Concept of ‘modern new religion’

In this chapter I discuss the ways in which globalization and information processes have affected religious activities in Japan from two perspectives. Firstly, the response of modern new religions to globalization and information processes, and secondly the appearance of new types of religious groups that have formed on the basis of globalization and the information age.

I explain the concept of ‘modern new religion’ and the reason why I use this term instead of ‘new religion’, which is the term most commonly used to indicate new movements in modern Japan. I apply the term ‘modern new religion’ to new movements that have the following two characteristics: a deep connection with Japanese traditional religions in terms of ritual and teachings which were widely accepted in society before the modernization of Japan, and a new method of organization to correspond to social changes caused by the modernization process. Tenrikyō, Reiyūkai, Sōka Gakkai, Risshō Kōseikai, Sekai Kyūsei Kyō are typical examples of modern new religions. In fact, most groups usually referred to as ‘new religions’ are included in the category ‘modern new religion’.

One of the reasons I am advancing this idea is that some scholars of new religions have the view that a new type of new religion has appeared since the 1970s, and since the 1980s these have been called ‘new new religions’, ‘neo new religions’, and other similar terms (Inoue 1997).

Introduction

This chapter presents a case study of the emergence in Europe of a network of local branches of one of Japan's major Buddhist sects, Jōdo Shinshū (also known as Shin Buddhism). Jōdo Shinshū is one of the largest Buddhist sects in Japan, dating back to the 13th century. There are nearly 20,000 temples in Japan affiliated to one of the two major branches of the sect: Hongwanji-ha and Ōtani-ha (also known as Nishi Hongwanji or Honpa Hongwanji, and Higashi Honganji), both of which have their head temples in Kyoto, and are headed by descendants of Shinran, the founder of Jōdo Shinshū. There is no difference between the teachings of Nishi and Higashi Honganji – the split between the two derives from a succession dispute in the late 16th century. Hongwanji-ha is the larger of the two, and the branch with which this chapter is primarily concerned.

A form of Pure Land Buddhism, Jōdo Shinshū can be more broadly situated within Mahayana Buddhism. Its central teaching is reliance on Amida Buddha. The movement teaches that we are all embraced by Amida's primal vow, which assures rebirth in Amida's Pure Land. Rather than advocating a particular practice therefore, Jōdo Shinshū teaches that we can simply rely on, or entrust ourselves to, Amida Buddha. The aim of Jōdo Shinshū could be summarized as awakening to the power of Amida's vow, and reaching a state of entrusting oneself to Amida, commonly referred to in Japanese as shinjin.

The purpose of this research is to examine the nature of management in religious organizations from the perspective of their diversified strategies in response to globalization. For illustrative case material, I will focus on the Unification Church (UC) and its global mission strategies. By diversifying its businesses into the political and economic domains, the UC succeeded in forging connections with those governments that offer political support for religious activities. Furthermore, they developed country-specific mission strategies, performing as a star entrepreneur in Korea, playing the role of troublemaker in the United States, and exploiting Japan as a money tree. As a result, the UC in Japan engaged in illegal missionary work and fund-raising activities for more than 30 years, which developed into a big social issue in Japan. This pattern in the evolution and organizational development of the UC suggests that the organization may be better understood when viewed as a conglomerate religious movement, rather than through the theories of congregational development advocated by researchers such as David O. Moberg and Kiyomi Morioka. The biggest contributing factors to the UC's growth are that it compensated for its lack of religious competitiveness with a strategy of business diversification in the political and economic arenas, and it established a global operational presence.

Introduction

There are two reasons to focus on the UC as a case study. The first reason is that the UC is considered to be an excellent subject of study to examine the globalization and management of religious organizations: it takes the façade of a religious organization expanding into multi-national corporate activities, or is a multi-national enterprise with a religious component.

The idea for this book emerged from discussions between Nakamaki and Smith, both anthropologists who have done ethnographic studies of large corporations. Since 1988 Nakamaki has studied corporate rituals such as Japanese company funerals and company tombs (2002). Smith (1994) has studied a Japanese multinational operating in Malaysia. Equally, both have researched Asian new religious movements (NRMs) in depth: Nakamaki has studied the operations of Japanese NRMs in Latin America (2003) and Smith, the headquarters and local centres of a Japanese (2007) and an Indian NRM (Ramsay and Smith, 2008) in Australia and Southeast Asia. From these research experiences, they decided it would be worthwhile to examine the organizational aspects of Asian NRMs. They wished to explore the ways in which their systems of management allow Asian NRMs to meet the same operational challenges faced by multinational corporations (MNCs), while functioning in a global context across memberships with vast cultural diversity. Furthermore, they considered that it would be equally valuable to investigate how NRMs ‘marketed’ themselves, in the sense that they could attract followers in diverse cultural contexts.

