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ABSTRACT
Peter Clarke’s work on the globalisation of Japanese new religions in the West remains a primary point of reference in this field. Despite its ground-breaking contribution, there needs to be a re-evaluation of his conclusion, which considers Japanese cultural elements of these religious groups as a hindrance to local adaptation in the West. This article revisits his claim by strategically focusing on a religious group known as Tenrikyō, which has been described by Clarke as a primary example of unsuccessful Japanese new religions in the West due to its strong association with Japanese traditional culture. This study highlights the group’s approach to use Japanese culture as a resource for increasing its public visibility and legitimacy in France, an initiative which coincided with a period of growing interest in the Japanese language and popular culture as well as the cult controversy in the country. By analysing the promotion of Japanese culture as a non-religious strategy of legitimation, if not competition, this study argues that the implications of particular cultural elements associated with a religious group need to be assessed in the light of the social dynamics of legitimation and delegitimation in a given context.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Contemporary Religion for their helpful comments and suggestions regarding earlier versions of this article. I am grateful to the Tenrikyo Overseas Department, Tenrikyo Europe Centre, and Association Culturelle Franco-Japonaise de Tenri for allowing me to use their archival resources as well as current and former leaders and other members of these organisations with whom I conducted personal interviews. The fieldwork I carried out for my research was partly supported by the SOAS (School of Oriental & African Studies) Fieldwork Award and the Jordan Travel Grant of the School’s Department of Religions and Philosophies. This article is based on the essay I submitted in 2017 to the Peter B. Clarke Memorial Prize Postgraduate Essay Competition of the BSA (British Sociological Association) Sociology of Religion Study Group. I wish to thank the anonymous judges of the competition for their helpful feedback. Some of the data and analyses presented in this article have appeared in my online blog entry “Translating a ‘Religion’, Translating a ‘Culture’: A ‘Non-Religious’ Expression of a Japanese Religion in France” in the Nonreligion and Secularity Blog (https://nsrn.net/category/nsrn-blog/).
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. In the study of Japanese religions, it is generally agreed that the category refers to religious groups and movements that came into being since the beginning of Japan’s modern period in the nineteenth century. See e.g. Astley (Citation2006) for a discussion of the history and scope of the terminology in this field.
2. See e.g. Kashio (Citation1996) for one of the few exceptions.
3. In this article, I follow the convention of using diacritical marks for Japanese words, including the names of religions, except where the religious organisations concerned use unmarked words as proper nouns in English.
4. The observation that Tenrikyō in France operates as two separate organisations has also been informed by the blog article of the Japanese journalist Yukinobu Katō which was published on a Japanese news web site known as Livedoor News on 31 May 2015.
5. Tenrikyō members believe that the foundress ‘withdrew from physical life’ and is ever living as she continues to work for the salvation of the world.
6. For more details about Tenrikyō, see Kato Citation2017.
7. It is important to note that Margaret Brady also conducted research at TEC as a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales at that time.
8. For recent work on the insider/outsider debate in the study of religions, see Chryssides and Gregg Citation2019.
9. Unless otherwise noted, the general description of the development of Tenrikyō in France and Europe in this section is based on Tenrikyō Yōroppa Shutchōsho (Citation1992, Citation2000, Citation2010) and internal archival resources obtained from Tenrikyō’s organisations.
10. For a more detailed account of ACFJT’s activities, see Matsumoto Citation2013.
11. It is noteworthy that this historical interaction has been recently highlighted as the theme of an event known as “Japonismes 2018”, which was held for eight months in Paris and other places in 2018, in commemoration of the 160th anniversary of the diplomatic relations between France and Japan.
12. Notes on ACFJT’s Japanese language school: the number of students beyond 2001 includes those enrolled in courses for children as well as adults. The official count of students beyond 2007 was not available at the time of fieldwork, but internal documents that I reviewed at TEC estimated about 900 students around the year 2015, indicating that the number had nearly doubled since 2007. The number shown in each year represents the average number of the enrolled students in two terms.
13. I wish to acknowledge Cosimo Zene and Sian Hawthorne for drawing my attention to this point during my PhD studies at SOAS.
14. In the sociological study of religions, the term ‘new religious movement’ (NRM) is commonly considered a neutral category compared to the term ‘cult’, which has become laden with pejorative connotations due to its association with deviant and harmful social groups.
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Masato Kato
Masato Kato completed his PhD at SOAS, University of London, in 2018. His doctoral research focused on the negotiation of cultural identity by Japanese religions in overseas contexts through the case of Tenrikyō. From 2018 to 2020, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Japanese Religions at SOAS. He is currently a part-time lecturer (equivalent to an associate lecturer) at Tenri University, Tenri, Japan. CORRESPONDENCE: Department of Foreign Languages, Tenri University, 1050 Somanouchi, Tenri, Nara 632-8510, Japan.