The Journal of Japanese Studies

For some years now, the linguistic turn in religious studies has strongly affected the research agenda of writing on modern Japanese religion(s). A number of influential works in both Japanese and English have focused on the appropriation of the concept of "religion" (and its corollary "the secular") in modern Japan. Jolyon Baraka Thomas has written Faking Liberties in the spirit of this constructivist approach when he chose not to write a history of religious freedom in modern Japan as such but to investigate how stakeholders and scholars have spoken about "religious freedom" in Japan. Although, according to the subtitle of the book, the chronological focus is "American-Occupied Japan," only three out of eight chapters in fact deal with the occupation period, which turns out to be a good thing as we are [End Page 166] treated to a full-blown history of the religious freedom discourse in Japan from the Meiji to the postwar period.

Thomas's point of departure is the observation that there is no such thing as a simple universally true principle of religious freedom. Rather, all we can ever find are claims to this freedom that are advanced in a specific locale, at a specific point in time, and by specific historical actors. In particular, Thomas discounts the simplistic narrative that the U.S. occupiers brought religious freedom to Japan, where the principle was either unknown or had not been granted up to the end of World War II. In contrast, Thomas contends that "prewar and wartime Japanese practices of religious freedom were extraordinarily normal" (p. 4). In order to thoroughly debunk the idea that it was only after 1945 that religious freedom was imposed upon Japan by an external force, Thomas devotes the first half of his book to a history of "religious freedom talk" in Japan before 1945.

In chapter 1, "The Meiji Constitutionalist Regime as a Secularist System," Thomas takes issue with State Shintō as the conventional conceptual paradigm to describe the prewar relationship between state and religion in Japan. Building on recent critical research, he instead characterizes the situation in place under the Meiji constitution as a secularist regime, i.e., one constructed by various stakeholders "by drawing the lines between religion and not-religion in pursuit of their specific administrative and apologetic projects" (p. 27). This view, reflecting the mainstream in religious studies today, contends that while we cannot meaningfully speak of an objective process of secularization in many modern societies, including Japan, we can identify an ideology of secularism, which holds "that 'religion' could and should be separated from 'non-religion'" (p. 25), with sometimes drastic consequences for how different groups are treated by the state. By looking at the stances of constitutional scholar Minobe Tatsukichi, the Japanese Catholic Church, Shintō scholar Kōno Seizō, and politician and lay Buddhist Andō Masazumi, Thomas manages to show that even in the 1930s, there were competing secularist visions. Although Thomas takes pains to note that "treating the Meiji constitutional regime as secularist does not deny its coercive character" (p. 45), he emphasizes that religious freedom was embraced as an ideal—albeit one whose interpretation was challenged—right up to the beginning of World War II.

The most sophisticated and probably most influential religious stakeholders in prewar Japan were Buddhists; it is to them that Thomas turns his attention in chapter 2, "Who Needs Religious Freedom?" More specifically, he traces Buddhist positions within three formative debates of the 1890s: that on mixed residence (naichi zakkyo), the question of officially recognized religions (kōninkyō), and the Yamagata Religions Bill of 1899. In the course of these debates, a range of Buddhist positions emerged, differing [End Page 167] from author to author. Thomas identifies three main approaches to religious freedom among Buddhist authors around 1900: statist (exemplified by policymakers but also some Buddhists such as Katō Totsudō), corporatist (represented by Andō Masazumi and Chikazumi...