinto, which led to its definition as nonreligious and in time to the creation of State Shinto. Finally, the work offers an extensive account of Shimaji’s intellectual dealings with the West (he was one of the first Buddhists to travel to Europe) as well as clarifying the ramifications of these encounters for Shimaji’s own thinking. Concluding chapters historicize Japanese appropriations of secularization from medieval times to the twentieth century and discuss the meaning of the reconception of religion in modern Japan. Highly original and informed, Shimaji Mokurai and the Reconception of Religion and the Secular in Modern Japan not only emphasizes the agency of Asian actors in colonial and semicolonial situations, but also hints at the function of the concept of religion in modern society: a secularist conception of religion was the only way to ensure the survival of religion as we know it today. In this respect, the Japanese reconception of religion and the secular closely parallels similar developments in the West.

This volume excavates the genealogy of xin 信--a term that has become the modern Chinese counterpart for the English word "faith." More than twenty experts trace its religious and non-religious roots in several traditions, including Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, Muslim, Christian, Japanese, popular religious, and modern secular contexts.

Informed by ‘critical religion’ perspective in Religious Studies and postcolonial self-reflection in Sociology, this book interrogates the ideas of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ in social theory and Sociology. It argues that as long as social theory and sociological discourse embed the religion-secular distinction and locate themselves on the ‘secular’ side of the binary, Sociology will continue to serve the very ideologies it tries to subvert – namely Western modernity/coloniality.

This sourcebook offers rare insights into a formative period in the modern history of religions. Throughout the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, when commercial, political and cultural contacts intensified worldwide, politics and religions became ever more entangled. This volume offers a wide range of translated source texts from all over Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, thereby diminishing the difficulty of having to handle the plurality of involved languages and backgrounds. The ways in which the original authors, some prominent and others little known, thought about their own religion, its place in the world and its relation to other religions, allows for much needed insight into the shared and analogous challenges of an age dominated by imperialism and colonialism.

Based on the assumption that existing epistemic and social structures shape the way in which Western concepts of secularism were appropriated, the contributions in this volume inquire into the historical conditions for the development of a Japanese form of secularity.

Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan is the first systematic study of Shinto's environmental turn. The book traces the development in recent decades of the idea of Shinto as an 'ancient nature religion,' and a resource for overcoming environmental problems. The volume shows how these ideas gradually achieved popularity among scientists, priests, Shinto-related new religious movements and, eventually, the conservative shrine establishment. Aike P. Rots argues that central to this development is the notion of chinju no mori: the sacred groves surrounding many Shinto shrines. Although initially used to refer to remaining areas of primary or secondary forest, today the term has come to be extended to any sort of shrine land, signifying not only historical and ecological continuity but also abstract values such as community spirit, patriotism and traditional culture. The book shows how Shinto's environmental turn has also provided legitimacy internationally: influenced by the global discourse on religion and ecology, in recent years the Shinto establishment has actively engaged with international organizations devoted to the conservation of sacred sites. Shinto sacred forests thus carry significance locally as well as nationally and internationally, and figure prominently in attempts to reposition Shinto in the centre of public space.

This volume looks at the secular state in the context of contemporary Asia and investigates whether there existed before modernity antecedents to the condition of secularity, understood as the differentiation of the sphere of the religious from other spheres of social life. The chapters presented in this book examine this issue in national contexts by looking at the historical formation of lexicons that defined the "secular", the "secular state," and "secularism". This approach requires paying attention to modern vernacular languages and their precedents in written traditions with often a very long tradition. This book presents three interpretive frameworks: multiple modernities, variety of secularisms, and typologies of post-colonial secular states.