 Hello and welcome. It's great to see so many of you here despite the railway strike. My name is Fabio Gigi. I'm the chair of the Japan Research Center here at SOAS. And it's my honor to chair the proceedings for the first event, first big JRC event that we hold in person after the pandemic. So thank you very much for coming. I particularly want to extend a warm welcome to the representative of the Japanese embassy, Mr. Ohashi Hiroki. Thank you very much for being here. And also a warm welcome to everybody who joins us online, the people there in the computer. So this year marks 16 years of support from the Meiji Jingu Intercultural Research Institute for which we are eternally grateful. I am proud to say that we have extended the funding arrangement for another round of three years. Our director, Professor Adam Habib, will sign the documents in person during his upcoming visit to the Meiji Shrine. We are saddened, however, that we cannot receive the representative of the Meiji Jingu Intercultural Research Institute, Director Sato Masahiro in person. The annual lecture was always a wonderful occasion to thank the institute, which not only sponsors this lecture, but also an annual scholarship program for two SOAS doctoral and or MA students studying any aspect of Japan and an annual research grant for the academic members of the Japan Research Centre. So any grad students bear that in mind, go online, see and apply for it. It's a very good opportunity to get some funding. As many of you know, Japan still has stringent anti-COVID measures in place, most of which will be lifted next week, October 11th. And so with this world slowly recovering from COVID, we hope that we can welcome the delegates from the Meiji Jingu Intercultural Research Institute back in person for the lecture in 2023. So I need not tell you, of course, how vital it is for researchers and students to be able to go to Japan, conducting interviews, undertaking participant observation, doing archival research, eating Japanese food, drinking sake. All these experiences are irreplaceable. Although we had to become fluent with new technologies such as Zoom and Teams, nothing can quite replace direct human interaction. Some of us, especially the field research base researchers, had to go as far as to reinvent ourselves as digital anthropologists or practitioners of digital humanities. I myself briefly try to rebrand as historical anthropologist. Nobody believed it. But I was hoping that I could take thousands of manuscript pages that I copied in the archives of Tokyo and Kyoto and sort of continue my research. So I'm very giddy with excitement and I immediately booked a flight to Japan during Reading Week to continue my research, as have many of my colleagues. So, now I'd like to introduce the speaker for tonight. I'm honored to welcome Dr. Dolores Martinez, or Lola to your friends. Dr. Martinez is an emeritus reader in anthropology and a departmental lecturer for visual material and museum anthropology at Oxford University. She received her PhD from Oxford with a dissertation on Japanese diving women and fishermen in mere prefecture. Her first monograph was entitled Identity and Ritual in a Japanese Diving Village, The Making and Becoming of Person and Place. And I understand we're going to revisit some of that material in the lecture today. Her second book, Remaking Kurosawa, Translations and Permutations in Global Cinema, marked a turn towards the anthropology of media and global culture. Asking how Kurosawa films are dubbed, translated and remade in different settings and what this can tell us about the human imagination more broadly, the book features striking interpretations and has remained a classic work of film analysis and criticism. I hope you don't mention me saying it also has the most fantastic typo in any academic publication. Okay, typos are the bane of academic existence, right? You work on a book, you spend one, two, three, four, five, six, seven years writing it. Then finally it arrives, you open it and the first thing you see is a typo and you think, oh my God, this is all for nothing. But sometimes typos have pedagogical use and this one is so practical because I can immediately tell whether a student has read the chapter assigned or not. Because if they had read it, they would immediately say, oh, did you see what it was? Now you're very curious of course what the typo is and it is fantastic. So there is a passage in the book where Lola interprets Kurosawa films, especially the forbidden fortress in relationship to Star Wars, because George Lucas has taken much of the narrative and actually used it for his Star Wars film, although the original Kurosawa film was set in Edo period Japan. And in this passage, there's a reference to Han Solo that came out as Han's solo in the typo. I think the proofreader added it, but anyway. It must have been German, but it's fantastic because with one moment you're propelled into a teutonic Star Wars universe, which is quite unlike the English-speaking Star Wars universe that we are familiar with. Or there are some similarities, yes, I won't do more German accents, don't worry. So apart from that, she has also left her mark on the discipline by series of theoretical and ethnographic interventions collected in edited volumes such as ceremony and ritual in Japan, religious practices in an industrialized society, the worlds of Japanese popular culture and assembling Japan, modernity, technology and global culture. Her latest volume, recreating anthropology, sociality, matter and imagination, edited with Professor David Gelner, appeared in April 2022. And it is a kind of, it takes stock of the discipline of anthropology as it is at the moment. And I think I'm not mistaken in thinking that the lecture tonight is also a kind of stock taking. It bears the title, a secular Japan, the continuing debate on religion in Japanese society. So we'll follow an academic format, the talk will be one hour, and then we'll take questions. There will be enough time for you to ask. So during the lecture, keep stum. People online may already feed in questions that you have into the chat or the Q&A form and we'll pick those up later. Now, please join me in welcoming Lola Martinez for this year's Meiji Jingu annual autumn lecture. Thank you. Right. Well, thank you very much, Fabio, and thank you for the invitation from the JRC and from Meiji Jingu, especially. I remember when it was just a plan a long time ago. And it's, and thank you to the JRC for hosting me. I was a member of it for 25 years. So it's fun to be back in the revamped room. It looks very revamped anyway. Yes, Fabio is correct. There is that typo and every Star Wars fan points it out. But it is a bit of stock taking. I am looking back on the fieldwork I did