Shinto
I was typing this as an answer to Jim's comment, but I might as well make it a post and be done with it. I don't really have much time to spend hours reading on religion in ancient Japan, interesting as it is. So I'll just start typing and see what comes out of it.
The gist of the issue is that Shinto was usual local animism, and the introduction of Buddhism with their holy ascetic monks and sutras and shit basically killed Shinto and replaced it for all purposes. Shinto animism was just your typical local spirit worship, and some clan god worship. Everybody had their dear gods/spirits who they prayed to or appeased, and that was it. The priests or wizards usually came from the same family of retainers of the local lord.
Then in the 6th century the imperial family's relatives in the Korean peninsula bring Buddhism, saying it's The Truth, and it's awesome. The Yamato court agrees, and Buddhism starts to spread like wildfire, together with their huge fancy temples, weird sutras in classical chinese, and ascetic monks.
Apparently the court start building temples next to any Shinto shrine of significance. I imagine it was a power coup to make the local clans understand who was boss now. Sure, you can pray to your clan god; but see this amazing temple just next to it! So much bigger and colorful. Eventually people got the message.
Big temple is big
And Buddhism is of course more attractive. Besides the fancy buildings and exotic songs; it has tales of heaven and hell, on how to behave, and the Buddhism trademark on how to stop suffering. People like that, and soon enough it was all temples and no shrines. Praying to the gods never worked very well when you think about it.
Buddhist temples were large corporations, extensive temples with hundreds of monks, supported by tax-free land grants from the court. Buddhist monks have a rather easy life, but it isn't easy to become a monk in the first place. Shave your head; no meat, no beer, no sex; hard schedule; regular visits to frozen rivers and high mountains to enrich your spirit. But hey, free food! And holiness. The temples obviously didn't reproduce themselves, but there was no shortage of monks.
Animism wasn't totally eliminated of course. Superstition about appeasing the local spirits never dies out; and some clans did their Buddhist thing, then make some offerings to the clan god anyway. In the end religion as an activity is a single thing for most people, so Shinto merged with Buddhism; mostly by building an altar inside the wider Buddhist temple. Some older, bigger shrines associated with big clans or the imperial family, such as what today is Izumo Taisha, managed to survive, but they were very influenced by the nearby Buddhist temples, from which they copied art style and ritual.
Apparently the theoretical rationale that people came up with was that spirits had the same problems as people, so spirits also needed to visit temples to get their desire out of them so they could earn nirvana. Then some spirits became Boddhisatvas and whatever. I'm no expert in Buddhism and it's always struck me as a huge pile of nonsense; but it's clear that the Japanese saw no contradiction in the two, and were quite happy to merge them, and Buddhism always had the upper hand, both in superior theology and superior management.
Buddhist temples being a superior business enterprise, especially in their management of human resources and public relations, started to get big, and numerous. They got land, they got people, and they got a hand in the court. Eventually the Heian court collapses in the 12th century, but by then the temples had armed themselves and were pretty good at defending their holdings, and could even fight outside as mercenaries.
Monks went to China to study the scriptures, came back with new theories which were holier than anything before. They started preaching and getting the peasants worked up on stories of Amida, an awesome boddhi-something that takes you to heaven if you say her name all the time. Then this Nichiren guy comes up and says there's one single sutra where all the good stuff is in. But you don't even have to read it; it's in classical chinese after all. So just say the name of the sutra all the time and you're set, straight to heaven. And then there's all this Zen stuff.
Some centuries of civil war and tenuous military governments pass, and eventually the new samurai lords got pissed with the temples not paying taxes and sending warrior monks everywhere; so they beat the shit out of them. However this is the 16th century and the Iberians are selling muskets only to Christian converts. Destroying the temples may give the Christians a chance to expand, and we don't want that. But you still want to take the temple lands, and you really really want to take their pikes.
So the Tokugawas in 1600 had this stroke of genius. Really, the sheer administrative brilliance that the early Edo period statesman came up with is a marvel of innovative government. What they did with religion is:
1. Forbid the construction of new temples or foundation of new sects
2. Force every single person in the country to register with their local temple.
3. Make the temple certify that they are not Christian.
And that's it. They call it the Danka System, Danka being the name of the households that financially support a temple. Now every single household was forced to become a Danka and pay for their temple. That way the government could take the temple's lands without having it collapse. And they also got a free of charge nationwide household registry, and the temples were financially incentivized to check for any traces of Christianity.
