The Influence of Globalization on Japanese Religion

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 97-120
Author(s):  
Nobutaka Inoue

The process of globalization has significantly and unprecedentedly influenced the activities, teachings, and many other aspects of religions within Japan since the 1980s. While Christian groups have been establishing churches in Japan since the nineteenth century, one now also sees various other religious groups including Muslims from a broad range of countries establishing branch churches and mosques of their own in the country. Meanwhile the many domestic modern new religions that were established during the modernization process now find themselves operating alongside even newer types of religious groups including hyper-religions. When one observes the religious life of ordinary Japanese these days, on the surface little may seem to have changed from before globalization developed in earnest. However, the pop subcultures of the younger generations have demonstrated a readiness to adopt and rearrange elements from religious and folk cultures alien to Japan even as they eschew elements from traditional folk life. The ways in which these foreign folk beliefs and their more magical elements have entered and spread in the country are often unpredictable. Thanks to globalization, the boundaries that once existed among Japanese religions—both among the traditional religions in particular and more generally throughout the religious world as a whole—are gradually dissolving.

Author(s):  
Carol Engelhardt

This chapter examines one of the most significant achievements of the Oxford Movement, the establishment of vowed religious communities for women. It discusses some of the most significant figures in the history of these sisterhoods and describes the work undertaken by the approximately 10,000 women who belonged to one of the many communities established in the second half of the nineteenth century. Acknowledging that in many ways these communities ratified existing gender roles, this chapter also sees that by standing firm against opposition from bishops and popular opinion, these women and their male supporters contributed to an alternative and productive role for women.


2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inoue Nobutaka

Abstract Many modern new religions in Japan, by using the mass media in their missionary work, managed to increase their influence on society in a very short time. With time, their use of media has also diversified, now covering all available formats: newspapers and journals, radio and TV, CS and video, the Internet and even smart phones. One of the characteristics of modern new religions is that they are associations composed of people bound by a common purpose rather than by shared blood or territory on which the traditional religions of Shrine Shintō and Sectarian Buddhism were established. It is this new principle of association that allowed new religions such as Sōka Gakkai, Risshō Kōseikai, Reiyūkai, Tenrikyō and Shinnyoen to quickly gain more than a million followers. In the mid-1990s, Japan entered the rapid information age, marked especially by the widespread use of the Internet. However, the changes that the Internet has brought to society differ from those provoked by the earlier modernization process. In this paper, I would like to discuss some of the difficulties that modern new religions face in the Internet age, particularly in the management of new forms of information that can now be sent and received.


Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 87-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catharine Coleborne

This article examines the interpretive framework of “mobility” and how it might usefully be extended to the study of the Australasian colonial world of the nineteenth century, suggesting that social institutions reveal glimpses of (im)mobility. As the colonies became destinations for the many thousands of immigrants on the move, different forms of mobility were desired, including migration itself, or loathed, such as the itinerant lifestyles of vagrants. Specifically, the article examines mobility through brief accounts of the curtailed lives of the poor white immigrants of the period. The meanings of mobility were produced by immigrants' insanity, vagrancy, wandering, and their casual movement between, and reliance on, welfare and medical institutions. The regulation of these forms of mobility tells us more about the contemporary paradox of the co-constitution of mobility and stasis, as well as providing a more fluid understanding of mobility as a set of transfers between places and people.


Author(s):  
Patricia Wittberg ◽  
Thomas P. Gaunt

This chapter briefly describes the history of religious institutes in the United States. It first covers the demographics—the overall numbers and the ethnic and socioeconomic composition—of the various institutes during the nineteenth century. It next discusses the types of ministries the sisters, brothers, and religious order priests engaged in, and the sources of vocations to their institutes. The second section covers changes in religious institutes after 1950, covering the factors which contributed to the changes as well as their impact on the institutes themselves and the larger Church. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the subsequent chapters.


This book addresses the sounds of the Crimean War, along with the many ways nineteenth-century wartime is aurally constructed. It examines wide-ranging experiences of listeners in Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Daghestan, Chechnya, and Crimea, illustrating the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the modes by which wartime sound was archived and heard. This book covers topics including music in and around war zones, the mediation of wartime sound, the relationship between sound and violence, and the historiography of listening. Individual chapters concern sound in Leo Tolstoy’s wartime writings, and his place within cosmopolitan sensibilities; the role of the telegraph in constructing sonic imaginations in London and the Black Sea region; the absence of archives for the sounds of particular ethnic groups, and how songs preserve memories for both Crimean Tatars and Polish nationalists; the ways in which perceptions of voice rearranged the mental geographies of Baltic Russia, and undermined aspirations to national unity in Italy; Italian opera as a means of conditioning elite perceptions of Crimean battlefields; and historical frames through which to understand the diffusion of violent sounds amid everyday life. The volume engages the academic fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, literary studies, sound studies, and the history of the senses.