nearly 40 years ago now. But only because I can use that material to examine this debate, which seems to have got stronger in recent years about whether Japan is secular, whether it's religious, what do we say about Japan. And that's not to say that I haven't been back to Japan and see ritual in other places, but my first fieldwork was nearly two years I knew the people well I knew the rituals well. And so it's much easier to use them as examples, but I will say as with everything in life. Don't go visit the village where I did my fieldwork and expect all the rituals to be the same everything changes over time so just just that. I will also begin by noting that the question mark is a bit of a red herring because I am going to come firmly down right now to say yes Japan is secular. For reasons that I hope will become clear as we go along. My question really is, in what ways, is it a secular society, how can we make this argument that is a secular society. There are fairly complex debates on the nature of what it is to be secular. And I'm not going to go through them all because I could do four lectures on them I think. And as I was putting this together I thought, oh well maybe I'm being pushed to write a book here. But we can approach this in contrasting ways. I would like to pause here just a little bit and tell you how I've decided to structure this talk. First, it had all the definitions at the beginning and then the ethnography and it was too top heavy. Then I switched it all around. And I didn't like that either. So I'm going to intersperse ethnographic examples with the theory. Before I go on to talk about why what secular is and how it applies to Japan. Let me tell you a bit about how I came to do my fieldwork and where I did my fieldwork. So, I, I always knew that I wanted to work on modern society. I didn't think anthropology should be one of those things you did in the back of beyond. And then suffered and got very ill and nearly died and everyone could say, oh what an anthropologist you are. I thought modernity deserve to be looked at with a fishy eye just as well as any other time place and society. But of course when when you're an Oxford in in 1982, people don't approve of this you had to go to the back of beyond. Japan seemed the alternative. It was difficult in other ways without being, you know, less developed might be the word we might use now. And so I thought, well, yeah, I've always been interested in Japanese film I'll go to Japan. And I'm a woman I probably need to work on women but lots of people are working on women now joy Henry's, you know, just here finished ahead of me. Maybe I don't know who I will work on and then someone said to me oh have you seen the Pearl Divers at Mickey Moto. And that picture right in the middle there is of the diving demonstration from Mickey Moto Island. And I said no. And I went to read what I could on them. And first of all, they're not pearl divers, please do not come to me and say oh you work with pearl divers. They dive mostly for abalone and seaweeds and other sorts of things, but they're famous because they supplied the oysters that Mickey Moto used for his experiments to create culture pearls. And then he does that Mickey Moto Museum does this demonstration which makes them look like pearl diving. Also don't expect them to look like a new tomato print. That's what a diving woman looked like when I did my field work there at the bottom. They were generally older. It was a dying way of life. Oh, and very few people practice it now except for tourism. There's been a bit of a boom since the Amachan series was on Japanese television. And at least one young woman has learned to dive since. So it's really a dying way of life. But at the time I was doing my field work. There was little in English or wanted to do my field work there was little in English. And I thought it would be interesting because they're supposed to be the bosses of their household. They're supposed to have more power than men in their household. Another untrue. But they're given kind of equal weight in household decisions. So that that was interesting. So I had a small grant and in 83 I went off to look for a village to do my field work in. And I met with Professor Yoshida Diego and now sadly gone and Nagashima Nobuhidu and both of them gave me tons of Japanese language material to read which was very good because there was nothing in English really. And joy Henry introduced me to a friend of hers who lived in Chiba. She luckily lived near in Alma village in Shirahama. And I thought it was all set. I met with the women in Shirahama they said oh yes we think well you know we could have you live with us. And all I needed was money. So very luckily I got a mombusho grant to take me to Japan for 18 months at least to Tokyo University to do my field work. So I arrived in Tokyo University and went to see Ito Abito who was my my supervisor, and I said well I'm all set. I'm ready to go. You know, I just, you know I found the place I'm really set. And he said, you can't go to Shirahama that's all touristy that's not real authentic diving you need to go to kuzaki. It's the most traditional village in Japan. The most traditional village in Japan. So he arranged for me to meet the folk florist, Kudata sensei who was at Su University, who had done a lot of work in me again. And we did a rapid weekend trip to kuzaki with a group of his friends that were celebrated that he fought the war with so it was a very odd trip to the field. And the afternoon before we left. He went off to talk to the cooperative heads who were the people who would be in charge of whether or not I could stay in the village and left me with the in owner. And the in owner said to me, do you want to go see the ginger. And I thought, yeah, I might as well see some of the village and the ginger. So off we went to the ginger. We went around the village and then we went to the ginger, the Amakajima Kime ginger, dedicated to Amateratsu. And we entered the height in the front bit of the ginger. And he said, and I looked around and I didn't really understand what all the things were but it looked interesting. And he said, shall we go into the whole then, which really is a very sacred space and we shouldn't have gone into but I didn't know that I said, all right, and we went into the whole then. And then he said, do you want to see the altar. And I went, okay, the go shinkai right. Okay, so he opened the doors to the altar, and there was a curtain. Right. And he said, do you want to see. And I said, wow, I guess so we've come this far right and he and he went to open the curtain, and he stopped, and he said, probably nine, maybe not right and close everything up and we left. Now, I understood began to understand why a few months later on the 1st of July. When it was he, the he Nichi Matsuri. And that was a big festival in which the local priest, the for the shine in blue there was joined by priests from Isen, which is the most important Shinto shrine in conjunction with Meiji in Japan. And it's the priest came from their musicians came from there, the mass dancer you see him unmasked in the first photograph there came, and they, and they played music and said prayers, and then the mass dancer perform the dance that was performed to get Amaterasu out of her cave. She was the sun goddess she was in a cave there was an eclipse. And the shamanic dancer dances and Amaterasu comes up. And at one point. The, the flute player the Shaku Hachi player played a long shrill note on the Shaku Hachi long long note, as the priest opened the doors and the curtain to the shrine. And there was nothing inside is there often isn't in some of these in some of these alters. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and even whenever I talk about it, it still happens I still remember that note. And there was a sense of presence suddenly filling the shrine. And I was lucky I felt a full force because they had allowed me as the anthropologist to sit in, you know, the home then in very close to the thing. So I want you to remember the hesitation and to remember that sense of something powerful happening. And I'll come back to that. So what sort of village was kuzaki why was it the most traditional village left in Japan left was the word that was often used. It was a fairly old village. It was an sacred guild visa shrine. It made the notion will be the drive will be for that was offered to the the deities that he said, every day. It had written there was written documentation of this connection going back to 1111. So the Christian era, although villagers told the story that 2000 years ago, Princess Yamato was wandering around Japan, got to kuzaki sat down was very tired and hungry and she asked the women what they were bringing up from the sea and it was abalone and they gave her something to eat and she said this is so delicious. I must have some and they said okay we'll do it. And so they claim they've been doing this for 2000 years. So there you can see the monument of the place where Princess Yamato is meant to have sat. There used to be a Shinto shrine there the one that I that ceremony took place in was built in 1927 as part of the continuing separation of Buddhism and Shintoism in Japan. So the Buddhist priest in the village and I won't be talking about Buddhist rituals because there isn't time to do everything, but the Buddhist priest said he was the 27th Buddhist priest in in the village, whereas the other priest, the Shinto priest was only the third. So the two religions had been closely connected and the Buddhist priest had done all the rituals to 1868. So anyway, the shine got moved from that spot, which was very near the Buddhist temple, further out on the outskirts of the village and the monument was put there to mark where Princess Yamato first was built. That's what Abalone what they will be looks like. And those are the grandfathers who made the sacred Noshi will be which involves days of drying and steaming and cutting into strips and cutting into all sorts of different shapes. So, one of the interesting things to keep in mind as as well about kuzaki is that it University spent a long time looking at the village and noting its rituals and published a very thick report that was useful. And in that report they mentioned that kuzaki was famous as one of several is a sacred gills who protested and were rebellious against what they saw as a double taxation. That is, they gave this Noshi will be to ease a shrine and then the feudal Lord had the nerve to ask them for fishing rice on top of that so they felt this was a double taxation and they were known as a very rebellious fishing village. So, some questions that comes out from this little introduction to kuzaki. Why was I told it was the most traditional rather than the most religious which might have been something that you could say to me I mean my year basically was so involved with ritual life in in kuzaki that I didn't do some of the basic anthropological things that you're supposed to do like interview the head of every household. I mean I got to know everyone but I, you know, I was glad I see University had gone and done that for me. Um, but let's think about what this might mean in terms that I want to think of the way in which tradition might be connected with religion and secular because that's what was happening here. I was not being told it was the most religious but the most traditional. So, I'll start by thinking a bit about what secular is and I, and I'm going to be very basic about this because, as I said, it's a complex subject. So, basically, the definition could be not connected with religion or spiritual matters. Right. And the Casa Nova has written about it, arguing that it is seen as part of the process of modernization in which we find three understandings of the term, the decline of religious beliefs and practices, the privatization of religion, and the differentiation of the secular sphere state economy and science from religion. But there is a problem here with defining a term by what it isn't. And we're defining it against something that people are still arguing what it is. So what is religion. Right. So yeah, these two mutually constituted terms neither which is entirely clear or agreed on anthropologists are not even sure that the basic Tyler, a belief in spiritual deans counts as an appropriate definition. So, you know, so we have a problem here with these these definitions. So when Casa Nova makes this three part definition, one of the things he says about the decline of religious beliefs and practices in modern societies is seem to be this is seem to be as a universal developmental process. And he then goes on to say, well, only Europeans seem to think that's what it means it's not it's not even accepted in dictionaries in Europe that much as is one of the definitions of secularization. Secularization is also seen as that privatization of religion often understood both as a general modern historical trend and as a normative condition. Indeed, as a precondition and this is very important for modern liberal democratic politics. So to be modern to be liberal, not to be hierarchical has become associated with being secular. And this involves as a ready that first point of the differentiation between secular sphere state economy and science. And this is often seen as an emancipation to separate these fears from religious institutions and norms. Right. And this, according to Casa Nova is the core definition you find in most dictionaries. And I think we can ask some