On the other hand, the temples now had a legal monopoly on the household registry system. Which means they could force the people to do anything they wanted, lest they branded you a Christian or some other strange sect that were forbidden later. Not having your registry in order was basically a death sentence; so the temples had right of life or death over the local populace.
You can imagine what happened. The temples started forcing everybody to give money on demand, to do a whole set of annual rites on the temple, to provide labor when needed, and whatever the local monks wanted you to do. Holiness competition was outlawed, so the temples became just another state bureaucracy, albeit a very powerful, and hence rapacious one.
People tend to like their church more than their bureaucrats. So the faith of the populace in Buddhism plummeted pretty fast. Eventually the monks stopped pretending they actually understood the sutras, and Buddhism became just a pretty damn expensive funeral service. Which it still is, by the way.
Now, it's one thing for the government to tame religion and make it a state bureaucracy. But that means there's a religious vacuum there waiting to be filled. People actually want to believe in something; and if the damn temples were beyond contempt, well surely there must be something out there worthy of worship.
As I touched upon in my Monarchy post, the intelligentsia of Edo period Japan were the Kokugaku guys; the national studies, which was a combination of decoding the old classics of the Imperial era, and some readings on Chinese Neoconfucianism. As it happened, the Chinese Confucians had been anti-Buddhist for a long time, and they had their own Confucian ethics to propose in place of the weird asceticism of Buddhism. This only fit with what the Samurai wanted to hear. And luckily the Japanese scholars had an even better fit for a good religion that the Confucians themselves. Confucianism in its origin was a nostalgic cult which worshiped the Zhou court and its rituals. But the Zhou court was destroyed, and the Zhou kings disappeared. So Confucians for 2000 years had to carry this weird cognitive dissonance in which they worshiped a past which was summarily murdered, as would all the successive dynasties that were built in its place.
But Japan actually had the old imperial court around; the imperial line survived there in Kyoto. And even the ancient religion was still around, lingering in a handful of obscure shrines in the provinces, and in the folk religion of the peasants. If we only washed away the corruptive influence of Buddhism in the shrines, and try to reconstruct the ancient spirit worship as is depicted in the ancient texts; then we'd have the perfect ancestral religion of the Japanese nation. They found some reference to Shinto opposed to Buddhism in the ancient texts, so voila, Shinto it is. The true religion of Japan.
As we know the National Studies guys won the culture war, and any Samurai scholar worth his salt was a fanatic believer on the divinity of the Unbroken Imperial Line, the True Religion of Japan, and the necessity of overthrowing the evil Shogun. And overthrown he was in 1868, in the Meiji Restoration. Which was a bottom-up revolution if I ever saw one, but like the fascists that would storm Europe 50 years later, leftist revolutions go down easier if you dress them up as rightist restorations. As always the Japanese were decades before everyone else.
After the Edo government fell, the first thing the Meiji did was turn against the hated Buddhist temples. A law mandated the separation of Shinto and Buddhism was passed, upon which all shrines were to expel any monks, Buddhist texts, figures or utensils found inside them, and they were to be put under the administration of the government. Soon some overzealous Samurai started going against the temples, and masses across the country started burning temples, destroying figures, and expelling monks en masse. And I guess killing some monks and raping some nuns, but the sources aren't clear.
The extent of the Buddhism purge varied among regions, the worst case being in Satsuma, the core of the Meiji revolution. 1600 temples were vacated, the monks drafted as soldiers and their wealth given to the army. And that was that. It does sound quite similar to the closing of the monasteries by Henry VIII of England, and I wonder if any of the Meiji guys had heard of it.
And so the government established a Shinto Ministry with high hopes for the establishment of a national religion based on the old imperial rites. But it only lasted 6 months. Basically the Shinto theologians they hired to preach around the country couldn't agree on a single tenet of faith, and there weren't that many of them to begin with. The Buddhist temples had started to complain about their unfair treatment; and as hated as they were in some places, it wasn't all that universal, and the temples did run schools across the country. If anyone had the expertise to teach a religion to all the peasants, it was them. So the government surrendered, and came up with a new Teaching Ministry that included the Buddhists, while the imperial rituals were transferred to the imperial household bureau.