Experiment ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Wendy Salmond

Abstract This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands] Church at Abramtsevo in 1880-81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was bitterly attacked in advanced art circles. Yet Vasnetsov’s new icons were increasingly linked with popular culture and the many copies made of them in the late Imperial period suggest that his hybrid image spoke to a generation seeking a resolution to the dilemma of how modern Orthodox worshippers should pray.


1971 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 621-637 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adolf Holl ◽  
Hyacinthe Crépin

Following Vatican II changes are rapidly taking place within Dutch Catholicism — the bishops no longer make decisions in an authoritarian way: religious practice is de clining ; priests and religious are decreasing in numbers and many religious and pastoral experiments have come into being. KASKI has the responsibility of keeping pace with the Church during this process of change. In order to do this it makes use of several modes of work — the production of statistics relating to the position of religion in Society, the planning of religious and pastoral institutions and the study of new forms of the religious life in orders and congregations. For the first task it has used the same instruments for twenty- five years and the censuses thus produced yield valuable infor mation. As far as pastoral planning is concerned, it works in the field, playing the role of catalyst for those who have to make decisions and the people who have to carry out these decisions. This was the case, for instance, in the pastoral planning of the town of Eindhoven. Finally, when dealing with the new forms of communal religious life it adopts the method of studying through participation so that two of its researchers working in this sector are themselves members of religious groups. Applied research poses important problems, both from the methodological and from the political points of view. Amongst them may be noted the difficulty of determining precisely what constitutes rapid change in religious life, and the political choice of the persons for whom the research is being con ducted; the latter inevitably imposes a certain degree of conformity upon the perspectives of the work. (For example, the choice of the Dutch hierarchy which was to follow the general lines given by a large majority of Catholic opinion when it was tested particularly on questions like the liturgical and parochial changes). The fact, also, that the director of KASKI himself has a personal commitment to what may be described as the « right of centre » position in Dutch Catho licism poses problems for the work of the Institute. Political and religious radicalism is not a strong characteristic of the more senior research workers. KASKI is a rare example of a centre which brings socio logists together and uses their professional competence to accompany change in religious institutions.


1984 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Goldstein

During the last half of the nineteenth century, major population shifts occurred throughout Western Europe, reflecting heavy international migration as well as internal movement from rural to urban places. The latter process, in particular, has been an integral part of the modernization process and was a response both to rural population pressures and to expanding opportunities in the cities. Yet the pace of urbanization was by no means uniform for different countries, in different regions of the same country, or among various subgroups within a single region or province. As a result, analyses using large geographic units or aggregated statistics may mask variations in the underlying dynamics of internal migration.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 456-461
Author(s):  
Ernest Caulfield

IN VIEW of the tremendous advance in pediatrics during the past half century, one might think that a full century ago no one could have known very much about the care of children. To read the newspapers of that day, one might also conclude that it was an age primarily of quacks and patent medicines—of worm cures, hive syrups and of little liver pills. But to appreciate the true status of American pediatrics in 1855 one must judge it not only by the standards of our time but also by the standards of a century earlier, and when that is done it will be seen that American pediatrics in the mid-Nineteenth Century had also made considerable progress. In 1755 the care of the sick was generally in the hands of well-meaning yet untrained practical nurses whereas in 1855 people were turning to physicians who were usually medical school graduates, well acquainted with a vast number of new and important publications. More and more pediatric articles were appearing in the many American journals; and in the review of a new book, one writer mentioned "the numerous publications on the management of infants and children with which the press has been loaded." Indeed, the press was loaded, for the Philadelphia physician had at his command no less than 8 fairsized textbooks in English devoted exclusively to the care of children. The second quarter of the Nineteenth Century saw a definite trend toward pediatrics as a specialty. There is no need to discuss here the numerous elementary guides which were intended primarily for mothers and which were precursors of the textbooks, or the many systems of general medicine with their chapters on pediatric subjects, especially since this trend may be well illustrated by mentioning only the impressive list of textbooks published in Philadelphia.


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