In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Religion, Power, and the Rise of Shinto in Early Modern Japan ed. by Stefan Köck et al.
  • Matthias Hayek
Religion, Power, and the Rise of Shinto in Early Modern Japan. Edited by Stefan Köck, Brigitte Pickl-Kolaczia, and Bernhard Scheid. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. 304 pages. ISBN: 9781350181083 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book).

Religion, Power, and the Rise of Shinto in Early Modern Japan is an important contribution to the study of the relationship between religion and politics in the Edo period. Since the second half of the twentieth century, our understanding of the religious and cultural history of early modern Japan has been gradually refined. As W. J. Boot states in the introduction to his contribution to this volume, the idea of Confucianism dominating the intellectual and religious landscape would hardly find many proponents today (p. 103). The place occupied by the Buddhist clergy (including the proponents of the syncretic Shugendō), especially in the context of social control through the system of temple certification (terauke), as well as that occupied by aristocratic institutions (Yoshida, Shirakawa, Tsuchimikado, etc.) overseeing the servants of shrines (kannushi, miko, etc.) and other groups of sedentary or semi-sedentary religious practitioners (onmyōji, gannin, kanjin hijiri, etc.), is now well established. Likewise, the importance of the "Christian moment" in the establishment of the religious policy of the Tokugawa shogunate is also widely recognized.

This volume portrays these complex dynamics of religious politics in a way as nuanced as it is rich and illuminating. The issues of religious control exercised by the shogunate, in both its social and discursive dimensions, are examined from an innovative point of view—one emphasizing the attempt, through the institutional reforms of the 1660s and 1670s, to establish "domain Shinto" in a handful of areas, with shrines acting as a substitute for the terauke of Buddhist temples (pp. 2, 152). This perspective, inherited from the 2018 conference from which this book stems, is a common if somewhat tenuous thread linking many of the contributions and turning what would otherwise be a disparate collection of essays into a coherent whole. The book offers a welcome synthesis of the latest developments in research on the political control of religions in the Edo period, as well as new and stimulating ideas on certain aspects of this control. [End Page 125]

The fourteen chapters are unevenly divided into four thematic parts. The first part deals with the establishment of the structures that frame practices that are "authorized" (orthopraxy), while the second part concerns those that are not (heteropraxy), drawing the contours of "heresy" from the point of view of the shogunate. In these first five chapters the emphasis is on praxis, not doxa. Covering the two main aspects of the control system put in place by the bakufu, they are an essential prerequisite for understanding the latter two parts of the book, which are centered on the notion of "challenge," both intellectual and institutional. The third part focuses on what can be considered breaches in the ideological and religious orthodoxy of the bakufu, namely the discourses linking Shinto and Confucianism, which potentially challenge the shogunate's Buddhist-based religious policy, as well as the polemics around these discourses. The fourth part deals with the institutional challenges of religious control.

Chapter 1, by Nam-lin Hur, looks at the terauke system, which was initially conceived as an anti-Christian measure. Although this system, which was based on the registration of families with a particular temple, is well known, Hur's contribution points out the very gradual and often ad hoc nature of its implementation throughout the country. Even once the system had been generalized during the 1660s through its inclusion in the "Laws of Military Households" and directives delivered to daimyo (p. 25), there were significant differences in its application across the fiefdoms throughout the period. Nevertheless, as Hur's analysis clearly shows, this system played a structuring role once its initial object (Christianity) had been eliminated, and when it was challenged the aim of the reformers was to take this role away from Buddhist temples to the benefit of other actors linked to Shinto shrines.

The next chapter also...

pdf