Jolyon Baraka Thomas and Matthew D. McMullen, "The New Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

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Head to quints.com/newbooks for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's qu-in-c-e.com/newbooks for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com/newbooks Welcome to the new books network. Greetings and welcome to another episode of new books in Japanese studies, a podcast channel of new books network. My name is Radeegia and I will be your host for this episode. Today we are joined by two guests Dr. Matthew McMollon and Dr. Jolly and Thomas. Dr. McMollon is currently a senior research fellow at the Non-Zan Institute for Religion and Culture and Dr. Thomas is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. They are the editors of the Niu Non-Zan Guide to Japanese Religions, which will be the focus of our episode today. The Niu Non-Zan Guide serves as a complement to the first non-Zan Guide to Japanese Religions, published over 20 years ago and has been a value where resource for students and college of Japanese Religions. Before we get into the book, can you to briefly introduce your work and your background for our listeners who are not familiar with you? Maybe we can start with you, Matt, if you don't mind. Thank you for that introduction. My name is Matthew McMollon and I'm a senior research fellow at the Non-Zan Institute for Religion and Culture, which is at Non-Zan University in the way of Japan. My own first, my research focuses on, I would say, early medieval Japanese Buddhism, so mostly, hey on period Buddhism. But my job at the Institute is primarily editing and publishing. We have a couple of book series as well as a journal, the Japanese Journal of religious studies, which I'm the editor for in the Non-Zan Library for Asian Religion and Culture. My background, I completed my PhD in 2016 at University of California Berkeley in Buddha studies, and before then, I received an in-a at the University of Hawaii in Asian Religions, which is where I met Jolian. Yeah, and I'm Jolian Thomas. I'm an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm trained primarily as a scholar of modern Japanese religions, which for me means religion from the 19th century all the way to the present. My background, I guess, I'll start with my academic background. I finished my PhD from Princeton University in 2014. As Matt said, we met while we were doing master's degrees at the University of Hawaii. What he didn't say is that we both had a fairly long master's program that included two years of living in Japan, sort of in the middle. So we started our master's program, spent one year in Hawaii. Then we were both based in Tokyo for two years, and then we moved back to Hawaii to finish our master's degrees. So it was already a long time and a real beginning of long conversations about the state of the field of Japanese religions. In terms of my research, I have three or four different things that I kind of work on at all times, but the basic question that animates my research is who describes what stuff as religion, and that comes up in the introduction to the book we'll be discussing. In my first book called Drawing on Tradition, I talked about manga and anime and religion in contemporary Japan. Then in my second book, Faking Liberties, I discussed the history of religious freedom, policy, politics, and law in Japan from the 19th century through the mid 20th century. I've got two forthcoming projects. One is a co-authored book with Ike Roots and Yulia Frumer, that's called Animating Action, Changing the World with Anime, rituals, and robots. It is what I like to call a tri-graph because we fully co-authored the book. That's coming out with University of Hawaii press in about a year, December 2026. And then again with University of Chicago press, I've been working on a book called Difficult Subjects that's about religion and tax-funded education in Japan and the United States. And as you might guess from the way I've described that, I've gradually been stretching into studying not only Japan and quote-unquote Japanese religions, but also religion in the United States and other places that have histories of imperialism. Great, yeah, thank you. I mean, those sounds like extremely interesting projects and we can get into those maybe in the end of the podcast. All right, so the new non-Zan-Zan-Gai to Japanese religions was published by the University of Hawaii press just earlier this year in 2025. The first non-Zan-Gai was published in 2005, so over two decades ago. And then I remember reading the first non-Zan-Gai when I started my study into my study of Japan and then going like, what do you mean Japanese people don't boyve in Tendo? But I think the kind of questions that were the focus of the first non-Zan-Gai have changed in these two decades. And the structure of the book, I believe also reflects that change. So the new non-Zan-Gai is divided into seven sections with smaller chapters and each sectioned, instead of themes like traditions and history, you have different things that will go over as we, you know, in this podcast. But can you tell us how this project began and what prompted this change compared to the first non-Zan-Gai? So yeah, so maybe I'll start answering that question. So as I outlined in the preface of the new non-Zan-Gai, I'm kind of providing a high geography of the origin of the book. Started several years ago, I think in 2018, 2019, shortly after I started here at non-Zan. And my predecessor, Paul Swanson, I, we're chatting over coffee and we had both seen a series of posts on Facebook group at the time and some scholars of the pre-modern Japanese religions were talking about, you know, guides to Japanese religion and how there's kind of a need for such guys for teaching and someone had which in the non-Zan-Gai from 2005 and everyone said, "Yeah, it's useful, but it's kind of outdated." So, so that kind of began a discussion. It's like, well, maybe we should publish an updated version. And then I learned that actually, you know, when they published the non-Zan-Gai back in 2005, they'd actually planned a series of, of guidebooks, you know, trying to maybe publish a new version every decade or so. And since at that point, it had been 15, 16 years. So we said, "Okay, well, maybe we'll look into that." So that's how it got started. And then I decided that actually I've been decide. My predecessor, Paul Swanson, wisely suggested that I not do that by myself because such a large book can drive you