The doctrinal problem

Japanese law contains no explicit constitutional clause that grants parents the right to provide their children with religious education according to their convictions. This absence, however, should not be mistaken for the absence of constitutional relevance. Article 20 protects freedom of religion; Article 13 protects individual dignity and liberty; Article 24 concerns family relations under the principles of dignity and equality; Article 26 concerns education; and private laws assign parents responsibility for upbringing for the benefit of the child (Constitution of Japan, arts. 13, 20, 24, 26; Basic Act on Education 2006, art. 10; Civil Code, art. 820). The difficulty is not that Japanese law entirely lacks materials from which a doctrine might be developed, but that these materials have rarely been assembled into a coherent constitutional account of religious upbringing within the family.

In practice, Japanese legal discussion has tended to address religion and childhood indirectly. Religious disputes in schools are often analyzed through educational administration, school discipline, or accommodation. Family disputes involving religion are frequently subsumed under parental authority, child welfare, or domestic relations law. Consequently, religious freedom appears clearly when the state directly restricts worship, association, or institutional religion, but becomes blurred when the same freedom is exercised through ordinary family life and the transmission of belief across generations.

That fragmentation has normative results. If parental religious education is not identified as a protected constitutional interest, then official interventions may be justified in vague terms such as “public welfare,” “sound upbringing,” or “ordinary development” without confronting the religious-freedom question directly. In that setting, the boundary between legitimate child protection and covert evaluation of religious content becomes unstable.

Why this omission matters

The omission is especially significant in a society where religious life is often described in relatively low-intensity terms and where constitutional discourse has not been shaped by a strong tradition of church-state conflict comparable to that of some Western jurisdictions. In many religious communities, however, family-based transmission of faith is not peripheral but central. It includes prayer, ritual participation, scriptural instruction, dietary discipline, choices about friendship and leisure, understandings of illness and suffering, and narratives about salvation, obligation, and moral identity. These practices do not become legally irrelevant merely because they occur within the household (Nishihara 2013: 65–67).

If the law does not recognize this domain as one in which freedom of religion is exercised, it will struggle to explain why some state interventions are impermissible even when they are motivated by concern for children. The constitutional question is not whether the state may ever intervene. Of course, it may in several cases. The question is on what basis, and with what limits.

A defensible constitutional approach must begin from two propositions. First, the state may not assess the truth, plausibility, or social respectability of religious doctrines as such. Second, the state may regulate parental conduct, including religiously motivated conduct, when that conduct causes or creates a serious risk of concrete harm to the child. Those propositions are simple in form but difficult in application. Their importance lies in preventing legal analysis from collapsing into either of two errors: a romanticization of parental freedom that ignores children’s vulnerability, or a child-protection discourse so open-ended that it authorizes suspicion of minority religiosity as such (Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989; Committee on the Rights of the Child 2013).

Japanese case law and its limits

Japanese case law does not yet provide a full doctrine of parental religious education. It does, however, reveal several constitutional strands that are relevant to such a doctrine.

The first is the limited but important recognition that educational matters are not reducible to state discretion alone. The Asahikawa Academic Achievement Test Case arose from a nationwide academic testing program and formed part of the postwar constitutional debate over where authority in education ultimately lies. It was not a case about religion or parental religious education, and its relevance here should, therefore, be stated narrowly. The Supreme Court did not treat education as a field committed exclusively to governmental authority; rather, it addressed the limits of state educational administration in light of the child’s development and the prohibition of “undue control” over education. The case does not establish a parental veto over state education. For present purposes, its significance is more modest: it shows that Japanese constitutional law does not understand educational authority in purely statist terms, leaving conceptual space for constitutionally relevant interests held by actors other than the state (Supreme Court of Japan 1976).

The second strand appears in the so-called Kobe College of Technology Kendo Case. There, a Jehovah’s Witness student refused compulsory kendo practice for religious reasons, repeatedly requested alternative assessment such as written reports, and was nevertheless denied any substitute measure. The case is especially important because the conflict did not remain at the level of a temporary classroom disagreement. The student’s refusal led to failing evaluations, non-promotion, and eventually expulsion, making the institutional burden on religiously motivated conduct unusually severe. The Supreme Court did not formulate a general constitutional right to exemption from curricular requirements, nor did it hold that every sincere religious objection must be accommodated. Its importance lies elsewhere. The Court treated the institutional pressure placed on religiously grounded conduct as constitutionally serious and stressed that the school should at least have considered whether alternative measures were possible before imposing such grave disadvantages. It, therefore, points beyond a narrow understanding of religious freedom limited to belief, worship, or profession alone (Supreme Court of Japan 1996).

