Christianity Made in Japan: A Study of Indigenous Movements

Notes

217 Notes References to works listed in the General Bibliography at the conclusion of this volume (pages 261–65) appear in the notes in abbreviated form, and Japanese titles listed there are given here in their English translation only. Chapter 1: Christianity as World Religion and Vernacular Movement 1 Hexham and Poewe, New Religions as Global Cultures, 41, 43. 2 Robert W . Hefner, “The Rationality of Conversion,” in Robert W . Hefner, ed., Conversion to Christianity, 5. 3 Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History, 7. 4 “Introductory Essay: on ‘Native Christianity’,” in Wendy James and Douglas H. Johnson , eds., Vernacular Christianity, 12, emphasis added. 5 Wilbert R. Shenk, “Toward a Global Church History,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 20/2 (1996), 50. 6 “Converting Buddhism to Christianity, Christianity to Buddhism,” Japanese Religions, 22/2 (1997), 112. 7 The Diffusion of Religions, 13. 8 This is the de³nition provided by Morioka Kiyomi in “A Conceptual Examination of the Indigenization of Foreign-Born Religions,” 52. Morioka makes a basic distinction between “acculturation” and “indigenization,” explaining that in studies of acculturation the central focus or concern is to what extent the native culture has changed under the inµuence of a foreign religion; studies of indigenization, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with the nature and degree of change in the foreign-born religion through contact with native religion and culture. 9 An important elaboration of this point may be found in Sanneh, Translating the Message. 10 Tradition Old and New (Exetor: The Paternoster Press, 1970), 17–18. 11 André Drooger, “Syncretism: The Problem of De³nition, the De³nition of the Problem ,” in Jerald D. Gort, Hendrik M. Vroom, Rein Fernhout, and Anton Wessels, eds., Dialogue and Syncretism: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 16. 12 Maruyama Masao, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, trans. Mikiso Hane (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1974), 331. 13 See his now classic text, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969). 14 This term I have borrowed from Winston Davis’s Japanese Religion and Society, 31. NOTES TO PAGES 8–12 218 15 See, for example, 9HÑ] Watanabe Shõkõ, Õûu[î [Japanese Buddhism], (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1958), 102–32; and Morioka, “A Conceptual Examination of the Indigenization of Foreign-Born Religions,” 55. Some of the dif³culties involved in the transplantation of Japanese Buddhism to individualistic North America are closely related to the fact that it is tied to this cult of the dead; see my earlier study, “The Organizational Dilemmas of Ethnic Churches: A Case Study of Japanese Buddhism in Canada,” Sociological Analysis 49/3 (1988), 226. 16 For a concise introduction and statistics on representative major New Religions in Japan, see Shimazono’s “New Religious Movements,” in Mullins et al., Religion and Society in Modern Japan, 221–30. For more details and an extensive bibliography, see Dictionary of New Religions, edited by Inoue Nobutaka. 17 Jan Swyngedouw, “The Christian Churches and Heretical Movements,” in Kumazawa and Swain, eds., Christianity in Japan, 1971–1990, 184; emphasis added. 18 For an important examination of indigenization within the United Church of Christ in Japan (Nihon Kirisuto Kyõdan), the largest Protestant denomination in Japan, see David Reid, New Wine. 19 Robert J. Smith, “Something Old, Something New,” 722. 20 Regarding the earlier case of transplantation from China, Albert M. Craig explains that “the eighth and ninth centuries were the time of Sini³cation, when Japan was deeply inµuenced by Chinese culture and institutions.… Then, as the embassies to China came to an end, Japan entered a period of digestion or indigenization, when the borrowed institutions were simpli³ed and reshaped to ³t Japanese society and its needs.” See his “Introduction” to Albert M. Craig, ed., Japan: A Comparative View (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 6–7. Chapter 2: The Social Sources of Christianity in Japan 1 This present exercise ³nds parallels in the classic work of H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929). Over half a century ago, Niebuhr identi³ed transplanted immigrant churches from Europe and new forms of American sectarianism as the primary social sources of denominational subcultures in the United States. One of Niebuhr’s central concerns was with the “Americanization” of the immigrant churches, similar to the process we refer to as indigenization in this study. Although the development of indigenous movements in Japan certainly resembles some forms of sectarianism in America, it should be noted that...