Religion and Psychotherapy in Modern Japan

Christopher Harding, Iwata Fumiaki, Yoshinaga Shin'ichi, Christopher Harding, Iwata Fumiaki, Yoshinaga Shin'ichi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138775169
• eBook ISBN: 9781317682998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Buddhism
• Index: Psychology

Since the late nineteenth century, religious ideas and practices in Japan have become increasingly intertwined with those associated with mental health and healing. This relationship developed against the backdrop of a far broader, and deeply consequential meeting: between Japan's long-standing, Chinese-influenced intellectual and institutional forms, and the politics, science, philosophy, and religion of the post-Enlightenment West. In striving to craft a modern society and culture that could exist on terms with – rather than be subsumed by – western power and influence, Japan became home to a religion--psy dialogue informed by pressing political priorities and rapidly shifting cultural concerns.

This book provides a historically contextualized introduction to the dialogue between religion and psychotherapy in modern Japan. In doing so, it draws out connections between developments in medicine, government policy, Japanese religion and spirituality, social and cultural criticism, regional dynamics, and gender relations. The chapters all focus on the meeting and intermingling of religious with psychotherapeutic ideas and draw on a wide range of case studies including: how temple and shrine 'cures' of early modern Japan fared in the light of German neuropsychiatry; how Japanese Buddhist theories of mind, body, and self-cultivation negotiated with the findings of western medicine; how Buddhists, Christians, and other organizations and groups drew and redrew the lines between religious praxis and psychological healing; how major European therapies such as Freud's fed into self-consciously Japanese analyses of and treatments for the ills of the age; and how distress, suffering, and individuality came to be reinterpreted across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from the southern islands of Okinawa to the devastated northern neighbourhoods of the Tohoku region after the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters of March 2011.

Religion and Psychotherapy in Modern Japan will be welcomed by students and scholars working across a broad range of subjects, including Japanese culture and society, religious studies, psychology and psychotherapy, mental health, and international history.

1 Religion and psychotherapy
in modern Japan

A four-phase view

Christopher Harding

We may usefully divide the period covered by the present volume into four phases: the initial impact of Japan’s modernizing reforms and its interaction with western politics and culture, from the late nineteenth century through to the early 1910s; the rise, from the 1910s to the late 1940s, of psychotherapies inspired by new scientific and medical ideas but rooted in – or making strategic use of – traditional Japanese religious or cultural forms; Japan’s rebirth as a nation in the early 1950s and the renewed impact of western, particularly American, dynamic and developmental psychology; and finally a boom for new religious, spiritual, cultural, and psychotherapeutic discourses from the 1970s onwards – some cosmopolitan and outward looking, others echoing pre-war concerns about the cohesion of Japanese society and culture, and almost all of them seeking to offer alternative or corrective discourses and rationalities to the modernism of the previous period. All four periods have fed into present-day mental health priorities in Japan, including the provision of counselling in schools and universities, together with grief, terminal, and disaster care.

Meiji-era religion and the psy disciplines: 1868–1912

Japan’s dramatically expanding involvement with western modernity from the 1860s onwards, and the resulting intellectual and social tensions over whether and how modernization could practically be distinguished from westernization, was a major force shaping the emerging religion–psy dialogue in this first period. The position of Japanese religious ideas and institutions in such a climate was rather ambiguous. Japanese Buddhism in particular was vulnerable, linked to the power of the old regime and to what many modern intellectuals saw as Japan’s historically weak polity and her humiliating scientific and technological backwardness. A period of anti-clerical violence at the end of the 1860s, as the early Meiji government’s policy of shimbutsu bunri (separation of Shintō and Buddhism) degenerated into haibutsu kishaku (the eradication of Buddhism), confirmed high levels of popular anger against the Buddhist establishment and heightened the sense that Buddhism was inconsistent with the aspirations of the new society that was taking shape.¹

And yet, in common with other non-western nations in the modern era, Japanese intellectuals and political leaders regarded their cultural inheritance as an important resource in establishing Japan as a powerful and sophisticated country in the eyes of western peers. As H. Gene Blocker and Christopher L. Starling have pointed out, Japanese leaders faced a dilemma here – alongside their counterparts in China and India – over whether their aims would be best achieved by reinterpreting and promoting indigenous culture in the terms of imported foreign disciplines and institutions, such as western philosophy and forms of political organization, or by eschewing foreign forms in favour of revivified local idioms.² As a number of the chapters in this volume show, the coming together of religion and psychotherapy in Japan was frequently a combination of these two approaches. The work both of the reforming Buddhist philosopher Inoue Enryō and the psychoanalyst Kosawa Heisaku was characterized by the conviction that the core of traditional religion and the cutting edge of western science were fully compatible and even complementary – helping to expose false religion and fraudulent science. Of the two individuals, Inoue was the more systematic in seeking to carve out areas of appropriate operation for religion and for science. He was assiduous in cultivating government and popular support for his schema: seeking to demonstrate, for example, that psychology could help in ridding Japan of harmful superstitions, for which real Buddhism had no time and bore no responsibility.³

