Abstract
This article focuses on the life of two individuals who were actively promoting universalism in the Meiji era, becoming silent during World War II, and then resurfacing after the war, pursuing similar ideas and agendas. These two individuals were Imaoka Shin’ichirō (1881–1988), the former secretary of the Japanese Unitarian Association who died in 1988 at age 106, and Nishida Tenkō (1872–1968), the founder of the Ittōen movement. The author scrutinizes their role in formulating ideas and forming alliances between groups that still claim to promote transnational and transreligious ideas in the twenty-first century. Although Imaoka and Nishida contributed to bridge the gap between the Meiji era and today, whatever remains of their legacy may be related to the current standstill in attempts to deal with transnational and transdenominational divisions. In reviewing avenues for future transreligious conversations, this article discusses the extent to which the present Japanese religious traditions could contribute to such nonsectarian endeavors. It also indicates some of the philosophical strategies that could be adopted, highlighting the limits of common attempts based on an ethical approach, suggesting instead that empirical and epistemological approaches avoiding the pitfall of language may be more conducive to overcoming the current inertia in transreligious conversations.
Highlights
Our scrutiny of links between the past, the present, and the future of transreligious developments in Japan must begin by reviewing some of the past gestures toward universalism
Far from claiming to prescribe how the future of transreligious conversations should unfold, this article attempts to contextualize the efforts made toward such endeavor in postwar Japan, by showing its neglected roots in the prewar period
Religions 2018, 9, 151 the prewar and postwar period, it attempts to address the broader issue of how religious studies could reopen discussions about universality in a postmodern era marked by skepticism toward this question. Choosing to examine these two individuals and to critically discuss their impact on postwar interreligious dialogues aims at complicating the images that tend to prevail on the contrast between
Summary
Our scrutiny of links between the past, the present, and the future of transreligious developments in Japan must begin by reviewing some of the past gestures toward universalism. Religious studies tend to focus on discrete individuals and discrete time periods, inevitably, providing a fragmented outlook on how deeper currents of thought tend to affect intellectual and religious history in the long run. Religions 2018, 9, 151 the prewar and postwar period, it attempts to address the broader issue of how religious studies could reopen discussions about universality in a postmodern era marked by skepticism toward this question. Choosing to examine these two individuals and to critically discuss their impact on postwar interreligious dialogues aims at complicating the images that tend to prevail on the contrast between. More scholarly attention needs to be devoted to areas of continuity in intellectual and religious history, precisely because political shifts occupied center stage throughout the twentieth century
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