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Jolyon Baraka Thomas and Matthew D. McMullen, "The New Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)
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Jolyne Thomas
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Matthew McMullen
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Raditya
Greetings and welcome to another episode of New Books in Japanese Studies, a podcast channel of New Books Network. My name is Raditya and I will be your host for this episode today. We are joined by two guests, Dr. Matthew McMullen and Dr. Jolyne Thomas. Dr. McMullen is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and culture, and Dr. Thomas is an Associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. They are the editors of the new Nanzen Guide to Japanese Religions, which will be the focus of our episode today. The Neo Nanzan Guide serves as a complement to the first Nanzan Guide to Japanese religions published over 20 years ago, and it has been a valuable resource for students in scholars of Japanese religions. Before we get into the book, can you two briefly introduce your work and your background for our listeners who are not familiar with you? Maybe we can start with you, Matt, if you don't mind.
- [02:09]
Matthew McMullen
Yeah, well, thank you for that introduction. Yeah. So my name is Matthew McMullen and I'm a senior Research Fellow at the Nansan Institute for Religion and Culture, which is at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan. My research focuses on, I would say early Medieval Japanese Buddhism, so mostly Heian period Buddhism, but my job at the institute is primarily editing and publishing. We have a couple of book series as well, as a journal, the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, which I'm the editor for in the Nanzan Library for Asian Religion and Culture. My background, I completed my PhD in 2016 at University of California, Berkeley in Buddhist Studies. And before then I received an M. A at the University of Hawaii in Asian Religions, which is where I met Jolene.
- [03:02]
Jolyne Thomas
Yeah, and I'm Jolyan Thomas. I'm an associate professor of Religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm trained primarily as a scholar of modern Japanese religions, which for me means religion from the 19th century all the way to the present. My background? I guess I'll start with my academic background. I finished my PhD from Princeton University in 2014. As Matt said, we met while we were doing master's degrees at the University of Hawaii. What he didn't say is that we both had a fairly long master's program that included two years of living in Japan, sort of in the middle. So we started our master's program, spent one year in Hawaii, then we were both based in Tokyo for two years, and then we moved back to Hawaii to fin our master's degrees. So it was already a long time and a real sort of beginning of long conversations about the state of the field of Japanese religions. In terms of my research, I have three or four different things that I kind of work on at all times. But the basic question that animates my research is kind of who describes what stuff as religion? And that comes up in the introduction to the book we'll be discussing. In my first book called Drawing on Tradition, I talked about manga and anime and religion in contemporary Japan. And then in my second book, Faking Liberties, I discussed the history of religious freedom policy, politics and law in Japan from the 19th century through the mid 20th century. I've got two forthcoming projects. One is a co authored book with Eike Rotz and Julia Frumer that's called Animating Changing the World with Anime Rituals and Robots. It is what I like to call a trigraph because we fully co authored the book that's coming out with University of Hawaii Press in about a year, December 2026, and then again with University of Chicago Press. I've been working on a book called Difficult Subjects that's about religion and tax funded in Japan and the United States. And as you might guess from the way I've described that I've gradually been stretching into studying not only Japan and quote unquote, Japanese religions, but also religion in the United States and other places that have histories of imperialism.
- [05:37]
Raditya
Great. Yeah, thank you I mean, those sounds like extremely interesting projects, and we can get into a bit of those maybe in the end of the podcast. All right, so the new Nanzangai to Japanese Religions was published by the University of Hawaii Press just earlier this year in 2025. The first nonzan guide was published in 2005, so over two decades ago. And I remember reading the first Nanzan Guide when I started my study into my study of Japan and going like, what do you mean? Japanese people don't believe in gentle. But I think the kind of questions that were the focus of the first Nanzan Guide have changed in these two decades. And the structure of the book, I believe, also reflects that change. So the new Nansen Guide is divided into seven sections with smaller chapters. And each section, instead of themes like traditions and history, you have different things that we'll go over in this podcast. But can you tell us how this project began and what prompted this change compared to the first Nansan Guide?
- [06:38]
Matthew McMullen
So, yeah, so maybe I'll start by answering that question. So as I outlined in the preface of the new Nanzan Guide, kind of providing a hagiography of the origin of the book started several years ago, I think it moved 2018, 2019. Shortly after I started here at Nanzan and my predecessor Paul Swanson and I were chatting over coffee and we had both seen a series of posts on Facebook group at the time, and some scholars of especially pre modern Japanese religions were talking about, you know, guides to Japanese religion and how there's kind of a need for such guides for teaching. And someone had mentioned the nanzan guide from 2005, and everyone's like, yeah, it's useful, but it's kind of outdated. So that kind of began a discussion. It's like, well, maybe we should publish an updated version. And then I learned that actually, you know, that when they published the Nan Zan guide back in 2005, they'd actually planned a series of guidebooks, you know, trying to maybe publishing a new version every decade or so. And since at that point it had been 15, 16 years, so we decided, okay, well maybe we'll look into that. So that's how it got started. And then I decided that actually, I didn't decide. My predecessor, Paul Swanson wisely suggested that I not do that by myself because such a large book can drive you crazy if you're editing by yourself. And it's always good to have a partner when you're going crazy. So I invited Julian to join the project shortly after that, and then we kind of got Started with some ideas for the book, and then we had a session at the AAR getting feedback from people. And then Covid happened. And so then everything was kind of discussed remotely for quite a while until the book took shape. I don't know. Jolene, do you have anything to add about the origins of the project?
