Peter B Clarke - Japanese New Religions in Global Perspective

JAPANESE NEW RELIGIONS

In Global Perspective

CURZON STUDIES IN NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS

Editor: Judith Coney

This Series is interested particularly in any innovative religious group that has established itself in the last fifty years. We welcome high-quality, original research contributions from across the globe, based on sensitive, in-depth research methods. Preference is given to the publication of material on religious groups which have not so far been documented. All the books in the Series address the theme of religion and society. The Series is mainly comprised of monographs exploring and extending existing theories about religion and society. It also includes edited collections designed to focus, in particular, on cross-cultural themes and draw together research findings from across the world.

Proposals or scripts for the Series will be welcomed by the Series Editor or by the Chief Editor, Curzon Press.

JAPANESE NEW RELIGIONS

In Global Perspective

Edited by

Peter B. Clarke

CURZON

First Published in 2000

by Curzon Press

Richmond, Surrey

Editorial matter 2000 Peter B. Clarke

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0700711856

Alfred Bloom is Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii and Institute of Buddhist Studies, Berkeley. He has taught World Religions and Buddhism at the Universities of Oregon and Hawaii. He was the Dean of the Institute of Buddhist Studies, and received ordination, at Nishi Honganji in 1990. His publications include Shinrans Gospel of Pure Grace, 1965; Shoshinge: The Heart of Shin Buddhism, 1986; Strategies of Modern Living: A Commentary with Text of Shinran Shonin: The Journey to Self-Acceptance, 1994.

Gary Bouma is Professor of Sociology at Monash University, Melbourne.

Peter B. Clarke is Professor of History and Sociology of Religion and Director of the Centre of New Religions at Kings College, University of London. His publications include Japanese New Religions in the West ed. P. Clarke and J. Somers, 1994 and New Religious Movements in Western Europe An Annotated Bibliography ed. E. Arweck and P. Clarke, 1997.

Catherine Cornille is Professor of Comparative Religion at the Catholic University of Louvain. Her publications include The Phoenix Files West: The Dynamics of Inculturation of Mahikari in Europe in Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 18, 23, 1991; Different Forms of Spirit Meditation in Mahikari and Shinnyoen: Shamanism East and West, in Syzygy, Vol. 1 No. 4, 1992 and Jesus in Japan: Christian Syncretism in Mahikari, in Japanese New Religions in the West, ed. P. Clarke and J. Somers, 1994.

Tina Hamrin is Research Fellow at the Scandanavian Research Institute at Stockholm University. She has published The Dancing Religion in a Japanese-Fiawaiian Immigrant Environment via Healers and Shin Buddhist Clergy to Nationalistic Millenarianism, 1996.

Sanda lonescu is Research Scholar on Japanese New Religions in the West at the Centre of New Religions, Kings College, University of London.

Louella Matsunaga is Lecturer in the Anthropology of Japan at the University of Oxford.

Ari Pedro Oro is Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande, Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Wendy Smith is Senior lecturer in Japanese Studies at Monash University, Melbourne.

Shiva Vasi is a Doctoral Student in Anthropology at Monash University, Melbourne.

Acknowledgements of Other Contributors

The editor is very grateful to all the various movements and their members who helped to provide information for use in this volume. Thanks also go to Sonia Crivello for her assistance with copyediting and with compiling the index, and to Keishin Inaba for his help with editing and correcting the Japanese.

Peter B. Clarke

Peter B. Clarke

This volume contains new research on a wide range of aspects of Japanese new religions abroad, particularly in Australia, Europe, and the Americas, since the 1960s, and hopefully will contribute to our understanding of the globalization process as a cultural phenomenon, and particularly to what might be termed the reverse influences in that process.

A multifaceted process, globalization has long been widely seen as unidirectional. As an economic idea it is described as a gradually expanding capitalist system that originated in Europe in the sixteenth century and began to spread out from there to other parts of the world in a necessary search for bigger markets and on the back of the technologies it developed and the political aspirations it espoused to drive it forward. A second dimension to globalization is also directly relevant to the issues raised in this volume, that is globalization in the sense of the spread of modern means of communication which facilitate the rapid exchange of ideas and information to every part of the world, including the Web and the satellite-based land mobile services which enable communication even in the absence of land based cellular services. With this alternative route for terrestrial calls fully operational nowhere will remain isolated from personal contact through geography, lack of land based technological infrastructure, or natural structures.

The third dimension to globalization, the cultural dimension, is the most relevant of the three to this research. From this perspective globalization is popularly seen as a process whereby one cultural form expands relentlessly and destroys, as it does so, the essence of every other culture that it encounters. The resurgence of Islam in Iran in the 1970s and 1980s has been interpreted as a response to such a process. Such an understanding of cultural globalization greatly oversimplifies the process.

If global culture is defined as the outcome of the interaction between regional cultures, some of which have acted as catalysts where the pace, form and content of modernization are concerned, this would appear to be heuristically more valuable than unidirectional perspectives which interpret it as the impact of the creative and dynamic, emerging from one single source, on the traditional and static.

The dynamic interaction of cultures, which is a central element of globalization, leaves nothing the same and often leads to a deepening in understanding and appreciation of the particular or to its idealization, or to a belief in its uniqueness and universal significance. In the interface between the particular and the global both are in a state of flux and both act as agencies of change. The making of Japanese Buddhism (Anesaki, 1930), of Japanese Christianity (Mullins, 1999), of Indonesian and Moroccan Islam (Geertz, 1968), and of Christianity in South Africa (Sundkler, 1961) illustrates this point. Japanese Buddhism is not reducible to beliefs and practices that are exclusively Japanese; it transcends them and yet is distinctive and different largely on account of the way it has been shaped and moulded by the Japanese cultural, intellectual and social context. As Gombrich (1994: 22) observes in his account of his impressions of Japanese Buddhism:

What concerns me is something more startling for a Buddhologist: that for each sect (in Japan) the content of its own text or texts is virtually co-terminous with the range of Buddhist ideas. In all Buddhist traditions particular monks and their pupils have specialized in sets of texts; in the days before writing when large bodies of material had to be preserved orally, this was a practical necessity. However, in those far-off days no Buddhist would have been unaware that the different bodies of text were complimentary, and in particular that the