The third strand appears in the jurisprudence of blood transfusion. Again, this line of cases does not directly decide whether parents may refuse treatment on behalf of minors for religious reasons, and its limits should be stated clearly. The leading Supreme Court case dealt with an adult Jehovah’s Witness patient who had firmly refused a transfusion, while the hospital followed a policy of transfusing if necessary to save life. The patient had agreed to undergo surgery on the assumption that her refusal of blood transfusion would be respected, but the hospital had an internal policy of administering a transfusion if it became medically necessary. The central legal problem was, therefore, not parental control over a child’s medical care, but whether the patient had been given sufficient information to make a meaningful decision about treatment. The Court’s central holding was not that religion automatically prevails over medical judgment, but that the physicians failed to explain that policy in advance and thereby deprived the patient of the opportunity to decide whether to undergo the operation on those terms. The case is relevant here not because it supplies a ready-made rule for parental control over children’s medical care, but because it confirms that Japanese law treats religiously grounded decisions about the body, conscience, and moral integrity as matters of legal seriousness rather than private eccentricity (Supreme Court of Japan 2000; Yanase Reference Yanase2022: 107–108).

Taken together, these cases do not yield a complete doctrine of parental religious education. But they do suggest a more modest and important conclusion: Japanese constitutional law already contains resources for recognizing that education, conscience, and religiously shaped ways of living cannot be collapsed into state policy alone. What remains underdeveloped is the family dimension of that concern, and thus the doctrinal framework needed to explain both why parental religious formation deserves constitutional regard and why it may nevertheless be limited where the child’s rights and welfare are seriously endangered.

The child’s position

Any attempt to derive parental religious education from Article 20 must address a likely objection. Does such a doctrine subordinate the child to parental authority? It need not. On the contrary, the doctrine should be formulated precisely to avoid that result (Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989, arts. 3, 12, 14; Committee on the Rights of the Child 2013).

The child is not merely an object of parental conviction but is also a constitutional subject. Japanese law, read in light of international human rights norms, increasingly recognizes that children possess interests and rights of their own: in life, health, education, bodily integrity, dignity, participation, and the gradual development of autonomy. That is no less true where religion is concerned. The child may eventually affirm, reinterpret, distance from, or reject the inherited faith. Law must leave room for that developmental trajectory (Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989, art. 14).

For that reason, parental rights to religious education should be understood as relational rather than proprietorial. The right does not mean ownership over the child’s conscience. It means that parents, as primary caregivers, possess a presumptive liberty to introduce the child to a religious tradition and to organize family life in accordance with it, so long as they do not inflict serious harm or foreclose the child’s basic developmental interests.

This formulation also helps clarify a persistent confusion in the current Japanese debate. The fact that some adults later describe their childhood religious experiences as coercive or traumatic is normatively important and sometimes legally decisive, but it does not follow that all strong religious upbringings are presumptively abusive. Retrospective testimony must be taken seriously without being converted into an automatic legal rule against intensive religion.

The present policy environment

Against this background, it is important for legal analysis not to convert shūkyō nisei into a self-evident legal category. As recent scholarship has emphasized, the term circulates across journalism, advocacy, and academic debate with different scopes and normative implications (Kojima 2024: 9–16). Some uses broadly denote people raised in religious families; others presuppose experiences of coercion, stigma, or developmental harm. This article, therefore, does not attempt to stabilize the term sociologically. Its narrower concern is doctrinal: how Japanese law should distinguish, when claims of harm are raised, constitutionally protected family-based religious formation from conduct that warrants state intervention.

The related term “spiritual abuse” has also been used in scholarship, sometimes with an overlapping scope (Koch and Edstrom Reference Koch and Edstrom2022). This article does not treat it as synonymous with “religious abuse,” however, and retains the latter term because it is the terminology most directly relevant to the post-2022 Japanese policy debate examined here.

