While there have been plenty of studies on the history of religions of the Meiji period (1868–1912), only a few have looked into how the idea and discourse of religion itself figured in that history.Footnote ¹ Trent Maxey's The “Greatest Problem”: Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan is a significant contribution to this small but important literature. Combining meticulous archival research with a conceptual approach informed by recent critical discussions about religion, in particular the insight about the mutual constitutiveness of the religious and the secular, this book makes a convincing case for how the modern discourse of religion, or what the author calls “the grammar of religion,” was made to centrally constitute the constructions of the Japanese nation-state as a formally secular political authority even though the state derived its ultimate legitimacy from the divinity of the imperial institution. As the author succinctly put it, “The sacralization of the nation-state relied on a secularization that placed a multiplicity of sectarian positions outside the realm of political representation” (p. 234), a realm marked by the centrality of the imperial institution, and “religion … had come to provide the conceptual and regulative means by which to contain and mobilize that plurality [of sectarian positions] in the service of a centralized nation-state” (p. 236).

Examining the performative nature of the category of religion and the political implications engendered by it, this book formulates a conceptual model by which to narrate Meiji history anew. It demonstrates persuasively that the formation of a grammar of religion, including the idea of religious freedom, and the mobilization of this grammar for constituting modern political authority was a process that tied Meiji Japan to Western-dominated global colonial formation and a global order of sovereign nation-states. That is, state formation in Meiji Japan was a process commensurable and contemporaneous with similar processes in major Western states. As such, it was not a latecomer's project in catching up with the liberal, advanced capitalist states of Western Europe by building a nationalist, authoritarian political regime. The latter view remains the mainstream one in studies of modern Japanese history. No less significantly, this new mode of narration helps bring to the fore the vital yet little understood role played by Buddhism and Christianity, or more precisely the fear of them, in the creation of the modern Japanese state. Last but not least, this is a narrative capable of finally superseding the still-dominant State Shinto paradigm which is about the state rather than Shinto. It does so by retrieving Shinto as a problematic central to Meiji state formation wherein the government was constantly pressed by the question: was Shinto a religion or not?

The book organizes this narrative in five chapters covering the period from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 to the institutionalization of the grammar of religion in 1900. Chapter 1, “The Crisis of Conversion in Restoration Japan, 1868–1872,” traces the policy changes in the first few post-Restoration years from a state-initiated project of popular conversion, “the Great Promulgation Campaign,” for countering the threat of Christianity, to the realization on the part of the government that the very contingent nature of conversion subjected the imperial authority to relativization and therefore risked undermining the basis of the state itself. The solution was to separate the Great Promulgation Campaign from the performance of state rituals directed to the imperial ancestors so as to distinguish these divine spirits from any Christian doctrine. This early policy response “came from a sociopolitical imagination that could not initially imagine religion as a discreet sphere of human belief and activity” (p. 54). But this imagination does not indicate that Meiji Japan lagged behind the Western states in understanding and implementing the idea of religion.

This point of contemporaneity was well argued for in Chapter 2, “Religion and Diplomacy in a Semicolonial World, 1853–1873,” which convincingly demonstrates that “the Meiji leaders' struggle to come to terms with the definition and place of ‘religion’ within the nation-state they were striving to create was informed by similar shifts in Europe and the United States” (p. 91). These shifts concerned issues of religious freedom and its limits, conceptual relationship of Christianity with religion, the political and social function of religion, religion and civilization. The results of Japanese leaders' diplomatic engagements with the Western treaty powers were twofold: they came to share with the latter the same key principles concerning religious freedom and toleration as well as a common problematic—how would “religion” figure in centralizing nation-states? The final three chapters deal with the process of the Meiji government's engagement with this problematic.

Discussions and debates about “religion” in the Meiroku Journal, examined in the first part of Chapter 3 “Civilizing Faith and Subjectified Religion, 1872–1877,” foregrounded “the competing legal logics of religious toleration and religious freedom” with which intellectuals of the 1870s began to imagine the relations among individuals, the state, and religion (p. 102). These discussions partially informed the Buddhist Shimaji Mokurai's critique of the Ministry of Doctrine which was administering the Great Promulgation Campaign by promoting veneration of the Kami at the expense of Buddhism. Shimaji's critique articulated a “subjectified” definition of religion: on the one hand it refers to a private and subjective sphere of individual belief that was beyond the state's control, and on the other it presumes and responds to the power of the state, i.e. is subject to it (p. 129). A grammar of religion started to take shape following this “subjectified” definition.

Chapter 4, “Seeking a ‘Religious Settlement,’ 1877–1884,” then examines how the Meiji government set out to implement this subjectified definition of religion to mark out a realm of competing sectarian identities, loyalties, and practice, thereby “erecting a wall between private, sectarian concerns and the public domain of state authority” (p. 141). Confronted by an internecine debate among the Shinto priesthood which cast doubt on the supreme authority of the imperial ancestors, the government distinguished Shinto shrines as public ritual institutions from Shinto sects as private religions in 1882. When it subsequently abolished the Great Promulgation Campaign in 1884 and set out to recognize Christianity by legalizing private, i.e. Christian funerals, the Meiji state came close to a settlement of what the bureaucrat Inoue Kowashi had called the “Greatest Problem” of religion. The distinction of public ritualist Shinto shrines and religious Sect Shinto, however, did not come to be institutionalized until after the promulgation of the imperial constitution in 1889.

Chapter 5, “The Religious Constitution of Meiji Japan, 1888–1900,” traces out how this distinction came to gain lasting administrative shape in the wake of the parliamentary politics in the first Imperial Diet. This chapter retrieves the role of Buddhists and Shinto priests in their struggle to escape the constraining category of religion, which yielded different results. Buddhists' arguments for a favored position over Christianity were to no avail, whereas Shinto priests and their Diet sympathizers catalyzed the recognition of the definition of Shinto shrines as non-religious, state ritual institutions. This outcome was expressed in the branching out of the Bureau of Temples and Shrines into the Bureau of Shinto Shrines and the Bureau of Religions, the latter of which would administer Buddhism and Christianity, in the Home Ministry in 1900. For the author, this institutional change marked the eventual consolidation of the political grammar of the “subjectified” religion that enabled the Meiji state to assume a secular form while basing its legitimacy upon the mythic foundation of the imperial institution.

This short review cannot do justice to the sophisticated and detailed analysis developed in the book. It will make for informative reading not just for students of Japanese history; anyone who wants to read more about secularization and religion–state relations will find here a stimulating case study outside conventional Western-centered scholarship. The language of this book, however, is conceptually dense and can sometimes be challenging. This is not appropriate material to be assigned for undergraduate reading. Nevertheless, readers who are willing to chew over the difficult sentences will certainly find it an intellectual treat well worth the time and mental effort spent.