Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan by Takashi Miura (review)

When I began reading Takashi Miura's book, Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan, the downtown streets of Portland, Oregon, where I live were filled nightly with thousands of angry protestors demanding a social and political revolution of sorts. Other streets throughout the city were lined with the tents of unhoused individuals and families, whether intentionally transient or victims of rising rents, gentrification, and a widening divide between rich and poor. By the time I finished the book, those same streets were also filled with thick orange smoke, hazardous to breathe, produced by almost a million acres of late summer wildfires across the state. And of course, at the time of this writing, a global pandemic has taken the lives of close to one million people worldwide. In short, the political, economic, and natural world seems ripe for renewal. It turns out that Miura's book—an insightful, carefully researched, and well-executed historical study of a class of Japanese divinities known as yonaoshi, or "worldrenewing" gods—is unexpectedly resonant in these tumultuous times.

Agents of World Renewal provides a captivating account of a different kind of religion than that which is the focus of the vast majority of scholarly studies. Miura offers us a fascinating picture, analyzed with insight and nuance, of the world of nonelite and largely extra-institutional religion in Japan. Examples of world-renewing movements from 1784 to around 1920 reveal a type of salvation or "renewal" which—contrary to the Protestantderived notions of religious liberation that tend to drive the development of our analytical categories—is both material and communal in nature. In this and other ways, it is an uncommonly valuable book that makes important contributions to our understanding of early modern and modern Japan, of Japanese popular religion, and of religion more broadly.

Miura's array of sources is truly impressive. Unbiased toward officially produced doctrinal documents that frequently guide religious histories, he is equally adept at analyzing artistic, literary, legal, and economic sources. The result is a well-rounded picture of a large number of local instances of the broader phenomenon of yonaoshi, across which important continuities can be observed.

One of the most impressive achievements of the book is Miura's careful unbraiding of emic and etic uses of key terms for understanding yonaoshi deities and movements. His close attention to indigenous meanings of yonaoshi presents a challenge to its predominant usage as a scholarly category. As Miura points out, in English-language scholarship, yonaoshi has a strong association with "millenarianism" (p. 7). Taking Norman Cohn's definition, Miura points out that millenarianism usually denotes "collective, terrestrial, imminent, total, and miraculous salvation" (p. 43).¹ In fact, yonaoshi has become such an influential second-order analytical category that scholars now attribute the label retrospectively to "uprisings that fulfill their analytical criteria" (p. 7), an academic move that overrides native understandings of what it means to "renew the world." This is particularly problematic once scholars no longer distinguish between the etic and emic uses of the term.

By presenting a series of examples of individual yonaoshi gods, and showing what power they had to renew the world in their original contexts, Miura delivers a careful genealogy of this particular function of divine authority in Japan. Importantly, in the majority of cases, those deified as yonaoshi gods in the early modern period brought about immediate economic improvement in a community's condition but "never directly challenged the prevailing world order" (p. 10)—a subversiveness that is implied in equating such movements with millenarianism.

Many richly detailed examples demonstrate the book's central argument. The opening vignette describes the apotheosis of the low-ranking samurai Sano Masakoto in 1784 into the "Great Illustrious Kami of World Renewal (Yonaoshi Daimyōjin)" (p. 1), an example which is further explored in the first chapter. Chapter 2...