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Course of Study:
(JAPANESE150) Exploring Japan

Title of work:
Nanzan guide to Japanese religions (2006)

Section:
Japanese religions pp. 3--13

Author/editor of work:
Swanson, Paul L.; Chilson, Clark

Author of section:
robert Kisala

Name of Publisher:
University of Hawai'i Press
Robert .K1sALA

Japanese Religions

In contrast to the situation in many of the European countries and some

other areas of the West, where we see relatively high levels ofat least �omi­
nal religious affiliation and low levels of participation in religious rites, re­
ligion in Japan is marked by almost universal participation in certain rites
and customs but low levels of self-acknowledged affiliation to a religious
group. It has become commonplace to say that Japanese are born Shinto,
marry as Christians, and die Buddhists, a phrase that indicates both the
high level of participation in religious rites of passage as well as the eclec­
tic nature of Japanese religiosity. Note is also often made of the fact that
nearly ninety percent ofthe Japanese observe the custom of annual visits
to ancestral graves, and seventy-five percent have either a Buddhist or
Shinto altar in their home. However, surveys consistently show that only
thirty percent of the population identify themselves as belonging to one
of the religions active in Japan-this despite the fact that the religions

3
4 Japanese Religions

themselves claim an overall total membership that approaches twice the actual population
of 126 million. This is mainly due to the fact that much of the population is automati­
cally counted as parishioners of both t�e local Shinto shrine and the ancestral Buddhist
temple.
Although identified today as the major religious traditions of Japan, Buddhism and
Shinto have been so closely intertwined throughout much of Japanese history that the
forced separation of the two at the beginning of the modern period in the mid-nineteenth
century resulted in a great upheaval in Japanese religious practice, and continues to have
repercussions today. In addition, these religious traditions have been combined with ele­
ments of Taoism and Confucianism from China, issuing in a kind of common or popular
religiosity that is not easily contained in any one religious tradition. Christianity, intro­
duced to Japan in the fifteenth century by the Catholic missionaries who accompanied the
Spanish and Portuguese explorers, was actively persecuted throughout the early modern
period (seventeenth century to mid-nineteenth century), and small groups of "hidden
Christians" continue to preserve a secret faith tradition that they trace back to the time of
persecution. Reintroduced in the modern period, Christianity has had little success in at­
tracting members in Japan, with less than one percent of the population belonging to one
of the Christian churches. Christian influence is generally acknowledged as greater than
those membership numbers would indicate, however, especially in the fields of education
and social welfare.
The modern period has seen the proliferation of new religious movements in Japan,
leading at times to widely exaggerated estimates of their number and strength. To varying
degrees these groups oftenincorporate folk religious practices, Buddhist doctrinal elements,
and, more recently, ideas and practices from a wide range of religions and independent
spiritualist practices. Given this religious ferment, it is hard to describe Japan as a secular
society. However, many Japanese would prefer to see themselves as secular or unconcerned
with religion. In a recent survey, for example, only twenty-six percent of the respondents in
Japan described themselves as religious. In part this is due to the controversy surrounding
some religious groups, particularly the new religions that have become so prominent in
the modern period The already poor image of these groups was further damaged by the
terrorist activities of Aum Shinrikyo in the mid-1990s, contributing to the rise of an anticult
movement in Japan. However, the attitude towards religion in Japan is also influenced by

*�'
differences in the understanding of "religion" as compared to the West, differences that
arise from the history of the use of the term shtikyo or religion, in that country.
Modernity, as it is understood in Japan, is closely associated with the country's contact
with the West. What is commonly referred to as the early modern period followed the
arrival of Portuguese and Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century, and was marked by
the attempt to limit contact with the West during the two-and-a-half-century Tokugawa
Shogunate (1603-1867). The modern period was ushered in by the collapse of that
regime in the face of the forced opening of the country by American and other Western
powers, leading to a mad rush to catch up with the West economically, technologically,
and militarily. The desire to build a nation strong enough to avoid Western colonization
contributed greatly to emergence of Japanese nationalism and Japanese colonialism, and
ROBERT KISALA 5

impacted on religious developments during this period. Government attempts to separate