crazy if you're editing by yourself and it's always good to have a partner when you're going crazy. So I invited Julian to join the project shortly after that. And then we kind of got started with some ideas for the book and then we had a session at the AR as getting feedback from people. And then COVID happened. And so, and then everything was kind of discussed remotely for quite a while until the book took shape. And I was really into having anything to add about the origins of the project. Yeah. So I think one of the other things is that we've got to somewhat unconventional structure of the book. We'll talk about that in maybe in a little bit more detail. When Matt first reached out and asked if I wanted to do that, my response was, well, I would love to have an excuse to hang out with one of my oldest friends and talk about Japanese religions as we have done, but also know why would I want to do an edited volume? Because they're notoriously lots of work. And so I think initially I said to Matt, I wasn't interested, and then less than 24 hours later I wrote him an email being like, "Okay, here's how I would do this." And like, and so it started off with this kind of like, like I just couldn't resist the intellectual puzzle. And but one thing I really want to stress here is that this meeting that we had at the AR was really generative, you know, asking other people in the field who are all in the same room. You know, what do you think is at the cutting edge of the field right now? And that is a real, even though our names are on the cover, I think that the structure of the book reflects that sort of origin story of like wanting to crowdsource the, you know, what the state of the field is. And the structure of the book also reflects that and that we brought on these collaborating or contributing editors who wrote introductions to each of the sections, knowing that we wouldn't have the area expertise and all of these fields and wanting to make sure that other people got to to say their piece about what the state of the field was. So those are all some things that are sort of going on in the background of the book, but as we stress in both the, I think it's in the preface and in the introduction, we're seeing these as the original non-tongued and the new non-tongued as a companion set, I think you can read one without the other, but it certainly helps to have the background of the original non-tongued when approaching our volume. - I think just to add to that before we get into the specifics of the section of the book. Yeah, I think as we discussed the content of the book with scholars in the field and amongst ourselves, yeah, we gradually realized that we didn't want to just put out the remake of the first volume. So as Jolene pointed out, we see them as a companion to each other. And as the first volume is really organized on traditional categories, historically by traditions, we wanted to do something different. We didn't just want to have another chapter on new religions or Shinto or Christianity in Japan or things like this. So that's why talking to people in the field and also getting help from section editors really helped us to kind of see what people are thinking about and like what the focus is of Japanese religion. But another point I would add to that is also the makeup of the contributors of the volume. So the first non-Zong guide, the authors, or the people who are solicited to contribute, most of them had some connection with the institute in some way. So this is kind of, the new non-Zong guide is a bit of a departure from at least my vision of what the role of our students as well as this book series, the non-Zong library for Asian religion and culture, as opposed to my predecessors, which was kind of focused on what we are doing here at the institute. I kind of envision our role in the field as kind of bringing together different networks of people. So the book kind of reflects that. There are different groups of scholars who work on a very broad category. Many of them know each other, some of them don't, but they often, we reference each other's works. And I kind of see our institute and the research that we publish here is kind of a hub of those different networks in the field. - Yeah, great. Thank you. So before we get into the topics, why don't we start with sort of the question that, I sort of pose at the start of the volume, why Japanese religions? And then the, but if you have mentioned this term, quite a few times, the four of us, the people who are not familiar, yeah, why Japanese religions? Why is that focus of this volume? - So my very strong feeling is that all of us, who study, let's call it religion and religion adjacent things in Japan, and we can question all of those terms, should always be asking whether the adjective, Japanese or the adjective religious applies to what we study. And, you know, looking over the field, we see a lot of publications where the category Japanese religions just sort of exists is taken for granted. These are the religions that exist in this particular place. And I have this lesson I do with some of my students and one of my seminars where I'll show them these color coded maps that have existed since basically like the 16th century. And there are always versions of these color coded maps. And they're originally missionary maps. And then eventually they turn into the maps that are at the first few pages of a world religions textbook. And then there are the maps that are in the beginning of Samuel Huntington's horrible like clash of civilizations book from the 90s. And all of these have exactly the same sort of color coding, which basically means civilization equals religion, equals race equals a place. And since I would prefer to think that imperialism is not great, I think that our academic text should not just like have that sort of baked in and should instead recognize that people and ideas are constantly in flux. And so therefore we should always be treating the phrase Japanese religions as a question. Now, you know, people, there's an obvious sort of question that arises here, which is like, but the book is called the new non-Zongai to Japanese religions. Fair question. I think that there's always this point of needing to draw people in, you know, students will come to my class thinking they're going to learn about some sort of content called Japanese religions. As we point out in the introduction, when I make the mistake of speaking in public and telling people that I'm a scholar of religion, and then I tell them that I work