Japanese Survey Data on Religious Attitudes, Beliefs, and Practices in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

The objectives of this chapter are: to report descriptive statistics from religion questions on surveys dating from 2000; to address issues of reliability and validity in these surveys; and to discuss the limitations and promising new research directions when using this kind of data for the study of Japanese religions in the twenty-first century. It focuses on descriptive analyses of eight individual-level survey datasets, which aims to serve as a single source for a variety of statistical information concerning contemporary Japanese religiosity. The chapter presents an overview of the data and methods used. Following that is a discussion of the main findings of this study, including multiple measures of religious identification, general religious beliefs, opinions, and attitudes. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the benefits and problems concerning the use of survey data in the study of Japanese religiosity, and addresses some possible solutions to these problems. Keywords:beliefs; Japanese religiosity; Japanese survey data; religious attitude; statistical information; twenty-first century