Religion and Society in Nineteenth-Century Japan: A Study of the Southern Kanto Region, Using Late Edo and Early Meiji Gazetteers (review)

Anything written here about Helen Hardacre's latest book has to be filtered through the fact that the reviewer is not in the same field as the author. I am a historian; Hardacre is in the field of religious studies. But both of us have examined aspects of the lives of ordinary people in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji periods in the Kanto region. Disciplinary boundaries may be hard to cross, but those lives were lived out locally, in myriad interpenetrating dimensions, and our shared subjects—mostly nonelites in Musashi and Sagami Provinces—lived simultaneously in all of them. If historians don't pay attention to the connections between these dimensions, who will?

Religion scholars like Helen Hardacre will. After all, religious studies is, like history, a "big tent" discipline that must take cognizance of scholarship in a variety of fields to make sense of its subject. Hardacre takes this disciplinary breadth one step further by, ironically, restricting the spatial boundaries of this work. Rather than tracking the development and thought of particular religious sects all over Japan, she focuses almost entirely on two areas containing a little over 100 villages each: Western Tama County in Musashi Province, and Kōza County in Sagami Province. Her emphasis on locality allows her to examine how a great variety of religious sects and transsectarian organizations interacted to provide the framework of religious activity for local inhabitants.

This work relies very heavily on two extensive sets of documents: official gazetteers compiled in the Tokugawa era, and their Meiji-era successors, compiled between 1872 and 1885. The Tokugawa-era gazetteers were assembled by the Chiri Kyoku (Geography Bureau) of the Shōheikō (official academy of the shogunate) for the provinces of Musashi (Shinpen Musashi fudokikō, compiled in 1826) and Sagami (Shinpen Sagami-kuni fudokikō, compiled in 1841).

Hardacre uses the sections of these thorough yet underutilized documents that apply to Kōza County and to Western Tama County and combines them with surviving or reconstructed segments of the post-Meiji Restoration gazetteers, called collectively Kōkoku chishi. The latter were compiled from 1872 to 1885 with, alas, a bit less historical detail than their Tokugawa-era predecessors. Most were destroyed in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and were reconstructed thereafter. After 1885 the gazetteer, and the rich detail included therein, was replaced by modern statistical studies. Reconstructed or not, enough segments of the Meiji-era gazetteers relating to Kōza and Western Tama Counties exist to further Hardacre's main purpose: to provide a thoroughgoing sense of how local shrines and temples affected and were influenced by religious practice in the region, and how these changed in the wake of the transition to the Meiji era. Hardacre supplements the gazetteers with other documents, including materials relating to specific shrines, temples, and pilgrimage sites, but the gazetteers are clearly her main sources.

This book is in most ways relentlessly local, but Hardacre is fully aware that some local insights may prove to be generalizable. There is no need to complete exhaustive studies of every local entity in Japan to reach broader conclusions, but a decent sampling is needed to bridge the gap between hypothesis and conclusion. Hardacre begins the process with two regional entities with the clear hope that others will follow her lead, take up gazetteers applying to other regions, and construct a more comprehensive, bottom-up picture of religious practices in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan.

Two sites are better than one. The two regions are close to each other and comparable in number of villages, temples (220 in Western Tama, 230 in Kōza), and shrines (162 in Western Tama, 164 in Kōza) but very different in other ways. Western Tama villages were mostly products of land reclamation projects...