Karli Shimizu. Overseas Shinto Shrines: Religion, Secularity and the Japanese Empire. Bloomsbury Shinto Studies Series. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Illustrations. 296 pp. 115ドル.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-350-23498-7.
Reviewed by Dana Mirsalis (Pacific University)
Published on H-Buddhism (April, 2024)
Commissioned by Marta Sanvido (UC Berkeley)
Karli Shimizu’s Overseas Shinto Shrines: Religion, Secularity and the Japanese Empire offers an incredibly rich series of case studies of modern shrines in the Home Islands, in the Outer Territories, and outside of the formal Japanese Empire. Shimizu’s monograph is composed of six body chapters (chapters 2-7), an introduction (chapter 1), and a conclusion (chapter 8).
In her introduction, Shimizu argues that to understand how Shinto shrines were positioned in modern Japan, we should be considering them not within the category of "religion" but within the context of "secularisms." In this respect, Shimizu joins a cavalcade of scholars—Jason Josephson Storm, Trent Maxey, and Jolyon Thomas, to name just a few—who in recent years have interrogated the importation and adaptation of the category of "religion" to the Japanese context. Rather than focusing on the well-trodden ground of "religion," however, Shimizu directs the reader’s attention to the sometimes taken-for-granted concept of "secularity" or "secularism." A secularity, Shimizu argues, "posits itself as universal, as containing facts which are true for all people" (p. 5). Shimizu identifies three specific building blocks common to secularity: space, time, and ethics, which she returns to in all her body chapters. Japanese modern secularity welded Shinto and Confucian morality onto Western civilization, morality, and technology. When Japanese secularity conflicted with Western secularities, Japan argued that Japanese secularity was more suitable for the Japanese sphere (the exact geographical area of which, of course, expanded over time) and/or "the East" than Western secularity. Shimizu argues that Shinto shrines were instrumental in instilling this new Japanese secularity in the populace—both in the Home Islands and in Japan’s colonies. Shrines were emphasized as historical (rather than mythological) sites and public facilities and as fundamentally compatible with modernity, as older traditions were presented as relics of a utopian past (which could once more become Japan’s future). However, as she demonstrates in her body chapters, establishing "a Japanese secularism committed violence against local customs in the Home Islands but even more so in the colonies," demonstrating "that secularism can be just as oppressive as a state religion" (p. 27).
The first of Shimizu’s body chapters takes Kashihara Jingū as a case study to which overseas shrines can be compared. Shimizu argues that the Kashihara Jingū, despite its early connections to semi-private reverence organizations, was largely conceived of and treated as a public, historical, and modern site that affirmed the new form of secularity promoted by the Meiji government. The site, Shimizu demonstrates, was conceived originally not as a Shinto site but as a historical site tied to the "birthplace of Japan" (associated with the legendary first emperor, Jinmu). As Shimizu argues, Kashihara Jingū "acted and was seen as a historical site, public and modern in character, similar and superior to other secular institutions like public parks and museums" (p. 39). While Kashihara Jingū downplayed "religious" elements in the early part of the twentieth century, one of Shimizu’s major arguments is that "the importance of distancing shrines from ‘religion’ lessened as the power imbalance with Western countries decreased as Japan grew in military might and national confidence in the 1930s," and during the wartime years, Kashihara Jingū continued to "see itself as a secular institution" but "also became a sacred site beyond a mere monument" (p. 42). Shimizu leads the reader through the ways that Kashihara Jingū contributed to new secular notions of space, time, and ethics, through its affirmation of a new imperial metageography centered on the Home Islands, its adoption of a new solar calendar that tied the start of linear time to Jinmu’s founding of Japan, and its propagation of and participation in a new national morality.