on Japan. The first question that I almost always get is what are the religions of Japan? So we have to meet people where they are, but I do think that turning that question itself into a question, like, well, why do you think that there would be specific religions that are bound to this particular place is really valuable in one of the public services that scholars of religion can do? So starting a book, any book, whether it's a monograph or an edited volume with a question, I think is very valuable. And I wanted, we wanted to start with the most basic question, which is just like, what are we even talking about here? And having turned the phrase Japanese religions into a question, then what are some of the other things that we might also productively question? So just as one example that we didn't already mention, in our field, by which I mean the people with PhDs or people who are earning PhDs or advanced degrees to study something that might be called Japanese religion or Buddhist or Mnchipan or Shinto or whatever, there's a tendency to rely a lot on certain kinds of periodization, the hay on period, the kamikura period. We have these phrases like kamikura go or kamikura Buddhism and that sort of thing, or modern Buddhism. And those categories are so taken for granted that we all organize our thinking around them. And one of the things that Matt and I agreed on very early on was let's break that. Like let's just try to see if we can push the field in a new direction by not assuming that classic periodization scheme. And so that idea of interrogating a lot of these taken for granted categories, as a spirit, as animating this volume. Matt, do you have anything you want to say? Yeah, Julian kind of hit on all of the main points. We're going to be querying the question of Japanese religions versus the theoretical points. There's also kind of a practical aspect to it about audience. Because the first non-Zon guide, I mean, I think, Rachel, you mentioned that you remember reading it as a student, as an overview of the field. And I remember, Julian and I reading it came out when we were MA students. And yeah, that's what it was designed for as an overview of the field. Siting scholars that if you want to study, for example, medieval Buddhism, here are the books that you need to know. And so the target audience was the field, like as it was perceived, especially graduate students or younger scholars. And so by questioning or looking at what is the field in broader terms, we wanted to invite other people who are not trained as Japanese religion specialists to look at the book. So especially, there were kind of two target audiences. One is Japan's specialist who aren't familiar with religion, people who study literature, social sciences, history, things like that. And so maybe this book could touch on some of their interest without them having to go through a whole kind of training of the background of reading about the whole history of Shinto, when perhaps they're just interested in kind of contemporary politics and Shinto-related political groups or something like that. So maybe there's short chapters in here that they might find interesting in trying to peak their curiosity of why religion is-- the study of religion is important, also for their subject matter. Another target audience are scholars every religion who aren't necessarily trained and are familiar with Japan. And that's also why Japanese religions, the question, is because if you're studying, for example, medieval European history, perhaps there's also something you can learn from scholars who are studying Japanese with just history. So for example, like a monastic debate. For example, there's Christian traditions and Jewish traditions. There's long traditions. They also have a long history of debate within their kind of theological traditions. In some places, especially in terms of structure and the social capital of those traditions, often there's overviews. So we were wanting to put people in conversation, perhaps, or use the book as a tool to bring people into conversation on various topics. That span, as Joanne was pointing out, these almost stereotyped religious traditions and places. And so we wanted to break that apart, also in a very practical way. Great. So while we're on this topic of audience, then do you ever envision the book to be used in a classroom setting? And if so, how do you imagine the book being used in that context? Yeah, well, I should say I have used it. least the introduction in my class, just because I wanted students to start off a semester. This is a class I teach regularly called the Religion of Anime. And I want them to be asking questions of the key categories right away. And you know, I mean, to the extent that students read, my students seem to find it, you know, generative in so far as I could contrast it with some other, you know, maybe things that have been published earlier so that then they could see kind of how the field has developed because I think it's really helpful to also invite students into scholarly conversations where they can see that what academics are saying is not just fixed because it exists in print, but it's always a reaction to what has come before and it's sort of anticipating why it might come after. It's still, you know, the book has only been out for less than a year, so we're still, I haven't, I don't know exactly how other people might have been using it. I think some of the chapters are naturally a little bit more accessible than some of the other ones. We wanted all of our authors to write in a very accessible fashion, but of course people have different styles and their subject matter also varies quite a bit. But I think that there are a lot of things here that are really, really valuable and I particularly excuse me, I particularly want to count the section introductions, which are brilliantly written, nice overviews for anybody who wants to get into a general topic and they're comparatively short, they have great bibliographies and so, you know, if you want to know about Japanese religions, the sort of non-built environment and geography, then ICO Roots' introduction on environment space in place is super helpful for just getting a general overview. And I just picked that one because it was the first one that came to mind, but all of them, I would just say, are really, really valuable in the classroom. So yeah, when we first started this project, we were really thinking about how it might be used in the classroom, but as we were discussing it with, like we had