The current policy environment illustrates both the necessity and the danger of legal intervention. The necessity lies in the existence of cases involving serious harm: physical punishment, threatening eschatological terror, refusal of medically necessary treatment, extreme restrictions on education or social contact, or systematic financial exploitation that destabilizes the child’s ordinary life. In such cases, the state not only may intervene; it may be constitutionally obliged to do so (MHLW 2022).

The danger lies in expanding administrative language beyond such cases. Once terms such as “religious abuse” are defined loosely, they can become containers for official unease with strict doctrine, social separation, non-majoritarian parenting styles, or demanding forms of communal life. At that point, the state’s attention shifts, often implicitly, from harmful conduct to disfavored religiosity. Minority religions become especially vulnerable because their internal disciplines appear unfamiliar or excessive to outsiders (MHLW 2022; Yamamoto Reference Yamamoto2023; Zermatten Reference Zermatten2024: 14–16).

Recent work on the construction and minoritization of religious minorities in Japan sharpens this concern. Baffelli shows that minority status is not simply a matter of numerical size: religious groups may be constructed as “marginal” or “outsider” religions through social processes in which fear and the boundary between “proper” and suspect religion play an important role (Baffelli Reference Baffelli2023). Her later work likewise emphasizes the complexity of current and former members’ experiences of belonging to religious communities that are publicly stigmatized or perceived as threatening (Baffelli Reference Baffelli2025). For legal analysis, the implication is not that minority religions should be immune from scrutiny, but that minority status, stigma, or social unfamiliarity must not themselves become proxies for evidence of harm.

A particularly difficult issue concerns claims that a child’s development is harmed not by physical coercion or direct deprivation, but by peer pressure, stigma, or social non-conformity resulting from religious difference. The 2022 MHLW framework can be read in terms broad enough to invite overreach on this point. To be sure, severe exclusion, bullying, or developmental isolation may become legally significant. But the mere fact that a child does not “fit in” with majority school culture cannot, without more, justify state second-guessing of parental religious formation. Otherwise, the framework would risk converting minority status itself into evidence of parental wrongdoing. What matters is not difference as such, but demonstrable harm, coercion, or deprivation.

For that reason, Japan requires a more discriminating doctrinal framework than it currently possesses. The framework must identify parental religious education as a constitutionally relevant practice. It must also specify the grounds on which that practice may be restricted. Without both elements, the law oscillates between under-protection and overreach.

Interim conclusion

Japanese law does not yet offer a settled doctrine of parental religious education. But neither is the field empty. Constitutional materials already exist for a more explicit approach: Article 20 as the anchor of religious liberty; Articles 13 and 24 as supporting norms concerning dignity and family life; educational jurisprudence limiting statist overreach; and child-centered norms that prevent parental freedom from becoming domination. The task is not to invent a right out of nothing. It is to articulate more clearly a right that has remained doctrinally latent.

The United States

American law is often described as strongly protective of parental liberty in education and religion, and that characterization is broadly justified so far as constitutional structure is concerned. The leading cases are familiar for good reason. The early parental-rights cases arose from state efforts to regulate schooling and cultural formation. Meyer concerned a prohibition on teaching foreign languages to young children, while Pierce concerned a compulsory public-school law that would have effectively eliminated private and religious schooling. Meyer v. Nebraska held that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the liberty of parents and teachers against excessive state control over the child’s education, while Pierce v. Society of Sisters rejected the idea that the state may standardize children by forcing them to accept instruction only from public teachers. Together, these cases established that the upbringing and education of children are not wholly under state control and that parents possess constitutionally significant authority in directing a child’s formation (Meyer v. Nebraska 1923; Pierce v. Society of Sisters 1925).

