Christianity Made in Japan: A Study of Indigenous Movements

Chapter 1. Christianity as World Religion and Vernacular Movement

1 CHAPTER ONE Christianity as World Religion and Vernacular Movement I N THIS BOOK I am concerned with what happens to a world religion when it is transplanted from one culture to another. By “world religion” I mean those missionizing religions of the world, such as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, that regard their religious teachings to be “truths” of ultimate signi-³cance for people of all times and places (truths, in other words, that transcend the boundaries of tribe, clan, and nation). For most of my adult life I have had a keen interest in the cross-cultural diffusion of these world religions. My interest is undoubtedly related to the fact that when I was still quite young my parents transplanted me—along with the gospel—to Japan. What was at one time no more than a vague, subconscious attempt to make sense of my cross-cultural childhood experiences and sense of marginality has evolved into my vocation. CHRISTIANITY MADE IN JAPAN 2 It is no accident, therefore, that my studies in this ³eld have focused on the two-way religious traf³c between Japan and North America. Two decades ago I began by considering the transmission of Japanese Buddhism to North America,³rst through a study of Zen Buddhism and the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This initial exploration prompted me to consider the transplantation of Pure Land Buddhism (Jõdo Shinshð), a tradition that accompanied Japanese immigrants to the United States and Canada during the past century. Since returning to Japan over a decade ago I have been studying various aspects of the transmission of Western Christianity and its encounter with Asian religion and culture. Just as the transplanters of Japanese Buddhist traditions have experienced considerable dif³culty in adapting an essentially familybased religious tradition to the individualistic religious culture of North America, Christian missionaries to Japan have discovered that their message regarding faith and practice is dif³cult for most Japanese to accept or, perhaps, even to understand. Some of the “natives” in both cultures are currently engaged in the reinterpretation of these transplanted religious traditions. It is this process of appropriation—of making something foreign one’s own—that I am concerned with in this study of Japanese Christianity. Scholars have recently referred to these universalistic world religions as global cultures, drawing attention to the dialectic between the “universal” and “particular” in the process of cross-cultural transmission. Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe, for example, explain that a global culture is a tradition that travels the world and takes on local color. It has both a global, or metacultural, and a local, or situationally distinct, cultural dimension. As global cultures, the aim of universalistic world religions has been to spread a religious metaculture that was perfectly capable of remaining identi³able while being absorbed by local cultures.1 While it is often quite dif³cult to distinguish or disentangle the “metaculture ” (universal elements) from the local variations or indigenous forms, these plural cultural expressions can be designated as part of a larger world religion because one can identify “striking continuities over time and space.”2 These “continuities,” of course, are based on the fact that speci³c sacred texts (the Bible, Koran, or Tripitaka) record the central experiences and revelatory events that represent salvation for humankind. In the case of Christianity, Andrew Walls suggests that it is possible to identify such common features, as “continuity of thought about the ³nal signi³cance of Jesus, continuity of a certain consciousness about history, continuity in the use of Scriptures, of bread and wine, CHRISTIANITY AS WORLD RELIGION AND VERNACULAR MOVEMENT 3 of water.”3 The fact that Christians often disagree about the signi³cance and interpretation of these features need not concern us here. While the category “world religion” is useful for referring to various religious traditions that share certain common features, it must be recognized that it only represents an ideal or abstraction. Religion only exists in the vernacular, or, to adapt a biblical phrase, the “treasure” only exists in “earthen vessels” (2 Corinthians 4:7). There is no such thing as a “pure” transcultural expression of Christianity or any other world religion—there are only particular cultural manifestations. Wendy James and Douglas Johnson accurately point out that Christian identity, as a confession of faith, does not bring with it or produce cultural and social uniformity; but because, as a personal experience, it...