ガイタニディス ヤニス

Contrary to other European countries, where Buddhism has been studied since at least the 19th century, this paper shows that there are no known direct channels of transmission of Japanese Buddhism between Japan and Greece. Connections have, however, been made through other European countries, where, for example, Italy continues to play a major role. Moreover, these transmissions have taken a very long time to spread beyond the immediate circle of one or two key figures, because such traditions have been met with suspicion by the larger population, which remains influenced by a Christian Orthodox outlook. The establishment of Zen meditation centers in today’s urban centers, however, shows that the legal and official protections from which the Greek Church continues to benefit are not a reflection of devout sentiment among the population. This paper illustrates that under Greece’s conservative Orthodox climate, Japanese Buddhism has become simultaneously “Japanese culture” <italic>and</italic> a philosophy open to “all religions.”

As with the relationships between shūkyō and “religion” and supirichuariti and “spirituality,” the Japanese term okaruto is embedded in a global network of practice and discourse around “occultism,” but is also informed by the politics of local practitioners and the media, and by scholarly narratives that try to make sense of them. In this introduction, we present: 1) an overview of the varied relationships between Japanese religions and “the global occult,” 2) an analysis of the Japanese-language scholarship on occult phenomena from sociological, cultural studies, and intellectual historical perspectives, and 3) a brief chronology of modern Japanese occultism. We conclude with some theoretical considerations about how to conceive of the Japanese occult vis-à-vis a transnational community of practice, including the roles of media, translation, and affect.

In the last decades, supirichuariti, the katakana word that refers to the concept of “spirituality,” which is generally understood as a post-1970s phenomenon in Japan, has been used to argue for the return of religiosity in domains outside “traditional religions.” The first decade of the twenty-first century even saw what was termed a “spiritual boom” which was mostly fuelled by an increased visibility on television and popular magazines of alternative therapies and self-development theories, resembling the spiritual-but-not-religious (SBNR) interests in other parts of the world, but basing themselves on an explicit boundary work with established religious practice. The spiritual, however, has, like the so-called “cults” since the Aum affair, been the target of attacks by media and scholarly discourse for its allegedly “dangerous” religiosity and fraudulent money transactions. The religion vs spirituality debate seems therefore to hide another debate, good spirituality vs bad spirituality, where taboo-discourse in relation to religion thrives. This paper introduces a recent phenomenon that adds yet another layer of attacks on spirituality in Japan. In the last 5 years, criticism against supirichuariti (sometimes termed datsu-supi, “ditching spirituality”) seems to have risen from among the ranks of the spiritual’s most fervent followers, to attack an ideology that has become “too self-centred” as its critics argue. This type of rhetoric seems, at first glance, to reiterate the anti-cult, pseudo-nostalgic narrative that considers money transactions to be “taboo” in the case of “proper religion.” Yet, I argue, that the taboo-ization of spirituality as object of business transactions by those whom I call “spiritual apostates”, reveals a more subtle critique, which is centred on capitalism rather than on religion. Spiritual apostasy, contrary to the anti-cult rhetoric, is, first and foremost, about what “good” capitalism is; not what “good” spirituality is.

© Nanzan University Anthropological Institute. The sudden disappearance from the market in 2016 of the type of polaroid film that happens to be used by cameras that are specially built to capture the halo of energy (or “aura”) believed to be surrounding human beings has made those cameras obsolete. As a result, Japanese aura camera owners who make a living from counseling clients based on a “reading” of aura photos express worry in regard to their loss of authority over the process of production of these photographs. At the same time, a historical analysis of aura photos as a sub-type of spirit photography shows that the popularization of specially built aura cameras had already led to the standardization of the “reading” of aura photos that is more prominent today in digital smartphone versions of the original aura cameras. Technological and religious authorities intermingle in this case-study and influence each other, showing an example of (partial) desacralization of religious media, at the expense of religious experts endowed with the ability to use them.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014. Studies of Japanese shamanism are on the decline while neo-shamanistic practitioners thrive in Japan's large cities. Based on this observation, the authors of this paper put forward two arguments. First, we claim that a rhetorical approach to the development of scholarly interest in Japanese shamanism reveals the existence of a rigid definitional framework that either ignores or undervalues new types of shamanistic practitioners. Nevertheless, certain theories stemming out of ethnographic work by Japanese researchers, such as the classifications of shamanistic initiations, could be adapted to the analysis of today's Japanese neo-shamanism. We demonstrate our first argument by dividing a sample of "spiritual therapists" according to the most commonly used Japanese scholarly typology of "hereditary" (seshu¯gata), "calling" (sho¯meigata), and "quest (training)" (tankyu¯ [shugyo¯] gata) types of shamanistic initiations, and by comparing their experiences with those of 'traditional' shamans. Our second argument concerns the basis for such comparison. In this respect, we join recent debates that put classic explanatory models of New Age individualized eclectism in doubt, and argue that, like 'traditional' shamans, contemporary Japanese spiritual therapists choose their profession and legitimize their role in constant interaction with, and often under the pressure of their environment. We conclude that, despite differences in content, forms of older and newer practices of shamanism resemble to such a degree that a revival of the academic field of Japanese shamanism may be in order.

