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  • Yasukuni Fundamentalism: Japanese Religions and the Politics of Restoration by Mark R. Mullins
  • Saitō Kōta
Yasukuni Fundamentalism: Japanese Religions and the Politics of Restoration. By Mark R. Mullins. University of Hawai'i Press, 2021. 270 pages. ISBN: 9780824889012 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book).

Despite the vast number of books and essays that have been written on it, Yasukuni Shrine remains a difficult subject for academic discussion. The difficulty stems first [End Page 170] of all from the complex history of the shrine from the Meiji period to the present. But another major factor is the violent political debate that the shrine still inspires in Japan and abroad. Discussions of Yasukuni tend to strongly reflect the political position of the debater, sometimes leading to an oversimplification of his or her viewpoint.

While some attempts at empirical historical research have been made in the interest of avoiding such problems, even they have not been able to wholly escape the ideology that inevitably surrounds Yasukuni Shrine. Especially challenging is the question of how to understand the ideology of rightists who are trying to revitalize the role of this shrine in current Japanese politics. Calling that ideology State Shinto would be one possible solution, but that only invites the more difficult question of what this academically and politically contentious term really means.

In Yasukuni Fundamentalism, Mark R. Mullins, who has published many important studies on religion in modern Japan, tackles these issues from the perspective of the historical sociology of religion. As reflected in the title, the key to this book is the concept of fundamentalism, which Mullins deploys to reveal the process by which the changes Yasukuni Shrine underwent during the Allied Occupation led to the rise of right-wing political forces seeking what they saw as restoration.

The introduction explains the author's framework for examining Yasukuni Shrine. Mullins focuses on the new relationship between nationalism and organized religion in contemporary Japan, seeing it as part of the rise of global religious nationalism. As a central example he cites the movement toward cooperation between the Shinto shrine community and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)—a push for desecularization or deprivatization that seeks to restore the official role that was taken away from Shinto by the policies of the Occupation.

This movement is sometimes understood as "an effort to restore State Shinto" (p. 20). However, Mullins himself does not choose to employ the concept of State Shinto, noting that the movement includes no claim to revive the prewar control of shrines under the Bureau of Shrines in the Home Ministry. He also observes that many in the Shinto community are not sympathetic to the movement. His argument and its rationale are solid.

Mullins contends, rather, that the contemporary Japanese neonationalist movement is best understood as religious fundamentalism, given that it emerged as a response to the confusion caused by modernization and secularization, and is a "politics of inclusion" that seeks to reclaim the "essential" beliefs and values of the past and enforce them on the entire population (pp. 23–24). Inspired by the discourse of the movement's critics, Mullins describes it as "Yasukuni fundamentalism" in acknowledgement of the symbolic meaning the shrine holds in the movement's goal of restoring an old Japan (pp. 25–27).

Part 1 (chapters 1 to 3) of the book delineates the postwar history of Japanese religious nationalism. Chapter 1, "Imperialist Secularization: The Restructuring of Religion and Society in Occupied Japan," details the establishment of the separation of religion and state in occupied Japan. As is well known, the Shinto Directive [End Page 171] issued by GHQ/SCAP in 1945 severed the relationship between Shinto and the state. This was a forced secularization by a foreign power and a typical example of what N. J. Demerath calls "imperialist secularization."1 Mullins notes, however, that the US State Department had been aware of the complex nature of "military shrines" such as Yasukuni from before the Occupation (pp. 38–39). The difficult decision of whether to apply the principle of freedom of religion to military shrines was left to the Religions and Cultural Resources Division of the Civil Information and Educational Section, which...

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