- [08:40]
Jolyne Thomas
Yeah. So I think one of the other things is that we've got a somewhat unconventional structure of the book. We'll talk about that maybe in a little bit more detail. You know, when Matt first reached out and asked if I wanted to do that, my response was, well, I would love to have an excuse to hang out with one of my oldest friends and talk about Japanese religions, as we have done. But also, no, like, why would I want to do an edited volume? Because they're notoriously.
- [09:06]
Matthew McMullen
Lots of.
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Jolyne Thomas
And so I think initially I had said to Matt I wasn't interested. And then less than 24 hours later, I wrote him an email being like, okay, here's how I would do this. And so it started off with this kind of. I just couldn't resist the intellectual puzzle. But one thing I really want to stress here is that this meeting that we had at the AAR was really generative, asking other people in the field who were all in the same room, you know, what do you think is at the cutting edge of the field right now? And that is a real. Even though our names are on the COVID I think that the structure of the book reflects that sort of origin story of like, wanting to crowdsource, you know, what the state of the field is. And the structure of the book also reflects that in that we brought on these collaborating or contributing editors who wrote introductions to each of the sections, knowing that we wouldn't have the. The area expertise and all of these fields, and wanting to make sure that other people got to say their piece about where the. You know, what the state of the field was. So those are all some things that are sort of going on in the background of the book. But as we stress in both the. I think it's in the preface and in the introduction, we're seeing these as the original Nansan guide and the new Nanzan Guide as a companion set. You know, I think you can read one without the other, but it certainly helps to have the background of the original Nanzan guide when approaching our volume, I think.
- [10:41]
Matthew McMullen
Yeah. Just to add to that, before we get into the specifics of the section of the book. Yeah, I think as we discussed the content of the book with scholars in the field and amongst Ourselves, we gradually realized that we didn't want to just put out a remake of. Of the first volume. So as Jolene pointed out, we see them as a companion to each other. And as the first volume is really organized on traditional categories historically by traditions, we wanted to do something different. We didn't just want to have another chapter on new religions or Shinto or Christianity in Japan or things like this. So that's why talking to people in the field and also getting help from. From section editors really helped us to kind of see what people are thinking about and like what the focus is of Japanese religion. But another point I want to add to that is also the makeup of the contributors of the volume. So the first non zan guide, the authors or the people who are solicited to contribute, most of them had some connection with the institute in some way. So this is kind of, you know, the Nunan Zangaid is a bit of a departure from at least my. My vision of what the role of our institute is, as well as this book series, the Nanzan Library for Asian Religion and Culture, as opposed to my predecessors, which was kind of focused on what we are doing here at the Institute. I kind of envision our role in the field as kind of bringing together different networks of people. So the book kind of reflects that there are different groups of scholars who work on a very broad category. Many of them know each other, some of them don't, but they often. We reference each other's works. And I kind of see our institute and the research that we publish here as kind of a hub of those different networks in the field.
- [12:31]
Jolyne Thomas
Yeah.
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Raditya
Great. Thank you. So, before we get into the topics, why don't we start with sort of the question that is sort of posed at the start of the volume. Why Japanese religions. And both of you have mentioned this term quite a few times before. So people who are not familiar. Yeah. Why Japanese religions? Why is that the focus of this. Of this volume?
- [12:53]
Matthew McMullen
So.
- [12:56]
Jolyne Thomas
My very strong feeling is that all of us who study, let's call it religion and religion adjacent things in Japan, and we can question all of those terms should always be asking whether the adjective Japanese or the adjective religious applies to what we study. And looking over the field, we see a lot of publications where the category Japanese religions just sort of exist is taken for granted. These are the religions that exist in this particular place. And I have this lesson I do with some of my students in one of my seminars where I'll show them these color coded maps that have existed since basically like the 16th century. And there are always versions of these color coded maps, and they're originally missionary maps. And then eventually they turn into the maps that are at the first few pages of a world religions textbook. And then there are the maps that are in the beginning of Samuel Huntington's horrible, like, Clash of Civilizations book from the 90s. And all of these have exactly the same sort of color coding, which basically means civilization equals religion equals race equals a place. And since I would prefer to think that imperialism is not great, I think that our academic text should not just like have that sort of baked in and should instead recognize that people and ideas are constantly in flux. And so therefore we should always be treating the phrase Japanese religions as a question. Now, you know, people, there's an obvious sort of question that arises here which is like, but the book is called the New Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions. Fair question. I think that there's always this point of needing to draw people in. You know, students will come to my class thinking they're going to learn about some sort of content called Japanese Religions. As we point out in the introduction, when I make the mistake of speaking in public and telling people that I'm a scholar of religion, and then I tell them that I work on Japan, the first question that I almost always get is, what are the religions of Japan? So we have to meet people where they are. But I do think that turning that question itself into a question like, well, why do you think that there would be specific religions that are bound to this particular place is really valuable in one of the public services that scholars of religion can do? So starting a book, any book, whether it's a monograph or an edited volume, with a question, I think is very valuable. And I wanted to. We wanted to start with the most basic question, which is just like, what are we even talking about here? And having turned the phrase Japanese religions into a question, then what are some of the other things that we might also productively question? So just as one example that we didn't already mention in our field, by which I mean the people with PhDs or people who are earning PhDs or advanced degrees to study something that might be called Japanese religion or Buddhism in Japan or Shinto or whatever, um, there's a tendency to rely a lot on certain kinds of periodization. The Heian period, the Kamakura period. We have these phrases like Kamakura Bukyo or Kamakura Buddhism and that sort of thing, or Modern Buddhism. And those categories are so taken for granted that we all organize our thinking around Them. And one of the things that Matt and I agreed on very early on was let's break that. Like, let's just try to see if we can push the field in a new direction by not assuming that classic periodization scheme. And so that idea of interrogating a lot of these taken for granted categories. That's the spirit that's animating this volume. Matt, do you have anything you want to.
