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Podcast: New Books in Buddhist Studies
Episode: Hans Martin Krämer, "Shimaji Mokurai and the Reconception of Religion and the Secular in Modern Japan" (U of Hawaii Press, 2016)
Description: Religion is at the heart of such ongoing political debates in Japan as the constitutionality of official government visits to Yasukuni Shrine, yet the very categories that frame these debates, namely religion and the secular, entered the Japanese language less than 150 years ago. To think of religion as a Western imposition, as something alien to Japanese reality, however, would be simplistic. As this in-depth study shows for the first time, religion and the secular were critically reconceived in Japan by Japanese who had their own interests and traditions as well as those received in their encounters with the West...