In Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868), Buddhism held an anomalous position. It was not formally a state religion, it played no part in government rituals, and the Tokugawa government seems to have been little influenced by Buddhist principles. Yet all families were required by law to be registered in a Buddhist temple, and everyone was buried in a Buddhist funeral. Fees for these services, institutionalized in the danka system of “the funerary patron household or individual who supports a temple,” were in fact the main source of income for Buddhist temples. This practice directly resulted from the anti-Christian policies of the Tokugawa regime, which required Japanese to be certified by a temple to prove they were not secret Christians. As Nam-lin Hur demonstrates in Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan, the danka system's “economy of death” met the needs of both the government and the Buddhist establishment.

Hur, a historian at the University of British Columbia, examines several major themes: how the government utilized Buddhist institutions for the suppression of Christianity, leading to the development of the danka system; how the system transformed Japanese religious practice by making funerals and ancestral rituals Buddhist in character; and how under the danka system “the paradigm of Japanese Buddhist death was imposed, contested, and negotiated among the danna [alms-giving] households, Buddhist temples, and the state—a process that eventually resulted in the backlash of the Shinto funeral movement” (28).

The danka system originated in the evolving policies of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa shogun, and his predecessors and successors, toward Christianity. Despite an early tolerance of Christianity motivated by the desire for western trade, by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Japan's rulers became increasingly concerned that Japan's political and religious order, based on a synthesis of Shinto and Buddhism, was incompatible with Christianity. The new religion, inseparable from Spanish and Portuguese expansion, had no place in Japan, the “land of the gods” and “the country of Buddha.” After the consolidation of the Tokugawa shogunate in the early seventeenth century, Japan expelled foreign clergy and eventually all Spanish and Portuguese merchants as well. Authorities forced the apostasy of most Japanese Christians and even some European missionaries, although tens of thousands of Kakure Kirishitan (hidden Christians) practiced their religion clandestinely. Korobi Kirishitan—literally “turned-over Christians”—swore oaths, ironically in the name of God and Mary, to renounce their faith. Anti-Christian writings, such as Hayashi Razan's Hai Yaso (Rejecting Jesus), provided intellectual support to the campaign against Christianity. Inoue Masahige, an official immortalized as the antagonist of Endo Shusaku's novel Silence, was particularly effective in using persuasion as well as coercion in suppressing Christianity. (Readers of the novel will be surprised to learn from Hur's book that Inoue was eventually dismissed for “being senile,” for being in fact too soft on Christians.)

Certification by Buddhist temples eventually became the centerpiece of government policies toward Christianity. This policy greatly augmented the power of the central government. The task of suppressing the religion resulted in bringing the formerly autonomous feudal domains and their rulers more directly under the control of the shogunate. Moreover, turning Buddhist temples into instruments of social control brought them, too, more directly under government regulation. At the same time, the privileges won by Buddhist temples ensured them an income and “often spawned spoilage, corruption, and even exploitation” (88).

Decades ago, George Elison (Jurgis Elisonas) described the anti-Christian cultural milieu of the early Tokugawa era in Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973). Japanese scholars such as Miyazaki Kentaro and Shimizu Hirokazu, among others, have examined the underground Kakure Kirishitan. Tamamura Fumio, one of Hur's mentors, pioneered in the study of funerary Buddhism in the Tokugawa era. Hur's thoroughly researched work, including over 150 pages of reference matter (notes, bibliography, and glossary of Japanese characters), builds on these earlier studies. He places the Tokugawa regime's anti-Christian policies in the context of Tokugawa Buddhism in both its institutions and its practices. Moreover, as Hur demonstrates, the campaign against Christianity—which by the eighteenth century was not even a negligible threat to the political and religious order—was central to the government's expansion of power. The suppression of Christianity, “subjugating the entire populace to Buddhist death,” provided a pretext for social control. Indeed, Hur writes, “Anti-Christianity was the cornerstone of Tokugawa Japan's statehood” (364).

Hur also argues convincingly that Buddhist funerary services and ancestral veneration reinforced the household as the basis of the Tokugawa social order. Moreover, Buddhism offered “peace in this world” and “a good place in the next life” in a way that Christianity might have but Shinto and Confucianism could not. But the danka system also shaped Tokugawa Buddhism by emphasizing its social and familial role over individual devotion and morality. This in part explains the state-sponsored shift toward Shinto in the late nineteenth century. But, as Hur shows, Tokugawa funerary Buddhism was absorbed into the “family state” ideology of Meiji Japan. This tradition, originating in the early Tokugawa attempt to eliminate Christianity, continues to be central to Japanese religious practice.