- [16:52]
Matthew McMullen
Yeah. Julian kind of hit on all of the, kind of the main points regarding the question of Japanese religions, especially the theoretical points. There's also kind of a practical aspect to it about audience because the first Nonzan guide, I mean, I think Reika, you mentioned that you remember reading it as a student as an overview of the field. And I remember Julie and I reading it came out when we were MA students. And yeah, that's what it was designed for, as an overview of the field, citing scholars that if you want to study, you know, for example, you know, medieval Buddhism, like here, here are the books that you need to know. And so the target audience was the field, like as it was perceived of, especially graduate students or younger scholars. And so, but kind of by questioning or looking at, you know, what is the field in kind of broader terms, we wanted to invite other people who are not trained as Japanese religion specialists to, to look at the book. So, you know, especially there were kind of, you know, two, two, two target audiences. One is, you know, Japan specialists who aren't familiar with religion, you know, people who study, you know, literature, you know, social sciences, history, things like that. And so maybe this book could touch on some of their interest, you know, without them having to go through like a whole kind of training of the background of, you know, reading about the whole history of Shinto, when perhaps they're just interested in kind of contemporary, you know, politics and Shinto related political groups or something like that. So maybe there's short chapters in here that, that they might find interesting and trying to pique their curiosity of like why religion is. The study of religion is important also for their subject matter. Another target audience are scholars of religion who aren't necessarily trained in or familiar with Japan. And that's also why Japanese religions. The question is because, you know, if you're studying, for example, medieval European history, perhaps there's also something you can learn from scholars who are studying Japanese religious history. So for example, like, you know, monastic debate, for example, you know, there's, you know, Christian traditions and Jewish traditions, there's long traditions. They also have a long history of debate within their kind of theological traditions in some places, especially in terms of structure and the social kind of the social capital of those traditions. Often there's overview or overlap. So we were wanting to put people in conversation, perhaps, or use the book as a tool to bring people into conversation on various topics that span the kind of, as Joanne was pointing out, these kind of almost stereotyped, you know, like religious traditions and places. And so we wanted to kind of break, break that apart also in a very practical way.
- [19:52]
Jolyne Thomas
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Matthew McMullen
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Jolyne Thomas
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Jolyne Thomas
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Matthew McMullen
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Jolyne Thomas
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Matthew McMullen
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- [21:12]
Matthew McMullen
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- [21:15]
Raditya
Great. So while we're on this topic of audience, then do you ever envision the book to be used in a classroom sort of setting? And if so, how do you imagine, you know, sort of the book being used in that context?
- [21:30]
Jolyne Thomas
Yeah, well, I should say I have used at least the introduction in my class just because I wanted students to start off a semester. This is a class I teach regularly called the Religion of Anime. And I want them to be asking questions of the key categories right away. And, you know, I mean, to the extent that students read, my students seem to find it, you know, generative insofar as I could contrast it with some other maybe things that had been published earlier so that then they could see kind of how the field has developed. Because I think it's really helpful to also invite students into scholarly conversations where they can see that what academics are saying is not just fixed because it exists in print, but it's always a reaction to what has come before and it's sort of anticipating what might come after. It's still, you know, the book has only been out for less than a year, so I don't know exactly how other people might have been using it. I think some of the chapters are naturally a little bit more accessible than some of the other ones. We wanted all of our authors to write in a very accessible fashion. But of course people have different styles and their subject matter also varies quite a bit. But I think that there are a lot of things here that are really, really valuable. And I particularly. Excuse me, I particularly want to tout the section introductions, which are brilliantly written, nice overviews for anybody who wants to get into a general topic. And they're comparatively short, they have great bibliographies. And so if you want to know about Japanese religions, the sort of non built environment and geography, then Eike Rotz's introduction on environment, space and place is super helpful for just general overview. And I just picked that one because it was the first one that came to mind. But all of them, I would just say are really, really valuable in the classroom.