As the media-driven "spiritual boom" that hit Japan in the last decade starts to fade away, the therapies that this phenomenon popularized among fans of everything termed "spiritual" continue to be carried out in small circles of practitioners and their most fervent clients. This article places these "spiritual therapies" within the long history of healing rites in Japan by showing that their current appeal can be explained by two factors. First, these therapies are conspicuously similar to techniques used by New Religious Movements in Japan. Secondly, the cultural criticism promoted by these therapies remains characteristic of modern occult theories and practices and has only been readapted today to suit the peculiar symbolic vacuum of post-Aum Japanese society. Finally, the author focuses on the self-cultivation element that remains central in Japanese healing methods, and argues that spiritual therapies seem to have simplified self-cultivation to such an extent that they reinforce a generalized discourse about ethnicity and about whose way of life (Japanese or American) is best suited to a Japanese clientèle. © 2012 Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture.

The current 'spiritual boom' represented by the phenomenal popularity of spiritual counsellor and television personality Ehara Hiroyuki provides evidence that the 1980s media-based religious boom in Japan did not come to an end in the aftermath of the terrorist act perpetrated by the new religious group Aum Shinrikyō. Today, however, the media focus seems increasingly to be falling on various therapies that have become objects of business transactions, which one Japanese researcher has vaguely referred to as the 'spiritual business'. The author of this paper, by examining the activities described as 'spiritual business' through an empirical study of practitioners active at the forefront of this phenomenon, narrows down the use of the term 'spiritual business' to the Ehara-inspired, independent professional spiritual therapists, and links their increasing number to two sociological factors: the sluggish Japanese economy and the commercialization of therapy as sacred. © 2011 BAJS.

不景気が社会に全体的に影響を与えているということは周知の事実である。2009年7月から有効求人倍率が3ヶ月連続、史上最低の0.42になり、30歳以下のニートが64万人に増えたり、今年の自殺者数が22,362人にすでに達したりする実例を見ると日本にもグローバル的な危機が到着したということが分かる。その中で、最近研究者の間で興味を持たれているサービス業界の一部分、スピリチュアル・ビジネスという現象にも不景気の影響が表れている。「スピリチュアル・ブームは終わった」と発言するセラピストがいる一方で、「不況でお客さんが殺到した」と言い出すヒーラーの方が多いようである。しかし、日本の社会経済的状況が今さらスピリチュアル・ビジネスの行方とかかわるわけではない。ここで紹介する65人のスピリチュアル・セラピストのケースを分析しながら、著者はスピリチュアル・サービスという業界の発展が1980年以降の日本の経済と密接な関係を持っていると論じる。スピリチュアル・セラピストの生まれた年、セラピストになろうと考え始めた年とサロンを開いた年をグラフに表してみるとセラピストが三世代に分類されること、セラピストへの道を歩み始めたのが90年代後半であること、サロンの半分以上が2005年以降に開店されたことが分かる。その結果をセラピストの話に照らし合わせた結果、著者は次の結論に到達した。ジョルジュ・バタイユの「普遍経済学」という理論を用いるなら、日本の1980年代の裕福な社会の剰余生産のおかげで、スピリチュアル・セラピストの初代になる人々が存在の意味を探るにあたり、西洋で人気だったニューエイジ概念と道具を追うことができ、使用し始めたということがいえる。その道具を日本に輸入した初代のセラピストがスピリチュアルの「場」(「場」はメアリー・C・ブリントンの概念である)の基礎を築いたともいえる。バブル崩壊の影響で「場」をなくし、そして二代目セラピストになる複数の日本人がそのスピリチュアル・「場」で社会化できたうえ、仕事を見つけることができたと著者は論じる。最後に三代目のセラピストは、そのスピリチュアル・「場」の存在を前提として前世代より速く、スピリチュアル・ビジネスをキャリアとして選び始めている世代なのである。