ABE FELLOWSHIP COLLOQUIUM
Difficult Subjects: Religious Freedom, the Allied Occupation, and Postwar Education
Summary
| Speaker | Jolyon Baraka Thomas, PhD Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania/Abe Fellow （2017） |
|---|---|
| Moderator | Kate Wildman Nakai, PhD Professor, Sophia University |
| When | Thursday, April 18, 2019, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. |
| Where | International House of Japan 404 Seminar Room 5-11-16 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo Access |
| Outline | Americans stationed in occupied Japan at the close of World War II claimed to be bringing religious freedom to a country where it did not exist. They described Japan’s 1889 constitutional guarantee of religious freedom as a fake, and they claimed to implant “real religious freedom” in its stead. But in making such claims, the occupiers overlooked inconvenient historical facts. Japanese people had been debating the meaning of religious freedom for decades before the Occupation began, and military government records clearly show that the American occupiers were not nearly as certain about how to protect religious freedom as their triumphalist rhetoric suggested. The concepts and governing practices the occupiers developed in collaboration with influential Japanese scholars in the late 1940s still dictate how academics, journalists, and policymakers working today imagine who deserves religious freedom, what kinds of political practices infringe on religious liberty, and who bears responsibility for protecting religious freedom. Focusing on postwar debates about morality education, changes to the Fundamental Law on Education, and constitutional revision, Thomas argues that disagreements about how religion should be defined are central to understanding Japanese political life today. |
| Language | Presentation in English with Japanese questions accepted. |
| Admission | Admission free. Booking required. To sign up, please email: abetokyo＠ssrc.org, Fax: +81-(0)3-5369-6142 or phone +81-(0)3-5369-6085 (When sending an email, please enter a half-width character “@” instead of a full-width character “＠”.) ※Personal information provided in this form will be used for arrangements for the event and evaluation of the event, as well as providing information for future events. |
Speaker Profile
Dr. Jolyon Baraka Thomas: Assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a PhD from Princeton University, an MA from the University of Hawaii, and a BA from Grinnell College. Current projects investigate who gets to define religious freedom and with what political effects, how conceptions of “religion” and “the secular” appear in debates about public school education in postwar Japan and the United States, and what sort of relationships exist between religion, capitalism, and sexuality. His first book, Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan, is available from University of Hawaii Press. His second book, Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan, was published by University of Chicago Press in March 2019. He is now working on a third book, tentatively titled The Problematic Subject of Religious Education: Debates over Morality, Patriotism, and Security in Postwar Japan and the United States.
Contact
Abe Fellowship Program
Social Science Research Council Tokyo Office
C/O The Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership
4-16-3 Yotsuya, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160-0004, Japan
Tel: +81-(0)3-5369-6085
Fax: +81-(0)3-5369-6042
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