questions of this as well. You know, we're having modernity being opposed to something we might think of as being pre modern and the world of tradition and faith. But we know that Bruno Lutter has said to us, there's, you know, we're not even modern yet. So what do we do that one. Charles Stuart across the way at UCL says not only are we not modern we're not even secular. There's no secular society. And Bruno takes a kind of middle path saying, well, you know, countries like Japan say they are secular should we not take them at their word, but not everyone in Japan thinks of themselves as secular. And there are some Japanese theorists, like the sociologist Mitsutoshi, Hori or Hori Mitsutoshi, I should say, who's unhappy with the use of both terms, right. And he argues, as you can see there that the secular religious divide is a conceptual binary, and it's modernity's epistemological backbone, as modernity defines itself as secular as opposed to religion by associating religion with such ideas as a modernity fiction illusion and the like, ostensibly secular modernity represents itself is rational, factual, real, and so on, as if it accords to the order of things in the universe. This is the structure of the mythology of modernity. And he's very critical about this because he sees it as a Western mythology, being foisted on the rest of the world. And anthropologists like Taylor Assad have also written rather critically about these terms and and how and how much they're based on Christian ideas of faith and religion. Right. It becomes interesting, however, if you if you challenge Hori on just where do we go, which I have done. He gave a seminar in Oxford a few years ago and I said, Well, you know, then is Japan religion. And you know what's going on here. And no, no, he gets, he gets really, he gets very upset about it all. He has an argument that hinges on the idea that the term often used for religion, religion in Japan issue kill. Right. And he's just re rehearsed that argument in a recent special issue of the Journal of Japanese Studies, I think, which includes one of my old students as a chapter. And they're all against this secular religion divide. And one of the, one of the things he argues is that she was invented under pressure from Western eyes. And in the Meiji era in 1868 and has nothing to do with the traditional Japanese faith and experience, particularly of nature, nature is where it is at right. And reader who, and he uses the work of Timothy Fitzgerald to support this. Now, to me, Fitzgerald is a scholar of religious studies who is very weighty very important, but he's the first to admit he doesn't read Japanese. He and Ian reader have had a long debate on shoe kill in Japan. And in reader does read not only modern Japanese but pre modern Japanese. And he points out that, you know, you first see the term shoe kill probably adapted from Chinese texts in the eighth century. In the, in, in the, in, in what, sorry, in the resources to your codes, right. It wasn't prominent. It didn't get used a lot, but it existed. And it was used as a, it was used to differentiate between different types of institutions, the state institutions as opposed to monasteries and other sorts of institutions. And he reader argues that major authorities pre major authorities and major authorities we could say, we're well aware of the differentiation between these different types of institutions right, they didn't need foreigners threatening them, although they were threatened by foreigners to open up to actually think about how you would uncouple and these, these two sorts of institutions. In fact, he says you can look back at a history of the Japanese state, trying to detach itself or have some sort of control over over religion mostly Buddhism as it was known so they often use the term before rather than shoe kill to talk about these things. And so he said, you know, he implies we take agency away from the Japanese when we say oh well they only did this under pressure as if there wasn't a history of the Japanese already being interested in these issues and already thinking about how to separate the two realms and if you remember kuzaki was famous because the realms were separated and they wanted to know why they had to pay twice in taxes right. So it was something that was going on there. So, we could say that in in Kasanova sense what we see in Japan in the 20th and the 21st century is that we do have a differential Asian of secular spheres state economy and science from religion something we would call religion. Religious organizations in Japan are seen as corporate entities. So religion has been privatized. And according to surveys there is a decline in religious beliefs. Now, is that not working. I need my next slide. Okay, hang on. Okay, so statistics are always wonderful things to look at and surveys very interesting and how do we bet through the anthropologist, you know, warned us about these these things for a long time. It's very simple and I have done it myself I will confess to use the statistics which show that Japan has you know 181,000 religious groups in 70.4% of the population follow Shinto 88% follow Buddhist traditions Christians are about 1.9 million. 8.9 million other religions. And that comes to more people than live on the entire island of Japan. And so what does that mean, you know, I've been going to ask this question in lectures. It's quite clear. If you ask people what they believe that only 30% or so Japanese say they believe in these religions and often they're members of new religions and not even of old traditional practices. And this trend has been ongoing since the 1960s 1960s surveys which asked people, do you believe do you got only about 30% of the population. So, you know, Japan is up there with we would say Western societies that think of themselves as tradition as secular rather than traditional or religious. So, the distinction between what people believe and what they do, and why they may do it is what scholars such as hardy hang the concept of tradition on, which of course is how many pre modern Western societies referred to their rituals. Actually, she'll kill me go back to the 8th century, but the term religion is a fairly modern one since the enlightenment in the West. So religion is the more modern term of the two. So that, so that begs the question. Okay, kuzaki was traditional. What did that mean. I've already hinted a bit at what that meant in that my year was full of attending rights and rituals when I did my field work. So let's think of another example and an example in which we, I want you to think a bit about the relationship of Japan with nature, because one of the arguments that that gets made is that, well, you know, it was a natural relationship that the Japanese had