Buddhism from Shinto and establish Shinto as the moral and spiritual basis for Japanese
nationalism provided the background against which religion as a concept was debated and
tmderstood.
In considering what "religion" means in Japan, we will first take a look at popular images
of religion as reflected in recent surveys on the subject. From there we will turn to the
history of the concept in Japan, and consider how that continues to influence popular and
public discourse on the subject. In the wake of the Aum Affair, religion and its future have
once again become a popular topic of debate by scholars and media commentators. We
will take a look at two influential arguments, before returning to survey results to draw
some of our own conclusions on the state of religion in Japan.

POPULAR IMAGE OF RELIGION

Since 1995, the Religious Awareness Project of the Japanese Association for
the Study of Religion and Society has conducted an annual survey of university students'
attitudes towards religion. 1 The results o f this survey bring into stark relief the image-prob­
lem that religion suffers under in Japan. The number of respondents who profess belief in
any particular religion hovers around seven percent, much lower than the thirty percent
that most national surveys in Japan yield. Around sixty percent say that they have little or
no interest in religion, but only three percent of these respondents attribute their negative
feelings toward religion to ·a personal experience. The vast majority, usuaJJy around sev­
enty percent, say they just don't see any need for religion.
These numbers indicate that very few university students have had a personal experience
of "religion;' with only seven percent saying they believe in a religion and three percent
claiming to have had a negative experience of religion. The low degree of interest in retigion
would seem to be a result then of shared popular images. Another survey, conducted in the
wake o f the Aum Affair in 1995 by the Yomiuri Shinbun, a national nev1spaper, indicates
what some of these images might be. 2 Offered the opportunity to make multiple choices
regarding their opinion on religious groups, forty percent of the respondents said that
religious groups "are just out to make money," and thirty-seven percent said that they "prey
on people's fears» to encourage them to join the group. Other complaints were that religion
was "only for show" (18%) or that religious groups are "too involved in politics" (20%).
A broader survey3 on contemporary values conducted by the Nanzan Institute for

1. SMkyo to shakai gakkai shukyo ishiki chosa pur()Jekuto fjf<fxt fl�J tf:.� · *#g.ffi,1") l
:t::fn :,J :r. 7 t-, 1995-2000. While the survey does not use a random sample, the number of
respondents range between four and eleven thousand, which should yield reliable results. The j
annual reports on the survey results are available from the author. I
2. The results of this survey can be found in IsHn 1997, p. 180.
3. The survey was conducted in 1998 using a random sample of three hundred from the I
Tokyo and Osaka metropolitan areas, weighted for sex and age. Preliminary reports on the ;
results of the survey can be found in K1sALA 1999a and 1999b. I
6 Japanese Religions

Religion and Culture also yielded interesting results regarding the meanings assigned to
religion in Japan. Twenty-nine percent of the respondents to this survey acknowledged
that they belong to some religious group, consistent with the results of surveys conducted
throughout much of the postwar period. Despite this rather low level of religious affiliation,
however, QJle-half the respondents said that they believe in the existence of gods or
buddhas, and nearly two-thirds professed that they believe in an "unseen higher power."
Perhaps the most startling result was that one-quarter of those who described themselves
as atheists (mushinronsha Mif���·, 19% of the total respondents) also professed some
belief in God. It would appear that "atheist" has different connotations in Japan, identified
more with a rejection of "religion" than a lack of belief in the divine.
The Nanzan study also confumed the low popular image of religion in Japan, in a most
definitive manner. A question was included in the survey regarding the level of trust af­
forded certain social institutions. While respondents gave high marks to the police {69%),
the legal system (63%), and the military (52%), religion came in dead last, with only thir­
teen percent finding it trustworthy, considerably lower than the twenty-percent level given
to politicians in the national parliament.
What these survey results dearly indicate is that "religion" is associated with religious
institutions in Japan today, and the vast majority of people have a very low opinion of
these institutions. W hat might normally be conceived as religious beliefs, practices, and
feelings have been divorced from the concept of religion in Japan, as illustrated by the case
of professed atheists acknowledging a belief in God. Although the surveys we have looked
at here were conducted in the years following the Aum Affair, which led to a further ero­
sion of religion's place in Japanese society, the meanings assigned to religion in Japan have
a longer history, going back at least to the final determination of a translation for the term
in the 1870s. We turn to these historical issues next.