But that Teaching Ministry didn't last much longer either. After 5 years it was out, its work divided between the new Education Ministry, and the court ritual parts transferred to a new Shrines and Temples bureau. For all their hopes of a new national religion; the fact is that, first, the ban on Christianity had to be lifted, else whitey and his gunships are gonna get very angry. Speaking of whitey, they tell us they have this thing called compulsory universal education, where they get all the kids in the country and lock them in a room for hours a day to teach them stuff. Might as well do the religion thing there, instead of the shrines and temples.
The Shrines and Temples Bureau did their thing, which was make sure the Shinto places were free of any Buddhist influence, and that the Buddhist temples didn't do anything strange. Buddhist monks were allowed to take wives, eat meat, and basically pay no attention to their monastic vows. Many had been secretly taking wives and having children since their Household Registry days during the Shogunate, but they weren't supposed to. The Meiji government told them it was cool, and they overwhelmingly chose to. Industrialization and the new army meant that there weren't that many aspirants to the monastic life, and the Buddhist temples basically evolved into hereditary fiefs of the chief monk. To this day, the chief monks of Japanese temples inherit their job from their father, even though the temple grounds aren't their personal property; the temple is a corporation.
Buddhist temples having lost their government privilege couldn't coerce the peasants into paying regularly or attending 5 rituals a year; but inertia is a funny thing, and to this day the Buddhist are in charge of most funerals in the country, for which they charge some serious money. You do want your daddy to go to heaven with good standing, right? It is slowly breaking down though, as even the last remnants of peasant superstition are starting to wear off.
So what about the Shinto shrines? As I've been saying the whole thing was totally made up by the Meiji guys. Shinto had no theology, and not that many shrines to begin with. There was a continuum of pure Buddhist temples to Buddhist-animist temples to formerly-important Shrines which had been mostly colonized by Buddhism over the centuries. The Meiji ordered a cleanup, and they built a lot of new ones, and made the whole thing into a neat state bureaucracy, with a hierarchy of priests and grades depending on passing a state exam.on ritual acumen. Yeah, they have exams, kinda like Karate but praying.
However, while Shinto was cleaned up and made into a fairly neat system of courtly rituals, it was never made into a state religion worth its name. The original idea was to have a God Ministry which was in charge of court rituals, the nation's shrines and public education. First the rituals were transferred to another agency, and then education and religion were separated for good. One big reason was that the Western powers weren't very cool with a non-Christian state religion, and they had the big guns. But the main reason was that the religion just wasn't there. There was a cool mythology of Sun Goddesses and their progeny that end up in the Emperor himself; but you can teach that in a couple of history classes. There was little else to it; and while the bureaucracy came up with new rituals to entice the people to visit the shrines, it never amounted to much. The Aristocracy were forced by law to change their funerals to Shinto style, but the commoners preferred to stick to what they knew. Mostly for inertia; but Buddhism has a fairly detailed account on heaven and hell, and you don't wanna get that wrong.
After WW2, the McArthur administration scrapped the whole Shinto bureaucracy, and the temples became a private corporation, which runs the exams and the rest of the paperwork. The priests now are not bureaucrats, and have become an hereditary position. The shrines remain cleaned up and separate from Buddhism; and privatization has made the shrines more efficient. While Buddhism is declining, complacent in the easy money that the funeral business provides, Shinto shrines have monopolized the fun stuff. Shinto weddings are a thing among conservative people with money (most people get a white fake priest in a fake white church), and religious rituals with children (to pray for health at age 3 and things like that) are exclusively done in Shinto shrines these days. Summer festivals and their wild processions have come to be associated with Shinto, when it wasn't like that before.
Jim says that the civility, tenacity and hard work of the Japanese comes from Shintoism, but that's transparent bullshit. The way more tenacious and hardworking Samurai (I mean the original warriors) were pious Buddhists, and Shinto was, as I said, a fairly empty theological contraption. In the end it was only a thin veneer, hardly more than a class on patriotic education. Saying Japan works because of Shinto would be like saying Germans were good soldiers because of Nazism, which doesn't sound fair.
Of course patriotism does work to an extent, but you hardly need a full religion to have patriotism. And it doesn't explain much; Japan and Germany today are still very functional and pleasant societies; but their people could hardly be called patriotic. The modern Japanese are a fairly decadent and hedonistic bunch; as are the Germans.
