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  • Celebrity Gods: New Religions, Media, and Authority in Occupied Japan by Benjamin Dorman
  • Inken Prohl
Celebrity Gods: New Religions, Media, and Authority in Occupied Japan. By Benjamin Dorman . University of Hawai'i Press, 2012. 304 pages. Hardcover $42.00.

Shimazono Susumu, one of the foremost researchers of contemporary Japanese religion, once remarked that the more he concerned himself with the New Religions, the more he got the feel­ing of merely scratching the surface. Benjamin Dorman's study Celebrity Gods, which depicts relationships between media, religion, and authority in occupied Japan, has a similar lesson for the reader: Dorman clearly and convincingly analyzes how media and government reports from that era, though still highly influential today, have not fully dealt with these emerging re­ligious traditions, their teachings, or their practices. The book characterizes those reports both as normative outlines differentiating "good" and "bad" religions and as attempts to formulate guidelines for being a good Japanese citizen. On a theoretical level, it has by now been widely accepted that discourses about religions are often heavily shaped by different normative inten­tions and preconceptions. Dorman's investigation in this volume of Jiu as well as Tenshō Kōtai Jingūkyō in occupied Japan offers a striking example in support of this assumption.

While Jiu has all but sunk into oblivion, Tenshō Kōtai Jingūkyō is still active today. Both of these New Religions were established in prewar Japan, went through a time of prosper­ity in occupied Japan, and were led by women: Jikōson (born Nagaoka Nagako, 1903-1984) was the driving force behind Jiu, and Kitamura Sayo, also known as "the dancing goddess" (odoru kamisama), established Tenshō Kōtai Jingūkyō. After Japan's surrender in 1945, the Occupation authorities, collectively known as SCAP, introduced unprecedented freedom of religion. The authorities' new policies created an environment that allowed for both the formation and establishment of many New Religions and the revitalization of many reli­gious organizations that had been suppressed until this point. This sudden and unexpected freedom led to an unfamiliar situation for many Japanese citizens: Should every form of religion be accepted? Was there even a common understanding of what "religious freedom" meant? How were these new religious developments seen and evaluated by the media, the government, the Occupation authorities, intellectuals, and ordinary people?

Through the lens of these two specific movements, Dorman identifies and analyzes the typical rhetorical and argumentative paradigms within the discourse on the New Religions. He thereby illustrates the reciprocal effects between the religious organizations and these [End Page 352] dominant discursive patterns as well as the tensions, insecurities, and many contingencies within the SCAP/Occupation policies toward New Religions such as Jiu and Tenshō Kōtai Jingūkyō. Dorman examines how Jikōson's and Kitamura Sayo's religious organizations were depicted by the print media-including newspapers, magazines, and books-and analyzes whether and how this media attention helped to contribute to their brief period of celebrity and notoriety. In addition, he analyzes other highly influential comments from the Japanese government, Occupation authorities, religious authorities, and intellectuals that were either spoken publicly or published in writing from the end of World War II to the early 1950s. The author analyzes, among other materials, primary source documents from Occupation archives and interviews with media workers and members of religious groups.

Dorman describes Jikōson and Kitamura Sayo as "celebrity gods," emphasizing their-as Max Weber would call it-"charismatic authority" as well as the media's decisive role in manufacturing their status as well-known and famous religious protagonists. For Dorman, the media's depiction of these two women can be described as a variation on the rhetorical patterns that had already been used to characterize founders and leaders of New Religions in prewar Japan. Both Jiu and Tenshō Kōtai Jingūkyō were touted in the media as the first postwar "models" of problematic religious organizations. This mode of description for new religious groups remains a predominant way of characterizing New Religions in Japan-for example Aum Shinrikyō-until this very day.

Dorman's attempt to trace the genealogy of typical ways in which New Religions have been...

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