At first glance, a coupling of religion and sport seems absurd. What could be further apart than the spiritual pursuit of transcendent truth and the physical clashes of sweaty athletes, cheered on by their besotted fans? Yet such a dismissal belies a modern history in which organized sports have sought justification through appeals to ethical character formation and organized religions have sought to retain relevance through secular attachments like sports. This well-formed and coherent volume brings together an impressive lineup of scholars to explore the forms that this conjunction has taken in Japan over the last two centuries. Following the editors’ introduction to their broad aims, the next two chapters effectively lay the foundation for the eight topical chapters that follow.
Saka Natsuko (chapter 2) offers a useful overview of the Japanese scholarship on sport, which is still divided between those who focus on physical education (taiiku) and those who study organized sports (supōtsu). There are now some unifying themes to these literatures, but she concludes that by and large neither has paid much attention to evidence of religion in sport.
In the following chapter (chapter 3), Annie Blazer surveys the largely American literature on religion and sport, attending first to some of the competing definitions of religion itself. Her preference seems to be for Bruce Lincoln’s (2003) capacious notion of religion as institutionalized discourses and practices that call upon a transcendent authority for human behavior. She does note formal similarities of religion and sport (28), but it would seem that these are distinct realms whose intersections are as particular as they are consequential.
This notion of separate but interpenetrating realms, although not put this way in the volume, is generally supported by the eight chapters that follow. Much has been written about how diverse samurai and commoner wrestling practices merged into a more generalized and immensely popular “sumo” by the late Edo period. Christoph Reichenbaecher, in chapter 4, uses the figure of Raiden, the best-known wrestler of the early nineteenth century, to argue that the temple and shrine performance spaces and attendant rituals marked this emerging sumo as a civil religion as well as popular entertainment. Civil religion also underpins the next chapter, by W. Puck Brecher, which traces the evolution of the Meiji Shrine Games in the crucial two decades from 1924 to 1943, during which national authorities tried to bring both physical education and sports under a banner of national polity (kokutai) ideology.
The Meiji Shrine grounds have continued to be crucial in post-World War II sports, particularly as the site of the National Stadium at the 1964 Olympics and, most recently, as the site of a new National Stadium for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The latter stadium project was mired in controversy because it required massive environmental degradation to the Shrine Outer Gardens grounds. This not only would defile the sacred space of the grounds and the Shinto sanctioning of the sporting activities within it, but it also contradicted Tokyo’s expressed commitment to Olympic goals of sustainability. In chapter 6, Robin Kietlinski reviews the controversy and shows how the one-year postponement brought sustainable technologies to the fore, not expressly justified in a Shinto idiom but claiming validation in Japanese cultural and spiritual heritage.
The next three chapters take up martial arts, which usefully reminds us that the global flows of sports may have initially had Anglo-American origins but more recently move in multiple directions. In chapter 7, Paul Droubie considers the challenges faced by the central judo organ, the Kōdōkan Cultural Association, to gain American Occupation approval to reconstitute itself domestically and to continue its drive to spread globally. It tried to do this by emphasizing judo as a “sport,” but this placed itself in tension with judo’s original moral and spiritual justifications. Droubie adapts religious scholar David Chidester’s (2005) notion of an “authentic fake” (“I’m not a doctor but I play one on television”) to suggest Kōdōkan’s efforts to finesse this tension was to insist that judo remained true to its spiritual origins albeit posing as a global secular sport.
Karate, often thought of as Japanese, is actually of Ryukyuan origin and is the most syncretic of the martial arts, as Eduardo González de la Fuente (chapter 8) reminds us. It has a myriad of spiritual lineages, and like its sibling martial arts, it now tries to fashion itself as a global secular sport with strong religious overtones that foreground indigenous Okinawan heritage. Another fine needle to thread!
The third martial arts case, that of aikido, is similarly ambiguously poised within a global matrix of practice. Andreas Niehaus, in chapter 9, details the philosophy of its founder, Ueshiba Morihei, and the subsequent efforts of his successors to expand its reach while staying true to Ueshiba’s vision of a “Way” of living through aikido practice based on Buddhist practices of unifying voice, body, and heart-mind. More than most other martial arts, Aikido retains this original impulse. Ironically, Niehaus observes, this is because its global practitioners have been entranced by its exotic Japanese spiritualism and themselves reinforce its Japanese spirituality.
Both sport and religion have been thoroughly commercialized, and the final two chapters document cases in which they are commingled by commercial interests. Like many professional baseball teams, the Seibu Lions operate as a subsidiary within a corporate group, in this case the massive Seibu conglomerate of the Tsutsumi family. And like many teams, the Lions have a titular connection to a Buddhist temple for annual prayers for success, in this case Sayama Fudoson in Tokorozawa. But the Seibu case is unusual, and in a fascinating chapter, Alexander Vesey (chapter 10) shows how the Tsutsumi family fashioned this temple complex as a “sports-religious world” of dense architectural, ritual, and human elements, which enhances the symbolic power of its various businesses including its baseball team.
Finally, this rich volume concludes with a study by Eric Teixeira Mendes and Zachary T. Smith (chapter 11) of perhaps the most iconic Japanese “religious technology,” the omamori, the vast array of amulets bought by temple and shrine visitors to bring supernatural powers to their everyday lives. Their case of Shiramine Jingu, enshrining the Guardian Deity of Sports, is popular for athletes of all levels seeking sporting victory and fighting spirit.
The larger ambition of the volume editors is to bring the study of sports and religions in Japan into the longer-standing debates on their conjunction in Europe and North America (3). Hopefully, the volume will succeed in this, but in this age of global sport and world religion, I believe, more importantly, it will appeal to scholars of and in other parts of Asia, who are developing a vibrant literature on these topics.