What is it then? I think that the fascist ideologies of roughly 1870-1945 are a consequence and not a cause. Japan, Germany and crucially Italy too developed their rather rabid strand of nationalism because they weren't real nations to begin with. Before their political unification, they were but areas of cultural unity, but politically independent, or at least highly autonomous principalities.The feudal han of Edo period Japan were of course subject to the Shogun, but they were virtually independent in most legislation, and they kept their own schools and armies; which was the Shogunate's undoing in the end.
The argument has been done that it was this very disunity that produced the literate and civil society of today (southern Italy being an exception; it was a centralized monarchy in its own). Ruling a country is hard, and ruling a large country is harder still. The biggest problem for the ruler of a large country is to prevent rebellion; which is of course harder the larger and more populous the country is. The easiest way to prevent rebellions is by tampering with the ability of people to assemble and organize themselves, and by impeding their access to information.
Smaller principalities don't have that problem; the concentric loyalty networks of patronage which are the basis of any power structure are short enough that a ruler can be secure in his place by sheer force of custom. A ruler is just a few degrees of separation from any commoner, who is tied to him by actually understandable chains of loyalty. It's Dunbar-compatible (my coining). Such a ruler has no need to tamper with the local flows of information, or from stopping people from assembling or becoming literate. Edo period Japan was a very highly literate society, and had fairly advanced economic networks (the rice futures of Osaka are famous). That didn't make it a restless or revolutionary place; everybody had Dunbar-compatible personal loyalties to the system, and they stayed in place until the outside shock of Western intervention 250 years later.
The breaking up of this system meant that a rather more abstract nation-state had to be built to replace the old feudalism; and it had to be quick. Japanese, Germans and Italians compensated their lack of actual national ties by going full retard on the national essence, the Gods and the Blood and whatever holy-sounding crap they could come up with. It didn't work; most people never cared much for the overblown rhetoric. But people went along and fought valiantly because they were conditioned by their long culture of loyalty to their immediate superiors (not so much in Italy I guess, but I'm no expert in Italian city state history. I guess the periods of French, Spanish and Austrian rule didn't help). And that's why Germans and Japanese were great soldiers, while Chinese and Russians died in millions when their centralized bureaucracy collapsed, or almost did.
The failure of State Shinto (as it's called by modern historians) also shows that you can't make up a state religion just like that. Of course in my defense I could say that the Meiji government didn't try very hard (giving up and shutting down the Ministry in 6 months? Come on). And Japan was trying to come up with a religion in a situation of effective religious vacuum. While my proposal is about replacing a positively harmful religion which afflicts the West today. In the end the Japanese didn't need a religion, and the vacuum continues to this day. But Westerners clearly can't function without theology, so if we want to do away with Social Justice, we're gonna need to replace it with something.
Something good though. Certainly not Shinto.
40 comments
"New Religion", hahaha you lads are always good for a laugh.
I think the propertization of holiness is a key element of Shinto's success. It gives the holy an incentive to support order,, private property rights, and the established hierarchy. Open entry holiness in inherently revolutionary. If you have an order of monks, the holiest monk is likely to become abbot, and a very holy abbot is likely to cause problems. "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"
Not even close. Shinto didn't succeed, it died unceremoniously to the trendy Buddhists in the 6th century. It was only in the Meiji era that Shinto was "revived" and made into the state religion. Which meant it was managed by the state. Priests were civil servants appointed by Tokyo, not property owners. It's after McArthur that the priesthood was made hereditary; the grounds aren't their personal property though. And it hasn't helped. Attendance to shrines has been dropping steadily. Buddhist monks were made hereditary by the Meiji government, and Buddhism has been in decline ever since. Do a quick Google on "hereditary monks" and all you get is people damning the fat monks who break their vows, take wives, drink alcohol, and still have the nerve to call themselves monks. Buddhism today is dead except as the usual choice for funerals; but that goes a long way. Actual buddhist monks had a fairly strenuous admittance process, and you couldn't eat meat, drink alcohol or have sex. Hardly open entry holiness. Still the ascetic monks did engage in holiness competition in the old days; they started new sects all the time. But that ended when the Samurai got tired of the whole thing.
Wasn't Buddhism used by the 6th century imperial court as a tool to consolidate control, much as Christianity was used for the same purpose in early Middle Age Europe?