- [23:34]
Matthew McMullen
So yeah, when we first started this project, we were really thinking about how it might be used in the classroom. But as we were discussing it with, we had this meeting at the AR and then discussing it with the section editors. We kind of decided that like, that we're kind of doing, trying to do too many things at once because if we want to target scholars in other fields, that's kind of one level of, for example, writing or how much detail you include as opposed to targeting it to students. So of course for funding applications you always say, oh yeah, this is going to be designed to use in the classroom. But we, we, you know, we do still hope that people can and will use it in, in the classroom. I mean, I've, it's. I found it interesting that Jolene said that he uses the introduction in his classroom and I tried to use the introduction in one of my classes and he absolutely hated it. But that was mostly my fault because I didn't, I think it has to be primed in a certain way because the introduction is a reaction to a long discussion in the field. And so I just kind of threw them in the deep end. And they didn't really like it very much. But some of the sections, chapters they did like they could kind of sink their teeth into and it was related to their own interest. And so I might use those again, I would say that a lot of the topics that we cover in this.
- [24:56]
Jolyne Thomas
Book.
- [24:58]
Matthew McMullen
Some of them were suggested by the section editor, some of them were suggested by authors themselves, some of them were suggested by us. And so some of the ones that I really focused on were things that came up in my classes that students wanted to read more about. And there just wasn't a kind of concise, a short, you know, chapter that they could read to prepare for a class in a week or something. Right. So, so actually I pursued several authors to write pieces on like, on those topics so I could use them in my classroom because, you know, the, you know, in many ways this book and you know, the idea of it came, came about as, from discussions I had in, in my classes. I teach several classes here at Nanzan. I teach one class for Rygaxe for exchange students in the center for Japanese Studies. And I use this, this material in that class. So, so yeah, so I think it, it can be used in the classroom, certainly. I think it's a book that, you know, graduate students can, you know, especially master students if they want to kind of give an overview of a particular topic and what's been written on that and kind of crafting, you know, possible, you know, PhD dissertation topic or something like that. It's a, it's a really handy book which the, the, the original hands on guy was as well. Right. So that's why I think they go together. Nice. So for master's students or maybe early stage PhD students, I think this book paired with the original Nansan Guide would be a must read if you're in the field of Japanese religions or very useful if you're in adjacent fields.
- [26:30]
Raditya
Great. Yeah, thank you. So, yeah, let's dive into some of the topics sections that we have here. Why don't we start with Knowledge Production and the chapters in sort of this section are Knowledge Production, Sacred Materialities, Monastic Debate, Ritual Medicine, and Academia. That last one is particularly interesting. But how does understanding these different modes of knowledge production say, help the study of Japanese religions? Understanding that Japanese religions is sort of this complex process and not necessarily just a list of traditions.
- [27:01]
Jolyne Thomas
I'll start and I'll try and be very brief here. You know, I think that there is a strong part of our field that we might think of as being a sort of intellectual historical tradition that's often focused historically on like the great man and his ideas. And there was of course this period up through the 1990s where most of the books that were published in the field were kind of like Shinran and his ideas, you know, Dogen and his ideas. And that's all really valuable work. But we wanted to kind of take that and turn it so that it would reflect not only the social, historical turn that happened around the turn of this century, but also some of the other ways that we might imagine intellectual history, if we want to use that term. And then the only other thing I'll say, and I'll turn it over to Matt for whatever he has to add, is that we wanted to include here the meta reflection on what it even means to call something Japanese religions. And the Academia chapter by Fuji in particular is really good at sort of situating historically what people have been doing when they're in Japan studying religion or when they're describing something as Japanese religions.
- [28:17]
Matthew McMullen
Yeah. Just to add to that briefly. Yeah, I think the section themes, we began with some very kind of loose categories, and then they kind of solidified around these even looser and broader concepts. But I think it turned out pretty well because it highlights, you know, the kind of this premise we have in the introduction that, you know, religion, you know, whatever religion is, can be defined a million different ways, but it is something that is constructed, and we as scholars participate in that construction. And this book is a part of that construction or maybe reconstruction, if we're kind of playing with the category a little bit. So, yeah, so these topics like knowledge production, cosmology and time, like, these are kind of chapters that look at kind of details about how, you know, the thing that we call religion is. It's. It just. It's not just there, like underground, like somebody dug it up and found it. It's something that gets constructed at a certain time in a certain place, and it has a certain meaning in that context. And so it was a very useful way to organize the book that. That fits with our premise of what is religion. And, you know, some of the authors, you know, really jumped into that, and then some others were a little bit hesitant, but we kind of, you know, push. Put, you know, push them to kind of, you know, challenge their boundaries of the way they usually represent religion. And I think it turned out pretty well also because they're general enough that they include, they conclude lots of different topics. And also going back to your previous question about how this might be used to teach, so you can pluck one of these sections if you're teaching a course on, for example, feelings and belongings. So maybe emotional aspects of it can be in a Social sciences course or kind of affect theory. This whole section, you can just take these chapters and use it as a section in a course or something. It would be very, very useful. So we also had that in mind. Kind of a practical organization of how not maybe the whole book, but you could use a section for teaching or for your own studies.
- [30:33]
Raditya
Yeah. And I mean, in one way, teaching perhaps is also a form of knowledge production. Right. Maybe in the next third installment of the Dean of Saga, we'll see that sort of included.
- [30:42]
Matthew McMullen
But.