before all this major stuff. They lived in a world of a special kind of nature Japanese nature, unlike nature anywhere else. And this shaped the Japanese character and Japanese personhood. So, the first thing I will say is having lived with Fisher folk and on the coast of Japan, I can tell you, there are different sorts of nature in Japan, it's not just that Akita and Hokkaido get snow and and Kyushu and Okinawa perhaps on the coast your relationship to the natural world is entirely different. You're in the front line for typhoons you're in the front line for tsunamis right. And you're also fishing. These were small scale fishermen, although many of the men had worked on large fishing fleets in their youth. You're in small boats in the middle of the ocean. And unless you actually have done that you cannot, you cannot imagine how obsessed people need to be and people in kuzaki were with the weather. I mean, it was a modern village. We had televisions and radios and so now around the boats and and the Coast Guard communicated through walkie talkie talkie everywhere through radio everywhere. But on a fishing day, you checked every radio report. You listen to every radio report you watched every television channel weather report. You rang the Coast Guard up to see if the weather was going to be fine. And then you consulted the four little men who sat on the dock watching the sky who knew more than anyone else before you went out fishing. Because the sea is a dangerous place. I had arrived in in 84 and someone had died fishing the year before. So of course, a lot of rituals fit this model of in kuzaki of we live in a natural world and that's part of our religion. So on the first day of diving, for example, as you see in the upper left hand corner there, we had to purify. Well, the Shinto priests had to purify the ocean and pray for safety and all the diving women were out pretty much to pray for safety. And in their diving in that year it was April, right. Very cold. I can tell you very cold to dive in April. And come a week later, the weather looks better doesn't it. We had to do it all over again, because in the village next door woman had died while diving. There are there are puffer fish, there are poisonous eels, you can get caught in the crevice and your boatman can't pull you up you might have a heart attack because you hit that cold water too hard. Anyway, so we had to do the whole purification ritual again. Fishermen had all sorts of rituals I won't go into now but that photograph there is just a new year's ritual where you have to give out sweets and presents to everyone, because you have to be bounty us in the hope that you will then have bounty come to you in terms of fish in the new year. So I've already said to you, we have to think what sort of nature are we talking about when when people say oh Japanese nature shapes the Japanese character there are different natures of Japan. And the historian Adani Thomas argues that actually if you look at the history of the term, it became linked or if you want you might say relinked she's not sure she wants to. To Shinto during its reformulation as a concept nature she's in in the Meiji era. She sums up the process in which the concept of nature metamorphist from nature as place to nature as a time sort of timeless Japan to nature as Japanese consciousness itself. And she goes on to argue that the process was based on the rejection of one aspect of Western assumptions about what it meant to be modern and of the place ascribed to the East in its discourse. So you can see how he's mirroring this a bit he's kind of rejecting what he sees as a Western in positions on Japan. The reaction of Japan says, Thomas was to create a Japanese 20th century sense of nature. She says it's far from being a traditional traditional or modern or pre modern hold up hold over as it's held to be. It's actually a new creation configured as a reaction against social Darwinism. Right, we're not we're not all descended from apes right, and in conformity with the requirements of national pride. So, this version of nature has been around for long enough that people take it for granted as being central to Japanese identity, and perhaps what religion was all about in the days or that thing we might call religion was about in the days before modernization. This modern emphasis on nature and the natural would allow us to class Japanese secularity, I think, as a version of secularism that strongly emphasizes the civil, but endows the natural world with divinity. Things happen. I was told I couldn't wander out by myself because who knows what I might meet outside the village boundaries. It was granted it was grandmother's and little children who worried about this but you know, it people did say it to me. I think we're looking at something that might be a, we might define as a civil religion, perhaps in so sense. It gets talked about as a public religion by Casanova. I would argue it's a form of nationalism, and I think we so definition only needs one tweak to work for the Japanese case. He talks about the existence of God in his original but I think the existence of the divine the life to come the reward of virtue, and the punishment of vice, and the exclusion religious intolerance, all other religious opinions are outside the cognizance of the state and maybe freely held by citizens, and that's the case in Japan now you religion and state, I seem to be separate and you can believe whatever it is you want to believe and you can start your own new religion if you like as well right. So, given this connection between Shinto as having been animistic, and therefore, possibly a worship of nature like worshiping on a Tadatsu in Himatsudi, this has become, as I've already said, key to the discourse of being Japanese. The very fact of being born into the Japanese landscape of learning to appreciate it and environment is fundamental to becoming and being Japanese. Now Thomas of course as you might imagine argues that this is, you know, it's purely political, right. Being an anthropologist want to walk between two poles of people believe something, then we have to take that seriously, even if we might have historical data that tells us something different. So, I think we see a secularism that via the idea of having a unique natural world and the argument that the Japanese originally worship nature before Buddhism arrived. This allows for something that I will call enchantment to exist in within within the imminent or the mundane and secular reality of Japan. Nature has the possibility of being a magical space. Additionally, Japan's modern discourse which opposes its groupism to Western individualism supports the idea that performing local rituals is a form of social cohesion. So it's something more it's