Women in Japanese Religions by Barbara R. Ambros (review)

Those of us who teach courses on religion in Japan share a constant frustration: depressingly few of the English-language readings we can assign to undergraduates discuss women. In fact, given the primary sources in translation and accessible secondary scholarship that make up most course syllabi, it is possible for a student to proceed through the entirety of Japan’s religious history and barely notice women at all. A course may mention a few female deities and monarchs recorded in the Nara period (710–94), brush past women courtiers in the Heian era (794–1185), and then miss out on women altogether until it reaches the Meiji era (1868–1912) and beyond. And, until recently, even treatments of modern Japanese religion have often resorted to what I have come to think of sacrilegiously as the “parade of bald guys” approach, namely the pernicious scholarly tendency to equate religious history with sectarian history and to then reduce sectarian history to the writings and biographies of male institutional founders. It is therefore likely that a student may leave a course with the impression that Japanese religion has always centered on male leaders and that women have contributed very little to it.

Thanks to Barbara Ambros, this pedagogical approach is no longer excusable. Novice students and experienced researchers alike will benefit from Women in Japanese Religions. Through economical yet compelling prose, Ambros guides the reader through the entirety of Japan’s religious history, from the earliest antiquity to the present. In lieu of rehearsing well-known overviews of Japanese history, she relays detailed accounts of the lives of women religious practitioners—clerical and lay, elite and nonelite—who constructed religious communities. Ambros troubles established narratives and easy readings by resisting a common understanding that, in Japan’s prehistory, women reigned only to be dethroned by centuries of patriarchy that have seen partial redress in the last century. This narrative, Ambros cautions, fails to take into account ways women have succeeded in realizing themselves as agents who effect sociopolitical change through religious engagement—even as they participate in, and even promote, misogynistic practices. Complexities abound as Ambros moves beyond sect- and founder-oriented perspectives to reveal Japan as a land defined by women who have contested Japan’s persistent gender gap into the present.

Chapter 1 begins with the earliest evidence of prehistoric human habitation of the Japanese archipelago, which includes female stone and clay figurines that suggest reverence for fecundity at the core of fertility rituals. However, the earliest textual evidence about Japan recorded in Chinese chronicles runs counter to biological determinism, Ambros notes, as these sources indicate that both women and men were understood to possess spiritual and political power. Chapter 2 takes us into the Kojiki (712) and Nihon shoki (720), government-sponsored chronicles that relay origin myths which challenge nativist understandings, as ideal images of women in these stories were clearly influenced by continental concepts of yin-yang cosmology, immortality cults, sericulture, and Confucian morality. Here and throughout the rest of the book, Ambros explores the extent to which the Confucian ideal of female deferral to men shaped, and at times ran counter to, Japanese social mores. Women in ancient Japan appear to have held property and exercised political authority on a routine basis; the practice of moving the imperial capital until the Nara era (710–94), for example, was motivated as much by seeking proximity to the emperor’s maternal line as it was driven by fear of a deceased sovereign’s angry spirit.

Chapter 3 covers the introduction of Buddhism to Japan in the sixth century, a familiar tale that Ambros reframes through accounts of nuns and female lay devotion. Women were central to the transfer of Buddhism from Paekche, as the first monastics ordained in Japan were women—an initiative that reflects important positions held by female shamans. There were six female monarchs within the first two hundred years of Japanese Buddhism, and three...