this meeting at the AR and then discussing it with the section editors, we kind of decided that we're kind of doing, trying to do too many things at once because if we want to target scholars in other fields, that's kind of one level of, for example, writing or how much detail you include as opposed to targeting to students. So of course, for funding applications, you always say, oh yeah, this is going to be designed to use in the classroom, but we do still hope that people can, and we'll use it in the classroom. I mean, I've done an interesting that Julian said that he uses the introduction to his classroom and I tried to use the introduction of one of my classes and he absolutely hated it. But that was mostly my fault because I didn't, I think it has to be primed in a certain way because the introduction is a reaction to a long discussion in the field. And so I just kind of threw them in the deep ends and they didn't really like it very much. But some of the sections, Sir Taptors, they did like, they could kind of sink their teeth into and it was related to their own interest. So I might use those again. I would say that a lot of the topics that we cover in this book, some of them were suggested by the section editors, some of them were suggested by authors themselves, some of them were suggested by us. And so some of the ones that I really focused on were things that came up in my classes that students wanted to read more about and there just wasn't a kind of concise, short chapter that they could read to prepare for a class in a week or something. So actually I pursued several authors to write pieces on those topics. So I could use them in my classroom because in many ways this book, the idea that came about as from discussions I had in my classes. I teach several classes here at Nonsign, I teach one class for Rigakase for Exchange students in the Center for Japanese Studies and I use this material in that class. So yeah, so I think it can be used in the classroom. Certainly I think it's a book that graduates students can, especially master students if they want to kind of give an overview of a particular topic and what's been written on that and kind of crafty and possible PhD dissertation topic or something like that. So it's a really handy book, which the original Nonsign guy was as well. So that's why I think they go together nicely as a set. So for master students or maybe early stage PhD students, I think this book paired with the original Nonsign guy would be a must read if you're in the field of Japanese religions or very useful if you're in adjacent fields. So yeah, let's dive into some of the topics sections that we have here. Why don't we start with knowledge production? And the chapters in the section are knowledge production, sacred materialities, monastic debate, ritual medicine and academia. The lesson is particularly interesting. But how does understanding these different modes of knowledge production help the study of Japanese religions, understanding that Japanese religions is this complex process and not necessarily just the list of traditions? I'll start and I'll be trying to be very brief here. I think that there is a strong part of our field that we might think of as being a sort of intellectual historical tradition that's often focused historically on the great man and his ideas. And there was, of course, this period up through the 1990s where most of the books that were published in the field were kind of like Shinran and his ideas, Dogen and his ideas. And that's all really valuable work. But we wanted to kind of take that and turn it so that it would reflect not only the social historical turn that happened around the turn of this century, but also some of the other ways that we might imagine intellectual history if we want to use that term. And then the only other thing I'll say, and I'll turn it over to Matt for whatever he has to add, is that we wanted to include here the meta reflection on what it even means to call something Japanese religions. And the academia chapter by Fujibara Satoko, particularly, is really good at sort of situating historically what people have been doing when they're in Japan studying religion or when they're describing something as Japanese religions. Yeah, just to add to that briefly, I think the section themes, we began with some very kind of loose categories and then they kind of solidified around these even looser and broader concepts. But I think it turned out pretty well because it highlights the kind of this premise we have in the introduction that religion, whatever religion is, can be defined a million different ways. But it is something that is constructed and we as scholars participate in that construction. And this book is a part of that construction. Or maybe reconstruction if we're kind of playing with the category a little bit. So yes, so these topics like knowledge production, cosmology and time, like these are kind of chapters that look at kind of details about how the thing that we call religion is, it's not as there underground like somebody dug it up and found it. It's something that gets constructed at a certain time in a certain place and it has a certain meaning in that context. And so it was a very useful way to organize the book that fits with our premise of what is religion. And some of the authors really jumped into that and then some others were a little bit hesitant, but we kind of push them to kind of challenge their boundaries of the way they usually represent religion. And they turned out pretty well. Also because they're general enough that they include, they can include lots of different topics. And then going also going back to your previous question about how this might be used to teach. So you can pluck one of these sections. If you're teaching a course on, for example, like, well, feelings and belongings. So maybe like emotional aspects of, it can be in like a social sciences course or kind of affect a theory. You can, you know, this whole section, you can just take these chapters and kind of use it as a section and a course or something and it would be very useful. So we also had that in mind, kind of a practical organization of like, how not maybe the whole book, but you could use a section for teaching or for your own studies. So. Yeah. And I mean, in one way, teaching perhaps is also a form of knowledge production. Right, maybe in the, in the next that they're installing the DNA and saga, we'll see that sort of included. But yeah, thank you so much. Do you have things to add for sort of cosmology in time, which is going to be sort of the next top section or we can sort of move on to space if you feel like that's sort of more. Well, I don't want to like, you know, take. But yeah, we can begin with why this effect is cosmology time here. I'm just going to be a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a negative. Yeah, well, I mean, I think, you know, we don't need to go section by section, but I mean, the cosmology and time was really more of the kind of historical section. I mean, it kind of reflects, I think, the, the interest of Takashi Miyoto, who is the section editor, and he kind of organized the section based around various kind of historical themes. The book itself is an organized in terms of history, but each of these chapters kind of deal with specific moments in history and then how things that we call religion were [BLANK_AUDIO] were constructed at the time. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know if we need to go through and discuss each section, anyway, I was referring to kind of the concept of the sections as a whole, but I mean, but if you have any particular, you know, specific questions about any of the sections, we can try to answer those questions. All right. Well, in that case, we can kind of move on to space and environment. And again, not to say that cosmology isn't significant, but I do feel like especially with the monographs in Japanese religions, sort of this very large category that we've been talking about, that the five-seed records are so, the spatial approaches I do feel like is quite common. And perhaps again, that sort of reflects the sort of legacy of the first non-slawn guide in sort of shaping how we think what Japanese religions are. But what are, I guess, some of the unexplored areas of spatial approaches to Japanese religions, they feel like neat, that serve more attention. Do you feel like some of the chapters here cover that? And if you feel like they're still new areas to explore, maybe you can kind of explore those about this. Yeah. So, I really, I think this, we've had spatial approaches to Japanese religion have been well developed for some time. The recently deceased Alan Grapard was a leader in this area, but then we've also had a slew of, you know, monographs by people like Max Mormon and Heather Blair, Barbara Ambrose, who have all kind of focused on ritual pilgrimage sites and so forth. So, in that regard, I think a place-based approach to Japanese religion is not necessarily new. But I happen to be married to a geographer. And so, I am constantly thinking along with her about what, how geographers think about their key categories of space, place, and scale. And one of the things that I think is different from the sort of localized, let's study a particular pilgrimage site thing that's happening in this section is really bringing the category of scale into, into the analysis of "Japanese religions." And the section introduction does this already. Some of the other sections do this by virtue of the scope that they're adopting. So, it could be a mountain or mountains as sites. We've had a lot of studies like that. Or it could be migration and thinking about how people who are ethnically Japanese may not necessarily exist in the Japanese archipelago. Those are all scalar questions. And I don't think our field has been very good until quite recently at addressing issues of scale. And I find that to be particularly exciting and is certainly animating my own monographs. So, let me just give two examples. Caleb Carter, in his recent monograph, not his chapter in this book, although they're related, made a scalar argument where he said, "A lot of people think of Shugendo as a Japanese tradition, but let me actually tell you that this is a localized tradition that's based in these particular mountains in these particular places." That's awesome. Such a good contribution to the field in highlighting that something that has traditionally been understood as sort of a Japanese folk religion or a Japanese native religion should actually be understood at the level of a different scale. I think that's such a valuable contribution. Then moving to the other side of things, both Ika Roots' introduction and Emily Anderson's chapter are looking at the ways that we might think of Japanese religions as they cross oceans. Sujim Kim's chapter as well, on the sea. We have all of these different ways that ritual practices, deities, humans, objects, traverse water, large bodies of water, and then end up creating whole new versions of Japanese religion, either through empire or through migration or whatever. I think that this is really a growth area in the field, and it's tied into that sort of non-essentialist vision of studying "Japanese religions" that we put forward in the introduction, trying to break apart the adjective "Japanese" and really think about both the promises and the limits of that adjective. Do you have anything to add matter? I know, I think Jolian really covered it all. I mean, also this section really kind of brings to the fore a question of why Japanese religions and challenging what is. This section really challenges like what is the Japanese part of what is Japanese religions, because the focus is on space, but it's also space that was all I have to think of as Japan, the sea, also the periphery colonized areas of Japan, so you really wanted to challenge people's notions of what constitutes Japan as we think about it today. For sure, because I think it might seem obvious for a lot of us, but again, Japan is not a monolith, it's a lot of different things happening at a lot of different sort of areas. Great, so let's move on to the next section, "Feeling and Belonging." I personally think this is a particular theme that do deserve more attention in religious studies. The chapters here are sort of "Feeling and Belonging" and "Controternities" on Reletics, Spiritual Care and of Life Care. These are great chapters, especially because they look at topics beyond what I do feel like earlier studies in this theme would be looking at, say, female communities or new religions or spiritual practitioners, and these have often been uncritically discussed. But how do we not only mention sort of "Feeling and Belonging" in that research, but also use it as a method or a way to approach research? Oh, man. So this is such a tricky thing for me because I find the research on affect and religion immensely fascinating and also sometimes a little bit frustrating for the methodological reasons that you mentioned. So just for