Description
Book SynopsisThis volume brings together contributions that, from different disciplinary perspectives, highlight certain aspects and problems related to the configuration of the relationship between the religious and the secular in Japan. In the background stands the question of the historical path dependencies that lead to the formation of a specifically Japanese secularity. Based on the assumption that existing epistemic and social structures shape the way in which Western concepts of secularism were appropriated, the individual case studies demonstrate that the culturally specific appropriation of Western regulatory principles such as secularism has created problems that are of political relevance in contemporary Japan.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Secularities in Japan Ugo Dessì and Christoph Kleine Formations of Secularity in Ancient Japan? On Cultural Encounters, Critical Junctures, and Path-Dependent Processes Christoph Kleine Religion, Medicine and the Notion of Charity in Early Jesuit Missionary Pursuits in Buddhist Japan Katja Triplett Secularization and the Jōruri Plays: The Decline of Religious Belief and the Search for Secular Salvation in Early Modern Japan Kawata Koh 川田耕 “Even Three-Year-Old Children Know That the Source of Enlightenment is not Religion but Science”: Modern Japanese Buddhism between ‘Religion’ and ‘Science,’ 1860s–1910s Hans Martin Krämer Practicing Belonging? Non-religiousness in Twenty-First Century Japan Fujiwara Satoko World Heritage, Secularisation, and the New “Public Sacred” in East Asia Aike P. Rots
