The "Greatest Problem": Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan by Trent E. Maxey (review)

Writing in 1934 in Christ and Japan, Kagawa Toyohiko 賀川豊彦 (1888–1960), a well-known Christian minister, socialist labor leader, and pacifist, described his approach as a Christian to visiting state Shinto shrines. Prefacing his remarks by noting the incoherence in the Japanese Department of Education's separation of religious sect Shinto from non religious state Shinto, Kagawa continues,

Therefore, the department insists that these [state] shrines are not of a religious character. Nevertheless, through the existence of these monument-shrines, the forms of ancient, Asiatic Shamanism are preserved. Yet it is true that the shrines of state Shinto are the monuments and tombs of men who rendered conspicuous service for the state. In this respect they differ not at all from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and the Cenotaph in London. Therefore when visiting them, I remove my hat and bow in reverence, just as I do when I visit my parents' graves.¹

Kagawa makes further remarks denouncing the resistance to participation in various state Shinto rites by foreign Christian missionaries:

Whenever I visit the Great Shrine of Ise I do not worship Amaterasu-O-Mikami as a goddess. I do, however, remove my hat and bow reverently. The guard on duty finds no fault with this. The educational authorities ask nothing more. Some missionaries, however, look upon this as idol worship and clashes occur. These missionaries may find satisfaction in ignoring Japan's whole past history and in destroying memorials of the nation's builders.²

The genealogy of the specifically Japanese construction of the secular and religious that underlies Kagawa's statements is carefully rendered by Trent E. Maxey in his book, The "Greatest Problem": Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan. Historians of Japanese religions, as well as those concerned with the comparative study of how the mutually imbricated secular-religious dyad was constructed around the globe during the modern era, will find much of value in Maxey's study. The book provides an indispensable guide for English readers through the legal, political, and intellectual debates that culminated with the adoption of a national constitution that, despite vigorous lobbying from Buddhists, Shintoists, and others, adhered to the principle of limited religious freedom instead of enshrining a specific state religion. With clarity, Maxey describes how Japanese officials adopted a policy of state impartiality—that is, freedom of religion—rather than a policy of the "tolerant state," in which an official religion is adopted "while granting religious toleration" (p. 87).

To date, Maxey's book is the most comprehensive guide in English to the plethora of rapidly changing laws, administrative offices, and attitudes involving religion in Japan. This book, which concentrates on legislative history and the construction of the governmental apparatus for administering religion, complements the analysis of the creation of religion and the sacralization of the court presented in such other works as Takashi Fujitani's Splendid Monarchy, Helen Hardacre's Shintō and the State, Jason Josephson's The Invention of Religion in Japan, James Ketelaar's Of Heretics and Martyrs, and Orion Klautau's Kindai Nihon shisō to shite no Bukkyō shigaku 近代日本思想としての仏教史学.³

Maxey begins his study of the development of state policies toward religion in Japan with his analysis of the "crisis of conversion" that the growing presence of Christianity precipitated during the Bakumatsu and Meiji eras. Maxey (chap. 1, esp. pp. 49–54) effectively utilizes conceptual tools based on Gauri Viswanathan's analysis of religion in the British Raj, where religious conversion was viewed as a grave threat to the stability of Indian colonial society.⁴ Fearful of the spread of Christianity and with it, "republicanism" and other pernicious foreign ideas, Japanese government leaders tried to restrict the practice of Christianity to the foreign settlement areas of the treaty ports, while prosecuting Japanese such as the Urakami Christians in Nagasaki who were bold enough openly to practice their faith during the Bakumatsu and early...