THE CONCEPT OF "RELIGION" IN MODERN JAPAN

As Shimazono Susumu points out, it was around 1873 that the Japanese word
sltflkyo was fixed as the translation for "religion" {SHlMAZONO 1998). The meanings attached
to the term religion and its Japanese counterpart were profoundly influenced by debates
in the emerging Science of Religion in the West, as well as the particular institutional and
political situation in Japan.
Under the influence of the evolutionary paradigm, many of the early theorists of the
modern study of religion in the West worked under the assumption that there was one
"elementary " form of religion, and all past and present religious expressions could be placed
on a spectrum from least developed to most advanced as that elementary form evolved
throughout human history. Occasionally this advanced form of religion was identified
with morality or ethics, cleansed of magical, superstitious, or irrational elements found
in lower religious forms. Often contained in this evolutionary view of religious forms was
the assumption, either explicit or implicit, that religion itself would ultimately give way
to the rational, scientific methods that these researchers themselves employed. Under the
influence of romanticism, however, the situation was further complicated by the desire to
ROBERT KISALA 7

reappraise the value of the irrational, frequently identified with foJk or popular religious
forms. Finally, the question of the definition of religion itself was a perennial problem for
religious researchers, with differing views regarding the importance of beliefs in God or
the presence oforganizational structures as necessary elements of that definition.
Modern religious studies in Japan emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, as one
result of the interest in the Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893. A Comparative
Religions Society was founded in 1896, and a course in Religious Studies was begun at
Tokyo Imperial University in 1898, with a chair in Religious Studies established at the same
university in 1905. Public and intel lectual discourse on religion, however, preceded the
founding of the academic discipline, since it was seen as crucial to the establishment of a
modern state after the collapse of the Tokugawa political system.
From early in the nineteenth century the presence of foreign ships off the coast of Japan
was seen as a threat to the enforced isolation of the country imposed at the beginning
the Tokugawa period. Aizawa Seishisai, a retainer of the Mito domain, composed in 1825
the Shinron ��. or New Theses, as a kind of manifesto calling on the regime to defend
the nation from this threat.' Aizawa proposed that in addition to a military defense the
times cal.led for a spiritual defense as well, and, indeed, the latter would ultimately be more
important. Drawing heavily on the arguments of the Kokugaku movement, he called for
the propagation ofbeliefs based on Japanese mythology, centered on the emperor, in order
to unite the nation against its enemies. These beliefs were to be combined with national
rites to constitute a national religion that would play a role in society comparable to that
of Christianity in the West.
Aizawa's proposals were adopted by the Meiji reformers, and from the earliest days
of the modern period saisei itchi t��-�' or the unification of rites and government,
was promoted as official government po1icy. While the implementation of this policy took
various forms as the government adapted to the changing situation and engaged in a-kind
of trial-and-error strategy, its unifying purpose was the promotion of Shinto, both jinja
shinto 1$fitlll�, or Shrine Shinto, and what later came to be called kokka shint6 00�*1!�,
or State Shinto.s
1B the early Mei.j.j. p€rioo, the ,p!iohwiooB- aga.i.nst Cmistianity, instituted p�i-Or te- the
establishment of the Tokugawa regime and enforced vigorously throughout the early
modern period, remained in force. This became a problem, however, as the government
tried to renegotiate the treaties forced on Japan by the Western powers in the final years
of the Tokugawa government. These powers demanded that the prohibition be lifted
under the principle of religious freedom, a principle that was eventually enshrined in the
Imperial Constitutfon promulgated in 1889. To preserve Shinto's favored position under

