Japanese Religions on the Internet T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution BBaffelliaffelli eett aall 44thth ppages.inddages.indd i 112/1/20102/1/2010 99:28:11:28:11 AAMM Routledge Studies in Religion, Media, and Culture 1. Religion and Commodifi cation ‘Merchandizing’ Diasporic Hinduism Vineeta Sinha 2. Japanese Religions on the Internet Innovation, Representation and Authority Edited by Erica Baffelli, Ian Reader and Birgit Staemmler T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution BBaffelliaffelli eett aall 44thth ppages.inddages.indd iiii 112/1/20102/1/2010 99:28:36:28:36 AAMM Japanese Religions on the Internet Innovation, Representation and Authority Edited by Erica Baffelli, Ian Reader and Birgit Staemmler New York London T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution BBaffelliaffelli eett aall 44thth ppages.inddages.indd iiiiii 112/1/20102/1/2010 99:28:36:28:36 AAMM First published 2011 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of the Erica Baffelli, Ian Reader and Birgit Staemmler to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Pat- ents Act 1988. Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global. Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global. 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 hereaf- ter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trade- marks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Japanese religions on the Internet : innovation, representation, and authority / edited by Erica Baffelli, Ian Reader, and Birgit Staemmler. p. cm. — (Routledge research in religion, media, and culture ; 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Religion and sociology—Japan. 2. Internet—Religious aspects. I. Baffelli, Erica, 1976– II. Reader, Ian, 1949– III. Staemmler, Birgit, 1967– BL2011.S63J37 2011 200.952—dc22 2010033407 ISBN13: 978-0-415-88643-7 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-83122-9 (ebk) T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution BBaffelliaffelli eett aall 44thth ppages.inddages.indd iivv 112/1/20102/1/2010 99:28:36:28:36 AAMM Contents List of Figures vii List of Tables ix Note on Japanese Names, Terms and Transliteration xi Acknowledgements xiii Introduction 1 PART I Religion and the Internet in Japan: Overview and Concepts 1 Media and Religion in Japan 7 ERICA BAFFELLI, IAN READER AND BIRGIT STAEMMLER 2 Internet and Religion in Japan: Innovation, Representation and Authority 20 ERICA BAFFELLI, IAN READER AND BIRGIT STAEMMLER PART II Case Studies 3 The Situation of Japanese Traditional Buddhism in the Web 2.0 Era: Who Attacks and Who Guards the Religion? 39 FUKAMIZU KENSHIN 4 Preserving the Dignity of Shinto Shrines in the Age of the Internet: A Social Context Analysis 62 KUROSAKI HIROYUKI T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution BBaffelliaffelli eett aall 44thth ppages.inddages.indd v 112/1/20102/1/2010 99:28:36:28:36 AAMM vi Contents 5 The Shikoku Pilgrimage Online: Offi cial Sites, Promotion, Commerce and the Replication of Authority 80 IAN READER 6 Pilgrim Leadership Rendered in HTML: Bloggers and the Shikoku Henro 101 JOHN SHULTZ 7 Charismatic Blogger? Authority and New Religions on the Web 2.0 118 ERICA BAFFELLI 8 Caught in the Net: Celebrity Representation and Japanese Religion from Historical and Contemporary Perspectives 136 BENJAMIN DORMAN 9 Shaping Shamanism Online: Patterns of Authority in Wikipedia 150 BIRGIT STAEMMLER 10 Refl exive Self-Identifi cation of Internet Users and the Authority of Sōka Gakkai: Analysis of Discourse in a Japanese BBS, 173 TAMURA TAKANORI AND TAMURA DAIYŪ Conclusions and Issues for Future Research 196 ERICA BAFFELLI, IAN READER AND BIRGIT STAEMMLER Bibliography 201 List of Contributors 217 Index 219 T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution BBaffelliaffelli eett aall 44thth ppages.inddages.indd vvii 112/1/20102/1/2010 99:28:36:28:36 AAMM Figures 3.1 Honganji’s offi cial website. 45 3.2 Honganji Web TV. 46 3.3 The Jōdo Shinshū Studies and Research Center’s digital archive. 47 3.4 The ‘long tail’. 55 10.1 Word map of news sections in 2ch (higher than Jaccard coeffi cient 2.0). 