- [30:43]
Raditya
Yeah. Thank you so much. Do you have things to add for sort of Cosmology in Time, which is going to be sort of the next topic section, or we can sort of move on to space if you feel like that's sort of more. Well, I don't want to, like, you know, take. But yeah, we can. We can move on to Vegas Cosmology time here.
- [31:03]
Matthew McMullen
Yeah, well, I mean, I think, you know, we don't need to go section by section, but I mean, the Cosmology on Time was really more of the kind of historical section. I mean, it kind of reflects, I think, the interest of Takashi Miura, who was the section editor, and he kind of organized the section based around various kind of historical themes. The book itself isn't organized in terms of history, but each of these chapters kind of deal with specific moments in history and then how things that we call religion were constructed at the time. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know if we need to go through and discuss each section. I was referring to kind of the. The concept of the sections as a whole. But if you have any particular specific questions about any of the sections, we can try to answer those questions.
- [31:54]
Raditya
All right. Well, in that case, we can kind of move on to space and environment. And again, not to say that cosmology isn't significant, but I do feel like, especially with the monographs in Japanese religions, sort of this very large category that we've been talking about for the past few decades or so, spatial approaches, I do feel like, is quite common, and perhaps again, that sort of reflects the sort of legacy of the first Nan Zan guide in sort of shaping how we think what Japanese religions are. But what are, I guess, some of the unexplored areas of spatial approaches to Japanese religions that you feel like, need to deserve more attention. Do you feel like some of the chapters here cover that, and if you feel like there's still new areas to explore, maybe you can kind of explore those with us?
- [32:43]
Jolyne Thomas
Yeah, so I really. I think this. We've had spatial approaches to Japanese religion have been well developed for some time. The recently deceased Alan Grippard was a leader in this area. But then we've also had a slew of monographs by people like Max Mormon and Heather Blair, Barbara Ambrose, who have all kind of focused on ritual pilgrimage sites and so forth. So in that regard, I think a place based approach to Japanese religion is not necessarily new. But I happen to be married to a geographer and so I am constantly thinking along with her about how geographers think about their key categories of space, place and scale. And one of the things that I think is different from the sort of localized, let's study a particular pilgrimage site thing that's happening in this section is really bringing the category of scale into the analysis of quote unquote Japanese religions. And the section introduction does this already. Some of the other sections do this by virtue of the scope that they're adopting. So it could be a mountain or mountains as sites. We've had a lot of studies like that. Or it could be migration and thinking about how people who are ethnically Japanese may not necessarily exist in the Japanese archipelago. Those are all scalar questions. And I don't think our field has been very good until quite recently at addressing issues of scale. And I find that to be particularly exciting and it's certainly animating my own monographs. So let me just give two examples. Caleb Carter, in his recent monograph, not his chapter in this book, although they're related, made a scalar argument where he said a lot of people think of Shugendo as a Japanese tradition, but let me actually tell you that this is a localized tradition that's based in these particular mountains in these particular places. That's awesome. Such a good contribution to the field and highlighting that something that has traditionally been understood as sort of a Japanese folk religion or a Japanese native religion should actually be understood at the level of a different scale. I think that's such a valuable contribution. Then moving to the other side of things, both Eike Rotz's introduction and Emily Anderson's chapter are looking at the ways that we might think of Japanese religions as they cross oceans. Soojin Kim's chapter as well, on the sea. We have all of these different ways that ritual practices, deities, humans, objects traverse water, large bodies of water, and then end up creating whole new versions of Japanese religion, either through empire or through migration or whatever. And so I think that this is really a growth area in the field and it's tied into that sort of non essentialist vision of studying Quote, unquote, Japanese religions that we put forward in the introduction, trying to break apart the adjective Japanese and really, you know, think about both the promises and the limits of that, of that adjective.
- [36:06]
Raditya
Do you have anything to add, Matt, or.
- [36:09]
Matthew McMullen
No, I think Joly had really covered it all. I mean, also this section really kind of, you know, brings to the fore a question of. Of why Japanese religions and challenging what is this section really challenges like what is the Japanese part of the. What is Japanese religions? Because it focuses on space, but it's also space that people don't often think of as Japan. You know, kind of the sea, also kind of the periphery, kind of colonized areas of Japan. So we really kind of wanted to challenge people's notions of what constitutes, you know, Japan as we think about it today.
- [36:44]
Raditya
For sure. Yeah. Because I think it's. It might seem obvious for a lot of us, but again, Japan is not a monolith. Right. It's a lot of different things happening in a lot of different sort of areas. Great. So let's move on to the next sort of section, feeling and belonging. And I personally think this is a particular theme that do deserve more attention in religious studies. The chapters here are sort of feeling and Belonging, Confraternities, Amaletics, Spiritual Care and of life Care. These are great chapters especially because they look at topics beyond what I do feel like sort of earlier studies in sort of this theme would be looking at say, female communities or new religions or spiritual practitioners. And these have often been uncritically discussed. But how do we not only mention sort of feeling and belonging in a research but also use it as a method or a way to approach research?
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- [39:08]
Matthew McMullen
So I, this is, this is such.