There was no centralized church though. I do think they wanted to use it to break up the local clans, but it didn't work out very well, did it? People could always change temples; temples could change patrons, and there were new sects coming up all the time. It kinda looks like Europe would have looked like if the Protestants had appeared 1000 years earlier and the Catholic church had remained a local organization in Rome.
I believe there were several waves of Buddhist conversion, a new sect occupying the dominant, state-supported position each time, with the principal patron being the court (emperors or Fujiwaras as the case might be). The massive shrines like Todaiji are products of such periods. Then the impetus ran out and the wave was consumed by court infighting or whatever.
Great article, something I've always wondered about. Didn't the Japanese have a very rigid social rules though? Strict rules about the behavior of men and women, respect for ancestors, tea ceremonies, hari kari, and all that? Where did that all come from if not religion?
Etiquette. Militarized societies can get very anal about their social rules. No God that commands its people to cut their bellies is going to get very far. Religion codifies social rules, but seldom creates them. Most of sharia is just "stuff that Arabs do".
So where do people's ethics in Japan come from? Also, what's with the whole Zen thing?
Zen quickly lost out to Amida worship and Lotus Sutra retards. People's ethics come from the people.
People's ethics can't come from just the people. There is always an external moral framework. So if nobody in Japan really believes anything formal and hasn't for quite some time, what is the framework?
You mean Europeans had no ethics before Christianity? Did Hebrews murder and steal without remorse without Moses? Religion does often improve the framework, but it always builds on what's already there. Buddhism is all about ascetism, but Asians aren't all celibate monks. So people ignore the parts od religion that don't fit their society.
> Religion does often improve the framework, but it always builds on what’s already there. Fair enough. Question: when you think about a new religion, what do you build on?
Well people have been starting cults for millennia, what do they build on? Religions don't catch on due to their superior ethics; that's what makes them last after consolidation. Usually there's a sharp shift somewhere in between.
What I take away from this, is that in the West, Christianity = Buddhism and Neo-Paganism = Shinto. Thus, Eth-Nat attempts to replace a compromised Christianity with some sort of "Blood and Soil" religion are sure to fail. The metaphysical foundation for any post-liberal society must develop organically out of an existing Christian denomination. But I'm a Theonomist, so I'm biased.
>But I’m a Theonomist, so I’m biased. Ah, that must be exhausting.
I don't dispute the story of Shinto and Buddhism, what you're saying jibes with what I already know. One thing I want to add is that different sects of Buddhism were popular in different social strata, for example Amida-ism and Nichiren-ism were almost exclusively lower-class, peasant and laborer, while Zen sects were the domain of the samurai and reflected their morals, which was quite different from peasants'. In the villages, they still had group marriage (youth houses), while the samurai were monogamous. They liked going to brothels too, but we know that's largely irrelevant to family structure. However, I don't buy the rest of your story about Edo period and Meiji restoration, there are too many details left over. Some of them you listed in the other post: Tokugawas obviously had enough power over all (then-)Japan to institute the Danka system and enforce it. Other details are well-known: Tokugawas forced the daimyos to destroy every single castle and to submit to alternate attendance (at least a part of daimyos' families had to live permanently in Edo, too). Tokugawas instituted forestry management and mandated that each land had to have its own particular signature products (this is the origin of omiyage). There were no internal military conflicts worth the name from the beginning of the XVI c. to mid-XIX c. It is true that individual hans had their own laws and police forces, but there were also shoguns' ometsuke. And so on. Of course Edo Japan was not centralized to anywhere near the degree that modern states are centralized, but it was at about the same level as contemporary European 'absolute' monarchies (France, England). With Meiji restoration also, where do you fit in the Choshu-Satsuma oligarchy that planned and executed the coup? Wasn't there more than enough samurai supporting the shogun to wage several civil wars during and after the restoration? I mean the Boshin war etc.
