| NOTA |
(★) (On 27 February 1991, I stood looking out over the ocean from the Mabuni Cliffs on the southern part of the main island of Okinawa. The news in the preceding days had been filled with reports of the ground attack against Iraqi troops occupying Kuwait, an attack that almost seemed to be timed to coincide with my long-planned spring vacation on the southern Japanese island. I had spent the day visiting the war memorials clustered between Naha and Mabuni, listening to the recorded accounts of survivors of one of the fiercest battles of World War II. In the battle for Okinawa almost two hundred thousand people died between the onset of battle on 1 April 1945, and its conclusion at the end of June : more than 107,000 Japanese troops, 75,000 Okinawan civilians, and 7,000 American troops. Many of the American lost their lives on the cliffs at Mabuni, where Japanese defenders hiding in the numerous caves on the face of the cliffs mowed down the Americans coming ashore for the final assault. Almost 28,000 Japanese were cremated with flamethrowers or blown up with grenades in the caves that dot that part of the island, and it was the ferociousness of the battle for Okinawa that arguably contributed to the decision to use atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events that have become perhaps the defining influence on the Japanese psyche in the postwar years. It was the confluence of images of these two wars --the recorded memories of survivors and live broadcasts from the Middle East-- that led to my decision at Mabuni to research the concept of peace promoted by the Japanese new religious movements. Since my arrival in Japan in 1985 I have been interested in the social ethic of the New Religions. I should perhaps acknowledge right from the start that my interest here is not purely academic. I believe that religion has a positive role to play in society, and it is this belief that has in part motivated many of the key decisions in my life --to become a Catholic priest, to ask for assignment in Japan, and to choose new religious movements as the focus of my research in Japan. In contemporary Japanese society it is not generally recognized that religion can fulfill a positive social function, and it is this skepticism that has, in part, motivated my desire to explore the social activism of Japanese religious groups, especially the New Religions. The choice of New Religions as a means to explore the positive role of religion in society is not an obvious one. In the wake of the poison gas attack on the Tokyo subways by a new religious group on 20 March 1995, these groups are looked upon with suspicion, as at least a degenerate form of religion if not, in fact, dangerous, either to their believers or to society at large. This view is prevalent in Japan, similar to the image of ´cults´ in the West, despite the fact that perhaps fifteen percent of the population are members of one or the other of these groups --a considerable number of people in a society where only thirty percent of the population profess any religious belief at all. I would argue that these figures indicate that it is precisely these new religious groups that mediate the religious traditions of the country most effectively to the contemporary population, and that is the reason for my interest in them. (---) This work is intended primarily as a study of Japanese New Religions from a perspective that has previously been largely neglected, that is, their social ethic and social activism. In this way I hope that it will make some contribution to the ever-expanding body of research on these movements. However, as I pointed out at the beginning of this introduction, I do not approach the subject dispassionately. My research has led me to critique popular notions of pacifism and national mission, as well as the efficacy of individual moral cultivation as a solution to social problems. It has also made me an advocate for a more positive role of religion in Japanese society. I hope, in the end, that these concerns do not detract from but rather enhance the value of this work as a study in social ethics and new religious movements. [from ´INTRODUCTION´] ▼) |
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