This dissertation is about Shinra Myojin, a god of Silla that was worshipped in medieval Japanese Buddhism. It analyzes the various networks with which the deity was involved, namely, networks of Silla immigrants, Silla shrines and temples, and a variety of gods. Through examining the worship of Shinra Myojin from several different angles, each chapter has different, and yet related arguments. In the first chapter, I argue that the emergence of Shinra Myojin's cult can be fully understood when viewed within the context of the "East Asian Mediterranean" trade network, in which Silla merchants, immigrants, and Buddhist monks played a prominent role. In the second chapter, while focusing on a pivotal moment of the Shinra Myojin cult--a process of sedentarisation in which he changed from a sea deity into a mountain deity, I argue that Shinra Myojin was the central deity of Onjoji, as well as the entire Jimon tradition. The third chapter explains how the Japanese imaginaire of Silla was evolved, encoded and had effects in medieval Japan, and how Shinra Myojin functioned as a god of pestilence. Another pivotal point of Shinra Myojin's career was his mythological transformation from 'a god of Silla' to 'a god who conquered Silla.' In the last chapter, I analyze the visual representation of Shinra Myojin within this larger religious context, and argue that Shinra Myojin is best understood when we consider the deity in this network of other Silla-related deities, represented as an old man. The examination of Shinra Myojin's cult from an interdisciplinary angle serves as a gateway for exploring other understudied associations between medieval Japanese religiosity and those religious ideas and practices that were either continental in origin or were at least perceived to be so by medieval Japanese. My findings from interdisciplinary research contribute to elucidating those connections existing across the boundaries of religion, history, mythology, literature, and visual culture, all of which describes broader dynamics of East Asian religion as a whole.

This dissertation focuses on the Izanagi-ryū, a Japanese folk religion closely associated with the Monobe region in Kōchi Prefecture, to study the challenges faced by local communities in preserving and transmitting their intangible cultural heritages. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines historical and textual analysis with observational ethnographic studies of actual ritual practices and performances, the study of Izanagi-ryū is intended to draw out the ways in which competing narratives amongst local communities and institutional rhetoric over the preservation of intangible cultural heritages affect the transmission of local cultural practices. The strategies undertaken by the practitioners of Izanagi-ryū to construct their local identities and legitimize their status within the framework of governmental policies and scholarly rhetoric will be examined, along with studying the effects of modifying ritual spaces and procedures to fit contemporary demands and limitations.This research encourages us to look deeper into the repercussions of cultural preservation whereby the enthusiastic drive to secure the continuity of cultural practices might conversely distort their significance and transmission instead. This dissertation argues that the implementation of cultural preservation, while critical for defining and protecting the identity of a culture, would require a more careful consideration whereby allowances for cultural practices to discontinue, when necessary, should be factored in to ensure the integrity of these practices. Cultural practices should always be allowed to continue, or cease, on their own terms

This thesis examines references to priests and temples of the Japanese Pure Land Buddhist school claiming Ippen (1239-1289) as founder; the most important of the lineages was the Yugyō-ha, or 'itinerancy school'. Scattered in Noh plays, epics, documents, histories, diaries, et cetera over a four-hundred-year period, these references are the residue of a long-term and successful propaganda campaign advertising doctrines, miracles, and services to the military class. The thesis focuses especially on the themes and formulaic diction borrowed from existing texts and developed by the school as it distinguished itself from other Pure Land schools. The rôle of what became the Jishū (usually translated 'Time Sect') in the guardianship of the identity of the founder of the Tokugawa family is of special interest.

This dissertation examines Japanese conceptions of and devotional attitudes toward Śākyamuni (the historical Buddha) during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. It focuses in particular on a new interest in Śākyamuni that arose in the twelfth century, and argues that this interest was a response to two developments: the appearance of the belief that the world had entered Buddhism’s final age, and the increasingly acute sense that Japan existed at the periphery of the Buddhist world. These two developments evoked in some clerics a sense of distance from the origins of Buddhism and a feeling of helplessness since the final age was a time when soteriological progress was thought to be particularly difficult. Japanese Buddhists were thus faced with a problem: how to proceed given these disadvantageous circumstances? Some clerics found comfort in theories about the Buddha Amida’s ability to take humans away from this world to his pure land, while others turned instead to the Mahāyāna Buddhist idea that humans are born enlightened (and thus need not worry about their personal salvation after all). The monks and texts at the center of my research instead looked to Śākyamuni in an attempt to reconnect with the source of the Buddhist tradition, thereby countering the inevitable decline of Buddhism by linking themselves to, and in some cases recreating, the imagined golden age that Śākyamuni and his Indian environs represented.

