Japan often fits awkwardly within narratives of modernity and orientalism. It was never economically dominated by Western powers; its rapid modernization made it a colonial power; and it often participated, through missions, foreign studies, and other political and cultural activities, in Western conversations about Japan. The same awkwardness is true with narratives on religion, which tend to stress the concept “religion” as a European imposition on other cultures. In his book, The Invention of Religion in Japan, Jason Ānanda Josephson, questions these narratives as he details 300 years of Japanese intellectual history, from Jesuit encounters in the mid-1500s to the modernization project of the Meiji period (1868–1912).

The book brilliantly weaves two genealogies of scholarship, making it deeply interesting to students of either one: studies examining the construction of State Shinto in the Meiji period as a nonreligious expression of modern Japanese identity with a generation of critical scholarship on the academic study of religion. This latter scholarship has upended the once comfortable assumption of religion as sui generis and universal to show it is a construction of modern Western provenance, covered in fingerprints that reveal Christianity as its template and imbalances of global power as its springboard. If all the author set out to do was to frame Japan as yet another example of how this Western construct came to define indigenous clusters of institutions, symbols, and rituals as “religion,” then he would have produced a thoroughly formulaic book. This was my expectation upon seeing the title, but fortunately Josephson dashed it. He eschews this now familiar academic story and instead, by making scholarly narratives fit centuries of Japanese primary sources rather than the other way around, has produced an elegant argument that religion (including its co-products, the secular and the superstitious) was not so much imposed on Japan, but rather, in the discursive gap created by Western missionary and diplomatic incursions, invented in Japan by the Japanese to serve the late nineteenth-century modernization project. In short, the book describes, in far-ranging discussions, how religion became the first modern manufactured product with the origin label “Made in Japan.”

In relating the history of this product, Josephson time and again uses Japanese data to place important caveats on critical discourses concerning religion. He begins by pushing outward on the categorical limits of Jonathan Z. Smith's valuable critique of religion as a scholar's category serving to demarcate, define, and interpret certain ethnographic and historical data as the analytical domain of religious studies specialists. For three centuries, however, previous to this category taking hold to produce the study of Japanese religion (to a degree another Japanese invention Josephson touches upon late in the book), other categories pertinent to the Japanese experience within the discursive gap were in play. The heresiographical category, for example, structured the discourse with Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where the Japanese relied on Buddhist heretical language to interpret the Christian other. The diplomatic category framed the discourse on religion in the political negotiations and treaties of the late Tokugawa and early Meiji years. This is when the modern term “religion” first entered Japan—not as philosophical inquiry but as political ploy to guarantee Japanese noninterference with Christian foreigners worshipping in Japan—and, as a diplomatic issue, it required not simply a Japanese response but a Japanese translation of the term, making it by diplomatic fiat a linguistic and treaty-bound reality. The legal category came to the fore in the establishment of the Meiji Constitution and its construction of religion—crafted along lines of contemporary European constitutions—as that of belief in a set of teachings (shinkyō) to which subjects had a right so long as participation in an organized religion (shūkyō) did not interfere with their civic responsibilities to the state, such as, in Japan's case, the public ritual performances constituting State Shinto. By framing religion as multiple, historically determined categories, Josephson shows not only the push from Western interlopers but also the pushback from the Japanese as agentive participants: coercing and persuading; taking advantage tactically of the historical moment among global actors; and, in degrees, controlling the terms of the debate as it shifted modes, figures, and historical circumstances during the centuries.

These terms included not only categories of religion but also those of nonreligion: the secular, the scientific, and the superstitious. Josephson details Japan's creation and use of these co-products as they relate to the “Shinto secular” (p. 132). The Shinto secular refers to the formation of Shinto in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a cultural species, distinct not only from Buddhism and, later, Christianity, but also from the concept of religion altogether. In its earliest formations, Tokugawa-period intellectuals imaginatively crafted Shinto to provide Japan not with a religion but with a national identity at home in, and indeed at the base of, modern science and statecraft—in part by reading Christianity and king out of available European scientific and political works and reading in kami and emperor. This laid the groundwork from which Meiji intellectuals and oligarchs created State Shinto as a “common-core-type secularism” (p. 133), by which Josephson means, in echoing Charles Taylor, that State Shinto, in conjunction with the Meiji Constitution, was the common signifier of modern identity to all Japanese subjects and thereby could trump the private religious pursuit of any of its subjects. However, the early intellectual formation, largely outside of European power, of what would become the Shinto secular—the Japanese state's embrace of the scientific modern, its creation of political space for religions, and its labeling of certain vernacular practices as superstitious and thus the opposite of science and undeserving of a space alongside religion—raises a fundamental caveat about contemporary models of secularism. These models understand secularism as Europe's attempt to replicate around the globe its own post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment dual construct of religious and nonreligious social spheres. The Shinto model, however, arguably represents another case of “Made in Japan.”