4. On Aizawa and the Shinron see WAKABAYASHI 1986.

5. Shimazono Susumu has pointed out that the term kokka shinto appears in the records of ·
parliamentary debates in 1908, and that the English translation State Shinto was used by the 1·
1

religious scholar Kat6 Genchi in his A Study ofShinto, publlshed in 1926. This information is
taken from a presentation by Shimazono at the 59th Annual Conference of the Japanese Associa- ·
tion for Religious Studies held in September 2000. 1
8 Japanese Religions

these circumstances, there was a movement toward the redefinition of Shinto as a non­
religious set of native beliefs and customs, a distinction that was reflected institutionally
in the reorganization of the religious aff�irs office of the Interior Ministry into the Agency
for Shrine Affairs (Jinjakyoku 1tJJt±f.u) and the Agency for Religious Affairs (Shukyokyoku
*�..F.u) in 1900.
Public and scholarly discourse on the non-religious nature of Shinto reached a climax
of sorts in the aftermath ofthe promulgation of the Imperial Rescript on Education in 1890
and the controversy surrounding the refusal of Uchimura Kanzo and other Christians to
reverence the Rescript. In focusing on one of the Shinto proponents in this debate, Inoue
Tetsujiro, Shimazono points out that although the Rescript takes on the character of a
"sacred text" in Inoue's attacks on Christianity, the terms of debate for Inoue are always the
opposition of religion (Christianity) to education, morality, the state, or the "teaching of
the East" (SHIMAZONO 1998). In Inoue's argument all of these are equated with Shinto.
As State Shinto and Shrine Shinto thus became identified with national morality, customs,
and patriotic duties, religion was characterized by the presence of an individual founder and
denominational organization. In addition to Christianity and the Buddhist sects, so-called
Sect Shinto, the new religious movements that were able to gain government recognition by
incorporating officially sanctioned beliefs, were included in the latter category. As Isomae
Jun'ichi points out, this was a convenient way to both account for the ''religious" elements of
Shinto, as well as to at least implicitly denigrate these elements as magical or superstitious
beliefs inferior to the national morality promoted by the government.6
While some of the leading scholars of Religious Studies in Japan argued for the religious
nature of Shinto, Shinto Studies emerged as an independent discipline early in the twenti­
eth century, and argued forcefully for the government's position. The profound impact that
non-religious theories of Shinto have had on modern Japanese sodety is reflected in the
fact that they have been recognized by the courts in the postwar period as justification for
the use of Shinto rites in groundbreaking ceremonies for government builaings and visits
by government officials to Shinto shrines.

TWO RECENT VIEWS OP "RELIGION" IN JAPANESE SOCIETY

Arna Toshimaro is a lecturer in Japanese intellectual history, particularly

respected for his views on the development of the idea of reHgion in Japan. In a popular
book published in 1996, Nihonjin wa naze mushftkyo na no ka [Why are the Japanese
"non-religious"?), he argues that the self-conception of the Japanese as non-religious has
its roots in a distinction between "founded religions" (sosho shukyo tJnS*fx) and "folk
(natural) religions" (shizen shukyo El �7f-f.!().7 Largely under the influence of the historical

