Japan often fits awkwardly within narratives of modernity and orientalism. It was never economically dominated by Western powers; its rapid modernization made it a colonial power; and it often participated, through missions, foreign studies, and other political and cultural activities, in Western conversations about Japan. The same awkwardness is true with narratives on religion, which tend to stress the concept “religion” as a European imposition on other cultures. In his book, The Invention of Religion in Japan, Jason Ānanda Josephson, questions these narratives as he details 300 years of Japanese intellectual history, from Jesuit encounters in the mid-1500s to the modernization project of the Meiji period (1868–1912).
The book brilliantly weaves two genealogies of scholarship, making it deeply interesting to students of either one: studies examining the construction of State Shinto in the Meiji period as a nonreligious expression of modern Japanese identity with a generation of critical scholarship...
