Editors’ introduction

This special issue of Religion, State & Society is distinctive for our journal both for its topical novelty and for its elaboration of themes long important to our readership. This is our first special issue focusing on Japan – a country with an immensely rich religious landscape, both historically and contemporarily, with complex intersections between religion and the country’s social fabric and political structures. In exploring religion in Japanese contexts, it engages with the broader themes of minority religions and their relationship with wider society and the state. These minority-related themes have always been central to our journal, as is evident in the sample of articles celebrating our fiftieth volume and in recent special issues on the European Court of Human Rights and Minority Religions (45/3– 4), Conflict, Politics, and the Christian East (48/5), and The Governance of Religious Diversity: Global Comparative Perspectives (50/4), among others. These publications have provided a wealth of data and theoretical ideas for understanding the situation of different types of religious minorities, from ethno-religious groups to new religions, and in relation to different forms of governance, political regimes, and legal institutions. In this collection, our guest editors Erica Baffelli, Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester, and Norihito Takahashi, Professor at the Department of Global Diversity Studies, Toyo University, Japan, and other contributors, take an incisive look at a variety of groups and further elaborate the very concept of minority religion. The five case studies they present show that far from being fixed, minority status is fluid and varies across historical and social contexts, with majority traditions potentially becoming marginalised minorities and minority subgroups emerging within minorities, based on gender, geographical location, ethnicity, or variations in practices. This status tends to be a matter of contention, as ways in which it is constructed by various stakeholders – from religious minorities themselves through academics to the state – have far-reaching implications, ranging from empowerment to exclusion, for those associated with various religious groups and movements. Given the pervasiveness and variety of religious minorities as well as the increasing complexity of the politics around them in our fast-changing globalised world, the findings and insights presented in this issue will be of great interest for readers well beyond Japan.