not just about nature there are other things going on here. And this kind of ships ships religious practice into the domain of cultural tradition and national identity. So, things like taking part in life and death cycle rituals can be left to individual choice in Japan, and it's common in secular societies, wherever large scale ceremonies and rituals are in the unbound brain words, which he once argued in the book we co edited. They're very Durkheimian these rituals in their nature they work to express both personal group and Japanese identity so it's not just about Japanese identity other things are going on here. So let me give you two ethnographic examples to make the case for that. Right, so I'm going to talk to you about Hachiman Matsuri. Hachiman Matsuri was probably a Buddhist festival at some point, because Hachiman is identified with the Daimyo who brought Buddhism to kuzaki in in early Tokugawa era. But it's now a festival managed by the Shinto shrine or was managed by the Shinto shine when I did my fieldwork. And it was a very interesting experience for me to be involved that was very lucky I got to sit in on all last, almost all aspects of the right. So Hachiman is the kami the God of war, the God of fishermen. He was once the protector of Japan and in some parts of Japan he had been worshipped as Amida Buddha in others is my brother Buddha yet to come. The festival then probably had been, as I've already said handled by the Buddhist priest. So it began with sitting in the, the cooperative office which was also the ward office kuzaki was a ward of Tova city. And while the men, the political leaders of the village tried to decide who would be a suitable candidate to be Hachiman. And it was eye opening. You know it was not him he drinks too much not him that my wife says his he hits his wife, not him, you know, he had to be 40. And that seemed but you know you, it was a small pool but even then you had to eliminate people. They finally chose one of my, my mates actually Matsui sun as a very suitable person. And then they had to choose a few other people to play the feudal retainers in the court as the daimyo were coming to visit the village. And so poor Matsui sun was very, very thrilled about it but not thrilled about the three days of fasting and very little sleep and the constant practice of the sort of ritual dance he had to get right to do on the fourth day. And on dawn of the fourth day he said the night before you are not coming out to photograph me. It was January, he had to dive into the sea naked. And then he but he did say to me afterwards that's when I felt Hachiman. That's when I felt the coming and to me right cold water may do that too. Anyway, he performed the ritual brilliantly. And he did very well. He was very pleased because the rumor was that if you, well, the belief was that if you did this and you did it well you would have one good years fishing. Right. And so he was pleased about that. And then he, he, we went to the feast afterwards I was invited to the feast with all the men which never ever had happened before and never happened again. Matsui sun ate a little bit and he drank a little bit of sake and he talked about going to see his wife that night and then he passed out from exhaustion. And the man sitting next to him who I think would have liked to have been Hachiman tied a pink ribbon in his hair and put his hand up behind him like this and said Lola take a picture of the coming now take a picture of the God now. I did but I'd had a lot of suckers too blurry to show to you. Right. So I want you to think about that moment for a bit. But I also have another moment with with Hachiman which occurred. A couple of years later I was back in the village I was staying with my friends the seiko song. They were the village socialists they were young couple and he didn't fish he ran a free range egg business and published a little newsletter about village life. And, and his wife said to me, you know, he was Hachiman this year. And without even thinking. I said, oh so he'll be head of the cooperative in 10 years time. And she said one cheeto. Yes, of course. Something had connected in my brain that being considered a steady suitable person in your 40s meant that in your 50s, as long as you didn't go off the rails you were considered a good possible political leader. Interesting enough, by the time seiko son was head of the ward and of the cooperative. He had to oversee the changes that were going on in Japan at the time the government was amalgamating fishing cooperatives downsizing staff and Kuzaki suddenly found itself. And as a, as a ward of toba with or satsu the village next door, where most of the divers who do the diving demonstrations in Mickey motor work, and about whom I never heard a good war word if I would say, I think I'll go to a satsu and then I'll talk to some of the armor there they were like no, don't don't go there. So, they were joined with us out soon. And I was back visiting the village in 2004. And I was told you come at the perfect weekend. The festival is on in or satsu and we're all going. I said, Oh, okay. We're all going so I went. And there was the harbor full of all satsu fishing boats and kuzaki fishing boats. And the this whale festival had been put together as a way of marking their political relationship their new political relationship. And the highlight of it was Canon, the Buddha Satra Canon writing a whale being paraded through the crowd. And I said, well, has a satsu always worship the whale writing, and they said no, invented it for this. But if you go to their website, they claim they've done it forever or satsu has a website and they, you know, it's and then they pull up nowadays they pull a big balloon whale through as well dressed as armor. But at that point I was told she was new. So I'm presented with several conundrums by these two interrelated events. So, it became clear to me that a lot of judgment, you know, goes on village. I knew that I mean I knew people people knew what size my clothes were at the first week I was in the village right so I knew a lot of judgment went on. And that to be worthy of the honor of being possessed by the coming in one year meant that, unless you went off the rails as I said, you would be a good political leader in the future. So it wasn't that villagers thought that being possessed by hachiman gave someone the qualities to be a good political leader. It is that he was worthy of being possessed by hachiman because he already had these good qualities of being an easy to a good person. So, being a commie then via this sort of possession was but a brief passing moment, something that the person who was being possessed felt personally, but it was not the moment that made him into the potential good leader