Jason Ānanda Josephson states that The Invention of Religion in Japan is about how the Japanese invented “religion” (2). The book's first two chapters illustrate that the Japanese had no comprehension of what Europeans understood as “religion” before the arrival of the Americans in the mid-19th century. Christianity was introduced by Europeans in the 16th century, but the Japanese either perceived it as a deviant offshoot of Buddhism or as some kind of heresy that needed to be expelled from the realm. In Chapter 3, Josephson argues that the concept of “religion” still baffled the Japanese as late as the 1850s, when they were grappling with the translation of the word in the official treaty documents they were signing upon the arrival of the Americans. Chapter 4, “The Science of the Gods,” examines a number of scholarly interpretations of the kokugaku movement in the Tokugawa period, concluding that “what the proponents of Shintō offered to supply the Japanese state was not a faith, but knowledge or something very much like science” (96). He claims that the kokugaku thinkers involved in the creation of modern Shintō were deeply engaged with Western science, and accordingly translates the word kokugaku as “national science” (rather than the usual translation, “national learning”). In Chapter 5, Josephson traces the Meiji state's attempt to produce a secular or nonreligious ideology that was nevertheless infused with Shintō symbolism, which he calls “the Shintō secular,” a hybrid Shintō-scientific ideology. Later chapters discuss the popularization of the concept of religion in Japan, and finally its codification into law in the Constitution of the Empire of Great Japan.

Josephson maintains that in 1700 Shintō had no recognizable political profile and no systematic doctrines (96). Here he subscribes to a position taken by, among others, Nitta Hitoshi and Sakamoto Koremaru, who reject the existence of a political, ideological, and intellectual history of Shintō before modern times. Such a position ignores, however, the fact that the emperor had served as a source of political legitimacy from the time of the Kojiki and the Nihongi, written in the eighth century.

In addition, Josephson deals with Hirata Atsutane's very important Shintō work Tama no Mihashira (True Pillar of the Soul), stating that Hirata explores the “fate of the soul upon death,” which he “approaches through means of a complex cosmology” (112). This is correct, but in this work, which consists of two parts, Hirata describes in 10 diagram forms the Shintō Genesis — how the universe began, the divine origins and the divinity of the emperor, and the origins of the Japanese ethnic nation (other humans emerged from the foam of the sea), and discusses what happens to the individual after death. Hirata did not try to reconcile this traditional Shintō creation account of origins with modern Western scientific theories of origins; thus it is hard to see how Hirata's cosmology can justify describing kokugaku as science. What Josephson seems to be discussing here is a kind of creation science, or scientific creationism: a Japanese form of creationism in which Hirata attempted to provide Western scientific support for the Shintō creation doctrine described in the Kojiki and Nihongi.

Josephson downplays the religious importance of Article 1 of the Constitution of the Empire of Greater Japan (promulgated purposefully on February 11, 1889, the anniversary of the founding of the Japanese state in 660 B.C.E. according to scripture). That article, which states that the “Empire of Japan shall be reigned over and governed by a line of emperors unbroken for ages eternal,” provided the essential doctrine of state Shintō. Yet the claim in Article 1 was as central to Shintōist theology as the omnipotence of God and the resurrection of Christ are to Christianity. He also declares that “The Japanese Constitution [Constitution of the Empire of Greater Japan] is often compared to the Prussian one, as if to imply that both were drafted by protofascists destined for the Axis” (232); yet given Itō Hirobumi's admiration for Otto von Bismarck and his employment of German legal advisors, the comparison may be a natural one.

Finally, Josephson states that “Shintō extremism” was transplanted European monarchism (230). He considers Article 3, “The Emperor is sacred and inviolable,” as a direct Japanese translation of clauses in a number of European constitutions. But Shintō extremism, or radical Shintō ultranationalism, of the 1930s and early 1940s had little to do with traditional European monarchism. Rather, it was the mixture of core Shintō doctrines and German metaphysics, which produced a religious ethnic national ideology very close to that expounded by thinkers in the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arberterpartei. Klaus Antoni, for example, has argued against delinking state Shintō from the ultranationalist, expansionist, and militaristic ideologies of the 1930s and 1940s (“Does Shinto History ‘Begin at Kuroda’? On the Historical Continuities of Political Shinto” in Politics and Religion in Modern Japan: Red Sun, White Lotus, ed. Roy Starrs ed.).

Josephson invokes Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and writes that his “translation is a provocative attempt to push it out of the discourse” (295). Josephson is not doing “normal science,” that is, working within and enlarging an established paradigm, but “revolutionary science” — trying to produce a “paradigm shift” in our understanding of the “science” of the [Shintō] gods. Most scholars will likely disagree with the interpretation of Tokugawa Shinto thought presented in The Invention of Religion in Japan, but Josephson deserves credit for the attempt.