- [39:12]
Jolyne Thomas
A tricky thing for me because I find the research on affect and religion immensely fascinating and also sometimes a little bit frustrating for the methodological reasons that you, that you mentioned. So, you know, just for context, in my department of religious studies, our sort of resident theorist is Donovan Schaeffer, who's one of the leading sort of experts on affect theory and religion. And I highly recommend his work. I've learned so much from him. And you know, I think one of the things that Donovan has been consistent in arguing in his published work has been that people, you know, sort of like people feel their way through the world. And if we want to understand something about religion, we should make sure that we don't just ignore feeling as being immaterial or unnecessary. And of course, like with the relationship between feeling and emotion and affect, different people parse that in different ways. Sometimes people will put a little bit more of an emphasis on bodily responses, but I think, you know, I kind of like just sticking with feeling. You know, that could be like a bodily response, like disgust, like your stomach turns at something, or, or it could be something that, that we would think of more as a, a feeling rather than an affect, like, like elation. Regularly, the people who have commonly been described as religious will describe things in terms of feelings or in terms of experience. And the, and there we get into the methodological problem. This goes back to William James of not before, like how do you actually access experience? And you know, Bob Scharf at Berkeley has great, you know, a great takedown of this from the 90s. You know, it's really difficult to access experience. But nevertheless, people who are engaging with deities or non obvious entities will often describe something. They will take a feeling and then they transmute that into discourse. And that's what we have. We have their bodily responses. We can observe bodies in a room reacting to things, and then we also have their verbal statements. And those are things that scholars of religion can assess, access and assess. And so I think that coming up with new ways of describing those kinds of things is one of the. The most exciting sort of frontiers, if I'm allowed to use that word, in our. In our field. And then just like one last thing is that eliciting feeling is also a huge part of what we think of as religious practice. Brian Lowe's chapter on homiletics is about how does an expert preacher elicit feeling in an audience? Right. And then we've got other people who are talking about how do people imagine themselves as communities? And I think all of that stuff is both in line with where religious studies has come from, but it also marks a sort of new direction for analysis.
- [42:18]
Matthew McMullen
Yeah, so this chapters from this section I've used in my class, and students respond to it very well because it gives them a way to approach the question of why are people religious from a different perspective? Because usually I usually start by questioning, you know, the. The problem of belief. Right. Because religion is often associated with some belief. You have some type of, you know, rational association or you have some idea, oh, there's gods or there's ghosts or there's demons or there's Buddhas or whatever. But if you kind of step out kind of from a broader perspective, you say, well, why are people religious? It's like, well, because they have a feeling towards some type of. There's some type of community building. You know, it may not be a logical idea because, no, I think this is not. Probably just. Not my. Not just my students here in Japan, but I think a typical response to people are like, oh, that's all kind of like, but why do people believe in, like, God or kami or Buddha? This is all kind of like superstition. But if you convince them to step back and look like, well, what are people doing in their communities? Right? Not just professed belief of some organization. And then people can relate to their own lives. Oh, yeah, people go to. People go to church on certain holidays, or people go to the synagogue or participate in certain religious events, Matsuri or festivals. Because it's has this kind of emotive effect that makes a person a part of a community, and you identify with that community. And students like, oh, okay, I think I kind of get that. You kind of step back and look at the sociological question of, like, why are people religious? And so I find that this approach really works towards addressing that question. And so I found it very effective for using it in the classroom. I don't know how scholars, social scientists would maybe deal with this. It's not my area. But I found it also a very pleasant section to Read.
- [44:10]
Raditya
All right. So I think, I guess this sort of connects nicely to the next section topic that I'd like to discuss, fieldwork. And this is a topic that I've personally interested in being an ethnographer myself. The chapters here, Perspectives on Fieldwork, Outer Eyes, Islands, Rural Field Work, Religious Industries, Digital Ethnography, Disability, Gender, and Trust. Now, a keyword that Chika Watanabe employs in her starting essay is patchwork ethnography. And this is the concept that I've also employed instead of my own work. But perhaps you two can share some of your experience in conducting fieldwork, some of the challenges and difficulties that you've sort of experienced, especially with Matt now being based at sort of Nanzen here in Japan. How does that, I guess, change your relationship with the field, with Japan? Especially now that the issue of distancing, if we want to call it that, might become a bit more complicated. But.
- [45:05]
Matthew McMullen
Yeah, well, first just. I'll comment on this section. We didn't originally have a section on field work planned, but this is a section that we, I think, you know, we had. We had talked to Chica, and then we had kind of this idea of a section which is wound up being the last section on resources. And then the question of, well, what about fieldwork? Came up. And instead of one asking Chica to write one large chapter on fieldwork, we actually, this is a section where we kind of thought about the topics based on the individuals who are doing the field work and then asked them to write short pieces. And it turned out very well. I mean, the concept of fieldwork, you know, because I'm a pre modernist, so we don't think about what we do as fieldwork. I mean, it is because, you know, you go to conferences, you meet scholars, you train with people, you go, you get resources. And so, of course, being based in Japan, where those resources are, is a benefit, even though, you know, more and more a lot of the resources are accessible online. So you don't, you know, you don't need to go and, you know, to some archive and take a gift and then a handwritten letter from some famous scholar to ask that you can get in to see the books because you can download them online. So that kind of changes, at least for us as pre modernists, a lot of the way that we do field work, it's not as essential. Yeah. And so this section, I think, was a nice addition to the book. It made me think, as a pre modernist, think about how people conduct research on contemporary Japan or on topics related to conferred Japan and what those mythological methodological obstacles might be. And so it gave me, as an editor for a journal that also publishes work that includes ethnography, really gave me some insight into how other scholars do their research. So I found it to be very valuable.