it was just a signaling out that other people recognized his good qualities. So, I want us to think here about the idea of coming as encompassing a quality. It is a quality and it's a fleeting quality. You're not one forever. You comes and it goes. I think that Tiago wrote about this about how strangers arriving in villages might be treated as if they were visiting coming and then, you know, three days later, go, your personal get out, right. You've always stayed your welcome. So this is something that that we, we have seen in other parts of Japan and Japanese anthropologists have written about it. So, the ability to correctly perform the ritual confirmed a man's good traits the ritual did not necessarily confirm merit except for that good luck in fishing. And these good attributes were not necessarily a result of the man being religious. If you asked women why are you doing all these rituals where are the men, they would pause and laugh and say well the man worship sometimes. But because it was not because he was religious it's because in the eyes of his fellow villagers he was seen as a moral and responsible human Japanese being. So, my in my monograph I discuss the terms of school to another is a way of understanding the person being made and making themselves, and I'm not going to go into that here. Something else was happening here as you might guess it wasn't just about the relationship of one person with the village and its politics but it was also about creating a new ritual for new situation. And this shouldn't be any surprise either Jennifer Robertson has noted how important creating new rituals is for social solidarity in new Japanese suburbs she's written beautifully about this. And despite being centered around a Kami or in the OSASU sense around a Buddha such on the purpose of many new rituals in Japan is often to smooth over conflicts between native and newcomers. Although Ted Bester has an example which points out no it just keeps the divisions there in place. I actually saw that ritual about 10 years after he'd done his fieldwork and strangely, the, the danger they were carrying was solid gold and could only be carried for eight. I mean, you know, let me go see they were carrying solid gold and could only be carried by three seconds at a time. But anyway, that's a Ted Bester ethnography. So, you know. So despite the religious characters such festivals are about civil society. We might even argue that they are post secular, or that they seem to best fit Casa Nova's category of public religion or religion which has or assumes or tries to assume a public character functional role. But you know here that I hedge my bets. Right. I'm saying seen or might. My Japanese interlocutors would insist that while such festivals are religious in origin, they're not necessarily celebrated as anything other than Japanese custom. We do this because we are Japanese, what I was often told. Don't you celebrate Christmas do you believe in in God and Westerners all Westerners believe in God yet they celebrate Christmas. I was asked this many many times in my fieldwork. So, Japan, you know, is seen by many as a secular nation state where people are free to practice their natural religion as another scholar. Interestingly, Nasser named Emma puts it right. That could be the end of the story, or is it. Hmm. Okay, I have one more. One more kind of example to give to you. So far I've been talking to you what it might mean to be traditional in the Japanese sense, having all these rituals and doing all these things. Okay, I forgot to show you that. Okay, no, I have not forgotten. It looks a lot like religion. So what I would argue in this whole debate and in this whole realm of possibilities is that modern Japan is a society in which we see the categories of secular and religion worked out in their own particular way, building on older we might say ontological ideas about the nature of the world and the place of humans within it and the relationship with the spirits that might inhabit it. So, Japan does this building on major era on the major era response to foreign powers, and a post second world war understanding of being secular, as a necessary condition for the construction of a good nationalism and I, I really want to question that one but I feel it speaks to what society is upset about in opposition to the contemporary religious states that are now seen as enemies of modernity and national society, right. I'm an anthropologist so I have to say to you a little bit. I said at the beginning is any modern society rational or factual, or even non religious, where we would supply, you know, have the concept of secular applied for full stop. I mean we've just had a very impressive Monarch's funeral, which was both secular ceremonial and and the boot religious. The head of state is the head of Church of England and this country. I grew up in the US had to say that pledge of allegiance every day where it was one country and to God, right. And we know politics and religion in the US are very hot issue right now. And in contrast, if we look at states that were deemed to be almost purely secular like the old USSR. We find that they never quite succeeded in this, the philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner used to joke that the Russians would say to him, when the last little lady, you know, worshiping at her icon or at the few remaining churches dies out, then will be totally secular, but there were always little old ladies and of course, religion has flowered in post Soviet Russia. So, what's going on here, you might say, and and I'm, you know, and I've not talked about all of Japan I've used kuzaki as an example that we know for well from other people's ethnographies that people outside Japan outside kuzaki engage in many Shinto festivals, lifecycle rituals and Buddhist rituals, especially for the dead. So why would you have what he's saying, you know, there's a problem with these categories. And again, I go, I go back to Fitzgerald here as holy does, and that is I think the problem is, there's, there's the possibility that foreigners are saying, they don't even know they are religious, which, you know, it's not the sort of statement you want to want to hear or even make. So, there is there is that Orientalism coming into play and I think that's what Hody is so about so upset about. And that's why the debate continues to go on. And it revolves around the continuous presence of religious and ritual slash ritual activity or traditional activity in Japan, and we have new things happening all the time spirit mediums may still be visited by some families when there's been a death in the family. This practice seems to be dying out. But we see scholars like Bafaeli and doorman know arise in television and internet