This “state of the field” survey of early modern and modern Japanese religious studies reveals the breadth and range of research in those fields. The books under review are not part of a monolithic academy of Japanese religious studies, but almost all respond in some measure to longstanding academic questions about colonialism, Orientalism, and religion in Japan. All six authors attend to questions of how centuries of colonialism and Orientalism have affected both Japanese and Western scholarship on Japanese religions. The following essay is an attempt to explore how this recent selection of academic literature on Japan contributes to more complete, if still preliminary, answers to these longstanding, vexing questions.

Barbara Ambros's Women in Japanese Religions is a self-proclaimed corrective to previous studies of Japanese religions that were conducted with patriarchal intent, either in mind or in deed. Ambros's intent is to counter a Marxist-inspired narrative of women being controlled by economic forces that have them playing a subservient role to men who are also not in charge of their religious activities. She further objects to Orientalist stereotypes that show all Asian women as passive subjects throughout Japanese history, completely used as instruments that support and help enforce Asian-male patriarchy. Instead, Ambros advocates scholarship that focuses on examples throughout Japanese religious history in which individual women—and also classes, groups, and types of women—may have taken positions within the existing patriarchal religious traditions with their own views and visions of intent and purpose, that is, their own agency, in mind.

Although the subject matter of Ambros's research is not always taken from modern or early modern Japan, the theory and method are thoroughly a product of Japan's modern encounter with Western ideas of religion. The book is made up of nine chapters, organized chronologically, all replete with examples of Japanese women's religious activity. Although these periods are all generally characterized by a continually growing tendency toward male dominance and control of important societal religious roles, Ambros demonstrates that there was also a continually developing panoply of women's popular roles and service in religious professions, including participation in the late medieval religious option of Christianity introduced by Catholic missionaries.

It is in chapters 6 through 9 that Ambros applies modern theory to modern Japanese examples of women's religiosity. The standard portrayal of Japanese women in religion during the early modern period usually has them absorbing and serving as propagators of a Confucian male hierarchy that did not allow them agency, but instead placed them in subservient roles. The higher the social status, the more rigidly this hierarchy of male dominance was imposed to thwart authentic female agency. Ambros proposes that this general understanding should be nuanced, as she finds examples of more privileged women who have some advantages for individual expression in religious activity. Furthermore, Ambros highlights examples that suggest that there were also differences in opportunities for women depending upon geographical region and social class. The rise of the development of new religions in the late Edo period also provides well-documented evidence of female agency in religion, most notably in the example of Nakayama Miki and Tenrikyō.

From the latter half of the nineteenth century, as Japan transformed into a modern nation-state, religions in Japan were redefined and women's roles within them also underwent notable changes. Ambros finds that most of the changes forced women into set societal roles, which she calls the “good wife, wise mother” ideal. This once again served to restrict women from engaging in roles that would grant them some form of individual agency, or even the semblance of agency that might be afforded male participants in Japanese religious organizations. In effect, Ambros concludes that the patrilineal household became hegemonic among women of all regions and classes, and those women—for example, those who were active in forming or even participating in outlawed or merely societally discouraged new religions—were all subject to suppression and various forms of societal disapproval or punishment. Even in the postwar era, when such new religious movements gained greater legal freedoms, they were still open to public criticism through the developing new media outlets, negatively impacting female participation and agency.

Ambros optimistically concludes that the postwar period saw the start of a movement toward women's enhanced status and greater equality. Still, this start was not achieved without societal tension and oppositions, especially reactions by existing patriarchal religious institutions. In general, Ambros assesses the last two decades, the so-called “Lost Decades,” to be a time of genuine flux for gender and religion in Japan. First of all, the Aum sarin attack served to intensify the critical eye that had been cast on religion in general starting from the early modern period's Western-inspired emphasis on rationalism and scientific method. Still and all, Ambros finds that gender roles and demographics have been changing in all areas of Japanese society, and religions have not been insulated from those societal changes. While many religious organizations have responded to the new social forces with conservative resistance, secular spiritual opportunities have appeared, which many women are finding to be attractive alternatives to formerly religiously confined impulses and activities.

