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Introduction Approaching Japanese Religions Under Globalization Journal of Religion in Japan 3 (2014) 83–95 brill.com/jrj Introduction Approaching Japanese Religions under Globalization Galen Amstutz Institute of Buddhist Studies, Berkeley, California, usa [email protected] Ugo Dessì University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany [email protected] Abstract Research on religion and globalization is revealing that religious responses to global dynamics have been highly varied, positioned across a broad spectrum that ranges from the defensive to the open and creative. However, attempts to engage this area of stud- ies in the case of Japanese religions have been unexpectedly few and fragmentary; the use of full-scale globalization theory remains underdeveloped. Sometimes an under- lying conceptual obstacle is that the dominating perspective is reduced to the dimen- sion of worldwide institutional expansion, which prevents a full engagement with the much more complex dynamics. In other cases, there may simply be resistance to the application of contemporary globalization theories to concrete case studies in religion. Possibly also some features peculiar to Japanese history have delayed the application of globalization perspectives to its religious worlds. Based on these premises the arti- cles by Inoue Nobutaka, Ugo Dessì, Galen Amstutz, Victoria Rose Montrose, Girardo Rodriguez Plasencia, Regina Yoshie Matsue, and Rafael Shoji and Frank Usarski col- lected in this special issue address several examples and themes in this diversified, complex world as part of the ongoing work of addressing our existing gaps in aware- ness. Keywords globalization – Japanese religions © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/22118349-00302001 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:51:05PM via free access 84 amstutz and dessì A quarter century after its massive intrusion into the public discourse, the term ‘globalization’ continues to be mainly applied to changes in the world economy. Its ubiquitous popular narrative of material change is produced and reflected by the modern media on a daily basis; given the undeniable and per- vasive impact of trade, technology and money at the grassroots level such an understanding certainly reveals a pragmatic sensibility. And yet this limited perception of globalization remains inadequate. Fundamentally, it shows itself to be ideologically driven by the idea of human society as a market—quite in contrast to the claim that our allegedly postmodern age has been charac- terized by the demise of all grand narratives. As Doreen Massey aptly puts it, such application of economism to globalization reveals a persistent conven- tional temporal conceptualization (or alternatively, radicalization of the idea of ‘flows’) rooted in the neo-liberal expectation that, in time, all societies will be inevitably drawn into a global community whose core unifying principle is economic growth. As such, this way of imagining the global, nothing other than an updated version of the linear Eurocentric story of capitalist modernity, is actually “aspatial” (Massey 1999: 29, 34); in other words a more adequate post- modern perception of ‘space’ as consisting of contingent, constructed (in that sense truly ‘spatial’) geometries of power has been missed. And yet there is a contrasting view, from a wider perspective, that such a narrow idea of globalization as simply economic transformation is partial and reductionist since it does not seriously take into account a vast array of other interrelated phenomena and dynamics in human experience. In the last two decades an increasing amount of scholarship has been insisting that dra- matic changes in the communications media and transnational mobility have ushered in a new period of global exchanges involving not only goods but also ideas and ‘culture.’ The relationships of these additional processes to a deeper understanding of globalization have come to be variously elucidated. Through the cultural turn in ‘hard’ globalization studies the new socioeco- nomic situation has been approached as “a revamped system of flexible cap- italism” expressed in cultural life; conversely, the globalization turn in ‘soft’ cultural studies has come to appreciate economic globalization’s being con- cretely “the product of inexorable and accelerated migratory cultural flows and electronic mediations beyond the space-time envelopes of the nation- state system” (Archer et al. 2007: 4). Such conceptual recognitions became apparent, for example, in even the initial approaches to globalization such as John Tomlinson’s (1999). In current sociology, it is widely acknowledged that the major contribution to this debate has been provided by the grand theory developed by Roland Robertson, in which globalization is understood in several terms: as a distinct “human-global condition” (with emphasis on Journal of Religion in Japan 3 (2014) 83–95 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:51:05PM via free access introduction 85 the reflexive awareness of the world as a single place); as an identifiable his- torical process originating in Europe in the fifteenth century; and lastly as accelerated processes of glocalization or local adaptation of global cultural resources (e.g., Robertson 1992, 1995). Certain ideas prefigured in early post- colonial theory were also quickly applied productively to issues of globaliza- tion and glocalization and opened the way to the already classical literature on hybridization, creolization, and global flows and -scapes (e.g., García Can- clini 1995; Nederveen Pieterse 2003; Hannerz 1996; Appadurai 1996). All the time these issues have resonated with scholars in the field of cultural studies who have been concerned about the resistance of local cultures to homoge- nization. Religious studies has not played any central role in the aforementioned theoretical developments, although religion as part of culture at large can be considered as an absent guest at the table. However, religion did make an early appearance in the debate on globalization and culture through the work of Robertson, who specifically addressed the role of religious factors in his analysis of Japanese globality (Robertson 1987). Afterwards, the most notable development of the field of religion has been found in the work of Peter Beyer, who has framed his analysis of religious change under globalization in terms of a comprehensive view of global society as analyzed via Niklas Luhmann’s theories of interaction of functionally differentiated global societal subsystems and their modes of communication (Beyer 1994). According to the anthropologist Thomas Csordas (2009: 11), the publication of Beyer’s Religion and Globalization (1994) was actually one of the main fac- tors behind the growing interest in this topic in the mid-1990s, the others being new recognition of the religious implications of the flourishing studies on glob- alization and transnationalism and the global impact of Pentecostalism. Sub- sequent research is revealing that religious responses to global dynamics have been highly varied, positioned across a broad spectrum that ranges from the defensive to the open and creative. Considerable attention has been paid to the issues of identity (Coleman and Collins 2004) and fundamentalism (Mis- ztal and Shupe 1992; Juergensmeyer 2003); otherwise religious phenomena as diverse as global Pentecostalism (Cox 1995; Dempster, Klaus and Petersen 1999), the New Age movement (Rothstein 2001), and new religious movements (Hex- ham and Poewe 1997; Clarke 2006) have offered themselves as obvious objects of study. Researchers have discovered that globalization not only may pose a threat to religion when understood as a promoter of detraditionalization, but may also offer new opportunities for growth and developing new religious forms. In view of Csordas’s observations, and combined with the association between globalization and mobility which can be intuitively recognized, it is Journal of Religion in Japan 3 (2014) 83–95 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:51:05PM via free access 86 amstutz and dessì no wonder that transnational religion has also become another area of consid- erable interest (Rudolph and Piscatori 1997; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Csordas 2009). As concerns Japanese religions, a promising overture was presented early by Robertson’s suggestion (however limited) that Japan’s modern form of global involvement reflected embedded tendencies in religious imagination such as the inclination toward syncretism, institutionalized polytheism, and the im- portance attributed to purification rituals. Similarly, scholars such as Beyer and Shupe have occasionally integrated religion in Japan in their reflections on reli- gion and globalization (Shupe 1991; Beyer 2006). However, further attempts to engage this area of studies have been unexpectedly few and fragmentary. Among the exceptions, the Japanese scholar Inoue Nobutaka 井上順孝, who also contributes to this volume, has been investigating the impact of the infor- mation age upon the development of new religious movements in Japan in various articles since the early 1990s (Inoue 1990, 1997, 2007). The anthropolo- gist Miyanaga Kuniko 宮永国子 has focused on Sekai Mahikari Bunmei Kyōdan 世界真光文明教団 to show how rituals, with their repetitive focus on the body and the creation of narratives, facilitate integration and provide options for countering the identity crisis induced by globalization (Miyanaga 2000). In a similar vein, Satō Takehiro’s 佐藤壮広 research on Okinawan shamans shows how the reshaping of local identities occurring at the level
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