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Japanese Religious Responses to COVID-19: A Preliminary Report
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
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As the novel coronavirus swept Japan, religious practitioners of all types responded. This article provides an overview of early-stage reactions by individuals and organizations affiliated with Buddhism, Shinto, New Religions, and other religious traditions in Japan. It features interviews with Japanese clergy and lay followers who contended with social distancing and more dire consequences of COVID-19, and it contextualizes their responses within media coverage, sectarian sources, and historical research. As it highlights trends in religious reactions to the coronavirus, such as a divide between policies enacted by “new” and “traditional” groups, the article discusses reasons for contrasting responses and points to dilemmas that will face Japan's religious organizations after the pandemic subsides.
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References
Notes
1 I am indebted to Micah Auerback, Erica Baffelli, Timothy Benedict, Caleb Carter, Bryan Lowe, Lauren Markley, Mark Rowe, Mark Selden, Shirahase Tatsuya, Jessica Starling, Takahashi Tomoaki, and Brian Victoria for their invaluable feedback. I am particularly grateful to the clergy and lay practitioners who appear here under pseudonyms who so kindly offered insights that appear in this article.
2 See the World Health Organization's novel coronavirus updates here. Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare maintained a running update in English on the government's anti-coronavirus measures, patient caseloads, and related data. The newspaper Asahi shinbun posted running updates on COVID-19 broken down by prefecture, The Japan Times updated a daily news roundup on coronavirus, as did the Kyodo News Service and numerous other outlets. See also Toyo Keizai Online for statistical breakdowns of case numbers, testing rates, and other data.
3 The IOC announcement relieved pressure on the Abe administration and Tokyo Governor Koike Yuriko, who had been criticized for delaying anti-COVID-19 measures in the hopes that the 2020 games would proceed. See Kingston, Jeff, “Abe Prioritized Olympics, Slowing Japan's Pandemic Response.” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Vol. 18 Issue 7 No. 5 (1 April 2020).
4 Dilemmas Japan's low-tech status poses for a quarantining population have attracted media attention (The Mainichi 26 April 2020). One third of homes in Japan, and most offices, still have fax machines, and numerous homes lack late-model computers that are linked to high-speed internet.
5 See Kyodo News 6 April 2020; Reuters 8 April 2020.
6 The Japan Times 23 April 2020; The Asahi Shinbun 27 April 2020.
7 Except in cases where they publish under their own names, or where they appear under their own names in published accounts, the clergy and lay activists featured in this article appear under pseudonyms. I communicated with my interviewees in Japanese. Here, I provide translated portions of their responses.
8 Fukusuibon ni kaerazu functions independently as a rough equivalent of “there's no use crying over spilt milk.” Higan, “the other shore,” is a Japanese rendering of the Sanskrit paryavasāna. It denotes persevering through karmic causality to awakening from conditioned existence.
9 In a Buddhist context, wisdom (Jp. chie, Skt. prajñā) is discriminating knowledge of impermanence and the causes of suffering, commonly understood as one of the requirements for attaining enlightenment. Murahachibu remains a common expression in Japan today used to describe social rejection of community members. For studies of ostracism and its nomenclatures in Japanese history, see Ehlers, Maren Annika, Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018; Ooms, Herman, Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
10 President Online 4 April 2020.
11 Seikyō shinbun 19 February, 20 March, 4 April, 28 April 2020.
12 BBC News 2 March 2020; New York Times 10 March 2020; The Korea Herald 17 March 2020
13 For analysis of how “religion” was imported as Japan transformed into an imperial nationstate, see Isomae Jun'ichi, Kindai Nihon ni okeru shūkyō gensetsu to sono keifu: shūkyō, kokka, shintō. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2004; Josephson, Jason Ānanda, The Invention of Religion in Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012; Maxey, Trent Elliot, The “Greatest Problem”: Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014; Sawada, Janine Tasca, Practical Pursuits: Religion, Politics, and Personal Cultivation in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004.