Atsuko Hirai's Government by Mourning is on the simplest level of understanding a description of the Tokugawa shogunate government's implementation of decrees of mourning and abstention upon the death of the ruling families of Japan during the early modern period. Hirai further highlights ordinances concerning Confucian-style bans on music-making by explaining their implementation and faithful observance as evidence of the central government's far-reaching power and legitimacy. Just as Ambros's work was meant as a corrective to earlier studies on Japanese women and religion, Hirai's work is meant as a corrective to a relatively recent academic narrative in early modern Japanese history that asserts that the Tokugawa government did not have centralized political authority.

The assertion that Tokugawa feudal leadership was strong and centralized was once the dominant narrative in the previous generations of Japanese political science scholarship in English, starting with the work of the great English Japanologist Sir George Sansom. In other words, Government by Mourning is an effort to use newly translated, previously overlooked historical evidence to remake the case for the conclusions of this earlier scholarship in opposition to the recent upstart narrative. On the most complex level, the evidence provided in the chapters of this book seeks to establish a greater extent of centralization of the Shogun's power over that of the regional daimyo lords, as well as the central government's power to control the general populace.

The book presents the history of mourning laws in Japan as they were developed from Chinese precedents and applied in aristocratic circles before the samurai class came to power in the twelfth century. The narrative moves on to show how these laws were adopted by the warrior Minamoto no Yoritomo when he received the title of shogun from the emperor. The following chapters focus on the early Tokugawa period to detail how the first Tokugawa family shoguns implemented their own rules and regulations on mourning after they rose to power. The central chapters of part one contain information from the previously unmined regional documents now made available in English by Hirai to explicitly reveal the extent of the mourning and abstention practices, and their effects on early modern Japanese society. Part two of Hirai's book continues to provide information from the volumes of regional document collections regarding the practices of mourning performed pursuant to the issue of governmental ordinances. The relatively abbreviated third part of Hirai's work shows how the politics of mourning was manipulated by the leaders of the Meiji Restoration.

Hirai has provided extensive analysis of previously undervalued sources to make a case for a Tokugawa government that held more centralized power than it sometimes has been granted in the recent decades of scholarship on early modern Japanese politics. Hirai further asserts that by doing this she has made a case for national mourning traditions as a vehicle for creating unity among the Japanese populace and creating an awareness of community in the early modern period in a Japanese state entity larger than a single daimyo's domain. In other words, Confucian mourning rites originating in China and passing through classical and feudal iterations became an institution that would help lead to a stable and unified understanding of a modern nation-state. Hirai demonstrates how this process started in the Tokugawa period, transitioned to the Meiji period, and continued its function of forming ideas of traditional Japanese identity on into the twenty-first century.

Jun'ichi Isomae's book Religious Discourse in Modern Japan is a history of the field of Japanese religious studies starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Western concept of religion was first introduced in Japan. Isomae asserts that the term “religion” translated as “shūkyō” came to mean something quite different in Japanese practical usage than the usual Protestant idea of a private realm of the spiritual inner life of each individual. He further claims that the idea of religion in Japan started out lacking the Christian monotheist-centered search for universality and so has had to find a way to include within it a concept of a nonuniversal native religion and an ethnocentric divine imperial institution.

The book is a collection of work completed over a number of years and covers a range of varied topics, but is unified by its focus on the intellectual history of Japanese religious studies. Part one is concerned with explaining the “formation of the concept of religion” in Japan. The explanation begins with the first introduction of the English word “religion” in the first treaty discussion on the opening of Japan to the West. The beginnings of intellectual speculation on Japanese religion inside Japan and out are painstakingly explicated, and the attendant political discussions concerning how religion was to be understood and treated in Japan are documented in more detail than has been available previously in English. The thoughts and writings of the earliest professors and departments that taught Japanese students and produced original Japanese research on religion are also highlighted more fully than ever before. Part one ends with Isomae's version of the history of the development of Japanese Buddhism from its native traditional Japanese expressions to a new, potentially universal, rationally adapted, Protestant-leaning Western Buddhism ready for export to Europe and America.