6. From a presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, held in
Washington D.C., March t998.
7. Shize11 would normally be translated as "nature," but AMA himself points out that he is
not referring to the worship of nature, but rather religions that emerge "naturally;' without any
distinguishable founder (1996, p. u). Folk religion seems to be a better conveyor ofthis meaning.
ROBERT KISALA 9

developments outlined above, "religion" in Japan has come to mean the founded religions
of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and the New Religions, while the practices of folk
religion that the vast majority of the population engage in- New Year's visits to shrines
and temples, funeral rites, visits to ancestral graves-are viewed as social customs, devoid
of "religious" meaning. For this reason, seventy percent of the population considers itself
non-religious, because they don't belong to one of the founded religions, while seventy­
five percent of these "non-religious" Japanese say that being "religious" is important
(shulcyoshin wa taisetsu) (AMA 1996, p. 8).
Expanding the argument beyond the question of the definition of religion in the modern
period, Ama finds the roots of Japanese non-religiosity in several trends evident in the
early modern period. He claims that the spread of Confucian ideas, with its emphasis
on the cultivation of morals, led to an emphasis on life in this world and a consequent
decrease in concern in the Buddhist concept of the afterlife. This trend was further aided
by the establishment of "funeral Buddhism" (soshiki Bukkyo ��-U.$;:), the parochial
system eventually enforced by the Tokugawa government that mandated registration with
a Buddhist temple to perform the funeral and later veneration rites. Arna argues that the
reassurance of prayers after death, guaranteeing the achievement of Buddhahood-as
seen in the spread of the practice of calling all the dead hotoke, or Buddha-also served
to alleviate concern with the afterlife. This lack of concern in the afterlife is illustrated
by the spread of the concept of ukiyo, or the transitory nature of life, and especially its
accompanying interest in the pleasures of life, as seen in the life of !hara Saikaku, a poet
and popular fiction writer of the late seventeenth century. Here Arna makes mention of
Koshoku ichidai otoko [Life of an Amorous Man], a popular novel written by Saikaku in
1682 that details, i n its first chapter, the sexual conquests of the hero Yonosuke, amounting
to 3,724 women and 725 boys. Arna concludes that "funeral Buddhism is Japanese folk
religion in Buddhist clothing" (AMA 1996, p. 66) and its development in the early modern
period is yet another reason why contemporary Japanese have little interest in founded
religion, and identify themselves as non-religious.
Yamaori Tetsuo, a scholar specializing in the history ofreligion, argues that two events in
i995 will lead to the death of religion in Japan, or, more accurately, that they have revealed
that religion in Japan is already dead. These events were the Kobe Earthquake in January
of that year, and, of course, the release of poison gas on the Tokyo subways by members of
Aum Shinrikyo in March. Yamaori says that in the first incident religious believers showed
the bankruptcy of their own faith by failing to offer a specifically religious response to the
catastrophe, content to provide the same aid as non-religious volunteers and counselors.
And the Aum case only served to confirm popular suspicion of religion in general, leading
to calls to restrict the activities of religious groups and reform the law governing officially
registered religious corporations.
Yamaori identifies three factors that have contributed to the perilous position of religion
in Japanese society: the hollowing out of Buddhism, the "dereligionization" of Shinto, and
widespread disdain for religion among the intelligentsia and media. Buddhism has been
hollowed out by the development of "funeral" Buddhism, and Shinto dereligionized in
an attempt to preserve its privileged place in the modern state, both processes discussed
10 Japa11ese Religions