That parental authority acquires an explicitly religious dimension in Wisconsin v. Yoder. Yoder involved Amish parents who were prosecuted under Wisconsin’s compulsory school-attendance law for refusing, on religious grounds, to send their children to formal high school after the eighth grade. There, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment barred Wisconsin from compelling Amish parents to send their children to school beyond the eighth grade when doing so would gravely burden a longstanding religious way of life. Yoder is, therefore, often read as the clearest American affirmation that parental rights in education may, in some circumstances, be strengthened rather than weakened when they are linked to religious conviction. Nevertheless, the case is best understood narrowly. It did not create a general parental right to withdraw children from public obligations whenever religion is invoked. Rather, it reflected a particular judgment about the severity of the burden, the coherence of the Amish community, and the limited additional educational gain expected from compulsory attendance in that setting (Wisconsin v. Yoder 1972).

The extensive scholarship on Yoder has likewise emphasized both the decision’s strong protection of parental religious formation and the unresolved tension between that protection and the educational and religious interests of the child (Peters Reference Peters2003). The case should, therefore, be understood not simply as a statement of parental supremacy, but as one influential—and contested—constitutional arrangement of the relationship among family, religion, education, and the state.

Yet American law is not simply a regime of majoritarian deference to parents. The state retains authority to protect children and to impose minimum standards of welfare, education, and public order. Prince involved a guardian who allowed a child to distribute religious literature in violation of child-labor laws. Prince v. Massachusetts remains the classic reminder that parental authority, even when religiously grounded, does not include a right to expose children to serious harm or to disregard the state’s protective role. In that sense, American doctrine is not absolutist. It is better understood as a system in which strong parental claims are acknowledged but are continuously mediated by the state’s responsibility for child welfare and civic formation (Prince v. Massachusetts 1944).

Recent U.S. case law suggests that these questions remain highly contested. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Supreme Court held that parents challenging a public-school policy denying opt-outs from instruction involving LGBTQ-themed storybooks were likely to succeed on their free exercise claim. The Court expressly reaffirmed that parents have a right to direct the religious upbringing of their children and relied heavily on Yoder in treating state-imposed exposure as a potentially serious interference with religious development. At the same time, Mahmoud also illustrates the contemporary difficulty of distinguishing between pluralistic public education and constitutionally cognizable burdens on parental religious formation. For present purposes, the case reinforces the point that American law continues to frame these disputes not as absolute parental control, but as contests over the threshold of legally significant interference (Mahmoud v. Taylor 2025). The significance of Mahmoud is already contested in U.S. scholarship. Katskee and Lupu, for example, characterize the decision as a substantial departure from the previously narrow role of Yoder in public-school disputes (Katskee and Lupu Reference Katskee and Lupu2026). That disagreement reinforces the need to treat Mahmoud as a recent and developing comparative reference rather than as a settled template for Japanese law.

For Japanese purposes, the American experience is useful because it shows that constitutional recognition of parental rights does not preclude legal intervention. On the contrary, it forces the grounds of intervention to be articulated more clearly. The American cases do not eliminate conflict between family autonomy and child protection, but they do make visible a constitutional structure in which neither side can simply be presumed to prevail.

Germany

German law structures the issue more explicitly than Japanese law. The Basic Law not only recognizes parental responsibility for the care and upbringing of children in Article 6(2), but also gives the state supervisory authority over the entire school system in Article 7(1), while specifically providing in Article 7(2) that parents may decide whether their children receive religious instruction and in Article 7(3) that religious instruction forms part of the regular curriculum in state schools. The German framework is, therefore, not built on an undifferentiated idea of parental supremacy. It is a constitutionally articulated arrangement that expressly acknowledges parental rights, the child’s position, and the state’s educational mandate (Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany 1949, arts. 6, 7).

German scholarship has similarly emphasized that Article 7 of the Basic Law reflects a constitutionally structured relationship between religious education, state responsibility for public schooling, and religious pluralism, rather than either simple state neutrality or unrestricted parental choice (Wittmer and Waldhoff Reference Wittmer and Waldhoff2019). This makes Germany particularly useful as a comparison with the less explicit constitutional architecture found in Japan.

This structure is reflected in the case law. In a 1975 decision arising from disputes over the religious character of public schooling and the place of religious instruction within the state school system, the Federal Constitutional Court held that school-based religious education is constitutionally grounded rather than a mere administrative policy choice. At the same time, German law does not treat parental choice as unlimited. The system assumes that religious education in public schools must be reconciled with state neutrality and with the child’s own legal position. That balance is further sharpened by the Religious Education of Children Act, under which parents decide on religious instruction for a child under 14, but the child acquires the legal right at 14 to decide his or her own religious affiliation. In this respect, German law expressly institutionalizes the idea that religious self-determination develops before adulthood in the full civil sense (Federal Constitutional Court 1975; Religious Education of Children Act 1921).