Part two of Isomae's book offers a detailed history of the establishment and development of the religious academy in Japan. This part traces the history of the major figures associated with the development of religious studies in Japan. It also shows the importance of developments in the Western academies and their theories of religion that influenced the development of the Japanese academy. These chapters reveal how tendencies to promote essentialist understandings of religion, popular during the early twentieth century, also affected Japan as those ideas rose to dominate the Western academies. However, Isomae astutely demonstrates how Japan's political circumstances, especially its particular context as the only Asian colonial power, which was then defeated in the Second World War, sent Japanese religions and religious studies on a completely different course than their Western counterparts. Isomae adroitly analyzes developments in Japanese religions caused by the singular political circumstances before, during, and after the Second World War. Part two ends with the most recent changes in Japanese religious studies, in particular, those sparked by the Aum Shinrikyō incident, as well as the explosion in the past couple of decades of popular New Age ideas promoting the importance of spiritual, if not religious, experience.

Part three of the book is apropos of the “and Shintō” in the title of this work, that is, it looks as if it were an afterthought. As an afterthought, it succeeds due to its introduction of a wealth of new information in English about Shintō studies and the system of State Shintō that was developed and practiced in the years between the Meiji Restoration and the end of the Second World War. We learn, in an ironic twist arising from Japanese religious studies academia and international treaty politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that Shintō studies was not always understood as discourse on religion, and so was not always included or excluded by the Japanese academy, in that way befitting its inclusion in Isomae's book on Japanese religions as “and Shintō.”

This book is important in that it reveals a history of the Japanese religious studies academy in previously unavailable detail and clarity. As such, it critiques and offers new insights into the changes that traditional Japanese religions have undergone, and explains what sparked those changes. Perhaps most important of all is that Isomae encourages readers to ruminate seriously on the vexing problem of describing and categorizing previously unknown elements of religions that do not correspond to Eurocentric Christian examples. The role and effect of Western concepts on Japanese religions and religious studies are of central concern in all six books constituting this present cross-section of the state of the study of Japanese religions, but that concern is made clearest in this particular work.

Jan Leuchtenberger's Conquering Demons begins with the expulsion of Christian missionaries and examines how popular literary accounts of Christianity in the Edo period focused on deceit, hypocrisy, greed, decadence, and the ultimate defeat of Christian ambitions to conquer Japan. The book analyzes the creation, development, and spread of three specific anti-Christian narratives from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These narratives touted the threat of Christian conquest of the Japanese islands by greed-driven, depraved Christian foreigners employing demonic magic. These narratives were repeatedly introduced into popular circulation, supporting the argument that Christianity was a dangerous practice, and further suggested that hidden proponents of that practice should be considered as treacherous menaces. The continual recapitulation of these narratives was carried out by those who believed that the threat of Christian subversion was still viable and warranted popular vigilance.

Leuchtenberger explains the function of the anti-Christian texts as “othering,” in this case the creation of a foreign “other” to be feared, as opposed to a native “self” to be revered. Leuchtenberger characterizes these narratives as likening the Japanese to a sacred people from a sacred land, while the Europeans were likened to demonic beasts from inferior lands. Christian missionaries were described as masters of magical medicine and were meant to bring to the Japanese imagination of that time the locally visible yamabushi. The yamabushi in Japan had been historically employed as exorcists skilled in healing rituals that were thought effective in driving off demons, who were thought to be the instigators of otherwise unexplainable illnesses leading to death. Christianity was not seen as a novel revelation of supreme divinity, as Christians would have it touted, but rather as just one more set of deviant practices based on the worship of kami-like divinities referred to as Jesus or Mary and known for magical power and provenance, not as examples of Christian virtue.

Chapter 2 renders the earliest chronicle of this genre of Christian arrival and expulsion, Record of the Padres, in extended detail. This work of seventeenth-century provenance contains first some Japanese explanations of the doctrine of the Catholic Church and is followed by Japanese stories of the founding of the Catholic Church in Rome. Both topics are described in such an extremely unflattering manner that no seventeenth-century Christian, Japanese or European, could possibly find faithful, or ever recognize as a serious attempt at relating a true account of Catholic doctrine and history. The narrative ends with all remaining Christian missionaries facing some form of ignominious undoing, which is inevitably followed by tortured apostasy, or sometimes conversion to Japanese native religion.