In the next chapter, Shimizu turns to shrines in the newly colonized Hokkaido and Karafuto. Like modern shrines in the Home Islands, these shrines in Japan’s colonies played a key role in promoting Japanese secularity and integrating new territories in the metageography of the Japanese Empire. Unlike the modern shrines in the Home Islands, however, shrines in Hokkaido tended not to invoke a longer history, instead treating Hokkaido as "virgin land" to be integrated into the Japanese national narrative, "a blank slate upon which a Japanese modernity could be constructed" (p. 63). Notably, shrines in Hokkaido tended to avoid integrating Ainu customs, as they might damage their reputation as "civilized" secular sites. Shimizu provides two important interventions in this chapter. Her first is in demonstrating the substantial diversity among shrines in the colonies, from prefectural shrines to local shrines founded by settlers. The most interesting distinction is the technical split between Shinto shrines and Shinto facilities for the dead, the latter of which were considered (by the government) religious Shinto sites. The sites that eventually became gokoku (nation-protecting) shrines were sorted into the latter category and, as Shimizu argues, were unconnected to shrines or Shinto ritualists for much of their prewar history. These sites were eventually folded into the larger category of shrines as the government became more interested in instilling a sense of patriotism and national identity in Japanese subjects rather than simply reinforcing the new secularity. Shimizu’s second intervention, however, is pointing out that although the government and priests themselves often saw clear distinctions between different sites and organizations, these differences may not have been clear to many citizens. Here we can see the difference in how the shrines were viewed by the average citizen versus how they were viewed by priests and colonial administrators, a theme that continues throughout her other chapters.
In the next chapter, Shimizu turns to the case of shrines in Taiwan. Similar to previous chapters, Shimizu details how shrines in Taiwan communicated Japanese secularity by creating new rituals and calendars to structure time on the island, integrating Taiwan into Japan’s metageography, and promoting Japanese ethics. She also points to another subcategory of Shinto institutions: pre-shrines (sha), which functioned the same way as fully fledged shrines but did not meet the minimum legal mandate for land and facilities. These pre-shrines allowed the governor-general to rapidly build Shinto sites across Taiwan at a lower cost than fully fledged shrines. Shimizu complicates the prevailing notion of Shinto as a "religion to which the local populace was forcibly ‘converted.’" Instead, she argues that Shintoists in Taiwan saw shrines as "an integral part of modern civilization suited to Asia," and so shrines in Taiwan often showcased a (theoretically) multiethnic empire rather than simply assimilating to Home Islands culture (p. 90). Specifically, unlike in Hokkaido, Shintoists in Taiwan subsumed some Taiwanese customs into a Shinto framework, creating a "local" form of Shinto wherein Taiwanese deities became Japanese kami. This integration of existing practices and figures helped legitimize Japanese rule of Taiwan. Also unlike in Hokkaido, the patriotic dead were integrated into shrine spaces early on—although administrators puzzled over whether to subsume Taiwanese mausoleums as a type of Shinto facility (a prospect made possible by the variety of Shinto facilities that Shimizu highlights). Despite the integration of Taiwanese customs, there was "little financial enthusiasm from the local populace," meaning that shrines tended to be top-down government projects or governmentally recognized settler-founded shrines and pre-shrines (p. 95). Shimizu also notes that the lack of "shrines’ pre-modern associations beyond that of ‘sites of state ritual’" allowed shrines to be mobilized "in the service of militarism, perhaps even more so than in the Home Islands" (p. 91).
In the next chapter, Shimizu turns to shrines in Korea, examining "how the particular circumstances of annexed Korea helped universalize and religionize shrines over the first half of the twentieth century, even as select indigenous customs were subsumed into Shinto" (p. 126). Like in Taiwan, some shrines in Korea included both Korean people and some Korean customs in shrine activities, which Shimizu argues "worked contrary to the goal of racial assimilation, rather than being one of the most egregious examples of it" (p. 145). Here Shimizu draws out clearly the trajectory from the "pioneer theology" of early overseas shrines to the "universalized theology" that transformed Shinto shrines from strictly secular sites to "the highest form of religion" (p. 126). Like sites in the Home Islands and Taiwan, Korean shrines integrated Korea into the Japanese metageography by invoking the idea that Japan’s annexation of Korea was the reunion of a long-separated nation. This universalized theology, Shimizu argues, was easily expanded "to include not just Koreans, but all East Asians, with Amaterasu and shrines untethered from the Japanese state and expanded into the ‘Greater East Asian religion’" (p. 139). In this chapter, Shimizu also explores how this increasingly hierarchical conception of Shinto as the true religion in concert with increased pressures for imperial subjects to demonstrate their loyalty to the state through shrine visits led to conflicts between Christians and the state, although Shimizu is careful to note that the colonial government was actively supporting Japanese Christianity in Korea while being suspicious of Western-affiliated Christian institutions.