German law, however, is not simply protective of parental religious claims. The state retains authority to require participation in parts of the public-school curriculum that it regards as indispensable to civic and personal development. This is clear from the later litigation over co-educative swimming classes, which concerned a request for exemption from compulsory mixed swimming lessons on religious grounds. German courts refused to treat such objections as a general right to withdraw children from ordinary parts of the mandatory public-school curriculum. The German approach is, therefore, not absolutist. It is better understood as a system in which parental rights are constitutionally strong but are continuously mediated by the state’s educational mission and by the child’s gradually strengthening autonomy (Federal Administrative Court 2013).

The German experience is useful for Japan above all because it shows the value of explicit constitutional architecture. Rather than leaving the relationship among parent, child, and state to implication, German law states more clearly what each may claim and where each claim reaches its limit. That clarity does not eliminate conflict, but it makes the grounds of intervention more visible and legally disciplined.

France

France offers a different model, shaped less by an explicit constitutional vocabulary of parental religious rights than by laïcité, compulsory schooling, and the central role of the republican public school. The constitutional background is important. French law protects freedom of education, and the Constitutional Council has recognized it as a fundamental principle under the laws of the Republic. That decision did not establish a broad parental right to religious exemption, but it provides the constitutional background for understanding freedom of education in the French system. At the same time, the public education system is expected to transmit civic equality, freedom of conscience, and laïcité. French law, therefore, does not deny that parents have convictions about their children’s moral and religious formation, but it tends to structure those convictions through the distinction between the family sphere, private schooling, and the secular mission of public education rather than through a free-standing justiciable doctrine of parental religious education (Constitutional Council of France 1977; Education Code).

This structure is reflected in both legislation and case law. A long-standing feature of French educational law is that compulsory instruction does not allow selective absenteeism on religious grounds. The Education Code requires school attendance, and official guidance implementing the 2004 law on conspicuous religious symbols makes clear that religious convictions cannot justify refusal to attend particular subjects such as physical education or life sciences. In this respect, the French model differs sharply from the American tradition represented by Yoder. It does not readily accept the idea that parents may withdraw children from core elements of the common curriculum because those elements conflict with religious belief (Education Code; Ministry of National Education 2004).

The European case law confirms this orientation. Both cases arose from conflicts between students’ religiously motivated dress and the requirements of participation in physical education classes in French public schools. In Dogru v. France and the related Kervanci case, the European Court of Human Rights upheld disciplinary measures imposed on students who refused to comply with school rules concerning religious dress in physical education classes. The Court accepted that the French authorities were entitled to give significant weight to the requirements of secular public education and the orderly functioning of the school. These cases did not involve parental religious education in the family narrowly understood, but they are highly relevant because they show how French law gives priority to integration into a common secular school framework even when religion is sincerely invoked (Dogru v. France 2008; Kervanci v. France 2008).

These decisions also form part of a broader scholarly debate on religious symbols, secularism, and the European Court of Human Rights, particularly with regard to the deference accorded to national conceptions of secularism and the margin of appreciation (Elver Reference Elver2012; Fenton-Glynn Reference Fenton-Glynn2021). This literature reinforces the point that the French cases should be understood within a distinctive institutional conception of public education and laïcité rather than as a general European rule concerning parental religious authority.

The French model, however, is not simply hostile to parental convictions. Its logic is better understood as one of institutional relocation. Religion is not excluded from family life, and parents remain free to transmit belief privately or through private educational arrangements, including private schools. But once the child enters the public school, the state’s secular and civic mission sharply limits claims to exemption from common rules.

In the Japanese context, the French experience is useful primarily as a caution. It shows that a strong commitment to neutrality and common citizenship may protect pluralism in one sense, yet also create pressure toward assimilation when religious difference is treated chiefly as a problem of public order, cohesion, or ordinary school life.

