Japan’s history of religion, from Shinto and Buddhism to cults and Jesus’ secret mission, and how fights between groups have been rife for centuries
Religion

For those not yet aware, Jesus Christ is buried in Japan. Yes, the Son of God flees Judea around AD33, leaving his brother, “Isukiri”, crucified in his place, and with another brother’s ears and a lock of his mother’s hair as mementos, our fugitive Lord and Saviour sets out for the far-flung Japanese archipelago, where he settles in Herai, Mutsu province (now Shingo, Aomori prefecture), becomes a rice farmer, marries, sires three children, and dies aged 106.

The legend is commemorated in the northern Japanese village, where the Tomb of Christ draws middling crowds of curious visitors. The chapel-esque Christ Village Tradition Museum tells the whole story, even down to an etymological theory that the place name Herai, as well as the lyrics to accompany the local Nanyadoyara dance, derive from Hebrew.

However interesting as a story – much like the crucifixion-defying legend that places Jesus in a Himalayan tomb in Srinagar, in Indian-administered Kashmir – this one is refuted by almost everyone, including James Morris, assistant professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, at the University of Tsukuba.

“Is the claim that Jesus is buried in Japan plausible? Not at all,” he says. There is “no record” of Shingo’s association with Christianity before the 1930s, let alone a linguistic lineage to Hebrew, and the source texts, “in which the associations are first made”, Morris emphasises, “are widely believed to be a forgery.”

The text in question, the Takeuchi monjo, is a raft of documents attributed to Heguri no Matori, a 5th century court minister who usurped the throne following Emperor Ninken’s death in AD498, and it was a descendant of Heguri, Takeuchi Kiyomaro (1874-1965), who allegedly discovered this trove on March 18, 1928.

Jesus’ secret mission to Japan was not the only wild “revelation” to be adopted into the scriptures of Amatsukyo, a religion Takeuchi had founded in 1911, based, so he said, on Japan’s native Shinto: the animist beliefs that merged with Buddhism to give Japan its unique mythological panoply.

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The documents described Japan not only as Jesus’ final resting place, but as a former centre of a world government and cradle of all races. This may not sound so shocking given the country’s Shinto mythology of the islands themselves being created by divine beings, but the Takeuchi Monjo tells of other intrigues that include UFOs, mythical metals, ancient Japanese pyramids and the lost continent of Mu. A migratory Jesus with a Japanese family? Why not.

For most, being an anomalous home of ancient alien theories does not factor into Japan’s image. Even veteran Japanophiles often view the nation as one of politeness and harmony – all Unesco-recognised temples and shrines, sumo and manga, geisha and gyoza – not a contiguous study of often bizarre religions, of which Amatsukyo was just one.

As far back as the Edo period (1603-1868), however isolationist towards the outside world, Japan was spiritually plural, where “the clear-cut distinctions between religions that we know today didn’t exist”, says Morris. “Japan’s religious world consisted of multiple traditions including numerous Buddhist sects, Shinto, folk religions such as Koshin, and the neo-Confucianism of the intellectual classes.”

The Futarasan Jinja shrine in Nikko is centred around the worship of Mount Nantai. Many sub-shrines, such as this one, can be found scattered in the nearby hills. Photo: Russell Thomas

One group of the period, as maligned as it was messianic, was Tenrikyo. The religion’s founder, Miki Nakayama, was a farmer. She had her revelation while filling in for the accompanying female medium of a mountain hermit monk, Ichibei Nakano, who had been conducting yosekaji, a ritual to bestow Buddha’s compassion on Nakayama’s sickly eldest son. But during the ritual, Nakayama’s appearance and voice suddenly changed: she had been possessed.

In conversation with Nakano, the entity identified itself as Ten no Shogun (heavenly general), the original god. It demanded that Nakayama’s body be used as the Tsukihi no yashiro (shrine of god the parent), a sort of prophetic spiritual conduit, in order to save the world. On October 26, 1838 (the traditional date of Tenrikyo’s founding), the violent, prolonged possession crescendoed, and Nakayama’s family acceded: she became Oyasama (“worthy parent”).