14 For discussion of how these categories have been applied to Soka Gakkai, and to New Religions generally, see McLaughlin, Levi. Soka Gakkai's Human Revolution: The Rise of a Mimetic Nation in Modern Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2019. For analyses of how moral panic over New Religions has mobilized media, politics, and populism in modern and contemporary Japan, see Baffelli, Erica, “Contested Positioning: ‘New Religions’ and Secular Spheres.” Japan Review Vol. 30 (2017), 129-152; Dorman, Benjamin, Celebrity Gods: New Religions, Media, and Authority in Occupied Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012; Garon, Sheldon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997; Klein, Axel, “Twice Bitten, Once Shy: Religious Organizations and Politics after the Aum Attack.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 39:1 (2012), 77-98; McLaughlin, Levi, “Did Aum Change Everything? What Soka Gakkai Before, During, and After the Aum Shinrikyō Affair Tells Us about the Persistent ‘Otherness’ of New Religions in Japan.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 39:1 (2012), 51-75; Stalker, Nancy Kinue, Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburō, Oomoto, and the Rise of New Religions in Imperial Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007; and Tsukada Hotaka, Shūkyō to seiji no tentetsuten: hoshu gōdō to seikyō itchi no shūkyō shakaigaku. Tokyo: Kadensha, 2015.
15 For considerations of the “New Religions” genealogy in its Japanese and American contexts, see Thomas, Jolyon Baraka, Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. For examples of debates over how to apply the “New Religions” category, see Melton, J. Gordon, “Perspective: Toward a Definition of ‘New Religion.‘” Nova Religio Vol. 8, Issue 1 (2004), 73-87; Urban, Hugh. New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements: Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.
16 New York Times 16 April 2020.
17 See Wagenaar, Wester, “Wacky Japan: A New Face of Orientalism.” Asia in Focus No. 3 (2016), 46-54. A Google search for “quirky Japan” or a similar term confirms the media stereotype.
18 Happy Science provided information on the service in English. By 18 February 2020, the religion had already published a book in Japanese of mediated spirit messages regarding the disease titled “Spiritual Investigations of the Novel Coronavirus Infection that Began in China”.
19 For studies of Kōfuku no Kagaku (Happy Science) in Japan, see Astley, Trevor, “The Transformation of a Recent Japanese New Religion: Ōkawa Ryūhō and Kōfuku no Kagaku.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 22:3-4 (1995), 343-380; Baffelli 2017; Tsukada, Hotaka, “Cultural Nationalism in Japanese Neo-New Religions: A Comparative Study of Mahikari and Kōfuku no Kagaku.” Monumenta Nipponica Vol. 67 No. 1 (2012), 133-157; and Winter, Franz, “Kōfuku no Kagaku.” In Pokorny, Lukas and Franz Winter, eds., Handbook of East Asian New Religious Movements. Leiden: Brill, 2018, 211-229. See also Japan Times 4 August 2009.
20 Tabloids reported on meetings the group held as Japan went into quarantine; examples include the magazine Shūkan jitsuwa 20 March 2020. Happy Science responded on 7 April 2020 with a defamation lawsuit against the weekly Shūkan shinchō, demanding 22 million yen (~US$200,000) in damages for an article the magazine published on 2 April 2020.
21 Shūkan jitsuwa 20 March 2020. Happy Science's periodical The Liberty covered Ōkawa's 14 March 2020 address in Sendai at which he expressed suspicion that the novel coronavirus had been developed in Wuhan laboratories and urged an investigation by the WHO.
22 For links between epidemic and premodern Japanese epistemes, see Como, Michael, “Horses, Dragons, and Disease in Nara Japan.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 34/2 (2007), 393-415; Farris, Wayne, Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; Rambelli, Fabio, “Gods, Dragons, Catfish, and Godzilla: Fragments for a History of Religious Views on Natural Disasters in Japan.” In Starrs, Roy, ed. When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 50-69; Wakabayashi, Haruko, “Disaster in the Making: Taira no Kiyomori's Move of the Capital to Fukuhara.” Monumenta Nipponica Vol. 70 No. 1 (2015), 1-38. For details on the kokubunji system and its founding as a means of combatting epidemics and accompanying calamities, see Yoshida Kazuhiko, “Kokubunji kokubun amadera no shisō.” In Suda Tsutomu and Satō Makoto, eds., Kokubunji no sōken. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kyōbunkan, 2011, 2-28.