A surge in Christian missionary activity in Japan, particularly in the generation beginning in the 1870s (when government restrictions on Christian activity were relaxed), further contributed to the reforms of Buddhism, encouraged by the likes of Inoue. Buddhist sects sending delegations to Europe and America around this time, to investigate Christianity’s institutional, intellectual, and social dimensions, quickly found that various of the modern sciences offered powerful means of critiquing the tenets and practices of this religion that they so feared as a potential competitor (relatively large numbers of former samurai became Christians during the early part of the Meiji era). One of the advantages for Inoue and others in showing how easily Buddhism and science could be reconciled was that this further underlined what they regarded – and hoped to advertise to fellow Japanese – as Christianity’s preposterousness and irreconcilability with science and with modernity more generally.⁴

This, however, was only one side of the story where Buddhist–Christian relations were concerned. Modernizing Buddhists began to emulate and even co-operate with some of the forms of education, outreach, and social work in which Christian groups engaged – something made all the more acceptable in social and political terms as Japanese Christians from the 1890s onwards sought to make the case for the compatibility of what the prominent Christian Uchimura Kanzō described as the two ‘J’s: Jesus and Japan. This was to be important for future religion–psy dialogue in two ways. First, investment by some Japanese Buddhist organizations in the creation of school and dormitory facilities proved a highly successful means of engaging with new generations, helping to ensure that the modern rationalist dimensions of their education were complemented by an immersion in Buddhist culture. It was at one such Buddhist dormitory that a Jōdo Shinshū priest, Chikazumi Jōkan, met and influenced profoundly the life of the young Kosawa Heisaku.⁵

Second, Buddhist intellectual outreach made possible the beginnings of a positive three-way dialogue between Buddhism, Christianity, and science.⁶ As Notto R. Thelle has pointed out, there were many in Japan at this time who experienced an attraction to both Buddhism and Christianity. Such people became pioneers of inter-religious study and Buddhist– Christian dialogue, with a Chair of Comparative Religion established at the University of Tokyo in 1889 and a Buddhist–Christian Conference taking place in 1896. Although Thelle cautions that these early encounters were rather rudimentary in philosophical terms, an intellectual and spiritual context was clearly taking shape in which religious ideas and practices were to be weighed and considered side by side.⁷ Science became a part of this context initially in the form of evolutionary theory, with Buddhists taking an interest in Christian debates about Darwin – possibly with slight smiles on their faces: evolution was rather more of a problem for Christianity than for Buddhism since the former’s anthropology and Old Testament narratives were still taught and understood in many quarters as (historically) literal. As Helen Ballhatchet has pointed out, the matter was most pressing of all for Japanese Christian converts, many of whom had initially been won over to Christianity as the apparent spiritual bedrock of western science and civilization.⁸ Here already, then, we find key elements of inter-religious and religion–psy dialogue in the decades to come: the status of doctrine, metaphysics, rationality, faith, belief, and the weighing of conflicting claims, academic disciplines, and professional expertise.

Developments in Japanese medicine and science – rooted in far-reaching explorations of western knowledge and techniques after 1868, including the employment of foreign experts and periods of study abroad for significant numbers of promising young Japanese professionals⁹ – shaped religion–psy dialogue both directly, in terms of new ideas, and indirectly, by creating legal frameworks, institutions, and professional hierarchies, within and often in opposition to which relatively informal psychotherapies and psycho-religious therapies then emerged. The two key pieces of mental healthcare legislation in the pre-war period were the 1900 Mental Patients’ Custody Act and the 1919 Mental Hospitals Act. Up until the turn of the twentieth century, regulation in Japan was largely an extension of an early modern emphasis upon confining those regarded as dangerous lunatics to their homes or to secure municipal institutions. Responsibility rested with the person’s family and with the local police, and it was only when news got out in the Japanese media in the 1880s that a powerful former feudal lord had been unjustly held on a pretext of lunacy that the call was raised for proper national legislation. The issue quickly got caught up with the Japanese political establishment’s one abiding preoccupation: to demonstrate that Japan had risen to become the equal of western nations in any and all things. The resulting Act in 1900 was not, however, a watershed in psychiatric care in Japan: it provided for the regulation by law of the old system of confinement, with a requirement that a ‘custodian’ be appointed for anyone deemed dangerously ill and the criminalization of wrongful confinement. The custodian was usually a family member, since coping with this kind of mental illness was regarded most fundamentally as a family rather than a state responsibility. This custodian would apply for the imposition of custody at an approved location, often the family home, in which a cage-like secure room was installed, to be inspected now and again by local police and doctors.¹⁰

As this construal of mental illness in terms of the confinement of the dangerously insane gathered...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Japanese names
• Introduction
• 1 Religion and psychotherapy in modern Japan: a four-phase view
• 2 Psychiatry and religion in modern Japan: traditional temple and shrine therapies
• 3 The birth of Japanese mind cure methods
• 4 The mind and healing in Morita therapy
• 5 The dawning of Japanese psychoanalysis: Kosawa Heisaku’s therapy and faith
• 6 Doi Takeo and the development of the ‘Amae’ theory
• 7 From salvation to healing: Yoshimoto Naikan therapy and its religious origins
• 8 Naikan and mourning: a Catholic attempt at Naikan meditation
• 9 Kawai Hayao’s transnational identity and Japanese spirit
• 10 The contemporary view of reincarnation in Japan: narratives of the reincarnating self
• 11 A society accepting of spirit possession: mental health and shamanism in Okinawa
• 12 Chaplaincy work in disaster areas
• Conclusion
• Index