above. Intellectual and media contempt for religion is traced to Western rationalism, and a
knee-jerk reaction on the part of Japanese elites to conform to Western trends.
These three trends have been exacerba_ted by two modern "separation policies": the
separation of Shinto and Buddhism at the beginning of the modern period, and the
separation of religion and state in the postwar period. Yamaori argues that the coexistence
ofthe kami and buddhas throughout Japanese history led to a popular religiosity based on
both Shinto and Buddhism, and the forced question of either-or, based on an exclusivity
found in the Christian concept of religion foreign to the Japanese, leaves many wondering
how they should respond. The Japanese have been forced to "examine their own psyches
through Christian eyes.. . they have observed the innermost Japanese soul through
the lens of a foreign concept of religion," 8 and so they respond that they have no belief
corresponding to that image of religion. The second separation, that of religion and state
in the postwar period, likewise forced Western distinctions of private (religious belief)
and public (government), sacred and secular-distinctions that are themselves rarely
rigorously enforced in the West, where the British monarch is officially titled the Defender
of the Faith, Western European countries provide financial support to churches, and the
U. S. president takes his oath of office on a Bible-on a culture that is not used to making
these distinctions, and thus has enforced them to a ridiculous, or perhaps dangerous,
degree. Yamaori cites the case of Doi Takako, the former head-of Japan's Socialist Party,
whose Christian belief was concealed by the media and by Doi herself, presumably in the
interest of preserving this separation, and observes that it illustrates a "strange melange of
unconscious contempt of religion and credulous susceptibility to the ambience ofWestern
civilization" (YAMAORI 2000, p. 236).
One gets the feeling that Yamaori is swept up in his own arguments, dramatically
proclaiming the death of religion in Japan and placing the blame on an ill-fitting Western
concept of what the term means. Recent studies on the history of religious conflict in
Japan temper the supposed reugious plurality that premises his argument&, and court
cases in Japan and the United States indicate that the separation of religion and state is a
developing concept, in both the East and the West. His arguments are provocative, however,
in pointing out, once again, the poor image of religion in Japan, and how this image even
affects the activities of religious groups and believers themselves. While the roots of this
problem seem to lie in the cultural dash in the concept of religion, as Yamaori maintains,
Ama's more nuanced argument, focusing on the difference between "founded" religion
and folk religion seems closer to the point, while raising questions of its own regarding
the characteristics that make foJk religion "religious" and its future in a modern society
(see also Ian Reader's essay in this Guide). Ama's shizen shukyo does not remain on the
level of amorphous religious sentiments, but is expressed in concrete actions: shrine visits,
weddings and funerals, veneration of the ancestors at the household altar, participation in
local festivals. All of these acts involve some degree of participation in religious institutions,

8. YAMAORI, 2000, p. 231. The article was first published in Japanese (Oumu jiken to Nihon
I no shukyo no shuen) in Shckun, June 1995. An English translation was published by Japan Echo
, the same year and is reprinted in the volume cited here.
.ROBERT KISALA 11

and. without these institutions Ama's folk religion would be an empty concept. We turn,
finall y, to a consideration of the state of institutional religion in Japan.

THE STATE OF RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS IN JAPAN

The Agency for Cultural Affairs of the Ministry of Education and Science
publishes annual statistics on the number of officially registered religious groups and the
number of believers claimed by these groups. The numbers, especially those regarding
membership, can be misleading, since there are no uniform criteria for membership and
it is assumed that at least some groups will inflate their numbers to give added weight to
their importance. On the other hand, the numbers can be taken as revealing the differing
mea nings assigned to religion that we have been discussing here, and in that sense they
need to be considered alongside the survey data introduced at the beginning of this article.
At the very least they indicate the relative strength of the various religious groups active
in Japan.
At the end of 1998 there were more than 183,000 officially registered religious
corporations in Japan. However, the vast majority of these are individual Shinto shrines
(86,000) or Buddhist temples (78,000). In addition there were four thousand Christian
corporations, including individual dioceses and Catholic religious orders, and sixteen
thousand corporations were classified as "other." In addition to the statistics on registered
corporations, the agency gives numbers of individual groups; in some instances the
corporation will represent a number of groups. Among the Buddhist groups, the largest
representation is found in the Pure Land sects (30,000), followed by the Zen sects (21,000),
Shingon (15,000), Nichiren sects (12,000), Tendai (5,000), and Nara Buddhism (500),
giving some indication of the relative number of temples affiliated with various schools of
Buddhism in Japan.
In terms of membership, the Shinto shrines claim a following of over 106,000,000,
and the Buddhist temples over 96,000,000. The Shinto membership reflects the number
of those considered ujiko ��' or parishioners, by the shrines, usually including all the
residents in the area of the shrine. The Buddhist membership is based on the number
of danka :ti.*, or families registered with the individual temples, usually for funeral and
memorial rites. Clearly most of the population is considered as belonging to both of
these categories. Christian groups, based on their own definition of membership through
individual choice, report a total of almost 1.8 million believers, and the groups classified as
"other" claim over eleven million adherents.
The above statistics are inclusive of all religious corporations registered either with the
Minister for Education and Science or with the local prefecture office. Under a revision of
the Religious Corporations Law following the Aum Affair, all groups active in more than
one prefecture must register with the central government, while local groups have the
option of registering either with the prefecture or the central government In a separate
set of numbers reflecting the membership of only those groups registered with the central
government, a breakdown given by sect is a further indication of the relative strength of
these groups. Here, out of a total Buddhist membership of almost 58,000,000, the largest
12 Japanese Religions

