Buddhism in Contemporary Japanese Society

The second of three reposts of papers from my first year of college that I remain proud of even now.

Buddhism in contemporary Japanese society

Nathan Turowsky

            Buddhism, especially forms of Buddhism imported from China and adapted to the Japanese cultural and spiritual consciousness, has played an important role in the history of the nation and people of Japan. From its nascence in Japan in the fifth century, through its legitimisation under the Suiko Empress, all the way up to its militaristic state lip service in the Taisho and early Showa periods, Buddhism has been the Boswell to Japanese history’s Johnson.

            But when one tries to investigate the role of Buddhism in Japanese society in the twenty-first century, one comes across a lot of confusing, often conflicting information. Religion in Japan generally is a bit of a moot point in that a bare majority of Japanese do not claim to follow any religion when asked (Fitzgerald); however, as Fitzgerald quotes in the same paper, Ian Reader asserts that:

…in reality Japanese people in general exhibit extremely high levels of religious activity and behaviour, and Japanese society and culture are intricately interwoven with religious themes (Reader 5).

            This presents a paradox in dealing with religion in general and Buddhism in particular. Many people have asserted that Buddhism is less a particular religion than a general framework of thinking in which religious behaviour and belief can grow (Merton). But there is no doubt that individual Buddhist sects have all the trappings of religion insofar as they have doctrines, sacred works (with the arguable exception of some forms of Zen), temples, clergy, and rites.

            The actual number of people in Japan who practise religion, as counted by the Culture Department, is something like two hundred and seventeen million, one hundred thousand (Kameyama 1). This is strange because Japan’s population is only a hundred and twenty million, meaning that at least some people had to be counted at least three times.

            The explanation that Kameyama gives for this is that this is a total of individual statistics from licenced religious organisations in Japan—Soto Zen, Nichiren, Rinzai Zen, Tendai, Shingon, various Shinto shrines, the Roman Catholic Church, et cetera. So if one person has a child who turns three years old (which is often celebrated at a Shinto shrine), gets married (often this will be at a Christian church), celebrates an ancestor festival at the shrine, then dies and is buried in a Buddhist ceremony all in the same year, that person will be counted three times, and this by no means an uncommon state of affairs.

            Kameyama states that the percentage of Japanese who answer ‘none’ when asked their religion is something like sixty-five per cent, which makes the statistics even stranger. This is because most Japanese people do not view attending religious ceremonies as actually being religious themselves (Suzuki ZJC), which to Westerners often sounds like some weird sort of Orwellian thing but makes perfect sense to most Japanese people—when one’s entire society is shot through with religious elements, practising or even believing in the religions concerned does not seem like going out of one’s way to be a religious person:

Another point that should be mentioned is, Nevis,(1998) said, that Japanese religion is not symbolized by prayer like Muslim does, people just practice religious behaviors in their daily lives. In Japan, religion is not separated from life. It makes Japanese people seem not to have religion to foreigner, and even to Japanese people themselves. People use many religious teaching according to their need (Kameyama 2).

            Kameyama also points out (3) the pervading sense of cynicism in God- or gods-oriented religious belief caused by the (to Japanese society) apocalyptic end of World War II. She discusses the idea also expounded by Suzuki throughout Zen and Japanese Culture that all of Japan’s culture—its nō, its architecture, its Man’yōshū, and as Hur discusses even its traditional street culture—flows from its religious traditions, to such an extent that it is impossible to cordon off part of Japanese society and say ‘Here! This is the RELIGIOUS part!’ Indeed, there is not even a separate, independently-developed word for ‘religion’ in the Japanese language:

A problem that occurs…is precisely what is understood when terms like ‘religion’ are used in Japan. The Japanese word generally used in surveys and elsewhere to denote ‘religion’ is shūkyō, a word made up of two ideograms, shū, meaning sect or denomination, and kyō, teaching and doctrine. It is a derived word that came into prominence in the 19th century as a result of Japanese encounters with the west and particularly with Christian missionaries, to denote a concept and view of religion commonplace in the realms of 19^th-century Christian theology but at that time not found in Japan, of religion as a specific, belief-framed entity. The term shūkyō thus, in origin at least, implies a separation of that which is religious from other aspects of society and culture, and contains implications of belief and commitment to one order or movement – something that has not been traditionally a common factor in Japanese religious behaviour and something that tends to exclude many of the phenomena involved in the Japanese religious process (Reader 13-14).