She secluded herself over the next few years, giving away her earthly possessions. Starting with the roof tiles, she dismantled the family house, gradually plunging them into poverty. But by 1854, it was clear she had started a small revolution. She began administering rites for safe childbirth called obiya yurushi, allowing women to give birth without observing rituals to dispel kegare, the defilement or pollution associated with birth (and death, among other things). Her new religion had, at least somewhat, and then only spiritually, lifted a yoke from women.

Four thousand dancers on the Budokan Hall floor in Tokyo introduce the Soka Gakkai’s cultural festival on October 19, 1970. The Buddhist religious movement today counts more than eight million members. Photo: Getty Images

This, along with her association with the Burakumin – an ostracised group akin to Dalits in India – further alienated locals from Nakayama, her family and her Tenrikyo faith. The fledgling religion, upsetting the social constraints of the day, was deemed jakyo (heresy) and inshi (immoral).

Heresy and immorality are not generally what one would expect in a Japanese religion thousands of years after Christ, but Jolyon Thomas, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, says that “with a few exceptions”, however much it may sound antithetical, “nearly all of the so-called ‘new’ religious movements derive in some way or another from the existing Buddhist and Shinto traditions”.

Practised in Japan since the 6th century, Buddhism has long been a moral compass, even used to exercise state control: every household was required to register with a Buddhist temple in what was known as the danka system. It became a way to suppress the onset of Christianity brought by European traders, which the Tokugawa shogunate confined to restricted port areas, notably Nagasaki in the south, and Yokohama outside Edo, now Tokyo, but the practice eventually became tantamount to – and as pedestrian as – a census.

The 1930s Christ Church in Yokohama, first built in 1863, represents a renewed tolerance for Christianity, once violently repressed in Japan. Photo: Russell Thomas

Shinto and Buddhism had become fairly indistinguishable by then, with Buddhist temples occupying Shinto shrines and vice versa, a gradual convergence since Buddhism’s arrival on its long journey from India. That was until 1868 and the shinbutsu bunri, literally “separate the kami [native Japanese gods] from the Buddha”, the forcible Buddhism-Shinto split ordered by the new Meiji government.

“The resultant outpouring of anti-Buddhist sentiment and persecution led to the closure or destruction of tens of thousands of temples by the early 1870s,” says Morris. “State Shinto began to be developed. In 1873, the boards outlawing Christianity were removed. Japan’s religious environment thereby began to evolve and diversify.”

State Shinto? Not so, according to Thomas. “First, Japan never established Shinto as a state religion,” he says.

Though not officially affiliated with the government, many Shinto shrines display the Japanese flag on festival days. Photo: Russell Thomas

The 1890 constitution of Japan did not set a national religion, and actually offered a guarantee of religious freedom. According to Article 28: “Japanese subjects shall, within limits not prejudicial to their duties as subjects, enjoy freedom of religious belief.”

“In other words,” says Morris, “the constitution guaranteed freedom of religion so long as other unnamed criteria were also fulfilled.”

Thomas explains that “State Shinto” was practically never used in Japan before its occupation by United States-led Allies (1945-52), and that Japanese govern­ment officials expressly avoided referring to shrines as religious. The understanding of State Shinto as a “coercive ideology” that led to militarism and imperialism “is misleading and reflects US propaganda more than it represents historical fact”, says Thomas.

Shinto shrines dedicated to the god Inari, like this one in Hiroshima, often feature numerous vermilion torii gates. Photo: Russell Thomas

Even classifying Shinto outside any national prescription is difficult; the popular epithet is that Japan is a nation of eight million gods. “Depending on who you ask, Shinto is either a nationwide religion with a single pantheon or it is a highly localised tradition with completely different practices from one shrine to another,” he says. “It’s a bit confusing.”

Eventually there were hundreds of officially recognised Shinto sects, not all of them equally accepted by Japanese society at large.

“In the 1880s, there was a lot of experimentation among government officials with what counted as religion and what did not, [which] continued all the way through [World War II],” says Thomas, as “scholars and journalists relentlessly castigated groups that they thought of as […] not ‘real religion’.”

