I’ll be visiting Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia to talk about chapter 7 of my book in progress.

After the religious group Aum Shinrikyō released sarin gas on the Tokyo subway system in 1995, a cascade of moral panics about youth sexuality and employment patterns spurred major educational reform efforts in Japan at the turn of the twenty-first century. A range of stakeholders including Shintō apologists, Buddhist moral majoritarians, and scholars of religion collaborated on introducing new language related to religious education in the 1947 Fundamental Law on Education. Although their long-term agendas diverged, collectively these groups called for revisions that would foster national pride, enhance moral training, and expand religious literacy. The revision that ultimately passed in December 2006 failed to include the explicit provision for confessional religious education that the Shintō apologists and Buddhist moral majoritarians had sought, but right-leaning religious and religion-adjacent groups were nevertheless successful in making Japan’s alleged moral decline a matter of national policy. Meanwhile, thanks to a mild legal tweak, scholars of religion were able to introduce religious literacy training in public schools, fulfilling a longstanding objective dating back to the Occupation era.