Religion and Psychotherapy in Modern Japan

Religion and Psychotherapy in Modern Japan

Language: English

Pages: 321

ISBN: 1138628999

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Since the late nineteenth century, religious ideas and practices in Japan have become increasingly intertwined with those associated with mental health and healing. This relationship developed against the backdrop of a far broader, and deeply consequential meeting: between Japan’s long-standing, Chinese-influenced intellectual and institutional forms, and the politics, science, philosophy, and religion of the post-Enlightenment West. In striving to craft a modern society and culture that could exist on terms with – rather than be subsumed by – western power and influence, Japan became home to a religion--psy dialogue informed by pressing political priorities and rapidly shifting cultural concerns.

This book provides a historically contextualized introduction to the dialogue between religion and psychotherapy in modern Japan. In doing so, it draws out connections between developments in medicine, government policy, Japanese religion and spirituality, social and cultural criticism, regional dynamics, and gender relations. The chapters all focus on the meeting and intermingling of religious with psychotherapeutic ideas and draw on a wide range of case studies including: how temple and shrine ‘cures’ of early modern Japan fared in the light of German neuropsychiatry; how Japanese Buddhist theories of mind, body, and self-cultivation negotiated with the findings of western medicine; how Buddhists, Christians, and other organizations and groups drew and redrew the lines between religious praxis and psychological healing; how major European therapies such as Freud’s fed into self-consciously Japanese analyses of and treatments for the ills of the age; and how distress, suffering, and individuality came to be reinterpreted across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from the southern islands of Okinawa to the devastated northern neighbourhoods of the Tohoku region after the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters of March 2011.

Religion and Psychotherapy in Modern Japan will be welcomed by students and scholars working across a broad range of subjects, including Japanese culture and society, religious studies, psychology and psychotherapy, mental health, and international history.

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is evident that nephesh is undeniably appropriate as a reference to the soul that underpins one’s love for one’s neighbours, as an ethical proposition. However, we should take care to note that in the Old Testament this is unconnected to the Greek idea of emphasizing the soul while holding the flesh in contempt, with one separated from the other. The Old Testament hints not at a soul residing in the body. Rather, the soul expresses itself through the body and signifies the entirety of human

1998). Okinawa Historical Document Compilation Office. Shuri ōfu Shioki (Ryukyu Kingdom government Criminal Rules), (Okinawa Prefecture Historic Document – Pre-modern times 1) (Okinawa Board of Education, 1981). Okinawa ni miru ‘no no counselor’ – Gendai Iryō to Minzoku Iryō (Counselor in the Field in Okinawa – Contemporary Medicine and Folk Medicine), video program. Nakamura Eitoku and Ohashi Hideshi (supervising editors), Ogawa Sumiko (responsible editor), Video Pack Nippon (production

at Tohoku University, which opened in April 2012, aims to help in this regard. What can chaplains usefully do? What is religious care, under these circumstances? As illustrated in Psychological First Aid: Field Operations Guide, the distribution of prayer beads and mortuary tablets is a form of grief care that may help victims to come to terms with their losses. Palm-size Jizō may function as a physical symbol of the dead, and as such function as an aid to grief care. In addition, the life

Tokyo, under the German doctor Erwin Baelz from 1879 and the German-trained Kure Shūzō after 1901, a professional psychiatric paradigm was established across Japan rooted in the categories and research focus of Kraepelinian neuropsychi atry. Japan’s second major piece of mental health legislation of the pre-war era was directly influenced by this new medical and psychiatric expertise: the Mental Hospitals Act of 1919 was in part the result of successful lobbying by Kure and others for ‘lunacy’ to

the universe. When we enter this state, we can work wonders. ‘There are neither esoteric ways nor secrets. We just need to be single-minded, maintain concentration, and be intent on one thing. There is no other way.’64 Although Kuwabara seemed to borrow some of his basic ideas from Kondō Yoshizo’s theories on magic, the pan-psychism of Kuroiwa’s Ten-nin Ron, and possibly also Inoue Tetsujiro’s theory of the large ego,65 he helped him to develop these into a unique psychology or cosmology,

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