186 T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution BBaffelliaffelli eett aall 44thth ppages.inddages.indd vviiii 112/1/20102/1/2010 99:28:36:28:36 AAMM T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution BBaffelliaffelli eett aall 44thth ppages.inddages.indd vviiiiii 112/1/20102/1/2010 99:28:36:28:36 AAMM Tables 8.1 Blog Postings Related to J-CAST News Article 144 10.1 “Belief” and “Importance of religious feeling” in Japan, Change in Time Series (%) 177 10.2 Interest in Religion Among Internet Users in Japan, Online Survey, 2006 177 10.3 List of Most Frequent Terms (Not Including Direct References to SG or Ikeda Daisaku) 184 10.4 Jaccard Coeffi cient Matrix of Frequent Words 185 T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution BBaffelliaffelli eett aall 44thth ppages.inddages.indd iixx 112/1/20102/1/2010 99:28:36:28:36 AAMM T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution BBaffelliaffelli eett aall 44thth ppages.inddages.indd x 112/1/20102/1/2010 99:28:36:28:36 AAMM Note on Japanese Names, Terms and Transliteration All Japanese names are in standard Japanese order of family name fi rst, followed by given name. Long vowels are indicated by macrons (ō, ū) except for words and names commonly used in English (e.g., Kyoto, Shinto). We have included Japanese kanji where their inclusion would be useful to readers who know Japanese; this does not mean that kanji have been provided for every Japanese term, name or institution mentioned in the book, but only for those that have direct and specifi c relevance to the topic at hand. When talking about religious institutions in Japan associated with its two main religious traditions, Shinto and Buddhism, we follow standard conventions and refer to Shinto institutions as ‘shrines’ and Buddhist ones as ‘temples’. T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution BBaffelliaffelli eett aall 44thth ppages.inddages.indd xxii 112/1/20102/1/2010 99:28:36:28:36 AAMM T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution BBaffelliaffelli eett aall 44thth ppages.inddages.indd xxiiii 112/1/20102/1/2010 99:28:36:28:36 AAMM Acknowledgements This book is the result of a collaborative effort. Cooperation between par- ticipants has previously taken place sporadically yet always fruitfully dur- ing panels at such conferences as the International Conference on Asian Studies in 2001 and the International Association for the History of Reli- gions conference in 2005, or through collaborative publication outputs. The basis for the book was the 12th European Association for Jap- anese Studies (EAJS) International Conference held in Lecce, Italy, on September 20–23, 2008 where the editors and one of the book contribu- tors presented the panel (Re)presentation: Religious Discourse and New Media in Japan. On June 11–13, 2009 an international workshop on Religion 2.0 in Japan: Shifting Patterns of Authority was held in Tübingen. The work- shop was hosted readily by the Department of Japanese Studies, University of Tübingen, and funded generously by the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation, the German-East Asian Forum of Sciences and Humanities and the Univer- sitätsbund Tübingen, and we gratefully acknowledge their help and sup- port. The chapters in this book originated as papers presented during that workshop, and the long discussions and exchanges that were possible during the workshop helped signifi cantly in enabling us to develop the papers into book chapters and to help us develop the wider framework of the book. T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution BBaffelliaffelli eett aall 44thth ppages.inddages.indd xxiiiiii 112/1/20102/1/2010 99:28:37:28:37 AAMM T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution BBaffelliaffelli eett aall 44thth ppages.inddages.indd xxiviv 112/1/20102/1/2010 99:28:37:28:37 AAMM Introduction Erica Baffelli, Ian Reader and Birgit Staemmler One of the most striking aspects of the rapid Internet growth of the past decade or so is that it has been a multi-lingual phenomenon. A vast Inter- net culture has developed, for example, in the Japanese language, and its growth continues to be exponential. Indeed, Japanese is becoming such a prevalent online language that a 2007 Technorati survey on the “State of Blogosphere” showed that the language most used in online blogs was Japanese (Sifry 2007). More recently, analysis carried out by Semiocast on the languages used in Twitter showed that while English (with 50% of messages) is still the most used language in this medium, Japanese is second with 14% (Wauters 2010). Japan is not an isolated case, of course. China (by 2010 Chinese has become the second most-used Internet language), Korea (which, at 77.3% in 2009, has one of the highest online penetration rates in the world, and the highest in Asia), India and other Asian countries are rapidly developing large and growing Internet cultures in their own languages (Internet World Stats online a; online b). The same, of course, can be said for languages such as Arabic, while in North American or Western European contexts, too, the multi-lingual nature of the Internet is such that any assumptions that the English-language- based Internet can be analysed as if it were representative of the whole have to be called into question.