The Oppressor’s Dilemma

How Japanese State Policy toward Religion Paved the Way for Christian Weddings

Bibliographic Data

ID22024914
AuthorsJesse R LeFebvre (0000-0003-0441-3104, Harvard University Press, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume11
Issue2
Pages109-138
Publication date2021-03-22
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Religion in Japan (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2211-8349 • E-ISSN: 2211-8330
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1163/22118349-20210001
OpenAlexW4288076149
LanguageEN
References cited11

For the last thirty-five years, the majority of Japanese wedding ceremonies have involved Christianity, but scholars have struggled with Christianity’s increasingly prominent place within the Japanese religious landscape. The tendency has been to refute the religiosity of Christian weddings and embrace the rhetoric of Japanese essentialism. However, following its prohibition in 1612, the ongoing “eradication” of Christianity defined the very nature of Japanese subjecthood, made Christianity indispensable to the Japanese state, and entrenched ritualized acts of disassociation from the religion within the lives of every individual. Modern arguments, too, continue to assert Christianity’s foreignness, portraying it as the religion of colonialism or contending that “foreign” conceptions of religion are inappropriate within the Japanese context. However, the popularity of Christian wedding ceremonies within the context of postwar Japan owes much to prewar and wartime Japanese state policy where the Japanese government adopted policies toward religion that helped set the stage for the later acceptance of the Christian marriage rite

Christianity · Islam · Political science · Popularity · Religiosity · Rhetoric · Rite · Sociology · State religion · Theology · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

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