context, in my Department of Religious Studies, our sort of resident theorist is Donovan Schaeffer, who's one of the leading sort of experts on affect theory and religion, and I highly recommend his work. I've learned so much from him. And I think one of the things that Donovan has been consistent in arguing in his published work has been that people feel their way through the world. And if we want to understand something about religion, we should make sure that we don't just ignore feeling as being immaterial or unnecessary. And of course, the relationship between feeling and emotion and affect, different people parse that in different ways. Sometimes people will put a little bit more of an emphasis on bodily responses. But I think I kind of like just sticking with feeling that could be a bodily response, like discuss your stomach turns at something or it could be something that we would think of more as a feeling rather than an affect like elation. Regularly, the people who have commonly been described as religious will describe things in terms of feelings or in terms of experience. And there we get into the methodological problem. This goes back to William James, if not before. Like, how do you actually access experience? And Bob Scharf at Berkeley has a great take-down of this from the 90s. It's really difficult to access experience. But nevertheless, people who are engaging with deities or non-obvious entities will often describe something. They will take a feeling and then they transmute that into discourse. And that's what we have. We have their bodily responses. We can observe bodies in a room reacting to things. And then we also have their verbal statements. And those are things that scholars of religion can't assess, access and assess. And so I think that coming up with new ways of describing those kinds of things is one of the most exciting sort of frontiers, if I'm allowed to use that word in our field. And then just like one last thing is that eliciting feeling is also a huge part of what we think of as religious practice. Brian Lowe's chapter on homolytics is about how does an expert preacher elicit feeling in an audience, right? And then we've got other people who are talking about how do people imagine themselves as communities. And I think all of that stuff is both in line with where religious studies has come from, but it also marks a sort of new direction for analysis. Yes. So this is chapters from this section I've used in my class and students respond to it very well because it really, it gives them a way to approach the question of why are people religious from a different perspective? Because usually I usually start by questioning the problem of belief, because religions often associate with some belief. You have some type of rational association or you have some idea, there's gods or there's ghosts or there's demons or there's gooties or whatever. But if you kind of step out from a broader perspective, you say, well, why are people religious? It's like, well, because they have a feeling towards some type of community building. You know, it may not be a logical idea because, you know, I think this is not probably just. not just my students here in Japan, but I think a typical response to over like, "Oh, that's all kind of like, but why do people believe in God or Kami or Buddha? This is all kind of like superstition." But if you get that you convince them to step back and look like, "Well, what are people doing in their communities, right? Not just profess belief of some organization?" And then people can relate that to their own lives. Like, "Oh, yeah, people go to church on certain holidays or people go to the synagogue or participate in certain religious events, Motsuri or festivals, because it's has this kind of a motive effect that makes a person a part of a community and you identify with that community and students are like, "Okay, I kind of get that. You can kind of contest to back and look at the sociological question of like, why are people religious?" And so I find that this approach really works towards addressing that question. And so I found it, you know, very effective for using it in the classroom. I don't know how scholars social scientists would would maybe deal with this. It's not my area, but I found it also a very no pleasant section to read. So, all right. So I think I guess this sort of connects nicely to the next section topic that I'd like to discuss, "Fieldwork." And this is a topic that I've of course, I'm interested in being an ethnographer myself. On the chapters here, "Prospective Sunfieldwork, Otter Islands, Earlfield Work, Religious Industries, Digital Photography, Disabilities Under and Trust." Now, a keyword that Chika Watanabe employs in her starting essay is patchwork and biography. And this is the concept that I have also employed instead of my own work. But perhaps you can share some of your experience in conducting fieldwork, some of the challenges and difficulties that you've experienced, especially with sort of Matt now being based at sort of non-Zen here in Japan. How does that, I guess, change your relationship with the field, with couldn't go to Japan, especially now that the issue of distancing, if we want to call it that, might become a bit more complicated. But yeah. Well, first, I'll just come in on this section. We didn't originally have a section on "Fieldwork Planned." This is a section that we, I think we had talked to Chika, and then we had kind of this idea of a section, which is one of being the last section on resources. And then the question of, well, what about "Fieldwork came up?" And instead of one, asking Chika to write some one large chapter on "Fieldwork," we actually, this is a section where we kind of thought about the topics based on the individuals who are doing the fieldwork and then asked them to write short pieces. And it turned out very well. I mean, the concept of "Fieldwork," you know, because I'm a pre-modernist. So we don't think about what we do as "Fieldwork," I mean, it is because, you know, if you go to conferences, you meet scholars, you train with people, you go, you get resources. And so, of course, being based in Japan where those resources are, is a benefit, even though more and more, a lot of the resources are accessible online. So you don't, you know, you don't need to go and you know, to some archive and take a gift. And then a handwritten letter from some famous scholar to ask that you can get in to see the books because you can download them online. So that kind of changes, at least