The Irony of Japan’s “Practical Religion”:

Otorii (Grand Gate) at Itsukushima, World Heritage Site

I was 15 when the American Field Service announced at my high school that it was taking applications for summer visits abroad by students. “Select a continent, not a specific country,” the AFS bulletin said.

Being an adventurous kid and knowing that my classmates would all choose the usual standbys of Europe or South America, I selected Africa.

“Nice try,” AFS said, in so many words. “There are no African host countries. But, since you don’t want Europe or South America, how about an Asian country?”

That was how I had my first encounter with Japan. I spent two months of my 15^th summer with a very kind Japanese family in Nagoya. I spoke no Japanese and they spoke no English, but we managed to smile and pantomime our way through my stay.

When I came home, that was the end of it. My teen lark to a foreign country was now a nice memory. One little regret I had was not being able to speak in Japanese to my host mother. I knew she’d been very fond of me and had wanted to be able to tell me so. I realized I wished I'd been able to do the same.

Japan did have one lingering effect on me through the rest of high school. Though I studied Spanish until I graduated, I entered the University of California at Santa Cruz as an Asian History major. While I was trying to decide whether to continue studying a foreign language, I saw that there was an opening for a Japanese class. Looking back on my wish that I had been able to properly thank my host mother, I figured I’d learn enough to be able to write her a formal letter of thanks.

I got hooked. Really hooked. For whatever reason, I became very good at Japanese. Yes, I studied hard, often long into the night, but my tongue, and palate and larynx actually cooperated in learning to form Japanese words with the right sounds and intonations. I became fearless about talking to anybody in my newfound language who would listen.

I moved to Japan when I was 24 to accept a job with a Japanese government-sponsored program designed to foster better international relations by assigning young foreigners to various posts throughout the country. Some people drew assignments with government ministries or mayors’ offices; I drew a posting at the island of Miyajima in Hiroshima Prefecture, the site of the Itsukushima Shrine, one of the most venerated Shinto shrines in all of Japan.

Miyajima was beautiful, its ecology thoroughly protected by ancient Shinto laws that forbade cultivation, and even birth or burial, on the island. That protection made it a magnet for retirees seeking a peaceful, bucolic life. But it was murder on a young woman. Since most of the island’s youth would leave to find jobs on the Japanese _selfland, there was little for me to do.

Shinto Festival for children of three, five and seven years of age. Kiana and her brother Ken - Kim Scranton's children.

I took up calligraphy and learning the tea ceremony, but I really wanted something more strenuous. Finally, I found a local taiko drum group that was only too happy to invite me in as a member. Taiko drums are very large drums, suspended on their sides, that must be approached with almost furious energy to get the proper sound out of them. Pounding at them with the required large sticks is an aerobic workout as good as any you’d find in an American gym.

I was the only other woman on the team, but my drum-mates made me feel welcome. Right away I fell into a happy routine of all-out taiko sessions followed by wonderful, laugh-filled sessions of eating, drinking and socializing. My taiko partner, a gentle, musically talented man, became my mentor. Eventually he became my steady date, and when I turned 28, my husband.

In all, I lived in Japan for 10 years near Hiroshima. In that time I lived as close a life to the Japanese as a gaijin (literally, “outside person” – foreigner) could. I surprised many people with my fluency, made many friends who found they could confide in me as an outsider about their discontents with Japanese life, and bore two children.

I saw the great differences between Japanese and American societies in things both large and small. I remember seeing the three bicycles that belonged to one neighborhood family’s children temporarily abandoned at the local park. As an American, I told myself that those bikes would be gone within hours, stolen by some opportunistic passersby.  They were still there after three days, unmoved and untouched. Their owners finally picked them up, and I realized that they had been in no hurry because the bikes had been as safe in that public space as they would have been stashed at home.

I wondered whether this show of public morality was based on some sort of religious impulse. Did the Japanese adhere to some Ten Commandments-type rules that they took more seriously than Americans ever would? I recall how when I visited Japan at 15 my host father had meticulously _selftained a Buddhist altar in the home, and I remembered how Japanese families would routinely send their children to learn the tea ceremony or traditional dances from neighborhood Buddhist monks and nuns.

Were home altars and children’s exposure to religious people in classrooms enough to explain a society where theft is still a shocking rarity?

I should be honest at this point and say something about my own religious background. Until I was 12, I was a practicing Baptist who took her Bible studies and Sunday obligations seriously. But when my father was killed in a car accident caused by a drunk driver, I lost my faith in God. I thought there was something real wrong with a belief system where the loss of innocent life could be permitted by a loving, all-powerful being.

So my interest in Japanese religious impulses was more a scholarly thing than it was any hope that my adopted country’s spiritual practices might tilt me back into faith. 

Watching the Japanese, I eventually found myself using the term “practical religion” when thinking about their spiritual practices. By “practical religion,” I meant a set of practices or rituals that that the Japanese would engage in whenever it was convenient. For instance, when there was a death, the local Buddhist temple would handle the arrangements and ceremonies as a matter of course. Most families belonged to a neighborhood temple, but there was no regular attendance at it like there would be at an American church.

If you were going to get married, the Shinto temple was the place where you did it. The Japanese saw no tension or contradiction between using one religion to celebrate a milestone in life and another religion to mark a different rite of passage. When I would ask why there was this difference, nobody could say. I fact, I soon learned that in Japan the idea of asking somebody his religious affiliation on a form, like we sometimes do in the U.S., made no sense.

I also learned that though there were people who belonged to Buddhist sects that required great self-discipline or austerity, very few Japanese based their morality on a holy book or set of dogmas. There was no revealed word that went through people’s heads when it came time to make a moral decision.

Instead, it seemed that morality in Japan was more a matter of what behaviors would do the best to _selftain social cohesion. The reason why my neighbor children’s bikes weren’t stolen wasn’t because would-be thieves wrestled with their consciences like Americans might do. They weren’t wondering what the spiritual consequences might be so much as the social. To take those bikes would have caused a grievous tear in the fabric of the community. Years of work building a high level of trust among neighbors could have been destroyed in seconds.

Yet just when I thought my speculations were pretty insightful, the Japanese would do something to cloud the picture for me. In Japan, abortion is practiced widely. It is a common form of birth control in a country which is still reluctant to discuss condoms and pills. There is no religious or ethical opposition to abortion there – the issue simply doesn’t exist for the Japanese as it does for us. Yet the Japanese, unlike most pro-choice Americans, believe that an aborted child has a soul. Because it does, a mother who aborts must make ritual amends in a Buddhist ceremony to that child’s spirit, apologizing for denying its entrance into the world.

This is the complete opposite of how most Americans view the matter. It makes little sense to our general religious or moral sensibilities, but makes perfect sense to the Japanese. Again, I tucked that example away as an example of “practical religion.”

I returned to the U.S. in early 2001. I came away from Japan with insights into how two nations can view moral or religious issues differently. Many Americans might be shocked at the unconcern the Japanese have for wondering over things like God, or sin or even right and wrong vs. what keeps society glued together. Yet ethically, the Japanese behave as though they do follow a set of commandments or believe in a conscious higher power.

Americans on the other hand generally do believe in those things, yet their public (and often private) lives often are lived far away from those ideals. I don’t say that to judge, only to note after my time in Japan one universal truth: What people believe very often has little to do with how they act.