Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Asia Center, 2007

Book Reviews / JESHO 53 (2010) 661-677 671

Nam-Lin HUR, Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Asia Center, 2007. 550 pp., 1 map, hardback. ISBN 0 674 02503 2.

This ambitious social history analyzes Japanese Buddhist institutions dur- ing the Edo period (1600-1868; a.k.a. the “Tokugawa” period, from the name of the ruling house of its bakufu, or military government). For most of the period, only Buddhist temples were licensed to manage the rituals concerning death, forming a comprehensive, government-imposed order known in historiography as the danka, or “patron household,” system. In this system, a given household would ideally affiliate with one Buddhist temple, which it would support financially. In return, the temple would provide the required yearly certification of the absence of Christians from the household, as it asserted exclusive control over funerary and regular memorial rites for that household’s members. Building on the author’s expertise in Edo socio-religious history, the study uses a breathtaking range of primary and secondary documents to chart the ascendancy, character, and tenacity of this system of compulsory patronage within the Edo-era social order. The study’s novelty lies not only in its temporal and documen- tary breadth, but also in its comprehensive framing under the rubric of “anti-Christianity.” In the sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries introduced Catholicism into Japan, where it rapidly spread before its dramatic sup- pression, as was the fate in the case of certain other intransigent minority religious movements, in the seventeenth century. The imposition of the danka system is generally understood as a result of the bakufu’s animosity toward Christianity; this study revises and expands this conventional inter- pretation, arguing that, in fact, “anti-Christianity was the cornerstone of Tokugawa Japan’s statehood,” thus assigning that animus a far weightier role (p. 364). The analysis in the study proceeds in four parts. The first traces the for- mation of the danka system over the seventeenth century, emphasizing edicts and directives from the bakufu and the lords of the various subordi- nate domains. Starting in 1598, priests from overseas were banned from Japan, though for some decades they defied this stipulation; in 1612, the bakufu forbade the practice of Christianity altogether, but it found the ban difficult to implement. A peasant uprising in 1637-8, though not origi- nally caused by religious conflict, attracted Catholic believers and took on a messianic flavor, and as late as the 1660s, significant groups of hidden

Catholics were still being discovered. To enforce the ban, local govern- ments began the practices of strictly and regularly monitoring for Catho- lics, the forced apostasy of any such Catholics, and the certification of such apostasy. These practices spread, culminating in thebakufu ’s demand for their implementation throughout its suzerainty—everywhere in “Japan.” According to the explanation in this study, Buddhist clerics assumed this surveillance function opportunistically, in part because some were quick to endorse the Shinto notion that Japan was “the country of the gods” (pp. 43-6) and in part because neither competing system—Shinto or Confu- cianism—was as robust as Buddhism (p. 93). Their weakness therefore opened up a “religious vacuum . . . [which] offered Buddhism a golden opportunity to come to the fore” (p. 23). As the invocation of Mary Douglas (1921-2007) on p. 148 suggests, the second part of the book takes a loosely structuralist approach. It is con- cerned with deciphering and classifying the underlying elements of Bud- dhist death and memorial ritual, and with decoding the meanings behind those elements. Historical change and regional variation are recognized but de-emphasized in favor of a largely synchronous account of the patterns of practice in the mature danka system. Each chapter in this part maps out a model stage in the processes of death and extended mourning. Chapter four treats the issue of danka temple affiliation; chapter five, rituals surrounding death and internment; chapter six, memorial rituals for recently deceased individuals; chapter seven, extended memorial rituals for more distant ancestors; and chapter eight, the relationship between these rituals and the ie (“household”) system. Citing (among others) the founder of Japanese folklore studies, Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), the study iden- tifies continuities between Edo-era Buddhist memorial practices and older, autochthonous patterns. Here, memorial tablets (ihai; pp. 168-9), the notion of an intermediate stage between death and rebirth (Jpn. chūu/ chūin; Skt. antarābhava; p. 173), the annual Bon festivities for the ancestral spirits (p. 193), and the segaki ritual for succoring hungry ghosts (pp. 194- 5) are all analyzed as new Buddhist interpretations of old Japanese cus- toms. In this treatment, the shepherding of the dangerous/endangered spirits of the dead into the secure realm of the beneficent ancestors—com- monly regarded as the goal of Japanese Buddhist memorial ritual—is also revealed as an expression of indigenous ideals: “In the final analysis, ancestors were neither buddhas nor Buddhist deities: they were [Shinto] kami” (p. 182).