They didn't destroy every single castle. Come on, there's plenty around. They did make a law restricting castles to one per fief. Although some like the Maeda in Kaga had 2 castles because he felt like it; and sub-fiefs no matter how small had their own castles, which kinda defeats the purpose. I'm no expert, just transmitting what I've read here and there. It is true that the Tokugawa had pretty much total control over the country; and they could and did fire Daimyo's or take their lands when they felt like it. But the Daimyos did have a lot of leeway in many things, and increasingly so as time passed by. The Mito clan, who were Tokugawa themselves, ran the Kokugaku studies mostly by its own, which eventually produced the climate that toppled the Shogunate. What people stress when talking about the autonomy of the Daimyos is that they owned the peasants, who couldn't move away, and they set taxes. The vast majority of people just never had much to do with the central government, so the patronage networks were very localized. The Daimyo administrations had very close control over the people; so you didn't have the widespread corruption so often seen in China, where the mountains are high and the emperor far away. The Daimyo was never far away. And there was no Church, municipal corporations, guilds or the civil society that produced so much friction in Europe. The Daimyo's authority was absolute, and the Shogun was absolute among the Daimyos. This eventually produced the hard working, polite, literate society that is Japan today. Again it's not my theory, but I think it's plausible. Japanese obey rules by sheer instinct; the Chinese break them by sheer instinct. It's not in the genes; it has to be the political culture. I'm always amazed at how the Meiji coup happened, and who ended up in power. The Satsuma Daimyo and to a lesser extent Choshu basically put their whole lives and property to the war; but the Meiji government ended up being run by low level Satsuma-Choshu samurai, not their Daimyos and elites. Apparently the uncle of the last Satsuma Daimyo was mighty pissed at how things turned out; he tried to have Saigo killed, and in his late days was constantly asking "When am I gonna become the Shogun?!" Why didn't he kill the guy? Why didn't he kill all of them? Guess they eventually were content with their peerage and fancy Tokyo mansion. It's clear that any samurai worth its salt in the Bakumatsu was a Mito-gaku zealot, so the Shogun had no legitimacy whatsoever. The whole thing collapsed surprisingly fast, and the Tokugawa had the better guns and armies. But guns are of no good if your soldiers don't want to use them, and the other guys were willing to do suicide attacks. Yoshinobu himself didn't put much resistance really, he probably bought the whole Restoration thing. Polities are never killed, they let themselves die.
If state shinto failed, why is not Christianity and assorted cults exploding into the vacuum, the way it is exploding in China into the vacuum left by the loss of faith in communism? You say it failed but I see ever symptom of a strong and effectual national religion.
That's utter crap. Nothing's going on in China, don't believe the hype. If anything is exploding in China it's the Money God. Japan had its own cohort of weird cults springing up during this period, and many became very popular. Tenrikyo dominates their own territory, and Soka Gakkai has millions of faithful, their own political party which is always on government, own university, schools and corporations. So something did spring up to fill up the vacuum. But most people don't mind the vacuum. Most Japanese will tell you there is no God and that Christians are fucked up in the head.
What did the Japanese government want from a state religion? Emperor worship, support for the existing social order, suppression of competing excessively holy religions, particularly religions that divide Japanese against each other "Our people are saints and going to heaven and everyone else is damned" What did they get? As for Christianity in China: Wikipedia tells us: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity\_in\_China " Official statistics show that the number of Protestants has increased to the tens of millions (from 700,000 in 1949) since the Communist Revolution. According to a survey published in 2010, there are today approximately 52 million Christians in China, including 40 million Protestants and 12 million Catholics" "In 2000, the People's Republic of China government census enumerated 4 million Chinese Catholics and 10 million Protestants.[45] An older report enumerated 13 millions, or 1% of the population.[46] In the same period the Chinese Embassy reported a number of 10 million (0.75%).[47]" "In October 2007 two surveys were conducted to count the number of Christians in China. One of them was held by Protestant missionary Werner Burklin, the other one by Liu Zhongyu from East China Normal University in Shanghai. The surveys were conducted independently and during different periods, but they reached the same results.[37][38] According to these studies, there were approximately 54 million Christians in China, of whom 39 million were Protestants and 14 million were Catholics.[37][38][48]" "The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life estimated over 67 million Christians in China in 2010.[44]" "The 2010 Blue Book of Religions (宗教蓝皮书) produced by the Institute of World Religions at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a research institution directly under the State Council, estimates Christians in China to number about 28.7 million.[44][49]" "The "Chinese Spiritual Life Survey" published in 2010 reports 33 million Christians, of which 30 million are Protestants and 3 million are Catholics.[6]" "According to government figures there were 31 million Christians attending official churches rather sanctioned by the government in 2012: 25 million Protestants and 6 million Catholics.[50] According to the Three-Self Patriotic Movement of the Protestant Churches in China the number of Protestants reached an estimated 23 to 40 million.[51]" "In 2012, Liu Peng, a scholar of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, considered by the Pew Forum as the government's leading expert on unregistered churches, declared to the Global Times: "It is hard to say precisely how many Christians there are in China. I reckon there might be 50 million. They come from various strata of society and half of them attend house churches."[52][44]" This looks very much as if, with the death of communism, Christianity (and, very likely, progressivism) is expanding into the vacuum - which is the problem that one wants an official religion to prevent.
