How "Religion" Came to Be Translated as Shukyo : Shimaji Mokurai and the Appropriation of Religion in Early Meiji Japan

Abstract

Investigations into the modern concept of in Japan usually stress its Western origins. According to this argument, shukyo was shaped following Christian, more precisely Protestant, notions of what religion was (and what not). Yet, in explaining why it was the word shukyo that eventually prevailed as the standard translation term for religion, pointing to the West is of little help. Instead we have to turn to the earliest discussions about religion at the very beginning of the Meiji period, in texts by Buddhist authors with domestic agendas little influenced by the Western notion of It was rather the religious policy of the Meiji government, up to the mid1870s deeply colored by the interests of the Shintoist group in the Bureau of Divinity and the Ministry of Doctrine, that prompted Buddhist authors, especially of the Jodo Shin persuasion, to theorize about religion and its relationship to the state. The most prominent of these was Shimaji Mokurai, who not only stressed the distinctness of religion from politics, but also came up with another conceptual opposition, one that would eventually yield the term shukyo as expressing the realm of religion. It is this terminological opposition which will be traced genealogically in the second half of the article; and through this exercise it will be shown that the main motive for Buddhist authors in definining shukyo in the early Meiji years was to come to terms with the role of Shinto within the modern polity, i.e. a purely domestic concern hardly affected by Western cultural dominance.

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