Religion in Japanese Daily Life by David C. Lewis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Religion in Japanese Daily Life by David C. Lewis John W. Traphagan Religion in Japanese Daily Life. By David C. Lewis. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018. 346 pages. Hardcover, £120.00/$175.00. David Lewis's Religion in Japanese Daily Life represents one of the more challenging reviews I have been asked to write over the years. The topic is both important and worthy of scholarly interest despite the fact that several fine works on the daily practice of religious and ritual activity in Japan have been written over the past twenty years (and earlier, as well). However, the book is marred by several problems ranging from a lack of significant theoretical situating of the data presented to an odd insistence upon using the outdated mode of writing known as the ethnographic present, [End Page 325] which leads to a problematic failure to sufficiently contextualize the data from a historical perspective. Before diving into my criticisms of the book, I would like to begin with some of the more positive aspects of Lewis's contribution to our understanding of religion in Japan. The book is organized into a traditional structure that begins by describing Lewis's field site and then moves into chapters that follow a conventional framework often found in older ethnographies in which each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of daily life, such as growing up (chapter 3), work (chapter 6), leisure (chapter 7), times of crisis (chapter 8), and death (chapter 9). One of the aspects of the book that I found particularly good is the manner in which Lewis shows through his presentation of ethnographic data the complex ways in which Japanese people engage Buddhist, Shinto, and other religious themes and rituals in relation to the process of aging over the life course. Although this is certainly not a particularly new or innovative insight, the author does a nice job of presenting the different ways in which Japanese construct and participate in religious ritual. I would argue that the second chapter is the highlight of the book in that it provides a detailed and well-organized outline of the history of religiosity in Japan that would be a useful reading assignment in most undergraduate classes on Japanese religions. This points to the book's strongest feature, which is representing a clear introduction to religious practice in Japan as it has typically functioned within the context of families and as a component of social life, rather than exploring the philosophical or theological aspects of Japanese religions. Unfortunately, Routledge, as usual, has chosen to assign very high pricing, at $175 for the hardcover and $50 for the e-book. This effectively makes the book impossible to use in the classroom and is a disservice to students, to scholars, and to the advancement of knowledge in general. Nonetheless, even if the price were reasonable it would be difficult to use Religion in Japanese Daily Life without a fair amount of lecturing and assignment of complementary readings to help situate the data presented in relation to contemporary Japan, because Lewis fails to do this adequately throughout the book. Indeed, Lewis notes early on that much of the book is focused on fieldwork he conducted at the beginning of the 1980s in Shiga Prefecture. On page 5, he states that he intends to use this ethnographic data as a "baseline" for comparison in order to assess whether any change has taken place in contemporary Japanese religiosity, but he does not succeed in this because throughout the remainder of the book little contemporary data with which to compare his older ethnographic research is presented. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that Lewis makes only limited reference to scholarly works on Japan written after 1990, relying on contributions that are often many decades old to support claims about twenty-first-century Japanese society. For example, at one point Lewis discusses variation in urban and rural regions in relation to religious participation and suggests that "daily worship at Buddhist household altars may be more common in urban than in rural areas" (p. 12). To support this claim, Lewis cites Smith's classic book Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan, which was published...