Well of course, since the official religion tells them that there are more gods than you can shake a stick at, and the Christian religion is fucked in the head.
Chinese Catholicism is the "Patriotic Church", i.e. a government stooge. Quite funny though. At least they take care of the churches. I don't believe shit about any foreign institution or Chinese pro-western scholar talking about Chinese protestants. In all likelihood they all that's happening is they are growing like Korean protestants grew; into a crazy chauvinist Church that talks about how Jesus was born in Korea. That is to say, undistinguishable with what all other Koreans believe anyway. Look at Hong Kong, where American missionaries have a free hand, and there's lots and lots of Christian and derived churches. All people do is go there, pray for success in business, and buy long-life elixirs that their priests sell them for a profit. That is to say, traditional Chinese folk religion Christ. They don't compete to see who's more holy. They compete about who's richer.
Yeah but they didn't get that through Shinto. They got that through Patriotic Education in schools. Shinto never developed a theology. In fact the closest thing to holiness competition arose in the military, which became the only holy institution in the country. The foot soldiers were very keen to start factions of competing holiness and kill people to prove their superior zeal. Society at large was spared. Universities of course were filled with holy theoreticians, but they were mostly fascist, and thus their influence was realized in the military. I take it that by "religion" here you mean both the ideological positions of the zealots, and the civil culture at large. But looking at the history you'll see the zealots were few, their influence limited eventually to the military, and while the military did eventually take over the country and impose it's ideology on the country; that was pretty late in the game, around the late 1930s. The civic culture at large wasn't influenced by it and so was formed by something else. My take is that it was the natural evolution of feudal society, plus the always limited influence of state ideology.
Do you need a theology? Every Japanese does shinto rituals. Take or find a survey of ordinary japanese. Is there one god, many gods or no god? That would resolve our debate. Every Japanese performs Shinto rituals, therefore every Japanese finds it polite to act as if there were many gods, which, for an official religion, is close enough to believing to be a serviceable substitute.
How does that solve the debate? I predict a small plurality for "many gods", then no gods, then don't know, and probably one figure worth of one god. Couldn't find any survey, which tells you how little thought is given to the matter. Buddhism would agree with the "many gods" idea too, by the way. Most Japanese performs Shinto and Buddhist rituals during their lives, in roughly equal proportions, although it varies regionally. At any rate, there being many gods or any doesn't inform Japanese behavior at all. 98% of people don't know whatever god is enshrined in the particular shrine they visit. They just go there for habit/superstition, and because they're nice places to go for a walk once in a while. A charitable way of understanding your point would be that the Japanese Religion (JR) is not Shinto per se, but whatever combination of rituals and behavior rules, Shinto, Buddhist and other, that the Japanese tend to follow. And that this package keeps them religiously satisfied and prevents them from going to Christianity and fall in the holier-than-thou trap. My answer would be that JR isn't the product of any consciously designed state religion. Japan did have one, State Shinto, and it didn't work out. JR is the product of Kokugaku, the precedent of State Shinto that did became prevalent and produced the Meiji revolution, plus some remnants of Buddhism, and the naturally evolving zeitgeist of Japanese folk culture and how it reacted to Western influence and industrial civilization. Many nationalist intellectuals, before and after the war, have deplored how Western influence had corrupted the Japanese psyche, how hedonistic and vain the people had become, etc. State Shinto wasn't like that, but it wasn't strong enough. The corollary would be that that's what always happens. Roman Christianity wasn't quite what the early Christians wanted; religion is never strong enough to completely control a culture; it has some degree of influence, but it's always just one factor among many, most of which can't be reliably controlled.
