著者
LARSSON Ernils
出版者
International Research Center for Japanese Studies
雑誌
Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.30, pp.227-252, 2017-07-24

Since early January 2016 Jinja Honchō has participated in a campaign led by Nippon Kaigi to establish popular support for constitutional reform. In this essay, I seek to understand Jinja Honchō’s involvement in this campaign through a reading of the postwar Supreme Court cases related to the separation of religion from the state. I argue that amendment of Articles 20 and 89 was never considered a priority for most of this period, since the prevalent paradigm in the Supreme Court was that Shinto was something other than a religion; but following the break with this paradigm in the Ehime Tamagushiryō case in 1997, and the subsequent confirmation of the validity of this precedent through the ruling on the Sunagawa I case in 2010, those seeking a closer relationship between the Shinto establishment and the state have had to find new routes. The rise of Nippon Kaigi as one of Japan’s largest conservative lobby groups coincides with this development in the Supreme Court, and the organization’s focus on constitutional reform can therefore partly be understood in this light. Should Nippon Kaigi eventually produce a draft for their vision of a new constitution, it is likely that the idea of Shinto as something other than a religion will be reflected in this draft.
著者
AUKEMA Justin
出版者
International Research Center for Japanese Studies
雑誌
Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.32, pp.127-150, 2019

This paper examines the early postwar history of the physical remains of World War II through the example of Keio University’s Hiyoshi Campus. During the war, the Japanese Imperial Navy’s Combined Fleet used this site as their headquarters, and they built a massive underground tunnel system there. Furthermore, after the war, the campus was confiscated and used by the U.S. Occupation Eighth Army until 1949. Yet this history of the Hiyoshi Campus was almost completely forgotten until the late 1980s. This paper argues that the reasons for this lie in the postwar history of the site and the university. Namely, Keio intellectuals in the early postwar sought to portray the school as an historical pioneer of liberal democracy in Japan. Yet in this historical rewriting, instances of liberal cooperation with militarism such as Keio’s wartime past became inconvenient truths, and the physical wartime remains on campus, as visible reminders of this past, became unwanted and undesirable anachronisms. In this way, the paper argues that the forgetting of war sites such as the Hiyoshidai tunnels was, in some ways, a byproduct of the creation of a liberal-democratic postwar Japan.
著者
TORRANCE Richard
出版者
International Research Center for Japanese Studies
雑誌
Japan review : journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)
巻号頁・発行日
no.29, pp.3-38, 2016

It was once thought that the prominence of Izumo gods in imperial myth was merely a function of literary structure, the creation of an antagonist to enhance the power and prestige of the Yamato polity. The idea that Izumo was, in archeological terms, insignificant in the context of discoveries in other regions contributed to theories that Izumo's importance in imperial myth was due entirely to narrative logic. With the archeological discoveries at Kanba Kōjindani in present-day Izumo City in July of 1984 and those in August 1996 at the Kamo Iwakura site in present-day Unnan City, it was no longer tenable that Izumo myth did not reflect a political and material reality during the mid to late Yayoi period. This article is an overview of the archeological evidence as a prologue to an examination of Izumo myth. It argues that the transition from Jōmon to Yayoi required about three to four centuries. It then takes up a series of archeological discoveries that establish that Izumo was the center of an Izumo cultural zone, not technologically inferior to the Kinai region. The article argues further, based in part on the evidence of tumuli and other forms of burial, that Izumo remained relatively independent through the sixth or early-seventh century, but it questions the meaning of Izumo's "surrender" to Yamato in the context of sixth or seventh century Japan.
著者
GOTO-JONES Chris
出版者
International Research Center for Japanese Studies
雑誌
Japan review : journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)
巻号頁・発行日
no.29, pp.171-208, 2016

This experimental article explores the question of whether it is possible to examine the experience of playing fighting games (video games) as a form of self-cultivation or practice and, in so doing, whether it becomes possible to shift the debate about the potential impact of violent video games on the people who play them (and on society around them). The article draws on five years of surveys and interviews with gamers from around the world, but seeks to interpret this data through a critical and creative reading of the games themselves as well as a reading of the so-called bushidō tradition (of texts about the intersection between Zen and the martial arts). The article concludes that fighting games might be experienced as forms of martial arts in themselves, complete with potentials for self-transformation, but that this form of engagement requires appropriate intentionality from players, which provokes a space for a manifesto to guide players' intentions.