for us, as pre-modernists, a lot of the way that we do "Fieldwork," it's not as essential. Yeah. And so, you know, this section, I think, was a nice addition to the book. It made me think, as a pre-modernist, think about how people conduct research on contemporary Japan or on topics related to "Consurate Japan," and what those methodological, methodological obstacles might be. And so it gave me as an editor for a journal that also publishes work that includes ethnography, really gave me some insight into how, you know, other scholars do the "Do the Research," so I found it to be very valuable. Yeah. And I just want to add, I mean, I found the process of reading, first, what our authors came to us with as things they wanted to talk about. When it came to "Fieldwork," it was really, really fascinating. You know, Tim Smith's chapter on "Trust," really, like, as one example, just kind of drilled down to such a basic aspect of "Fieldwork," you have to establish and maintain trust with the people with whom you're speaking. And I think that that was a natural outcome of this earlier generation of "Fieldwork" in, you know, sort of, I'm thinking of people like Mark Rowe and Levy McLaughlin, who have spent decades really getting deep access with Buddhist communities. And, you know, as Levy says in the introduction to his book, "Unso Kakaakai," you know, these are not his informants. They're his friends. And I think Tim's chapter shows the outcome of somebody who sort of came with academic age reading a book like that. It's like, "Right, these are my friends." And they also give me valuable information from my academic research. That's so different from the old school kind of very extractive mode of ethnographic research. And I think that that's really valuable. The other thing that I want to highlight, I'll maybe make reference to two different chapters here, is the questions of access. You know, like, Matt raised a certain kind of, raised the issue of a certain kind of access. Like, you need to have the fancy scholar with a big name who writes you a handwritten letter so you can get into an archive. That's one thing. But the other thing is like, what are the circumstances of the researchers' embodiment? Or their, you know, their familial situation. One of the great things that Chika Watanabe and her colleagues did with their original Patrick ethnography article was to highlight that a researcher today, working today, probably has child care or elder care to work around. And then if we think about a couple of the chapters in this section, you know, my former PhD student who is unfortunately now deceased, Mark Buchmann, used a powered wheelchair. And so for him, studying Japanese religion looked a certain way because he couldn't enter Buddhist temples, right? And then, you know, to mention the chapter by Danem Rsalis, they had a really fascinating take on the issue of gender where some communities that the researcher might be engaging may have very specific binary sort of expectations of gendered performance. And the researcher may need to sort of adjust to those sorts of expectations. And that provides, again, a new opportunity for a meta reflection on what it is that we're even doing. So I really think, I mean, of all of the sections, you know, in some ways, the questions that people are asking about method in this section are the sort of future of the field in many respects, not only because many of our contributors are relatively junior scholars, but also because they're asking like, sort of almost deeply disturbing questions about how we even do what we do. And so, I think that that's very valuable. Yeah, now that's that's great. Thank you. So I guess it's sort of like a concluding reflection for sort of a discussion today. Let's say, we're going to do someone who's not familiar with pretty much everything we've been talking about so far, but who's sort of interested in the book in Japan or in sort of religious traditions. What's the one thing that you kind of want that person to obtain from, say, reading this volume? If there is sort of one thing, I mean, I'm sure there's a lot, but if you can kind of just, you know, okay, I guess I'll take the first to have a question. That's a big question. Well, I mean, I would like one thing I would like people to take away from the book, you know, if they're not going to the book for content, is that the study of Japanese religions, how are we defining? We define it very broadly in the book. Is a beneficial window into understanding based on the human condition and aspects of the human condition that we call religion, right? I mean, in Japan, it's often cited as a kind of extreme case because it's on this kind of periphery, right? It's not at the center of the world. And, you know, in the post-war period, I mean, a lot of us benefited from, you know, a lot of funding that went into the study of Japan. That was not as now, of course, extinct. But for a long time, a lot of funding was going into Japan, our kind of previous generations. The study of Japan was so built up, was because after the war two, for a very short period in time, the American government realized like, oh, people should study things. And so Japan, the study of Japan benefited from that, right? So there's lots of scholarship on religion in Japan. But it seems to be very, what's the word of the book? Very kind of, maybe, Nibogazis, not the word of the book, but it's like, it's very interfocused on Japan because that's what the incentive was. But we live in a different world today, than, you know, the 1960s or 1970s, where even though Japan sometimes politically likes to see itself as distinct and geographically, it looks like it's kind of far away, it isn't. It's interconnected to the world and also to other religious traditions. So, so this, you know, looking at different aspects of what we call Japanese religion also tells us about the world and ourselves as as human. So, so that's what I would like people to take away from the book. Yeah, and to add to that, I mean, I think the anti-essentialist spirit that animates this book, it should be very, very clear for from everything that we've said so far today. I would also add that, you know, because I've been doing a lot more research on religions in the, in North America, specifically the United States, I've been talking with a lot of scholars of American religions. And one thing that's come up in those conversations is, you know, a scholar saying like, oh, yeah, we, we really need to know more about Japan. And so who the we is there is