The Oppressor’s Dilemma: How Japanese State Policy toward Religion Paved the Way for Christian Weddings

For the last thirty-five years, the majority of Japanese wedding ceremonies have involved Christianity, but scholars have struggled with Christianity’s increasingly prominent place within the Japanese religious landscape. The tendency has been to refute the religiosity of Christian weddings and embrace the rhetoric of Japanese essentialism. However, following its prohibition in 1612, the ongoing “eradication” of Christianity defined the very nature of Japanese subjecthood, made Christianity indispensable to the Japanese state, and entrenched ritualized acts of disassociation from the religion within the lives of every individual. Modern arguments, too, continue to assert Christianity’s foreignness, portraying it as the religion of colonialism or contending that “foreign” conceptions of religion are inappropriate within the Japanese context. However, the popularity of Christian wedding ceremonies within the context of postwar Japan owes much to prewar and wartime Japanese state policy where the Japanese government adopted policies toward religion that helped set the stage for the later acceptance of the Christian marriage rite.