Chapters 3 and 4 provide detailed examples of subsequent versions of Christian arrival and failure narratives. The various iterations of these publications are charted past the end of the Edo period and into the early years of the late nineteenth-century Meiji period, allowing readers to speculate on the popular effects of this anti-Christian literature in Japan during and after the time when the practice of Christianity was not just frowned upon but actually punishable by torture and death.

Conquering Demons also provides students and scholars of Japan with sixty pages of annotated translations of the most representative of this genre of early modern Japanese literature. A further contribution to the field is an appendix listing, dating, and explaining the dozens of variants, and their availability throughout Japan during the Edo period before the first printed versions became available in the early Meiji period. In a sense, this book, the first four chapters, the translation, and the appendix and bibliography encapsulates the entire process of a scholar's attempt to offer original research in the field of early modern Japanese history and literature, and as such, should be particularly useful to graduate students with similar ambitions. Leuchtenberger's virtue lies not in making precarious theoretical claims, but rather in demonstrating that thorough and competent translation, annotation, and analysis does not have to mean tedium for the reader.

Buddhism, Unitarianism, and the Meiji Competition for Universality by Michel Mohr is the second of these six books under review to feature Japanese reactions to attempts to bring Christianity to Japan. Mohr further focuses on Unitarian missionary attempts to present Christianity as a viable option in the milieu of new intellectual options in Japan's Meiji period. The Buddhism that appears in the title is the Western Protestant–influenced Buddhism that was being formulated in that same time period, not to be mistaken with older Japanese Buddhisms, for example, those that Barbara Ambros wrote of in Women in Japanese Religions. That is to say, Mohr's Buddhism is the Buddhism made popular in America by D. T. Suzuki, which is best known for the practice of meditation for insight, while Ambros's Buddhisms were perhaps best known for the practice of exorcism for healing. Western Orientalism and Japanese reactions to that Orientalism, which is a topic important to both Isomae's book and Leuchtenberger's book, is another central issue in Mohr's work.

In the late nineteenth century, some Japanese intellectuals sought to examine how Western religious options might be useful in modernizing Japan, or at least helpful in bringing a semblance of Western civilization to the religious landscape of Japan. This willingness to experiment led to the invitation of Unitarian missionaries from America, in hopes that their ideas of “universality” and “universal truth” could bring progress to Meiji Japan. The invitation was sent in the sincere hope that it would increase Japanese standing in the eyes of hegemonic Western nations by adopting elements of their supposedly superior and advanced cultures. Mohr explains that the American missionaries' efforts at proselytizing were thwarted on the whole by their own agendas. The “universality” they offered was, in effect, a particular Western Christian “universality” that in the end failed to gain enough popularity among the Japanese populace.

Mohr's book is comprised of three distinct parts. In part one, the context of the times that made both Japanese intellectuals and American Unitarians believe the stage was finally set for the introduction and acceptance of a Christian religion purportedly founded on universal truth is described. It was believed that Unitarianism could be shown to include the truths of Japanese religions, particularly new philosophically explained Buddhist truths. Through newly discovered letters written by the Unitarian missionaries and their leadership in America, Mohr explains how and why within a few decades of the first missionary work in Japan popular Japanese support for even this supposedly more inclusive form of Christianity wavered and the mission was dissolved. His source evidence shows that this end was due in part to the particular circumstance whereby Unitarianism in Japan initially became associated with the native socialist workers' movement. When the workers' movement and the universalists' interests diverged and the Unitarian leadership sought to disassociate from the movement, Unitarianism on its own could not find sufficient support from the Japanese populace. Furthermore, personal problems among key leadership figures along with the wavering support from American officials in the headquarters led to changes in the missionary leadership in Japan. The new leadership in Japan thwarted all attempts to reinvigorate the mission, hastening its inevitable failure. Mohr also argues that American Christian bias favoring a universalist understanding of religion was undeniably intrinsic to the missionary project, and in essence this particular Christian “universalism” undermined itself.

