This panel addresses relationship between religious liberty, national identity, and the category of religion, as described in two University of Chicago Press books from 2019: Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan and Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism and the Redefinition of Democracy.
After Abe Shinzō became prime minister of Japan for a second time in 2012, he soon signaled that constitutional reform would become one of the flagship issues of his administration. As of 2018, Abe is closer to initiating the process of reforming Japan’s 1947 constitution than any other prime minister of the postwar period. While attempts to reform Article 9 tend to gain much attention, other aspects of postwar Japanese society that could be the target of significant reform include the principles of religious freedom and the separation of religion from the state. Article 20 of the 1947 constitution provides the basis for these principles, while at the same time forcing Japan as a constitutional democracy to deal with “religion” as a legal category. The papers of this panel explore issues related to “religion” and Japan’s postwar constitution from various perspectives, historical as well as contemporary.
Religion and the Controversial Subject of Constitutional Law
In the last two decades conservatives in Japan have experimented with ways to revise the postwar constitution. The redefinition of the capacities of the Self-Defense Force during the Iraq War, the 2006 revision of the Fundamental Law on Education, and the 2017 passage of anti-conspiracy legislation have all presaged a concerted push for constitutional revision. Notable among these initiatives is the LDP draft constitution of 2012. The draft document preserved the idiosyncratic constitutional language of “fundamental human rights,” but it also refocused attention on duties over rights, granted rights to “persons” (hito) rather than “individuals” (kojin) and treated the household, not the individual, as the fundamental legal unit of society. Building on recent advances in the critical study of religion and religious freedom, this paper interrogates what sort of human the LDP proposal imagines and how the proposed revisions change the way religion might be free in Japan.
Public schools are noted sites of legal battles over the religion clauses of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Yet, even as scholars have noted the significance of religion and law outside the courts, few have turned their attention to public schools and education as sites and sources of religious practice, organizing, and debate. Building on work that denaturalizes the court-centric categories of religious freedom and establishment, this panel aims to decenter American legal definitions of religion altogether in scholarship on twentieth- and twenty-first- century religion and public education. With papers on corporations and patriotic education in mid-twentieth century Japan and America, government aid to parochial schools and public school desegregation in 1967 New York State, homeownership and the Islamic school movement, and contemporary Holocaust education, the panel will take an interdisciplinary and transnational approach to explore themes such as secular governance, corporate influence, race, respectability, and national identity.
Inculcating Corporate Morality in Public Schools: A Comparative Look at Japan and the U.S.
This paper uses archival materials from Cold War-era Japan and the United States to examine corporate influence on public school education, especially as related to morality and patriotism. While morality and patriotism training in public schools serve obvious disciplining functions by socializing students in preparation for civic life, they also serve ideological functions by preparing humans to accept the potentially dehumanizing demands of the workforce as normal and natural. Punishment and rewards systems in schools inculcate allegiance, obedience, and specific modes of comportment. Training in morality and civics gives students concrete tools to distinguish “right” from “wrong.” Because corporations play major roles in curriculum development and because training in morality and civics overlaps with implicit religious norms and ideals, the academic study of religion can benefit from sustained inquiry into the complicated relationship between morality, patriotism, and corporate interests in postwar Japan and the United States.