He adds that in the late 1890s journalists’ attacks on marginal movement Renmonkyo were “so severe that the group dissolved”.

Foxes are said to be messengers of the Shinto god Inari, whose shrines are scattered throughout Japan. Photo: Russell Thomas

This democratisation of religion was apparently widespread, according to “Local Newspaper Coverage of Folk Shamans in Aomori Prefecture”, a 1994 essay by Yoshimasa Ikegami, a professor at Komazawa University.

Ikegami wrote, “[It] might be possible to consider the ‘folk’ as referring to those of the ‘non-ruling’ class, the class of ‘subjects’ (tami), in contrast to the ‘officials’ (kan) linked to public authority.”

Under governmental framework, “village Shinto shrines and their priests were considered ‘non-religious’ elements of the community, and organised within the system of government ‘officials’ who bore responsibility for national ritual”.

Not falling into this category, Tenrikyo was at the receiving end of demonisation. Japan’s religious past is certainly not as harmonious as people think.

The LDP [Liberal Democratic Party] literally can’t get votes without the [religious group Soka] Gakkai’s vote mobilisation
Jolyon Thomas, associate professor of religious studies, University of Pennsylvania

Japanologist and historian Helen Hardacre wrote in 1994 that “conflict has been a constant element of Japanese religious history”, despite stereotypes to the contrary.

She recounts various contemporary reports of male folk practitioners confronting Nakayama, questioning her authenticity and violently destroying her property.

Fights between religions have been rife throughout Japanese history. For example, Hokkeshu, an early school of Nichiren Buddhism, became powerful in Kyoto (possibly due to the support of its merchant class). In 1536, a lay follower of Hokkeshu defeated a Tendai Buddhist monk in public debate. This enraged the infamous warrior monks of nearby Mount Hiei, spiritual home of the Tendai sect. The monks burned 21 Hokkeshu temples, and much of Kyoto in the process, in an event known as the Tenmon Persecution.

Even Nichiren (1222-82) himself was subject to oppression. His critiques of the ruling classes’ Zen Buddhism, among other things, almost led to his execution. He was exiled twice.

Contemporary press, then and now, has stoked the flames. On November 22, 1899, Aomori newspaper Too Nippo reported that: “The use of magical incantations to interfere with medical therapy was prohibited in a notice issued by the Ministry of Religious Education in 1874. […] In spite of these prohibitions, immoral and deviant religions have been growing steadily in recent times, causing no small injury through their superstitions.

“Worst of all, many of those now appearing are mistaken in their treatment of precious human life; if left to themselves, there is no telling how much harm may occur.”

Hakodate Orthdox Church, in Hokkaido, was founded by the Russian consulate in 1859. Photo: Russell Thomas

Ikegami’s 1994 essay is replete with newspaper reports like this, many concerned with fuzoku bunran – the destruction of public morals. Some accuse Tenrikyo of having “assembled men and women together, and used reprehensible means to engage in unbelievably licentious activities, going so far as to act as agent for carnal liaisons”, others that Tenrikyo is “deceiving the ignorant folk and greedily accumulating money and possessions for its own private profit”.

Tenrikyo had by 1900, according to Ikegami, become the archetype for all “deviant religions”, and survives as one of many so-called new religious movements that exist today in Japan, despite many of them not being new at all.

Post-World War II Japan jostled with organisations incorporating themselves as religions, often for tax breaks. “One famous case is Denshinkyo,” says Thomas, “the ‘electricity religion’, which was actually an electronics shop.”

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Another more recent religion is Aum Shinrikyo, which was responsible for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo metro.

Wanting to “avoid the sort of religious oppression that existed during and prior to World War II”, says Morris, “the primary legal concern was to guarantee religious freedom and protect religions.”

He deems Aum Shinrikyo – which has now branched into two derivative sects, Aleph and Hikari no Wa – “a firm product of religious trends in 1980s Japan [which] started as a yoga group that focused on acquiring superhuman powers”. (Kofuku no Kagaku, better known as Happy Science, was also founded around the same time, in 1986.)