The United Kingdom

The United Kingdom offers a distinctive model because parental claims in matters of religion and education are shaped less by a single constitutional text than by statutes, public school regulations, and human rights adjudication. Across the United Kingdom, though with territorial variation, religious education and collective worship have long remained embedded in the legal structure of state schooling. In England and Wales, maintained schools are generally required to provide religious education, and there is also a statutory framework for collective worship; at the same time, parents are given a legal right to withdraw their children from religious education or worship in at least some settings. The British model, therefore, does not assume that religion must be excluded from public education. Rather, it combines the continuing public role of religion in schools with procedural protections for parental conscience (School Standards and Framework Act 1998, sec. 71; Education Act 1996).

More broadly, scholarship on English law has identified a continuing tension between parental responsibility for religious upbringing and the state’s use of ostensibly neutral values to establish the outer limits of legitimate religious education and family choice (Taylor Reference Taylor2015). This tension provides useful background for understanding the more recent human-rights analysis in JR87.

That structure, however, does not mean that parental rights are either complete or fully secure in practice. In Northern Ireland, the issue has recently taken a distinct form in JR87. The case was brought by a parent and child who challenged the religious education and collective worship arrangements at a primary school in Belfast under the Northern Ireland core syllabus. The UK Supreme Court held that the provision in question breached the rights of both the child and her parent under Article 2 of Protocol No. 1, read with Article 9, because the teaching was not sufficiently objective, critical, and pluralistic. The Court also concluded that the formal right of withdrawal did not cure the problem, since requiring parents to withdraw their child could impose an undue burden and expose the child to stigma. JR87 is, therefore, significant not simply because it affirmed parental conviction, but because it showed that opt-out rights are not always an adequate substitute for neutrality within the ordinary curriculum itself (JR87 2025).

Yet the British system is not best understood as one of broad parental supremacy. Across the United Kingdom, religious education remains linked to the common educational framework, even though its legal form varies among the constituent jurisdictions. What JR87 demonstrates is not that parents may demand exemption from any material they dislike, but that the state cannot rely on formal withdrawal mechanisms if the content of instruction itself crosses the line into non-pluralistic religious formation. In that sense, the United Kingdom occupies a position between the American and French models: it preserves a public role for religion in schooling but increasingly insists that such provision must be delivered in a manner consistent with equality, pluralism, and freedom of conscience (JR87 2025).

The British experience is especially helpful for Japan because it shows that the legal problem is not simply whether religion may appear in public education, but under what conditions it may do so. The key questions are whether teaching remains genuinely pluralistic, whether withdrawal rights are realistically usable, and whether the burdens of accommodation fall unfairly on minority families. Framed in that way, the British experience offers a particularly valuable comparison for cases in which schools confront pupils from minority religious backgrounds without wishing either to indoctrinate or to fragment the common educational system.

Spain

Spain is especially important because its Constitution explicitly states that parents have a right to shape their children’s religious and moral education, unlike either Japan or France. Article 27(3) of the Spanish Constitution provides that the public authorities shall guarantee the right of parents to ensure that their children receive religious and moral instruction in accordance with their own convictions. This textual formulation matters. It means that parental claims in this field do not depend solely on broad inferences from liberty, family autonomy, or freedom of religion; they are anchored in the constitutional text of the right to education itself. Article 27 as a whole also establishes compulsory basic education and links education to the full development of the person in conformity with democratic principles and fundamental rights. The Spanish framework is, therefore, not built on parental supremacy alone, but on an expressly structured relationship between parental conviction, the child’s education, and the state’s educational responsibilities (Spanish Constitution, art. 27(3)).

This structure is reflected in the case law. In Judgment No. 5/1981, decided in the early constitutional period after Spain’s transition to democracy, the Constitutional Court made clear that parents’ right to choose the religious and moral training of their children forms part of the broader constitutional principle of freedom of education. At the same time, the Court also emphasized that these rights are necessarily limited and must be reconciled with the constitutional aims of education and with the legal framework governing schools. Later, in Judgment No. 133/2010, which concerned whether parents could rely on constitutional freedom of education to justify home schooling outside the ordinary statutory framework of compulsory education, the Constitutional Court rejected the argument that parental freedom under Article 27 entitled parents to replace compulsory schooling with home education of their own choosing. The Court held that parents remain free to teach their children outside school hours and may choose or create schools consistent with their convictions, but they may not treat Article 27(3) as a general constitutional exemption from the duty of school attendance. In this respect, Spanish law clearly recognizes parental rights, yet refuses to read them as a blanket power to withdraw children from the basic structure of public educational regulation (Constitutional Court of Spain 1981; Constitutional Court of Spain 2010).

