Japan, Religion, History, Nation

Abstract

I connect the invention of Japanese ‘religion’ since the Meiji era (1868–1912) with the invention of other modern imaginaries, particularly the Japanese Nation State and Japanese History. The invention of these powerful fictions in Japan was a specific, localised example of a global process. The real significance of this idea that religion has always existed in all times and places is that it normalises the idea of the non-religious secular as the arena of universal reason and progress. The invention of Japanese ‘religion’ had—and still has—a significant function in the wider, global context of colonial capital and the continual search for new ‘investment’ opportunities. Meiji Japan illustrates, in fascinating detail, a process of cognitive hegemony, and the way a globalising discourse on ‘progress’ transformed the plunder of colonial sites into a civilising mission. The idea that there is a universal type of practice, belief or institution called ‘religion’ as distinct from government, ‘politics’ or ‘science’ was not only new to Japan. It hardly existed in England or more widely in Protestant Europe and North America until the eighteenth or even 19th century. The idea of a secular constitutional nation state was only emergent in the late 18th century with the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Most of Europe—including the colonial powers England and France—were still Christian confessional church states through most of the 19th century. The franchise was granted only to Christian men of substantial property, and denied to women, servants, wage labour, colonised subjects, and slaves. This critical, deconstructive narrative helps us to see more clearly the ideological function of the generic category of religion in the wider configuration of modern secular categories such as constitutional nation state, political economy, nature, history, and science. I also discuss the relation between History as a secular academic science, and the invention of ‘the Past’ in universal Time. I argue here that the invention of the Past by professional Historians has a significant role in transforming modern inventions such as ‘religion’ and the secular categories into the inherent and universal order of things, as though they have always been everywhere. I reveal this on-going process of ideological reproduction by close readings of some recent ‘histories of Japan’ and the way they uncritically construct ‘the Past’ in the terms of contemporary configurations.