This panel examines emotions as powerful forces that move, confound, and connect a variety of actors in Japanese religions. The panel analyzes poignant emotions expressed and enacted in an array of contexts, such as the notions of shame and regret in medieval Pure Land literatures, sacrificial rage exhibited by Tokugawa peasant martyrs (gimin), emotive reconstructions of war memory in a modern new religion, and the senses of sadness and loneliness confronted by Buddhist women during the Covid-19 pandemic. Beyond simply offering case studies, the panel seeks to destabilize the persistent Euro-American centrism in the study of emotions and situate Japanese religions as sites of theory making in understanding the ways in which culturally formulated emotional matrices and affective landscapes inform religious actors and their practices in varying temporal contexts.
This paper examines two kinds of transformations of shame (zanki) in late Heian Pure Land discourse through the contrasting ideas of emotion and affect. First, subjective remorse was formalized into standardized rites of repentance (sange). This formalization generated a strong emphasis on ritual expression of shame, as opposed to the internal emotion itself. It effectively converted invisible individual feelings into an intersubjective affective field accessible to other individuals. Second, the perceived lack of shame was paradoxically redefined as a performative gateway to spiritual success. By self-portraying as shameless, practitioners strategically aligned themselves with a particular category of people expounded in Pure Land teachings as an object of salvation, thereby ensuring their position within the soteriological system. This paper argues that the emotion of shame functioned not merely as a psychological state but as a conceptual matrix for ritual embodiment and performative self-definition.
This paper examines the emotion of rage as expressed by Tokugawa protest martyrs (gimin) and complex affective landscapes their rage engenders. Although individual circumstances differ, stories of early modern protest martyrs largely hinge upon the sacrificial deaths of virtuous peasants who engage in “illegal” protests against corrupt feudal lords. The prototypical example of this narrative pattern is Sakura Sōgorō, a seventeenth-century peasant executed by the Sakura domain for the crime of making a direct appeal to the Shogun. Moments before his death, Sōgorō expresses his rage at the corrupt domain lord and makes a vow of vengeance, no matter how many lifetimes it may take. Sōgorō thus articulates his rage in trans-corporeal and trans-temporal terms, assuming that his rage will live on even after his body perishes. This paper argues that it was the trans-corporeal, trans-temporal conception of Sōgorō’s rage that informed his postmortem apotheosis as a kami.
This paper analyzes emotion, religious cultivation, and pacifism in Konkōkyō war commemoration rituals. Drawing on textual testimonies and fieldwork, I examine how adherents of Konkōkyō—a Sect Shinto new religious movement (NRM) that was both oppressed and privileged in the 1930s and 1940s—create, share, and transform war emotions through memorial rituals. I focus on two rituals: spirit pacification (ireisai) in Konkōkyō peace conferences, and war remains repatriation (ikotsu shūshū) in Okinawa. Konkōkyō participants recall a range of emotions and experiences evoked by the ritual; negative feelings of guilt and suffering are interpreted as opportunities to cultivate gratitude and pacifism. I show how adherents of a marginalized religion grapple with loss, suffering, and responsibility through communal rituals that mobilize war experiences toward goals of self-cultivation and pacifism. My paper theorizes these rituals as pulling participants back in time as a way to cultivate new emotional capacities in the present.
Anne Allison introduced “sensing precarity” in her influential 2013 book, Precarious Japan which argued for precarity as an emotional status, one characterized by an insecurity and desociality that pervades contemporary Japanese society. Sensing precarity, then, can be interpreted as an inability to move within social worlds, what Gilles Deleuze (1978) defined as sadness. Yet Allison did not consider the role religion plays in sensing precarity through practices that enable movement, what Deleuze saw as joy. In this presentation, I draw on Buddhist women’s experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic to revisit Allison’s sensing precarity in light of Deleuze’s concepts of joy and sadness to understand the ways that women negotiated their extreme senses of sadness through their active Buddhist practices of joy. These women turned to Buddhist teachings and practices to craft a quasi-communal life of joy that helped them battle the precarious emotional tides that threatened to overcome them.
| Timothy Benedict | benedict@kwansei.ac.jp | View |