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“In the early 1980s […], there was a lot of disillusion­ment among young people with the ‘standard’ path of success,” says Thomas, adding that journalists were worried about young people who were not committed to lifelong careers, thereby predicting the moral panic induced by NEETs, those “not in education, employment or training”.

“These [religious] groups had some similarities: they were led by charismatic young male leaders claiming powers of prophecy, had millennial messages and claimed to teach the ‘authentic’ form of Buddhism,” says Erica Baffelli, a senior lecturer in Japanese studies at the University of Manchester.

Another element was Nostradamus – specifically, journalist Ben Goto’s 1973 book about the 16th century astrologer’s predictions. It became a bestseller. And in 1979, Mu, a magazine on the occult, was founded. These were just some of the “millennial themes” circulating in popular culture at the time, says Baffelli.

A 1973 book on French astrologer and physician Michel Nostradamus’s predictions was a bestseller in Japan. Photo: Getty Images

The result is that “people were primed for a message that singled them out as having a special role in a world that was suddenly re-enchanted and imbued with mystery,” says Thomas. “Aum promised its followers supernatural powers like levitation. Happy Science wove together an elaborate cosmology based on past lives and a grand plan for the individual within the universe.”

Religions that offer an alternative path have been successful before, and remain so. Buddhist religious movement Soka Gakkai, founded in 1930, is one. Its second president, Josei Toda, went on a vigorous conversion spree in 1951, aiming to convert 750,000 households before his death. Today it counts more than eight million members.

Soka Gakkai’s second president Josei Toda.

But the real story, says Thomas, is Soka Gakkai’s political party, Komeito.

“The LDP [Liberal Democratic Party] literally can’t get votes without the Gakkai’s vote mobilisation, which means that the junior coalition partner Komeito can put a lot of drag on any LDP policies it doesn’t like,” he says. “It’s not an automatic veto, but it is real power.”

In the media frenzy that followed the 1995 sarin gas attacks, Aum Shinrikyo became a template for nefarious fictional evil cults that appeared in various anime and manga. But though this was popularised in post-Aum manga, it is not limited to this period; “[…] it was only natural that mangaka [manga artists] would focus on [evil cults], disparagingly pushing anything reminiscent of Aum to the margins,” writes Thomas in his 2012 essay “Horrific ‘Cults’ and Comic Religion”.

Shoko Asahara, leader of the Japanese cult group Aum Shinrikyo, which was responsible for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo metro, during his visit to Moscow, Russia, on February 17, 1994. Photo: Getty Images

Religion as an alleged social problem, however, is nothing new – just look at the early years of Tenrikyo and how it was received by the media. Happy Science, perhaps due to its perceived hostility to criticism (a New York Times article called it “Tokyo’s answer to Scientology”) and its own right-wing political arm, the Happiness Realization Party, is sometimes deemed controversial. But that’s not a “particularly useful” term, says Baffelli.

Aum, too, and other religions across the world are often classified as cults. Though it is a neutral word to denote homage paid to a particular deity, nowadays it is what Baffelli calls a “pejorative term”.

“This simple four-letter word is a power ploy, and when journalists and scholars use it we run the risk of justifying state violence with which we may not agree,” says Thomas, who prefers the term “marginalised religious movement”.

Marginalised or not, coexistence is the crux: even in the wake of the deadly sarin gas attack, Aum Shinrikyo – founded by Shoko Asahara, a man who (among other things) claimed to be Christ – was not dismantled. It is unlikely Aum’s lay members knew about the attacks; Morris says a “massive exodus” took place, membership dropping from about 40,000 to 2,000 people.

In 1999, the Act on the Control of Organisations Which Have Committed Acts of Indiscriminate Mass Murder was passed. The result is that Aum’s derivatives are surveilled and their activities are published online by the Justice Ministry.

Somehow, the final resting place of Christ seems less controversial once it rolls away a stone to this hidden history of spiritual syncretism; and given how quickly the country’s “new religions” multiply under the first rays of inquisition, maybe a cross-escaping, transcontinental Jesus is more at home in rural Japan than he would be anywhere else.

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