- [47:07]
Jolyne Thomas
Yeah. And I just want to add, I mean, I found the process of reading first what our authors came to us with as things they wanted to talk about when it came to fieldwork was really, really fascinating. Tim Smith's chapter on trust really, as one example, just kind of drilled down to such a basic aspect of fieldwork. You have to establish and maintain trust with the people who, with whom you're speaking. And I think that that was a natural outcome of this earlier generation of field work in, you know, sort of. I'm thinking of people like Mark Rowe and Levi McLachlan who have spent decades really getting deep access with Buddhist communities. And you know, as Levi says in the introduction to his book on Sokakai, these are not his informants, they're his friends. And I think Tim's chapter shows the outcome of somebody who sort of came of academic age reading a book like that. It's like, right, these are my friends and they also give me valuable information for my academic research that's, that's so different from the old school, kind of very extractive mode of ethnographic research. And I think that that's really valuable. The other thing that I want to highlight, I'll maybe make reference to two different chapters here is questions of access. Matt raised the issue of a certain kind of access. You need to have the fancy scholar with a big name who writes you a handwritten letter so you can get into an archive. That's one thing, but the other thing is what are the circumstances of the researchers embodiment or their, you know, their familial situation. One of the great things that Chika Watanabe and her colleagues did with their original patchwork ethnography article was to highlight that a researcher today, working today probably has childcare or elder care to work around. And then if we think about a couple of the chapters in this section, you know, my former PhD student who is unfortunately now deceased, Mark Bookman used a powered wheelchair. And, and so for him studying Japanese religion looked a certain way because he couldn't enter Buddhist temples.
- [49:30]
Raditya
Right.
- [49:32]
Jolyne Thomas
And then, you know, to mention the chapter by Dana Marsalis, they had a really fascinating take on the issue of gender where some communities that the researcher might be engaging may have very specific binary sort of expectations of gendered performance. And the Researcher may need to sort of of adjust to those sorts of expectations. And that provides again, a new opportunity for a meta reflection on what it is that we're even doing. So I really think, I mean, of all of the sections, in some ways, the questions that people are asking about method in this section are the future of the field in many respects. Not only because many of our contributors are relatively junior scholars, but also because they're asking sort of almost deeply disturbing questions about how we even do what we do. And so I think that that's very valuable.
- [50:29]
Raditya
Yeah, no, that's great. Thank you. So I guess as sort of like a concluding reflection for sort of our discussion today, let's say Xeander is someone who's not familiar with pretty much everything we've been talking about so far, but is sort of interested in the book in Japan or in sort of religious traditions. What's the one thing that you kind of want that person to obtain from, say, reading this volume? If there is sort of one thing? I mean, I'm sure there's a lot, but if you can kind of just, you know.
- [51:03]
Matthew McMullen
Okay, I guess I'll take the first stab at that question. That's a big question. Well, I mean, I would like. One thing I would like people to take away from the book, you know, if they're not going to the book for content, is that the study of Japanese religions, however we define it, we define it very broadly in the book, is a beneficial window into understanding basically the human condition and aspects of the human condition that we call religion. Right. I mean, and Japan is often cited as a kind of extreme case because it's on this kind of periphery. Right. It's not at the center of the world. And you know, in the post war period, I mean, a lot of us benefited from, you know, a lot of funding that went into the study of Japan that was now, is now of course extinct. But for a long time a lot of funding was going into Japan, our kind of previous generations. The reason the study of Japan was so built up was because after the, after World War II, for a very short period in time, the American government realized like, oh, people should study things. And so Japan, the study of Japan benefited from that. Right. So there's lots of scholarship on religion in Japan, but it tends to be very. What's the word I'm looking for? Very. Kind of maybe nibel gazing is not the word, but it's like it's very inter focused on Japan because that's, that's what the incentive was. But we live in a different world today than, you know, the 1960s or 1970s, where even though Japan sometimes politically likes to see itself as distinct and geographically it looks like it's kind of far away, it isn't. It's interconnected to the world and also to other religious traditions. So looking at different aspects of what we call Japanese religion also tells us about the world and ourselves as humans. So that's what I would like people to take away from the book.