group is once again the Pure Land sects (19,000,000), followed closely by the Nichiren sects
(18,000,000),9 Shingon (13,000,000), and Zen and Tendai with over 3,000,000 apiece.
In a sense it can be said that these n\lmbers, yielding a total religious membership of
almost twice the population ofJapan, reflectthe differing meaning ofreligion in the country
that Ama and Yamaori have pointed out; shrines and temples claim the same people as
members, in accordance with Ama's idea of folk religion and Yamaori's claims for religious
pluralism. Neithergroup seems wanting for participants in its religious functions, with the
shrines bustling during the New Year holiday, in mid-November for traditional blessings
ofyoung children, and a steady stream ofyoung couples coming for marriage ceremonies
or to mark the birth of children, and the Buddhist clergy particularly busy at the spring
and fall equinoxes and at the end of the year with memorial rites. Neither group, moreover,
seems to lack for financial support, an observation that can be extended to new relig1ous
groups and Christian churches as well. On these terms, institutional religion seems to be
at least holding its own, if not, indeed, prospering, despite the professed lack of interest in
"religion'' by a large majority of Japanese.
The problem of the image of these religious institutions, however, continues to have a
profound effect on how "religion" is perceived in Japan today. Religious institutions have
made some attempts to address the issue, or at least have given indications that they are
aware of the presence of a problem. Perhaps the best example of this is the discussions
in some Buddhist groups on how to reform the practice of kaimy6 J&ti, or the charging
of substantia) amounts of money for the granting of a posthumous Buddhist name. In
general, however, religious groups have shied away from the problem, choosing to remain
anonymous in their activities, as Yamaori points out in the case of the Kobe Earthquake,
refraining from engaging in public discourse on current problems, even the problem of
religion itself, as in the case of Aum Shinrikyo. 10 There are indications that the public
expects religious institutions to play a more active role in such discourse. and that the
image of religion would improve if it were seen as more engaged (see KISALA 1999c, pp.
184-86). Despite the ambiguities reflected in survey data on religion, it would appear that
reports on its death are still premature.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AMA Toshimaro �iiJii,ilj;fJJ�, 1996. Nihonjin wa naze mushukyo na no ka B ;.$:Ai;J: �-it1!!ri*fx1i- (l)
iJ,. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo.
AGENCY FOR CULTURAL AFFAIRS, 2000. Shukyo nenkan *1x11:-�. Tokyo: Gyosei.
Isttn Kenji :OJHiJf±, 1997. Detabukku gendai Nihonjin no shukyo: Settgo gojunen no shukyo
ishiki to shiikyokodo -r- -7 -:f·J 7 m1-t B*Ao)*�-�{Ui:O�Q)*tt,lrat*l<rrfw.
Tokyo: Shinyosha.

9. Some of the large new religious groups, such as Rissho Koseikai, are included in this
number.
10. On the general lack of religious responses to the Aum Affair, see K1SALA 2001.
ROBE RT l{]SALA

J(JSALA,Robert, 1999a. Asian Values Study. Bulletin of the Nanzan Institute for Religion and
Culture 23: 59-73.
_, 1999b. Japanese Religiosity and Morals.. ln Religion in Secularizing" Society: The
Europeans' Religion at the End of the 20th Century, ed. Loek HaJman and Ole Riis, pp.
173-88. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press.
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