The rest of the book tells in detail the story of Japanese intellectuals' interest and involvement in the search for rational religion and universal truth as essential elements of their efforts to catch up to more technologically advanced Western nations. Mohr explains how Buddhist philosophy provided a number of doctrinal sources that could be understood, or re-understood, in the light of Western rationalism. He provides examples of Japanese students, teachers, and other intellectual leaders active in finding or claiming similarity between Christian and Buddhist ideas in efforts to uncover universal truths. In these later sections, the details of the last years of the Unitarian mission and its struggles and differences with the Japanese labor movement are closely explained, and also the work of Theosophists and the Zen priest Shaku Sōen are introduced to demonstrate how other alternative universal ideas of new religions or reconstructed traditional religions, Buddhism in particular, were developed and propagated during that time period.

The Western half of that story of New Buddhism has been explained in detail, often centering on Colonel Olcott's Buddhist catechism or D. T. Suzuki's efforts to popularize Zen in the West. However, the information provided in Mohr's book is extremely useful for filling out the story of the Japanese half of that creation of New Buddhism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mohr's book also has more detailed information regarding the intellectual activity in Japanese university settings, as well as the work of intellectuals within the labor movements of the time. Mohr ends with an epilogue that suggests new directions for research and also his hopes for further examination and reevaluation of the universalist project in academia.

Rebecca Suter's Holy Ghosts is not a specialized monograph for the early modern Japanese religious studies academy. Nonetheless, it is an interesting and useful contribution to that field, due to its focus on twentieth-century Japanese artistic reconstructions of the symbols, images, and stories of the so-called “Christian Century” in the Edo period. In a move similar to Mohr's book, Suter's book recognizes that twentieth-century Orientalism and reactions to those Orientalizing forces in Japan caused the creation of new representations of a supposed native or essential Japanese identity. Also similar to Leuchtenberger's contribution, Suter's book examines literary creations that defy Western descriptions of the meaning and purpose of Christianity and Christian missionary activities. All six of these books rest on the assumption, or point to the conclusion, that Christianity has not succeeded to establish itself religiously or spiritually in Japan. However, Suter's book displays how Japanese cultural appropriations of Christian symbols and Christian imagery devoid of doctrinal integrity have become popular tools and props of literary and visual artists, and continue to evolve into unique Japanese creations in the contemporary period.

The so-called “Christian Century” in Japan began with the Jesuit Frances Xavier in the sixteenth century and ended slightly less than one hundred years later with the official government prohibition of the Christian religion and the oppression of all remaining Christians. Suter's first chapter reviews both elite and popular literature for representations of Christianity into the twentieth century. She concludes the chapter by stating that by the early twentieth century Christianity functioned as a metaphor for modernization and the changes in Japanese culture brought on by the power of Western cultural influence.

Suter's chapter 2 highlights the interest in the exotic stimulated by Christianity in Japan during the early twentieth century, particularly in Japanese who were not practicing Christians. Some of the best scholarship in this book can be seen in the analysis of Akutagawa Ryûnosuke's series of short stories, specifically concerning his treatment of Christian topics. Suter summarizes Akutagawa's literary renditions of Christianity and their impact on Japan starting in the seventeenth century. She reveals the layers and depths of his ironic and unflattering commentary, and his incisive critique of Christian hypocrisy and irrationality. Her analysis and treatment of Akutagawa's creative literary skills and political engagement is an impressive achievement.

Chapter 3 continues the analysis of Akutagawa's stories but focuses on episodes of recanting and apostasy. This project necessarily includes the Christian Endō Shûsaku's work on that topic in Chinmoku, as Suter's analysis of Christian influence continues into the postwar period.

In chapters 4 and 5, Suter continues to explore the use of Christian stories and symbols in Japan. Particularly notable is the popularity of symbols from the Shimabara rebellion, the last stand for Christianity in Japan in the seventeenth century. Suter ends by attempting to relate the use of particular Christian figures in Japanese culture to changing attitudes in Japanese society directed toward Western culture during different decades of the postwar period.

Overall, Suter's book attempts to relate the differing artistic representations of Japanese modern culture to the prevailing societal tensions caused either by feelings of nationalism, xenophobia, social crisis due to international economic difficulties, or questions of queer identity and spirituality deeply influenced by Western culture. In effect, the central aim of Suter's analysis is to detail how the so-called Christian Century has been continually mined for symbols, images, and stories. Just as Suter so effectively explained how Akutagawa's literature on Christian topics based on the Christian Century addressed his anti-Orientalist concerns, she argues that postwar writers and illustrators continue to mine that rich, partly historical and now also highly imaginative resource in order to express their own doubts and concerns. The Japanese artists among the current generation use their own versions of Christianity to propose change and advocate new directions in Japan's continually renegotiated cultural relationship with would-be hegemonic Western culture.