already interesting. And then why, like what the motive is for knowing more about Japan, I also sort of have questions, but I think that it is telling that the Japanese case reveals something that scholars of American religions into it and, and maybe sense about the practices of religion in the United States, but can't quite articulate. And so when they get a chance to read books that they find accessible, and this goes back to Matt's earlier comment about like we've, we've written a lot of books that are very naval casey and you, there's a high bar, there's sort of like a high activation energy to enter into the field. But if we lower that threshold, then our colleagues who are studying religion and other places or studying other societies tend to find it really, really stimulating. So let me just name a few examples. You know, Jason Josephson, that storms book, the invention of religion in Japan, got a lot of attention when it came out in 2012 for good reason, because he offered like not only a compelling historical account about the emergence of this category, but also interesting and sort of portable theoretical concepts that people could apply. They're based in the Japanese historical case, but he was saying like, look, you can apply these categories to other areas. I'm thinking about like his categories of hierarchical inclusion and exclusive similarity. For example, those travel well. You know, a, another thing that is, is quite striking is that some books in our field have gotten recognition by the American Academy of Religion. Adam Lyons' book on, on prison religion, Mark Mullins book, titled, "Jascoonie Fundamentalism," which came out from the, the Nonsan Library, I, you know, my own book got, I got some recognition as well. All of these things, I think they've gotten recognition because not, they're not just for Japanese scholars of Japan. They're not just for experts who happen to focus on Japan and who are reading those sources. They were written in such a way where other people are like, oh, now I understand prison religion differently. Or, oh, now I understand religion and politics differently because the Japanese case gives me a new perspective on something that I thought I already understood. That's really, really valuable and that's the kind of thing that we were wanting to sort of facilitate with this book. And, and to make sure that there would be an affordance for somebody who doesn't know anything about Japan to sort of dip their toes into the water and, and be able to say, okay, like, maybe I don't know everything and maybe I can't access the primary sources, but this at least helped me get a little bit closer to knowing what's going on. That's great. Thank you. And instead of just continuing off what, Julian's just talking about, I would also recommend just sort of, a sort of article, "Coron by Julian also himself on why scholars of religion must study the corporate form," which is, again, another phenomenal resource on, on why this adjective of Japan is more than just the geographical subarcopal of Japan. But yeah, great. I think that's, that's all we have time for for today. If you have even the slightest of interest in Japan and religion or Scotland for the police to check out the non-Sunday guide, before we leave, can you to share what projects you're currently working on? If you have anything to add or if, you know, not then I guess we can just say goodbye. Yeah, let me go. I think Julian mentioned some of his current projects at the beginning. So as I mentioned, so I'm the editor of the Japanese Dervilist Studies, so I'm always having projects going. We have an issue that should be coming out tomorrow, if I can finish it in time. And also here we have a special issue that has less of great articles in a nuclear one by Julian. For the non-Zone library series, our next book in the series is also an edited volume, which will be on the topic of a gender and religion in Japan. Our current title is "Practicing Religion and Gender in Japan." It's edited by Kawashi Noriko and Kobachi Noko. Almost all of the chapters are written by Japanese scholars of various topics related to gender. I'm hoping to have that published next year. I'm also editing a translation of one of Jury's commentaries on the Lotus Sutra by Paul Swanson, my predecessor. So I'm doing lots of editing projects in my own research. I'm hoping to find the right, the damn book based from the dissertation. I'm solely working on that. The other statistician is about the kind of establishment or creation of esoteric butnesoteric Buddhist tradition in Japan, which I define as a scholastic tradition in time. I'm working on that. I also have another small book project that's based on a translation that I'm hoping to publish. What else? We also launched a new book series on the non-zon library for Japanese philosophy, which we recently published a series of translations about a work by Michiro Kitaro. We'll have other forthcoming books in that series, including translations, but also an edited volume. I'm also hoping to put together an edited volume of translations and essays about the early hey on period Buddhist scholastic name on NIN. I've been organizing some conferences related to that topic, and so I'm hoping to see a book come to fruition in the next couple years on that. I have a few projects I'm working on. I just want to chime in here and say that Matt is an extremely hardworking person in our field. If listeners couldn't get a sense from this, and he's doing so much behind the scenes work, sustaining the field with one of the flagship journal, the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, plus all of these other editing things. We all owe him a really great debt. I just want to go on record here saying that it's been a real pleasure co-editing this volume with him. When I say co-editing, Matt edited it, and I helped out from time to time. Credit where credit is due, he put in the lion's share of the work on this project, and that must be stated. Thanks. It was a fun book project. I have to quote Rocky Baboa in the first Rocky movie. There will be no rematch on this volume, so we'll see if that happens. It was fun, but once there's enough. If there's anybody out there listening, they're thinking maybe 10 years down the line, they want to publish another volume. I'll please start. It takes that long to put together an ended volume, so she's start thinking about it now. So thank you. This was a lot of fun. Thanks again. Yeah, great. Awesome. Thank you for listening and happy holidays. [Music]