- [52:56]
Jolyne Thomas
Yeah. And to add to that, I think the anti essentialist spirit that animates this book. It should be very, very clear from everything that we've said so far today. I would also add that, you know, because I've been doing a lot more research on religions in the, in North America, specifically the United States. I've been talking with a lot of scholars of American religions. And one thing that's come up in those conversations is, you know, a scholar saying like, oh yeah, we really need to know more about Japan. And so who the we is there is already interesting. And then why, like, what the motive is for knowing more about Japan? I also sort of have questions, but I think that it is telling that the Japanese case reveals something that scholars of American religions intuit and maybe sense about the practices of religion in the United States but can't quite articulate. And so when they get a chance to read books that they find accessible. And this goes back to Matt's earlier comment about like, we've written a lot of books that are very navel gazing and there's a high, there's sort of like high activation energy to enter into the field. But if we lower that threshold, then our colleagues who are studying religion in other places or studying other societies tend to find it really, really stimulating. So let me just name a few examples. Jason Josephson Storm's book the Invention of Religion in Japan got a lot of attention when it came out in 2012 for good reason because he offered a like, not only a compelling historical account about the emergence of this category, but also interesting and sort of portable theoretical concepts that people could apply. They're based in the Japanese historical case. But he was saying like, look, you can apply these categories to other areas. I'm thinking about like his categories of hierarchical inclusion and exclusive similarity. For example, those travel well. You know, another thing that is quite striking is that some books in our field have gotten recognition by the American Academy of Religion. Adam Lyons book on prison religion, Mark Mullin's book titled Yasukuni Fundamentalism, which came out from the Nansan library, my own book got some recognition as well. All of these things, I think they've gotten recognition because they're not just for Japanese scholars of Japan. They're not just for experts who happen to focus on Japan and who are reading those sources. They were written in such a way where other people are like, oh, now I understand prison religion differently. Or oh, now I understand religion and politics differently. Because the Japanese case gives me a new perspective on something that I thought I already understood that's really, really valuable. And that's the kind of thing that we were wanting to sort of facilitate with this book and to make sure that there would be an affordance for somebody who doesn't know anything about Japan to sort of dip their toes into the water and be able to say, okay, like maybe I don't know everything and maybe I can't access the primary sources, but this at least helped me get a little bit closer to knowing what's going on.
- [56:16]
Raditya
That's great, thank you. And sort of just continuing of what Joanne is just talking about, I would also recommend just sort of a sort of article co written by Joy and also himself on why scholars of religion have studied the Corporate Forum, which is again, another phenomenal resource on why this adject of Japan is more than just the geographical archipelago of Japan. But yeah, great. I think that's all we have time for for today. If you have even the slightest of interest in Japan and religion or scholars in the field, please do check out the Nanzan Guide before we leave. Can you two share what projects you're currently working on if you have anything to add? Or if not, then I guess we can just say goodbye.
- [56:57]
Matthew McMullen
But yeah, let me go. I think Julian mentioned some of his current projects at the beginning. So as I mentioned, so I'm the editor of the Japanese Religious Studies, so I'm always having projects going. We have an issue that should be coming out tomorrow if I can finish it in time. And also here we have a special issue that has lots of great articles in a Nuclear one by Julian for the Non Zone Library series. Our next book in the series is also an edited volume which will be on the topic of of gender and religion in Japan. Our current title is Practicing Religion and Gender in Japan. It's edited by Kawashi Noriko and Kobachi Naoko and almost all of the chapters are written by Japanese scholars of various topics related to gender. I'm hoping to have that published next year. I'm also editing a translation of one of Jury's commentaries on the Lotus Sutra by Paul Swanson, my predecessor. So I'm doing lots of editing projects, my own research. I'm hoping to find the right. The damn book from the dissertation. I'm slowly working on that dealing with the station is about the kind of establishment or creation of esoteric, esoteric Buddhist tradition in Japan, which I define as a scholastic tradition. And I'm working on that. I also have another small book project that's based on a translation that I'm hoping to publish. What else? I also launched a new book series on the Nonzan Library for Japanese Philosophy which we recently published a series of translations of a work by Nishida Kitaro and we'll have other forthcoming books in that series, including translations but also unedited volume. Yeah, I'm also hoping to put together an edited volume of translations and essays about the early Heian period Buddhist classic named Anen. I've been organizing some conferences related to that topic and so I'm hoping to see a book come to fruition in the next couple years on that. So yeah, I have a few projects I'm working with.
- [59:18]
Jolyne Thomas
I just want to chime in here and say that Matt is an extremely hard working person in our field. If you couldn't, if listeners couldn't get a sense from this. And he's doing so much behind the scenes work like you know, sustaining the field with one of our, the FLAG flagship journal, the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, plus all of these other editing things and, and we all owe him a really great debt. And, and I just want to go on record here saying that it's been a real pleasure co editing this volume with him. And when I say co editing, I mean Matt edited it and I sort of like helped out from time to time. So credit where credit is due. He put in the lion's share of the work on this project and that must be stated.
- [59:59]
Matthew McMullen
Okay, thanks. Yeah, it was a fun book project. I will have to, you know, to quote Rocky Balboa in the first Rocky movie. There will be no rematch on this volume. So we'll see if that happens. It was fun, but once is enough. So if there's anybody out there listening, they're thinking maybe 10 years down the line, you want to publish another volume, please start. It takes that long to put together an edited volume, so you should start thinking about it now. So thank you. This was a lot of fun. So thanks again.
- [60:34]
Raditya
Yeah, great. Awesome. Thank you for listening and happy holidays.
- [60:52]
Jolyne Thomas
I'm Kelly Kennedy. I've been called a Hope dealer for leaders and with over 300 episodes of the Business Development Podcast. We'll guide you, and we'll always be in your corner. Follow the Business Development Podcast on Spotify and let's make 2026 your best year.