Pure Land Buddhism in Modern Japanese Culture (review)

Apart from a few notable exceptions, scholars of Japan not in the field of religious studies have paid little attention to the established Buddhist denominations after the Tokugawa period. English-language surveys of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japanese art, history, and literature lack in-depth analysis of the role of religion, particularly the established Buddhist denominations. If one looks at the now, admittedly, somewhat dated Cambridge History of Japan, for example, it is notable that the two volumes covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries do not have a single chapter devoted to religion, let alone Buddhism. More recent one-volume surveys of Japanese history do not do a much better job dealing with the topic. Historians are not unique in this regard. As Patricia Graham points out in her valuable recent survey of Buddhist art from the seventeenth century to the present, Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600–2005 (University of Hawai'i Press, 2007), most scholars of Japanese modern art and architecture have been equally dismissive of traditional Buddhist visual culture and the Buddhist sources that continue to inspire independent, secular artists.

Elisabetta Porcu's Pure Land Buddhism in Modern Japanese Culture brings much-needed attention to Buddhism's impact on Japanese culture in the twentieth century. Although the main purpose of Porcu's work is to highlight the ongoing importance of Pure Land Buddhism, particularly Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism, in modern Japanese culture, her book also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Buddhism in literature and the arts. In this fine book, Porcu explores why one of the largest established Buddhist denominations in Japan, Jōdo Shinshū (True Pure Land) Buddhism, has been overlooked as a vital cultural force in Japan. Porcu limits her discussion of Pure Land Buddhism's influence to literature, "creative" (visual) arts, and traditional arts (primarily tea ceremony), so entitling the book Pure Land Buddhism in Modern Japanese Culture is somewhat misleading. Many other vital cultural arenas (for example, politics, economics, and social organization) in which Pure Land Buddhism has played a role receive no mention. Nonetheless, Porcu does an excellent job revealing the contributions of Jōdo Shinshū to literature and the arts in modern Japan. Given the relevance of this subject for most Japanologists, it would be a shame if the high price of the book and the apparent narrowness of the topic prevented a wide readership.

Porcu builds on the writing of scholars such as Galen Amstutz¹ who have attempted to explain why scholars have paid so little attention to Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism, despite its size and prominence. Porcu writes not as a partisan of Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism but as one hoping to utilize the methods of the Study of Religion (Religionswissenschaft) to complicate mono-causal, essentialist understandings of modern Japanese culture that portray Buddhist creative arts and, particularly, traditional arts such as tea ceremony and flower arranging as solely the by-products of Zen Buddhist influence. In her useful first chapter, "Creating Images of Japanese Buddhism and Culture," the author traces how Orientalist and Occidentalist sentiments shaped the reconceptualization of Japanese Buddhism that took place during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like many other scholars of this subject, Porcu places blame for this monolithic understanding of the traditional arts and the use of Zen as a synecdoche for an unchanging Japaneseness at the feet of Japanese intellectuals D. T. Suzuki, Nishitani Keiji, Hisamatsu Shin'ichi, and Abe Masao, along with many others. In this chapter, Porcu provides a thorough summary of two decades of scholarship concerning the ways these proponents marketed their repackaged Buddhism as the foundation of Asian culture and Zen as a free-floating, decontextualized system of thought that had influenced every aspect of Japanese cultural life.

The chapter does not depart from the conclusions of scholars such as Bernard Faure, James Ketelaar, Robert Scharf, and Judith Snodgrass with regard to the ways Japanese Buddhism was used to promote Japanese cultural nationalism. However, the author's command of Italian...