Saturday July 20, 2013

"Josephson asserts that the claim to Shinto's secular status was based on over a hundred years of discourse on science introduced slowly but convincingly from the Western nations, which later came to be reconstructed and reinterpreted by a Japanese intellectual movement with strong nativist and proto-nationalist proclivities. To make his long argument short, this intellectual movement repeatedly made the assertion that the empirically verifiable, publicly reproducible results of Western science, which were originally inspired by and equally identifiable through Japanese classical sources, depended on the power of Japanese _kami_, that is, Shinto. However, at this time in the early eighteenth century, the modern Christian-determined concept of religion had yet to reach Japan. Moreover, secularized Western scientific discoveries and procedures, intentionally stripped of Christian influence by government decree, were becoming well known in educated circles in early modern Japan."

Citation: Wilburn Hansen. Review of Josephson, Jason AÌ„nanda [?], _The Invention of Religion in Japan_. H-Shukyo, H-Net Reviews. July, 2013.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38984