In the next chapter, Shimizu turns to shrines within Manchuria. Manchukuo integrated a Shinto-based secularity, using national mausoleums, styled after Japanese sites for venerating the war dead, to instill patriotism and a modern national identity in the population. This was a further extension of the transition from pioneer theology to universalized theology; now Shinto expanded beyond Japanese imperial subjects to instead become a "universal truth" that applied to all of East Asia. This new theology created a hierarchy, familiar to many scholars of Japanese Empire, wherein Emperor Puyi ruled over the people of Manchukuo but was the "little brother" of the Japanese emperor. Here, Shimizu details the conflict between the Kwantung Army’s conception of Shinto sites and that of Home Islander Shintoists and Manchukuo state ritualists. While the Kwantung Army had no issue enshrining Amaterasu alongside the war dead and imagined shrines as a way to mobilize Manchukuo for war, Home Islander Shintoists and Manchukuo state ritualists pushed for a separation between kami and war dead (paralleling the division seen in the Home Islands and other colonial shrines) and imagined shrines as a vehicle for the construction of a new Japanese secularity in Manchukuo. Like in the earlier colonies, these shrines helped establish new understandings of time, space, and ethics, but unlike in Korea and Taiwan, local customs tended not to be integrated; since Shinto was now understood to be universally applicable to all ethnicities, there was no need for local variations. As Shimizu details, however, shrine communities, especially those established by settlers rather than the state, often saw shrines as sites for ethnic Japanese that should be exclusive to Home Islanders, creating conflict with shrine priests and governmental officials who preferred the multiethnic conception of Shinto.
In her final chapter, Shimizu turns to Shinto shrines in Hawai’i. Hawai’i was outside of the Japanese Empire and therefore not subject to many of the regulations regarding Shinto facilities within the colonies, but it was also operating within a different cultural context and prevailing secularity. Shimizu argues that these shrines in Hawai’i helped communicate a modern Japanese secularity to Japanese migrant audiences. Despite not being under the Japanese government’s jurisdiction, the shrines themselves reinforced similar conceptions of time, space, and ethics as shrines in the Japanese Empire. Like in Taiwan and Korea, some American and Hawaiian customs were legitimized as local variations at shrines, including the enshrinement of American and Hawaiian national heroes. Shinto thus continued to be a vehicle for patriotism, even outside of the Japanese Empire. Unlike shrines in the Home Islands and colonies, however, some of the shrines in Hawai’i maintained relationships with legally religious Shinto sects in Japan and performed personal ceremonies for this-worldly benefits; since both shrines and Sect Shinto were considered religious under American law, these relationships and rites were not problematic in how they would have been under Japanese law. However, Shimizu notes, many of these sites had to explain their own practices differently in English, recategorizing "secular" practices as "religious" for an American audience or conflating practices and institutions that were carefully kept separate in Japanese. As a result, shrines "were fitted, however clumsily, into the American framework of religion even while they maintained the ambiguous non-religious framework of shrines in Japan in a Japanese-language context" (p. 195). Shintoists "often did not see secular and religious aspects as conflicting opposites, but rather as two parts of a greater whole, to be emphasized or de-emphasized as circumstances demanded" (p. 206).
In her conclusion, Shimizu points out that while Shinto shrines within the boundaries of postwar Japan were understood as religious sites that had been misused by the government, shrines outside of those borders remained secular sites to be abolished as part of the colonial apparatus. Still, before the end of World War II, there were significant continuities across modern Shinto shrines, regardless of their location: their conception as secular sites that primarily functioned to affirm new Japanese notions of secularity, the image of a multiethnic Shinto endorsed by the government (which was often ignored by migrants, who wanted shrines to maintain their ethnic privilege), and the universalized theology that allowed Shinto secularity to be relevant even outside of the formal Japanese Empire. Shrines integrated history with modernity and cutting-edge technology with tradition stretching back to time immemorial, and affirmed shared understandings of space, time, and ethics. The postwar shifting of shrines within Japan into the religious sphere also allowed the category of "shrine" to absorb the wide variety of separate Shinto sites that had existed before the end of the war. Shrines in former Japanese colonies were largely shut down or destroyed, while shrines in Hawai’i were treated as part of "State Shinto" until they argued in court that they were religious organizations connected to Sect Shinto.
