Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan by Jolyon Baraka Thomas (review)

The study of religion and American popular culture has blossomed in recent years, with a flood of fascinating scholarly publications on the presence of the sacred in pop music, media and celebrity culture, sports, comic books, film, and so on. In the case of Western studies of Japan, however, we find only a trickle of such works on Japanese popular culture, despite the fact that it is a potent form of “soft power” today throughout the world. Jolyon Baraka Thomas’s new book is a welcome contribution to an area of study that, as he correctly notes, is still in its infancy. This short book explores how manga and anime authors, artists, directors, and the consuming public treat religion in ways ranging from “piety to playfulness” (p. 155). Thomas is absolutely correct to challenge scholars who would dismiss manga and anime as evidence of religious degeneration or decline. Rather, his key premise is that entertainment media like manga and anime can make religion relevant to a modern mass audience—at the very least to entertain, but also, at their best, to express artists’ deeply meaningful spiritual or religious ideas.

Thomas sets out to answer what initially seemed to him a simple question: “Why—in light of Japan’s evident and often fervent secularism—were manga and anime with apparently religious themes so numerous and so popular?” (p. viii). It is an excellent question, and, as Thomas realized during the course of his research, a daunting one, not only because of the vast number of works requiring analysis but because of the amorphous character of what he calls contemporary Japanese “vernacular religion” (p. 13–14). This term usually refers to the way religion is lived and experienced in daily life apart from its more institutionalized and formalized aspects. Thomas argues that the term avoids applying the problematic categories of “folk” and “popular” religion to what goes on in manga and anime.

However, exactly what Thomas means by “vernacular religion” remains obscure.¹ Is he referring to something like Peter Brown’s “cult of the saints” in late Christian antiquity? Brown makes a persuasive case that the high festivals of the Christian martyrs served as a common religious framework for both rich and poor, and for ecclesiastics and laypeople alike. They all enjoyed these occasions—singing, dancing, and getting drunk—without feeling the need to imitate the austere moral way of those martyrs of God.² These festivals, while not “religious” according to their ecclesiastical detractors, pointed to a new religiousness tied to a particular notion of the sacred; the participants experienced the saints as holy figures who, through God’s miracles, not only triumphed over suffering but transformed pain into its opposite. Ordinary Christians in late antiquity experienced the sanctification of pleasure as they enjoyed the spectacle of the saints’ festivals.³

That said, is Thomas arguing that one locus of the religious in modern Japanese culture is to be found in modern mass entertainment media like manga or anime? The answer is yes. When ecclesiastical authorities and lay entertainers create and use “media written in accessible language (and frequently augmented with images) to encourage familiarity with religious vocabulary, imagery, and concepts,” they are, in his view, creating religion. Thomas notes that manga and anime, as forms of modern mass art, are powerful today because they can translate “formal religious ideas to quotidian (but not necessarily plebian) contexts” (p. 14). Here the comparison to Christian saints’ festivals becomes intriguing. The religious experience of watching anime and reading manga can move beyond traditional views to new notions of the sacred. Like saints’ festivals, manga and anime, while greatly entertaining, thereby provide meaningful religious content for their audiences. However, unlike saints’ festivals, there is no unitary cultic core to which manga and anime works are connected. So, what does Thomas mean by “vernacular religion”?⁴

In his introduction, “Religious Frames...