Existential and Ontological Dimensions of Time in Heidegger and Dogen.

Abstract

religious world view is not found (pp. 31-31), and in this respect she harkens back to her short monograph on this subject published in 1984. When read before or separately from the study on Kurozumikyo, The Religion of Japan's Korean Minority comes over as a hastily written collection of field-work notes that are interesting in themselves but cry out for further development. Moreover, the title of the monograph is misleading since the book deals with the religion of a rather small minority within the Korean minority in Japan, namely, the Koreans who worship at some temples in the Ikoma mountains in the Osaka region. Readers not familiar with the actual situation may easily be led again to inflating the strength and importance of that particular minority. On the other hand, when read after Kurozumikyo, this short treatise serves to corroborate the thesis presented in that book, that is, the world view of Japan's religions is inseparable from Japanese ethnicity, for it presents a concrete example, within Japan, of a religiosity in which this is not the case. The religiosity of the Korean minority contributes in fact to the preservation of another ethnic identity, although, as the author convincingly shows, it does not take a pure Korean form. Her thesis in this short monograph is that the religion of the Koreans in Japan is not a mere transplantation of Korean practices but an innovative development that is influenced, but not absorbed, by Japanese culture. The author categorizes it as 'the institutionalization of the Korean laywoman's world view'. Although I have some reservations about the desirability of publishing a study that is unfinished, so to speak, Hardacre's monograph deserves attention. But it has to be seen in connection with her other works that, to repeat, are major contributions to our understanding of Japanese culture and religiosity.