Religion in Japan: A geographic analysis.

[Zioneer]

Out of curiosity, can you differentiate between Protestant churches in that map? Japan is one of the Asian nations that the LDS Church has had the longest presence in, since 1901 (though only in any real sense since WW2). We're supposed to have about 127,000 in all of Japan, which admittedly isn't much, but I was just curious if it even shows up as a blip.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Sadly, no, I can't.

I can tell you, however, that 127,000 is almost exactly 0.1% of the total population, and about four or five per cent of the Christian population.

[Zioneer]

Sadly, no, I can't.

I can tell you, however, that 127,000 is almost exactly 0.1% of the total population, and about four or five per cent of the Christian population.

Ah, thanks. Excellent maps by the way, very informative.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Expect Christianity and formal Shintō maps by mid-week (was going to be tonight but I got badly sidetracked).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Sorry this took me so long! Long week.




Christianity concentrates in the west, but not for the same reasons as Buddhism (or as we shall see in the next map, Shintō). This rather has to do with the directions from which missionization came during the Nanban Trade period, which basically set the plot for subsequent Japanese Christianity despite the two hundred and fifty-odd years of vicious persecution that separate it from modern Japanese Christian life. The missionization during this period came from the west and concentrated on what a lot of histories of Japan call, during this time and up to about the middle of the Meiji Era, the 'southwestern periphery'--Kyūshū, the southern half of Shikoku, and the westernmost tip of Honshū--and on the Seto Inland Sea, which at the time was the main avenue of trade and transport between the Spanish and Portuguese mission sites and the power centers in Kansai. For a generation or two in the late sixteenth and very early seventeenth centuries before the persecution started, parts of Kyūshū and Shikoku were majority-Christian. A lot of these Christians went into hiding, obscuring their faith in rituals that cosmetically resembled those of Buddhism and eventually drifting further and further away from orthodoxy due to their lack of priests and Bibles. Most of these 'Hidden Christians' rejoined the Catholic Church after the Meiji Restoration but some have persisted to the present day as 'Separated Christians', and are worthy of study and might make a fascinating thread topic some day in and of themselves.

Note that the most Christian prefecture is to this day Nagasaki. It’s the very dark red area in the far west, a group of barely-connected peninsulas and islands—that is in fact a prefecture and not just a bunch of overlapping lines and blotches! It's 5.8% Christian and was first the main hub of Catholic missionary work and later the only area that was partially open to Europeans throughout the Tokugawa bakufu. The insular portions of this prefecture are where the vast majority of the remaining Separated Christians live.

The Tōkyō Metropolis is the second most Christian prefecture because it's Tōkyō. Tōkyō has a lot of everything.

William Temple once said that the Church was the only organization that existed for the benefit of its non-members. This wasn’t even close to being true and it doesn’t even make Christianity unique among religions in that the formal Shintō shrine network exists to cater to the needs of as many people who don’t belong to it as possible as well. There are a few generally highly specific and arcane things for which formal membership in a shrine helps but in general in order to participate in most aspects of Shintō worship one basically just has to show up (or volunteer, in the case of things like carrying portable shrines at festivals). It’s enough of an ethnoreligion that people who are obviously not Japanese might get looked at a little askance but even that is not insurmountable. Indeed, I’m really not sure why anybody would feel the need to be a formal member of a Shintō organization exactly, other than clergy and their families; and indeed, few enough people are that this group is actually smaller than Christianity by some measures.

There’s a softer instance of the same general patterns from the Buddhism map in this map, but other than that what’s interesting here is basically just one prefecture, Kōchi. It, Akita, Tottori, Miyazaki, and Kagoshima are the only prefectures that stand out enough that it is basically impossible to argue that it’s statistical noise, and Kōchi (5.5% formal Shintō) stands out the most among these by a considerable margin. It stood out on the mushūkyō map too, so clearly the idea of Shintō over against other religions has some sort of strong appeal here. There are very specific, locally powerful shrine networks in these five prefectures, which rely partially on the religious equivalent of patronage, but I wasn't able to figure out exactly what the nature of these shrine networks is. Shimane Prefecture in the southwesterly part of the Sea of Japan coastline, the location of the Izumo Grand Shrine, is part of a cluster of prefectures with slightly higher rates of formal Shintō adherence than most of the country, but doesn't even stand out as much as neighboring Tottori does; Mie Prefecture between Nagoya and Kansai, the location of the Ise Grand Shrine, doesn't stand out at all, which surprises me.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Any interest in me continuing this with the specific Buddhist sects?

[politicus]

Any interest in me continuing this with the specific Buddhist sects?

Yes, I would very be very interested.

[anvi]

I would also be interested.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Finally doing this again! Now for the specific sects of Japanese Buddhism.



We begin with a map of the Pure Land sect. Pure Land in its various denominations is the most popular type of Buddhism in Japan. It's a Mahayana school that advocates faith in a cosmic buddha called Amida who will help one attain rebirth in the Pure Land or Western Paradise, a world in which one can more easily practice the dharma and attain enlightenment since this world has entered the 'Age of the Degenerate Dharma' in which properly following the Buddhist teachings is no longer possible. It's a leveling, populist kind of Buddhism, and Pure Land figures have often found themselves on the political left throughout Japanese history.

The distribution of Pure Land honestly surprised me a little bit, and it was more surprising in its weaknesses than in its strength. I would have expected it to have made more inroads in the northeast, and I'm genuinely shocked by its near-absence in the area around Tokyo.  What's not surprising is its strength in a belt across central Japan, particularly in Fukui, Ishikawa, and Toyama Prefectures on the Sea of Japan coast. This area has a lot of Pure Land temples and during the Warring States period of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was ruled for several generations by the Ikkō-ikki, a peasant uprising turned proto-anarcho-communist movement encouraged by a radicalized Pure Land splinter sect that interpreted the mainstream Pure Land leader Rennyo's preaching as a call for revolutionary political change. (One term used for their intentions and modus operandi was gekokujō, 'the low oppress the high'.) The Ikkō-ikki revolution was eventually crushed but its spirit lived on in the kakure nenbutsu ('Hidden Name of the Buddha'; the nenbutsu is a formula including Amida's name that one chants as a petition to be reborn into the Pure Land), underground continuations of the movement based primarily on the southern island of Kyūshū (another place where Pure Land Buddhism remains strong). The kakure nenbutsu were generally more orthodox than their Hidden Christian counterparts because they had the luxury of being able to secretly contact sympathetic elements in the Hongan-ji temple network for help maintaining their beliefs.

Wikipedia tells me that there's still a separate, unrelated kakure nenbutsu group in the northeast that remains independent of the Pure Land temple networks, which could explain Pure Land's apparent and surprising weakness in that area, but I haven't looked into this further.

[H. Ross Peron]

The Ikko-Ikki sound like a more successful version of the Munster Anabaptists or the Diggers.