Abstract
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Japanese government ended the centuries-long Japanese policy of isolation and initiated a rapid modernization effort that aimed to create a competitive Japanese nation state. In addition to such changes as new family law, compulsory education, and redistribution of property, the government contracted foreign experts with the goal of importing western knowledge. As a result, civil engineers, artists, and physicians started moving to Japan, as did missionaries. This resulted in intense cultural encounter and negotiation, in the course of which Christian faith and Western church architecture became acculturated in Japan. This article sketches the socio-cultural and technological parameters shaping Japanese Christian church buildings from the 1860s onwards as well as the transfer of meanings and forms from an explicitly Western tradition into a Western-looking and yet entirely Japanese tradition of Christianity. It sketches a second line of transfer as well, that reinterpreted the ‘church’ as an architectural form into the Wedding-Chapel-Romanticism of the non-Christian Japanese mainstream wedding industry.
Highlights
During the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan was forced by western economic and diplomatic interests to end its previous isolationist policy and to play a greater role in the East Asian region
Western social practices were adopted by some parts of Japanese society, while building technologies and architectural forms became part of the Japanese built environment, as did—over time—Christian churches
The ‘handing down’ involved actors from different cultural backgrounds and various interpretations, and even the artefacts themselves underwent changes; yet the whole process reads like the continuous weaving of a textile with changing patterns, yarns, or weavers: innovative and adaptive. This case challenges the understanding of the term ‘tradition’ as explicated in the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Dynamics in the History of Religions Between Asia and Europe working paper on tradition (Krech and Karis 2017, 1) by showing that the performative dimension of tradition is not entirely self-referential but might include outside referencing
Summary
This contribution to Entangled Religions is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC BY 4.0 International). The license can be accessed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. Entangled Religions 5 (2018) ht t p://d x.d o i.o r g. / 10.13154/e r.v5. 2018. 312–3 46
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