Scholars share a broad consensus that the Aum Shinrikyō subway attacks in March 1995 fundamentally shifted prevailing attitudes against "religion" in Japan. However, comparison with the case of Soka Gakkai, Japan's largest active "new religion, " complicates this view. In this article, I provide a counter-narrative to the argument that "Aum changed everything" by showing that public officials' strategies against Aum Shinrikyō from 1995 emerged in large part from a sustained anti-Soka Gakkai campaign that intensified immediately before the Aum attacks. Tracking interactions among politicians, the media, and Soka Gakkai before and during the Aum Shinrikyō incident, I outline ways in which Soka Gakkai and Aum Shinrikyō form part of a historical continuity of high-profile "new religions" that public moralists have consistently scapegoated for political gain throughout the modern era. At the same time, I also confirm that Aum Shinrikyō did, in a way, change everything: Aum may have marked the end of religious mass movements in contemporary Japan.
This article serves two principal purposes: 1) to survey the many rescue, relief, and reconstruction initiatives undertaken by Buddhist, Shinto, Christian, and New Religious organizations in the two years since the March 2011 disasters that devastated northeast Japan, and 2) to introduce electronic and print resources to readers interested in learning more about specific religious disaster response campaigns. The pragmatic aid efforts carried out by religions contrast with moralistic interpretations offered by public figures, and they indicate that many religious groups regard their disaster aid not as temporary relief but instead as opportunities to begin positive new engagements with the Japanese public.
When religious organizations of all types mobilized relief efforts in the wake of the 17 January 1995 Great Hanshin/Awaji earthquake in western Japan, their contributions failed to translate into favorable media coverage. By contrast, religious aid responses after the 11 March 2011 Great East Japan earthquake disasters attracted a largely positive mainstream media response. This article surveys Japan's major daily newspapers, popular books, academic reports, and other published treatments of religious responses to these two major disasters to assess a shift in recent post-disaster "religion" media narration. It suggests reasons for a change in tone from skepticism to support and points to questions about an evolving selection process that determines which religious actors fit and which are left out of a burgeoning post-2011 media picture. keywords: religion-disaster-Japan-media-Great Hanshin/Awaji earthquake-Great East Japan earthquake disaster
W hat does it mean to offer salvation in the midst of disaster? This is the question that animates the articles in this special issue, all of which probe the complex dynamics at play in the intersections of religion and disaster relief in contemporary Asia. Here, we seek to advance inquiry into the conceptual categories of "religion," "disaster," "relief," and "Asia" by drawing on recent theoretical advances across a variety of disciplines.The recent history of Asia is replete with frequent, massive, and high profile "natural" disasters as well as innumerable smaller-scale events that nevertheless devastate local communities. Though the casualties, economic losses, and graphic images of material damage caused by Asian disasters often receive primetime-albeit shortlived-attention in the global media, disaster impacts are far more wide-ranging than such reporting tends to reveal. Disasters affect all aspects of social life in ways that continue long after a precipitating event, and they frequently operate as decisive points at which new spaces are opened for political, social, and religious change. 1 The cultural dynamism of disasters also emerges from the social processes that arise in response to it, including efforts to "salvage" damaged assets and through actions aimed at delivering "salvation"-a process that is simultaneously material and social. Additionally, in the wake of major disasters in contemporary Asia, relief and reconstruction activities, as well as various forms of gifting and charity, frequently inspire complex global entanglements across spatial and cultural gaps.We argue that religious mobilizations in the wake of Asian disasters provide compelling opportunities to scrutinize pivotal theoretical concerns within the contemporary social sciences. This special issue is particularly concerned with what analysis of the religion-disaster-relief nexus can do for our understanding of the first of these three key terms: religion. Among the increasingly diverse set of actors that engage in disaster relief today are an array of organizations, movements, congregations,
This chapter discusses the contemporary characteristics and historical development of Sōka Gakkai 創価学会, or the 'Value Creation Study Association', a group that began in 1930s Japan as a society of educators and grew into a postwar religious mass movement. Sōka Gakkai is now not only Japan's largest collective of religious adherents; it is most likely the largest mass movement in Japanese history. Today, the group has a self-declared membership of 8.27 million households in Japan and more than 1.5 million adherents in 192 countries abroad under its overseas umbrella organization Soka Gakkai International, or SGI.1 Recent scholarship challenges these figures and points to a figure in the neighborhood of two percent of the Japanese population.2 Yet even allowing for the certain
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