Spanish scholarship on Judgment No. 133/2010 has likewise examined the case through the relationship between parental educational authority, liberal state neutrality, and compulsory schooling (Barragué Calvo Reference Barragué Calvo2011). The decision is, therefore, not treated here as an isolated judgment, but as part of a broader debate over how an expressly protected parental right under Article 27(3) is reconciled with the state’s responsibility for education.

Spanish and European case law also points to a broader concern with coercion and abusive control in religion-related conflicts. Riera Blume and Others v. Spain arose from the confinement of adults associated with a religious group for the purpose of “de-programming,” raising questions about coercion, private intervention, and state responsibility. The European Court of Human Rights found a violation in relation to unlawful detention, although it did not find it necessary to examine Article 9 separately. The case is significant for present purposes because it shows that the legal focus in religion-related disputes should not be the mere existence of strong belief, but the way power is exercised over persons in the name of religious or anti-religious intervention (Riera Blume and Others v. Spain 1999).

The Spanish experience offers two lessons for Japan: it shows the value of explicit constitutional recognition of parental religious and moral education, while also demonstrating that such recognition does not eliminate the state’s authority to secure compulsory education, protect children, and respond to coercive practices.

Interim conclusions from the comparative analysis

Comparison reveals no single universal formula. It does, however, reveal a recurring structure. Constitutional systems that address religion and childhood responsibly generally avoid two simplifications: they do not treat parents as having unlimited authority over the child’s conscience, and they do not treat child protection as a warrant for state evaluation of religious doctrine as such. Instead, they rely on mediating principles such as developmental autonomy, proportionality, neutrality, educational pluralism, minimum welfare standards, and careful attention to evidence of actual harm.

This is precisely what the current Japanese debate still lacks in sufficiently explicit doctrinal form. Comparison, therefore, supports not transplantation but clarification. It strengthens the claim that Japan should adopt a more explicit doctrine of parental religious education, while also clarifying the constitutional standards by which that freedom may be limited.

Re-situating parental religious education within Article 20

The first doctrinal task is to state clearly what has too often remained implicit: parental religious education belongs within the constitutional field of Article 20. This does not mean that Article 20 alone answers every question. Articles 13, 24, and 26 remain relevant, as do statutory norms governing family relations and child protection. But Article 20 should be the starting point whenever the state evaluates the transmission of religious belief and practice within the family. This is because such transmission is not merely an aspect of parental discretion in general, but an exercise of religion in a constitutionally specific sense (Constitution of Japan, arts. 13, 20, 24, 26; Basic Act on Education 2006, art. 10; Civil Code, art. 820).

Why is this important? Because without Article 20, the issue is too easily redescribed as a mere parenting style. Once that occurs, interventions may be justified in paternalistic or majoritarian terms without sufficient attention to the burdens placed on religious freedom. Locating the issue in Article 20 does not immunize parents from regulation. It simply ensures that regulation must be justified as a limitation on a constitutionally protected practice rather than as routine social management.

A relational and child-centered right

The second task is to define the right correctly. The right at stake is not a sovereign power over the child’s belief. It is a presumptive liberty to initiate the child into a religious life and to organize family practices accordingly, including, for example, prayer, attendance at worship, moral and scriptural instruction, and other forms of religiously shaped family life. That liberty is relational, because it exists within a family bond, and it is child-centered, because it is justified only so far as it remains compatible with the child’s status as a person with independent interests and an emerging conscience (Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989, arts. 3, 12, 14; Committee on the Rights of the Child 2013).

This formulation matters for both constitutional theory and institutional practice. It allows courts and administrators to say simultaneously that parents are not mere delegates of the state in matters of religion, and that children are not mere vessels of parental conviction. It also makes better sense of developmental change. The younger child and the adolescent may stand differently in relation to parental authority, especially where the adolescent’s own convictions have become stable and explicit (Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989, art. 14).