One simple and final takeaway from Suter's work for the Japanese religious studies audience is that for a great many Japanese, for a great many centuries, Christianity and its symbols do not refer to religious or spiritual salvation, but rather to its allure and power, and often to the hypocrisy, the unworthy insubstantiality, and certainly the danger associated with losing Japanese identity due to an excessive faith in and devotion to Western culture.

Almost all of these six authors are keen on the prospect of correcting narratives they find to be insufficiently explanatory or neglectful of colonialism, Orientalism, or feminist intersectionality. They define new starting and ending points for their more accurate narratives, as well as new ways of structuring those narratives, or of evaluating and valuing the actions and the actors. Almost all of these examples of recent scholarship assure the reader that the authors themselves are aware of their own academic choices and value judgments. Nevertheless, they all provide evidence and argument to justify and substantiate the insistence that their version should be the one to garner the most attention from today's academic audiences.

In contrast to Ambros's work, which argues for a forward-looking theory and method but offers little in the way of new sources of research, Hirai's work is heavy on the use of previously underrepresented historical sources while seeming to suggest that scholars would be better served by looking back to earlier twentieth-century models of scholarship when it comes to theory and method. In actuality, even though the documents being highlighted are being used to argue a new point, this kind of history through the study of documents and the assertion that the Tokugawa shogunate should be understood as a strong, centralized form of government are both reminiscent of past generations of scholarship.

On the other hand, Ambros opposes past generations of hegemonic Marxist and patriarchal scholarly narratives of Japanese religion, focusing on individual agency and the power of human intention. This scholarly argument is, of course, not new, but its appearance in Japanese religious studies is clearly a sign of marginal voices on the rise. Ambros's work is not intended to introduce significant new sources or research accomplishments, but rather to advance the argument that the field would be well-served to attempt to review the volumes of existing sources from the point of view of gender studies.

Isomae's book, like Ambros's, is a collection of previous work assembled so as to create a narrative of the field. Although the parts are not new, the complete narrative of the field of Japanese religious studies from the first use of the term “shūkyō” as a translation for the word “religion” to the contemporary work on new religions and secular spirituality is an important contribution for student and scholar alike, especially those who rely solely on English-language sources for their information. Isomae's book is detailed and interesting, and his theoretical breadth of understanding is unparalleled.

Leuchtenberger's, Mohr's, and Suter's books express many of the same concerns about similar subject matter, mainly Christianity in Japan. Comparing and contrasting their individual contributions is extremely revelatory for one whose interest lies in better understanding the issues that scholars in the early modern field feel must be dealt with when the subject of Christianity's impact on Japan is raised. For instance, the history of the Christian Century in Japan has created waves of literature concerning specific events of that period. Both Leuchtenberger and Suter find that this literature brings up questions of self and other, Orientalism and self-Orientalism, and the political implication of anti-Christian rhetoric, while at the same time saying virtually nothing about actual religious belief and practice or the fulfillment of individual spiritual desires or needs.

Mohr's book too has much to say about the topics of self and other, Orientalism, and identity politics as part of the influence of Christian missionary work in Japan. In that way, it shares concerns with Suter's work because the contemporary time periods of their studies somewhat overlap. However, Mohr is more concerned with religious and philosophical cause and effect, while Suter emphasizes changing political and social contexts from which Christian symbolism is appropriated by Japanese artists without concern for religious or philosophical continuity of meaning or intent. Leuchtenberger's, Mohr's, and Suter's books all examine the effect of Christian incursions into Japan, but come to different conclusions on how those incursions affected early modern, modern, and contemporary Japanese identity formations.

All six of these books have much to recommend them. What is most evident is how scholarship in English on Japan has been determined by changing Western expectations of Japan, as well as by hegemonic Western preconceptions and stereotypes. As a result, large parts of these studies are dedicated to creating the distance needed to appreciate the Japanese “other,” while also accepting partial responsibility for the very existence of that “other.”