            So what does this Japanese view of religion in general mean for a study of Buddhism’s influence in Japanese culture? Obviously one can watch many Japanese media exports, from Kurosawa’s great Rashōmon up to well-known anime series like Utena or Noir (the latter of which also has Roman Catholic themes), and see Buddhist themes crop up at some point. Indeed, on some occasions Western Japanophiles such as Lafcadio Hearn have criticised Japanese media that don’t include Buddhist or Shinto themes for not being Japanese enough! Japan has well over forty thousand Buddhist temples and about twice as many Shinto shrines (Sansom) and to entirely eschew them, or the functions they serve, from even the most cursory depiction of Japanese life is often seen as simply not the done thing to do.

            Suzuki talks at length about Japanese aesthetics, reprinting in Essays in Zen Buddhism the well-known Ten Cow-Herding Pictures, which are of Chinese origin but which enjoy immense artistic and cultural prestige in many other countries, Japan included. These are the focus of an entire chapter (Suzuki EZB 363-376), in which Suzuki says about them that they are ‘doubtless another such instance [of aesthetically-themed parable], more elaborate and systematized than [the Parable of the Three Carts]’ (EZB 370-371). One can see similar stylisation even in novels written by Japanese expatriates, such as Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, which is all about ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

            If one takes the trope of Japanese people being as a rule irreligious at face value, one is going to find a lot of contradictory, confusing things in Japanese culture. This is why people like Reader, Kameyama, Suzuki, and Fitzgerald contend that Japan is a religious society ‘without recognising it’, though Fitzgerald’s article discusses what he sees as Reader’s mistake in discussing Japanese Buddhist and Shinto practises in terms of ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ at all.

            It is in any case true that even now Buddhist thought permeates most aspects of Japanese life. This makes Japan an oddity much like Britain in that, in Terry Pratchett’s words:

I was brought up traditionally Church of England, which is to say that while churchgoing did not figure in my family’s plans for the Sabbath, practically all the Ten Commandments were obeyed by instinct and a general air of reason, and kindness and decency prevailed. Belief was never mentioned at home, but right actions were taught by daily example (quoted in Brown).

            Keeping in mind that Britain is not Japan and Pratchett is not Suzuki, it becomes slightly easier to wrap one’s head around the sort of harmless self-congratulatory contradiction involved in the Japanese psyche when one reads things like this for comparison. Buddhism’s influence in modern Japan is ritually encoded, it is pervasive, and it is subtle.

Works Cited

Brown, Andrew. “The Anglican culture wars.” The Guardian 23 June 2008. guardian.co.uk. 13 Dec. 2008 .

Fitzgerald, Timothy. “‘Religion’ and ‘the Secular’ in Japan.” Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies Discussion Paper 3 in 2003 (July 2003): n/‌a; there is no print version of the journal. japanesestudies.org.uk. 13 Dec. 2008 .

Hur, Nam-lin. Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensōji and Edo Society. Cambridge (Massachusetts): Harvard University Press, 2000.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. An Artist of the Floating World. London: Faber and Faber, 1986.

Kameyama, Ruiko. “Japanese Sense of Religiousness.” Compass Online, The Yearly Magazine of Student Writing in English for Faculty of Policy Studies, Chuo University, Japan 6 (1999-2000): n/‌a; there is no print version of the journal. tsujiru.net. 13 Dec. 2008 .

Merton, Father Thomas. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions, 1973.

Noir. TV Tokyo. Tokyo. 6 Apr. 2001. Noir aired from the date given until 27 September of the same year. The citation refers to the entire programme as a coherent entity.

Rashōmon. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. 1950. DVD. Criterion Collection, 2006.

Reader, Ian. Religion in Contemporary Japan. London: Macmillan, 1991.

Sansom, George. Japan: A Short Cultural History. New York: Appleton-Century
     Crofts, 1962.

Shōjo Kakumei Utena. TV Tokyo. Tokyo. 2 Apr. 1997. Utena aired from the date given until 24 December of the same year. The citation refers to the entire programme as a coherent entity.

Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. Essays in Zen Buddhism. New York: Grove Press, 1949.

- - -. Zen and Japanese Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series LXIV, 1959.