My primary research interests lie in the fields of modern Japanese and North American religions, with theoretical interests in the visual and material culture of religion; the politics of religious freedom; relationships between religion, sexuality, and gender; and the history of human rights. At the University of Pennsylvania I teach courses on the relationships between popular culture and religion, marginal religious movements, religion and rights, intersections between religion and violence, and religion and empire. 

My latest book is called Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan. The first half of the book examines how competing interest groups advanced very different understandings of religious freedom during the time that Japan’s first modern constitution was in effect (1890–1945). The second half focuses on the shorter period of the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–1952), when the U.S.-led occupiers aimed to reconfigure Japanese religious and political life by eradicating “State Shinto” and inculcating a “desire for religious freedom” in Japan’s citizenry. As of March 2019, the book is available from University of Chicago Press.

I am now in the midst of a new comparative project on religion and education in Japan and the United States after 1945. Like most of my academic projects, this one will focus less on specific sects and denominations than it will on how the category “religion” operates in seemingly non-religious contexts. I expect the book to deal equally with Shinto, Buddhism, Christianity, and other religious movements. Basically, the project asks what sort of ideal subject/citizen has been imagined in postwar educational settings in both countries; it also investigates how clerics, teachers, and scholars of religion have envisioned religious literacy and morality as part of the process of subject formation that forms the linchpin of modern education.

I am currently planning another book about the problem of desire in Japanese religions. This book will revise old-school anthropological and religious studies terminology like “animism,” “fetishism,” “idolatry,” and “cult” to show that Japanese religion is fundamentally about sex and money and crass consumerism, but not in a reductive sense. Focusing on quotidian objects like trains, televisions, USB sticks, robots, and plastic figurines, this study will examine how desire—one of the fundamental problems diagnosed by Japanese Buddhism and also one of the fundamental drivers of Japanese religiosity—structures the political economy of contemporary Japanese religion. I expect to argue that contemporary Japan provides a model for understanding the co-constitutive relationship between religion, capitalism, and sexuality that features in many wealthy economies today. Some early thoughts on these topics can be found in essays and articles that I have written for Sacred Matters, Marginalia, and Material Religion; a forthcoming book chapter critiquing insufficiently substantiated relationship between animation and animism keeps the thread going.

I have also published extensively on religion and media in contemporary Japan, with a particular focus on religious aspects of the culture surrounding manga (illustrated serial novels) and anime (animated films). My 2012 book on the subject, Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan, is available from University of Hawai‘i Press. The book examined religious aspects of the culture of manga and anime production and consumption through a methodological synthesis of narrative and visual analysis, history, and ethnography. In it, I showed that manga and anime not only contribute to familiarity with traditional religious doctrines and imagery, but also allow authors, directors, and audiences to modify and elaborate upon such themes, sometimes creating hitherto unforeseen religious ideas and practices. Through case studies of manga and anime, Drawing on Tradition advanced a methodological argument about how the category of religion can be defined and applied in light of deep ambivalence about the position of religious traditions in contemporary Japanese society.