Buddhism is a religion of monks, and to a lesser extent, nuns. The state suppressed monks for the usual excellent reasons. They remain suppressed. As you yourself observed, Shinto is still state shinto, and all Japanese do shinto rituals The religion still doing one thing that is highly effectual and useful. It is preventing more dangerous religions.
Informative.
Hello? Sir, I presume you are a white european very tall (at least 1.85 meters) Your country very high IQ and producing many nobel prize winners. All women very tall and beautiful. How you have such gifts sir? Please explain their acquisition.
Mazari koonam jan abshad bo shiptale? Soortooh shamzanje chema aparazadi?
nan, je kooni, shiptalam asmat ye hanka joohoonguri sarjanam. Samzani shesh baaz junoor samaat.
But sanctimony over politics and religion is limited by the fact that these are abstract matters that often go over people's heads. On the other hand, people are far more likely to have an opinion about whether they should wake up early to work 9 to 5 for the Man or should shun regular employment to focus on art or drugs (the whole bohemian/hippie lifestyle). If and when Japanese leftists propose more support of unconventional lifestyles by the state, does that provoke indignation or even zealotry and sanctimony from corners of society in Japan that are otherwise apathetic to big and weighty issues? Or am I wrongfully assuming that progressives have provoked culture wars in Japan like in America?
Plenty of hippies in Japan, overrepresented in the media and the megaphone industry in general. Politics and most people just ignore them and secretly despise them, but there's no "culture war". Leftists shout a lot, conservatives ignore them and go on with their lives. It just happens that the government is in the side of the conservatives. There is a minority of right wing zealots who proclaim all those dirty hippies (or whatever the left is peddling) should die in eternal hellfire; but they're very few, and even more despised than the leftists. Things move very slow in Japan. Talking of 9 to 5, Japanese working conditions are atrocious in general, and 15 hour workdays are not unheard of. Discontent has been growing, mostly in online forums for more than a decade; but it's only now starting to get noticed by the media, and that's mostly because the decreasing population means harsher companies are starting to have trouble finding employees. Politics will only do something about it in perhaps another 10 years.
"In the end the Japanese didn’t need a religion, and the vacuum continues to this day. But Westerners clearly can’t function without theology…" Why do you suppose this difference exists? Why can't Westerners come to function in a religious "vacuum" as the Japanese do?
That's the big question. Wish I knew. I have a bunch of theories doing circles inside my head. It might be that Asians in general are just wired like that. Not that much into bullshit. Intensive farming will do that to you. Another, not unrelated to the above is that Japanese society, and East Asian society in general, is just too harsh and unforgiving. Asians don't build communes of free love and brotherhood. They want to do well for themselves, they can be pretty nasty, and watch out or you'll be scammed and bullied to death. The idea that people are nice by nature and all we need is to have more faith smells like utter crap if you've been raised in an Asian culture.
Well, part of the reason I ask is that the "vacuum" you describe fits pretty well to my own background, and that of my father's side of the family: unchurched; celebrating Christmas and Easter out of praxis (and mostly as an excuse for a large meal and gift exchange) without any particular belief; and a general absence of any sort of contemplation of metaphysical or theological matters. (And yet, with a politics so right-wing that the friend with which I agree most on matters moral, political, and sociological is a reactionary Catholic.) Then again, there's also a long history of antisocial tendencies (and occasional outright sociopathy) in that branch of the family, so perhaps it's a matter of being to nasty and ornery for organized religion.
What about all of the endless circles of Confucian philosophizing, if not as pointless as theology?
How endless? There's the madness of Zhu Xi, but Confucian doctrine was quite stable. Civil service exams were graded according to the official interpretation. Which did change, but not at all often. There must be some studies on how often it happened, but I'm no expert. At any rate Confucian debates were more like academic debates today: a pastime for the elite. They didn't engage the peasantry and start new sects and communities in the outback.
Hasn't there still been a huge boom in new religious sects and cults all over Asia? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese\_new\_religionshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese\_salvationist\_religionshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiantiandao
Hardly huge. Fairly marginal, with some exceptions (SGI), but generally out of the mainstream.
Fascinating article and discussion. I rather think your comments about fake countries with cultural unity but not real nations could increasingly apply to the USA. Also the comment about Christianity/neopaganism equating to Buddhism/Shintoism echoes what I was thinking while I was reading the article.
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