diviners. And fortune dollars being frequently consulted, particularly by women, but not just by women. Andrea the Anthony has studied the belief in hauntings in Japanese cities and towns and on the internet. And, but you can tell us about uncanny dolls and how do we get rid of sacred objects, which is a huge problem. So, I want to elaborate on a term I used in passing to it here in my, my ending few minutes, I will have time be quick. And that is by thinking about Charles Taylor's elaboration of Casanova Casanova's first point that becoming secular also involves a process of disenchantment in the very various sense that the imminent secular world becomes an accepted norm and that the descendant is seen as but an invention of false belief and experience. Yet in terms of ethic, we might say these can be very real experiences. So my final ethnographic example. Once a month all the women who died went up to Mount Sengen to leave offerings at different altars to different deities that could be found on the mountain top. Most of the altars look like the one on the left. You left some sweets, you took some sweets home because they've been blessed by being in the presence of the God. And we went around doing this till we got to the dragon of the sea, the coming of the sea, where it was a black rock and an egg got left. So I said, well, what happens to the eggs? You know, I thought, is there a big egg exchange going on? There's been a candy exchange going on. And they said, no, the eggs get eaten. Who eats the eggs? And then I ventured a little guess I said, does the dragon eat the eggs? The laughter. There was a pause and then lots of laughter and listen, the whole village by the evening heard the story and we're laughing. But I want you to think about that pause. Okay, because I'm coming back to pauses, right. So, I will conclude in a moment so we, we can ask what are rituals for in a world that might be secular in the world that is Japan. And we've seen various different sorts of examples here, commemorating local history and identity, as well as social cohesion for safety and good luck in dangerous lifestyles, celebrating a political past and future hachiman again, confirming a person's status within the community, and not discuss but you know celebrating the individual in all sorts of ways lifecycle rituals rights that commemorate the day. So all of this is going on. But what else might be going on. And I want to come back to enchantment here. Peter van de Veer who works on China has noted yes, the world is becoming more and more secular and more and more disenchanted. He was constantly challenged by the re enchantment of modern life. He goes on to think about it in terms of finance or self fashioning. But he adds then that this enchanted realm is seen as magic or superstition or the remnants of older little traditions and Robert Redfield sense. And I think that's why we're sent to kuzaki is like, you'll see some of the traditions we once had in Japan in kuzaki religion becomes rationalized as well. The source of morality from modern societies. That would seem to explain everything that I've been talking to you about. But I want to present us with a slightly different possibility, or still thinking about enchantment but in a different way perhaps than Peter van de Veer. Those examples I gave you of hesitating before the altar of pausing before laughing, laughing of making fun of religiosity that just had passed someone had been a God. I think demonstrate an awareness of the possibility of a transcendent realm. There are moments of disjuncture. A sense that there's something more than a secular reality. The notion of disjunctors closest to Jonathan Smith's argument in the bear facts of ritual that in which he argues that the idea of the sacred comes from the experience of an or encounter with disjuncture. So I remember hearing him lecture on this when I was an undergraduate 50 years ago. In the mountains and a bush is on fire and there's no fire anywhere and there's no lightning and and the bush talks to you. And that's disjuncture and you know you're you're you're experiencing something and you know, religious and powerful. So this disjuncture is a break in and from the mundane from the imminent. It's just a tweak that the disjuncture is itself the experience right. And I think Miyazaki and especially my neighbor total gives us some nice examples of this going on visually, you know, imagine for us within Japanese nature. I'm positive. I'm positive team that's a hesitation before I'm a Tadasus alter the pause before laughing at me or the pause at the idea of religiosity, joking about someone having been a God, all signal and encounter with the possibility that the divine is real. There's a powerful force there. They all point to an awareness of a disjuncture between two types of codependent experiences that of the secular, and that of the transcendent transcendendent and ritual has a way of revealing this fact to its practitioners, yet it doesn't have to be a ritual. It can be an encounter with the objects or places or things. The variation of ritual traditions indicates an awareness that the world may yet be enchanted, and this is part and parcel of being secular in Japan. We might well class this as a version of secularism that strongly emphasizes the civil and repeating myself here, and yet allows the possibility that the natural world is in doubt with magic or enchantment, we might say. So it's not just that rituals reveal this possibility. It is also the asset of the encounter between the ordinary and the possibly extraordinary, which allows us to pound ponder the actuality of our experience. What then does the Japanese case tell us about secular and religious as categories. One point I hope you'll take away is that in many societies the regimes of power have long had this dual character. They've, they have been about the effective ruling people combined with rituals of care, and of caring in an uncertain world, and they appeal to the divine. Japan, I'm sorry to say is not unique here, perhaps the way it's organized is unique, but it's not unique in its basic premises, we would say. I would agree with Hody in part by saying that the real issue is the fact that moral value becomes implicit within the definitions of these categories. The idea that to have worldly authorities in power is modern and good. While religious authorities who rule in every case case are a problem. And I think that's why Hody gets, he doesn't like this distinction and I agree with him. I don't think it's a fair distinction color to solve which say the same thing. Social life and social organization are more complex than that. Just ask any anthropologist. I hope I demonstrated that in some way to you today. And I thank you for listening.