“Religion” and “Politics”: A Japanese Case

Timothy Fitzgerald’s The Ideology of Religious Studies should not be  read as something just about “religion,” but about the modern Euro-  American “secularity,” which functions to mystify the colonial matrix  of power of Euro-American modernity. Fitzgerald’s later work focuses  on two mutually parasitic categories of “religion” and “politics.” As a  case study of the Fitzgeraldian perspective, this article examines the  construction of the religion-politics distinction in Japan since the  late nineteenth century. In the latter half of the nineteenth century  the aggression of Euro-American colonial power motivated Japan’s  elites to institutionalize the nation based upon the Euro-American  concepts of “politics” and “religion.” After Japan’s defeat in the Second  World War in 1945, the US-led Allied Occupation redefined prewar  Japanese state orthodoxy and institutions as “religion,” in order  to eliminate them from the post-war Japanese statecraft.