This dissertation examines early modern (seventeenth-mid-nineteenth century) Japanese religion through a study of a cult devoted to the popular deity Fudō Myōō ("The Immovable King of Illumination") at Naritasan Temple (also known as Shinshōji Temple) in Shimōsa Province (present-day Chiba Prefecture). It discusses how Naritasan developed a distinctive corpus of miracle tale literature centered around its sacred statue of Fudō, and how these tales interwove doctrinal and sectarian traditions with local geography and history to produce a regionally-specific brand of the deity. This process of individuation became central to the creation of Naritasan's identity and religious activities, its promises of material and spiritual rewards, and to the way stories were used to spread the cult among the populace through recreational and commercial enterprises. I demonstrate how these narratives can thus be read in light of the temple's evolution and socio-economic changes affecting early modern Japan as a whole. By employing a locally-based and trans-sectarian approach to the study of the Fudō cult at Naritasan, this dissertation seeks to illuminate a number of issues: how the temple used miracle tales to domesticate and transform Fudo into a trademark "Narita Fudō", a process central to the religious and commercial identities of temples; how the Narita Fudo was not static but evolved over time to became an object of worship shared across a variety of religious and popular traditions; and finally, how the deity therefore resists convenient categorizations afforded him by modern scholarship, thus challenging the ways we understand one of Japan's oldest and most important deities. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis examines the ways in which popular culture reveals, and shapes, religious thinking in contemporary Japan. Through an investigation of popular culture including animated films (anime) and graphic novels (manga), and the cultural processes related to their production and consumption, it explores how and why popular culture in Japan is acting as a repository for ideas and images relating to religion, the supernatural, and the human and non-human agents who mediate them. Popular culture is important not only for the ways it discloses contemporaneous cultural trends, but because it acts in dialogic tension with them. In Japan, where society has grown increasingly secularized since at least the middle of the twentieth century, an overwhelming majority of citizens consider themselves non-religious. Surveys have consistently indicated that only a small percentage of respondents identify as actively Shintō, Buddhist, Christian or some other religious affiliation. At the same time, depictions of religious images and themes have grown exponentially in popular culture such that a recent internet search on “anime” plus “kami” (a Shintō deity) produced an astounding 20,100,000 hits. Clearly, religion continues to play a crucial role in the popular imagination. This juncture of popular culture and personal religious identity in contemporary Japan raises a number of questions discussed in the following chapters. What benefits do consumers derive from the treatment of religious themes in anime and manga? What do depictions of religion in popular media indicate about the construction of religious identity in Japan? Why the disparity between religious identification survey results and cultural consumption of religious themes and images? In short, what are the ways in which popular culture in Japan reveals ideas about religion and the supernatural, and in what ways does popular culture actively shape those conceptions? / text

This dissertation investigates how different stakeholders have competed over the interpretation and commemoration of the Aum Affair. The Aum Affair was a series of crimes committed by new religious movement Aum Shinrikyō between 1988 and 1995, which culminated in the gassing of the Tokyo subway system using sarin in March 1995. The Tokyo attack was the largest act of terrorism in post-war Japan. I combine qualitative methods of media analysis, interviews, and participant observation to analyse how different stakeholders have narrated and commemorated the Aum Affair. I propose ‘collective trauma’ as a revised theory of ‘cultural trauma’ to describe an event which is represented as harmful and indelible to collective memory and identity. In contrast to ‘cultural trauma’, which stresses the importance of symbolic representations of traumatic events, ‘collective trauma’ considers other ‘material’ processes – such as establishing facts, collective action, state responses, and litigation – which also contribute to trauma construction. My overarching argument is that various stakeholders – including state authorities, mass media, public intellectuals, victims, and former Aum believers – have constructed the Aum Affair as a collective trauma in multiple and conflicting ways. Many media representations situated Aum as an evil ‘cult’ which ‘brainwashed’ believers and intended to take over Japan through terror. State authorities also responded by treating Aum as a dangerous terrorist group. In some instances, these binary representations of Japan locked in a struggle against an evil force led to municipal governments violating the civil rights of Aum believers. Some individuals such as public intellectuals and former believers have challenged this divisive view by treating Aum as a ‘religion’, not a ‘cult’, and locating the root causes of Aum’s growth in Japanese society. Additionally, victims and former members have pursued divergent goals such as retributive justice, financial reparations, and social reconciliation through their public actions. A key conclusion of this dissertation is that whilst confronting horrific acts of violence may require social construction of collective trauma using cultural codes of good and evil, the entrenchment of these symbolic categories can result in lasting social tension and division.

The history of Japanese women who love women is often either ignored by or inaccessible to English speakers. To address this lacuna, I will lay out two case studies of women whose Queerness is potentially useful as models of Queer Japanese womanhood. I examine the narratives surrounding two women, Murasaki Shikibu (c. 973 or 978 – c. 1014 or 1031), the author the Tale of Genji, and Otake Kōkichi (1893-1966), an author, artist, and first wave feminist activist, in order to see how narratives surrounding their Queerness, known or posited, affect or are affected by cultural and religious narratives of identity and sexual values. The only major reading of Murasaki Shikibu as a woman who loved women is that of literary scholar and lesbian feminist Komashaku Kimi in Murasaki Shikibu’s Message (Murasaki Shikibu no Messeji), written in 1991. Her argument is that the interest in women’s bodies Murasaki shows in her diary and Poetic Memoirs was a kind of same-sex desire and that that desire was integral to her message in the Tale of Genji. This argument has never been given significant scholarly attention. As such, I examine this argument and present it in English. Otake Kōkichi, born Otake Kazue, is one of a handful of Queer women from the early 20th century who are regularly discussed in academic literature on Japanese feminist history, but most narratives surrounding her tend to center on a same-sex relationship she had in her youth and ignore the radical nature of her life after marriage. I will present aspects of her life that worked with and resisted various religions and systems of value creation that were competing for influence in twentieth-century Japan. The narratives surrounding Otake and Murasaki as Queer people center the radical nature of their work and lives. Both are discussed as having a kind of embodied politics that resists dominant images of womanhood and sexuality in favour of more liberatory constructions of value and identity. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)