Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan. By Jolyon Baraka Thomas

Abstract

In <i>Faking Liberties</i>, Jolyon Thomas subjects a pervasive idea that in 1945 American religion brought freedom to a religious despot Japanese state to careful critique. During an intense period of teaching both Japanese and religious studies during his Ph.D. tenure, Thomas explains that he began to engage in the discourse of religious freedom in Japan. Arriving to live in Japan in the post-2001 global environment in which religious movements and religiosity were coming under question, his interest in the situation in post-war Japan was piqued. The U.S. occupation characterized the militarist and expansionist Japanese state of the Pacific War, he writes, as solely and absolutely founded on an “emperor-centric state religion,” designated as “State-Shinto.” Thomas examines lazy “orientalist” arguments which demonized and “othered” all things “Shinto,” and aims to “decolonize” the U.S. discourse of the time, which presumed Christianity would function as a “medicine” for the Japanese masses and as a precursor to democracy.