Shimizu’s monograph is incredibly rich and dense. I struggled to summarize the chapters simply because each one hits on so many important points, making it difficult to pick only a few to highlight. Each chapter could be a monograph on its own, and hopefully future researchers will build on Shimizu’s work and delve more deeply into all of her case studies.
Let me highlight a few of Shimizu’s contributions. First, her decision to tackle "secularism" rather than "religion" makes her book an excellent companion to many earlier works that have focused on the concept of "religion" but also offers the opportunity to bring shrines into larger conversations about modern institutions’ contributions to building modern Japanese secularism. Second, the massive geographical swathe she cuts allows readers to see how Japanese imperialism adapted to different colonial contexts, as well as the diversity within any given geographical space. The long temporal span she covers similarly allows the reader to track how specific ideas and trends develop, most notably the shift from seeing shrines as a purely secular space to, after Japan secured its space on the world stage, relaxing some of that strict separation. The later chapters are some of my favorites, as she carefully builds on her earlier groundwork to demonstrate how ideas traveled and adapted to new geographical and political circumstances. Third, her chapter on shrines in Hawai’i does an excellent job both of extending her themes in time and space and of offering a fascinating case study of the collision of conflicting secularities beyond the formal Japanese Empire.
For those who are thinking about the classroom (as I often am), Shimizu’s writing is accessible enough for advanced undergraduates, and chapters of this book could easily be taught in modern Japanese history, modern Japanese religion, Japanese Empire, or transnational Asian Pacific courses. I would lean toward assigning chapters 4-7, since I think they offer some of the most interesting material, although it might be productive to bring her introduction into conversation with earlier works on the concept of "religion," perhaps in a graduate seminar. Another option would be to pair one of her chapters with another work covering a similar topic—her Kashihara Jingū chapter with Kenneth J. Ruoff’s Imperial Japan at Its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2,600th Anniversary (2010), her Korea chapter with Todd A. Henry’s Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (2014), or her Hawai’i chapter with Jolyon Baraka Thomas’s Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (2019), for example.
I have a few obligatory minor criticisms of the book. First, the copyediting is sometimes lacking; there are a number of missing or stray words in sentences as well as some geographically puzzling typos (e.g., "Aichi Prefecture, Shikoku" and "Seattle, Oregon" [pp. 197, 207]). Second, the density of the work is sometimes a double-edged sword. Shimizu crams so much information into each chapter that sometimes I wanted her to slow down and linger on the messy human details. In the early chapters, she has a tendency to say that "the shrine" did things—imposed new notions of space or time or ethics—but I was curious about the human actors who decided on new calendars or about local people needing to be coaxed into volunteer brigades. Some of the most interesting material in her later chapters is about conflicting visions of what shrines should do or be; given the amount of ground she covers in a slim 228 pages, it is understandable that she avoids getting into the weeds with every example. Finally, I wondered at times how much of the story of shrines as secular institutions was just a story of modern institutions. Shimizu returns over and over to time, space, and ethics as constituent parts of secularism, but were there any modern institutions that refused to adopt the new calendar? She argues that shrines were instrumental in disseminating new notions of Japanese secularity, but her story frequently crosses over with other modern institutions including the military, museums, public parks, national monuments, the educational system, and more. I think there is a fascinating future project that would bring shrines into conversation with other modern institutions disseminating Japanese secularity to consider how much of this story is unique to shrines and how much is widely shared.
Overall, this is an excellent monograph that will be required reading for the field and that has laid the groundwork for many future studies.
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Citation:
Dana Mirsalis. Review of Shimizu, Karli, Overseas Shinto Shrines: Religion, Secularity and the Japanese Empire.
H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2024.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58750