Jolyon Thomas, Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan

Abstract

American Religion 1, no. 2 (Spring 2020), pp. 157–159 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.1.2.07 Book Review Jolyon Thomas. Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) Anne M. Blankenship North Dakota State University, Fargo, USA Jolyon Thomas’s book serves as an astute religious history of the US occupation of post-WWII Japan, and also provides a powerful corrective to misperceptions about religious freedom broadly and about prewar religious freedom in Japan specifically. Contrary to claims made by occupying forces, Thomas argues that “prewar and wartime Japan actually exemplified the normal functioning of legal regimes characterized by religious freedom” (3). The book interrogates the concept of religious freedom, citing the reality that “freeing religions” invariably requires defining religion, a task necessitating the determination of which practices and beliefs “count” as religious and which do not. In the case of the rapidly modernizing nation of Japan, some Buddhists attempted (and failed) to label certain practices as superstition, not religion, to permit their eradication. Simultaneously, it allowed Japan to define certain Shinto rites as patriotic secularism in order to mandate their practice. These intransigent complications of regulating religious freedom are the puzzles that Thomas explores during the prewar decades and into the US occupation, when American officials launched a problematic mission to inculcate a desire for religious liberty in all Japanese while simultaneously abolishing various Shinto rites. American Religion 1:2 158 Faking Liberties is organized by pairing the first four chapters with the final four chapters, creating a parallel discussion of the pre- and postwar periods. The first half of the book succinctly defeats claims that the Japanese had no concept of religious freedom prior to the occupation. Thomas assembles plentiful evidence from Japanese-language sources to show that a robust discourse on religion began soon after the enactment of the Meiji Constitution of 1898. Similar to laws elsewhere, it allowed free religious belief “within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects.” His argument for the existence of secularism is buoyed by reports of Japanese who failed to privilege certain groups or establish an official state religion. These conversations existed in clear contradiction to postwar propaganda that claimed that the Meiji Constitution was uniquely and inextricably flawed. The book’s second half speaks more directly to the interests of scholars of American religion. Thomas details the acrobatics American officials performed to declare religious liberty and insist on its application, while simultaneously de- and reconstructing religious organizations. Beginning with the premise that “legitimate” religions had been widely oppressed and a national religion had been forced upon the people, occupying forces cranked out pseudo-academic studies to reach that conclusion, ignoring insistent claims by the Japanese that religious freedom was already protected by existing laws. That the nation’s constitution guaranteed that right and no existing laws declared a national religion complicated matters only in the short term. As Thomas writes, “State Shinto had to be created to be destroyed” (150). The US government relied on American and British religious scholars who labeled both shrine rites and imperial ritual as “religion” and attempted to eradicate it from schools, while US officials sought to convince the Japanese people to value religious freedom. Their regulations also replicated aspects of the 1939 Religious Organizations Law that they had so harshly criticized. While notable differences existed, both governments found that they could communicate more effectively if small religious groups merged under umbrella organizations. This created unique problems for new religious movements, which had struggled under Meiji law as well. In both sections, Thomas focuses on the roles of academics within these debates and how politicians and other government officials used their work. He is critical of the complicity of both Japanese and American scholars and states from the outset that his “project is unabashedly politically motivated” (5). However, while Thomas critiques resulting policies, he offers generous portrayals of the individual scholars involved. The conclusion includes a cautionary note to current religious studies scholars. While the book makes significant contributions to the field, it has some notable problems. First, Thomas limits the Japanese perspective...