Event

Please join us in welcoming Prof. Jolyon Thomas to Philly and Penn!
He is an Assistant Professor of the East Asian Languages and Civilizations and is teaching courses on Japanese religion, pop culture, and history. His research covers the politics of religious freedom; religion and material and visual culture; and relationships between religion, sex, and gender. Prof. Thomas' primary research interests lie in the field of modern Japanese religions, with additional interests in the visual and material culture of religion, the politics of religious freedom, and the history of human rights. He is currently at work on a book manuscript about competing understandings of religious freedom in Japan and in U.S.-Japan relations during the first half of the twentieth century. The first half of the book examines how different interest groups advanced very different understandings of religious freedom during the time that Japan’s first modern constitution was in effect (1890–1947). The second half focuses on the shorter period of the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–1952), when the U.S.-led occupiers aimed to reconfigure Japanese religious and political life by eradicating “State Shintō” and inculcating a “desire for religious freedom” in Japan’s citizenry. He has also published extensively on religion and media in contemporary Japan, with a particular focus on religious aspects of the culture surrounding manga (illustrated serial novels) and anime (animated films). His 2012 book on the subject, Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan, is available from University of Hawai‘i Press.

ABSTRACT: The idea that Japanese Buddhism is in a state of inevitable decline is widely accepted by scholars, clerics, and journalists as both demographic fact and doctrinal truth. However, this analysis fails to capture the complicated dynamic between the narrative of decline and the reality of Buddhist survival. Using animated music videos, plastic figurines, and illustrated merchandise created in collaboration between the for-profit company Hachifuku and the small Tokyo temple Ryōhōji as examples, this lecture shows that the very things that are taken as evidence of Buddhist decline—crass materialism, raging lust, and declining formal membership—are actually the things that allow Buddhism to survive and thrive in contemporary Japan. The talk concludes with a critical analysis of the political economy of the decline narrative, showing that religious studies scholarship, mainstream journalism, and Japanese ecclesial institutions all materially benefit from a story that is not factually true.