23 Mainichi shinbun 6 April 2020.
24 A tweet by @kojomrmt on Twitter 24 April 2020; NHK News Web 24 April 2020.
25 Asahi shinbun 18 April 2020.
26 A tweet by @kojomrmt on Twitter 20 April 2020.
27 Yomiuri shinbun 8 April 2020.
28 See McMullin, Neil, “On Placating the Gods and Pacifying the Populace: The Case of the Gion ‘Goryō‘ Cult.” History of Religions Vol. 27 No. 3 (1988), 270-293.
29 See Takahashi's blog posts for the Futago Tamagawa neighborhood site.
30 For information on Takahashi's Sacred Forest Project (Chinju no Mori no Purojekuto), see here. For discussions of ways the “sacred forest” is promoted within contemporary Shinto, see Rots, Aike P., Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan: Making Sacred Forests. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
31 Mainichi shinbun 15 April 2020.
32 Asahi shinbun 18 April 2020.
33 Kyōdo News 6 March 2020.
34 Detailed explanations of proper funeral procedures, flow charts for procedures in the event of contagion, and histories of Sōtō Zen practices during disaster appear in documents uploaded by the Sōtō sect's Tokyo Yūdōkai, or Tokyo Bhavana Path Society.
35 Enryakuji updates available here and here.
36 Asahi shinbun 18 April 2020; Also see facebook posts.
37 Chūgai nippō 24 April 2020.
38 Chūgai nippō 23 April 2020.
39 Kyodo News 16 March 2020; Yomiuri shinbun (Osaka edition) 13 April 2020.
40 Yomiuri shinbun (Osaka edition) 13 April 2020; See updates from the United Church of Christ in Japan and https://covid19jc.com/.
41 Asahi shinbun 14 April 2020.
42 Information on Rinri Kenkyūjō's Good Morning Ethics Academies (Ohayō Rinri Juku) is available here.
43 Agreement on the stimulus package was reached after a tense standoff within the national governing coalition between the Liberal Democratic Party and its junior partner Komeito, the party founded by Soka Gakkai. Komeito's success in forcing the LDP to adopt its payout policy accompanied a drop in public approval of Prime Minister Abe's handling of the coronavirus crisis. See Kyodo News 18 April 2020.
44 Details on application procedures for entities suffering from income lost because of the COVID-19 shutdown and the benefits available to each entity type were updated by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. See here.
45 Discussion of suspicions raised by tabloid journalists and defense of religious practices promoted by temple-based practitioners appears in Shūkan asahi 4 June 2010; Nelson, John, Experimental Buddhism: Innovation and Activism in Contemporary Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2013.
46 For discussions of the on-the-ground realities traditional practitioners face, including financial and legal challenges, see Covell, Stephen G., Japanese Temple Buddhism: Worldliness in a Religion of Renunciation. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005; Rowe, Mark M., Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Starling, Jessica, Guardians of the Buddha's Home: Domestic Religion in Contemporary Jōdo Shinshū. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2019.
47 For overviews of religious responses to 3.11, see Berman, Michael, “Religion Overcoming Religion: Suffering, Secularism, and the Training of Interfaith Chaplains in Japan.” American Ethnologist Vol. 34 No. 2 (2018), 228-240; McLaughlin, Levi, “Hard Lessons Learned: Tracking Changes in Media Presentations of Religion and Religious Aid Mobilization after the 1995 and 2011 Disasters in Japan.” Asian Ethnology Vol. 75 No. 1 (2016), 105-137.
48 Details on Interfaith Chaplaincy training at Tohoku University's Department of Practical Religious Studies are available here. See also Fujiyama Midori, Rinshō shūkyōshi. Tokyo: Kōbunken, 2020.
49 For insight into the lives of women Buddhist priests in Japan, see Rowe, Mark, “Charting Known Territory: Female Buddhist Priests.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 44/1 (2017), 75-101.
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