Methods and effects, not doctrine

The third task is to specify the object of legal scrutiny. The state should not intervene because a religion is exclusivist, apocalyptic, non-mainstream, or unpopular. Nor should it intervene simply because outsiders regard a community’s internal discipline as severe or strange. Such grounds are incompatible with freedom of religion in a plural constitutional order.

Intervention is justified only where the methods or effects of upbringing create serious and demonstrable harm, or a sufficiently concrete risk of such harm, to the child’s protected interests. Examples include physical violence; degrading punishment; medically dangerous refusal of essential care; prolonged terrorization; coercive isolation from education, peers, or ordinary social development; or forms of manipulation and economic extraction that directly and seriously damage the child’s welfare. In such cases, the law need not deny the religious character of the conduct. It may acknowledge that character while still regulating the conduct because of the harm involved (MHLW 2022; Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989; Committee on the Rights of the Child 2013).

This methods-and-effects approach is especially important in the current Japanese context. It guards against a drift from child protection into ideological suspicion. It also improves legal accuracy. Harm is more likely to be established by evidence concerning coercion, injury, exclusion, and developmental impact than by broad descriptions of a religion’s theology, intensity, or public reputation (Yamamoto Reference Yamamoto2023; Zermatten Reference Zermatten2024).

Schools, neutrality, and accommodation

The fourth task concerns schools. Japanese schools often serve as institutional sites where family-based religious difference encounters state norms. The legal question is not whether schools must accommodate every objection. They cannot. Nor is the question whether religion should disappear at the school gate. It should not.

A better approach begins with properly understanding neutrality. Neutrality does not require official hostility to religion, nor does it require indifference to conscience. It requires that public institutions neither privilege nor disparage particular religious or anti-religious commitments. Where feasible, schools should respond to serious conscientious objections through appropriately tailored forms of accommodation, particularly for older students whose views are their own rather than merely derivative of parental authority (Supreme Court of Japan 1996; JR87 2025).

The lesson of the Japanese case law is not that accommodation must always prevail. It is that bureaucratic convenience cannot be the sole measure of legality. Where a school can preserve its educational objectives while reducing unnecessary pressure on conscience, it should do so. Conversely, where an accommodation would undermine core educational requirements or seriously burden the institution, refusal may be justified. What is needed is a principled framework rather than unstructured case-by-case intuition.

Reframing conflicts over shūkyō nisei

The current Japanese discourse surrounding shūkyō nisei, or people raised in religious families, should also be reframed. Narratives of severe suffering are indispensable. They have exposed wrongdoing that would otherwise have remained hidden. But they do not exhaust the social reality of religious childhood. Some individuals describe their upbringing as damaging; others describe ambivalence, selective retention, or more mixed retrospective evaluations. Law should not force these heterogeneous experiences into a single narrative form (Ogiue Reference Ogiue2022; Kaburagi 2022; Kikuchi 2022; Yokomichi Reference Yokomichi2023b).

A constitutional framework that recognizes parental religious education while rigorously policing harmful methods is better suited to this diversity than a framework organized around a general suspicion of “religious abuse.” It protects those who have suffered serious wrongs without converting minority religious family life itself into an object of official distrust.

Toward a workable doctrine

A workable Japanese doctrine would, therefore, contain at least five propositions.

First, parental religious education should be recognized as a constitutionally relevant exercise of freedom of religion under Article 20.

Second, that right should be understood as relational and child-centered rather than as a proprietary entitlement over the child’s conscience.

Third, limitations on the right should be justified through identifiable harms to the child’s life, health, bodily integrity, education, development, or dignity, not through disagreement with doctrine.

Fourth, educational institutions should operate under principles of neutrality, pluralism, and appropriately tailored accommodation, with particular attention to the independent convictions of older children.

Fifth, administrative and judicial decision-making in this field should rely on clear criteria and evidence. Vague appeals to “ordinary development,” “social common sense,” or the notoriety of a religious group are insufficient where constitutional freedom is at stake.

This framework would not eliminate conflict. It would, however, clarify the questions that courts, ministries, schools, and child-protection authorities must actually answer. That kind of clarification is what the present Japanese law still needs in a more explicit doctrinal form.