Out of these discussions grew an international symposium on ‘Management and Marketing of Globalizing Asian Religions’ at the National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka, Japan, in August 2009. Later, two more anthropologists were co-opted as editors: Louella Matsunaga, who studied the now bankrupt supermarket chain Yaohan, which had endeavoured to become a multinational Japanese company and which was closely and publicly linked with a Japanese NRM, Seichō-no-Ie (Matsunaga 2000, 2008); and Tamasin Ramsay, whose in-depth, longitudinal ethnography of the Brahma Kumaris (2009) and current historical and social inquiry into the organization, has included a posting as their NGO representative to the United Nations (New York).

The ‘Management and Marketing of Globalizing Asian Religions’ conference was jointly funded by the National Museum of Ethnography (Minpaku), in Osaka, Japan, and the Interntional Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), in Leiden, the Netherlands, and organized by Nakamaki in 2009 at his home institution, Minpaku. Significantly, this institution, the National Museum of Ethnology, was inspired by a very early ethnological museum in Japan, the Tenri Sankōkan Museum, which was set up in 1930, in Tenri City, Nara Prefecture, by the earliest global Japanese NRM, Tenrikyō, (founded 1838) to aid missionary activity outside Japan.

Introduction

This chapter will discuss aspects of management and marketing within the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University (BKWSU), an Indian globalized new religious movement (NRM) established in 1936 in pre-Partition Hyderabad (now in the Sindh province of Pakistan). The founder, Lekhraj Kripalani, a middle-aged, pious and wealthy jewellery merchant received dramatic yet contrasting visions of the supreme beauty of paradise and the destruction of the present world. He subsequently sold his half of the lucrative business and created a meditative community, initially called Om Mandli. He handed over his wealth and management of the community to a small group of young women followers, thus initiating a revolutionary spiritual path for women in the context of Hindu society (Ramsay 2017).

Students of the community call themselves BKs (Brahma Kumaris1) and, as part of their lifestyle of brahmacharya [seeking God realization through a virtuous life], practise celibacy and consume a ‘sattvic’ [‘pure’] lacto-vegetarian diet. These disciplines mirror Hindu Brahmin tradition, embodying a revolution in social identity within the dominant Hindu culture, as members are termed ‘Brahmins’ regardless of their caste origins. Despite its close adherence to the most ascetic forms of Indian religious practice, in the early 1970s the movement spread to Europe and Asia.

Introduction

Tenrikyō was founded in 1838 in a farming village in Yamato Province (currently Nara Prefecture) and expanded its religious activities even after Miki Nakayama, the Foundress of Tenrikyō, withdrew from physical life in 1887. After about 50 years, the number of its adherents reached three million. Tenrikyō attained government recognition of its sectarian independence from the Shinto Honkyoku in 1908 after it had institutionalized into a religious organization with numerous branch churches. In ten years, the number of branch churches increased rapidly and reached approximately 1300 in Japan. In Japan and abroad, Tenrikyō altogether has approximately 16,000 branch churches at present and is viewed as a representative Japanese new religion in terms of its scale and historical importance.

Tenrikyō's global expansion has led to the establishment of overseas bases in Asia, Europe, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Its first overseas post, the Kankoku Fukyō Kanrisho (Tenrikyō Mission Administration Office in Korea) was established in the year it attained sectarian independence, and was renamed the Chōsen Fukyō Kanrisho the year after Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910. It is possible to interpret that Tenrikyō's overseas expansion occurred as a result of the historical context of the Japanese government's colonial occupation of Asian countries, for Tenrikyō's next overseas missions were established in Taiwan and the South Pacific

In the non-Western world, the contemporary revitalization and expansion of Pentecostalism, a movement within Christianity that stresses a believer's personal encounter with God through the Holy Spirit, is an unprecedented phenomenon. This development is of particular interest because Pentecostalism itself is not a ‘new’ religion. While its formal origins are generally traced to revival meetings held in Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906, antecedents can be found in Christian renewal movements in the late nineteenth century. The name is derived from the Greek Pentekostas [50], which in Jewish tradition refers to the ritual held seven weeks after Passover. The Pentecostal movement takes its inspiration from the biblical description of events on the Day of Pentecost that followed the death and resurrection of Christ as described in Acts 2. A group of disciples were gathered together for prayer when the sound of a mighty wind engulfed the entire house. ‘And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance’. The conviction that the Holy Spirit can once more descend in all its power is thus central to Pentecostal theology.

The multi-directional face of modern globalization

Globalization is envisioned here as multi-directional. For some time now globalization in its various forms, including its economic, cultural and religious forms (Clarke 2000), has been moving in all directions perhaps most noticeably from East to West, rather than from the West to the rest of the world, as was once largely the case. Some have argued this is profoundly modifying the ethos and worldview of the latter (Campbell 1999) and, it may be added, the way we think of and define religion.

Moreover, in the contemporary world the boundaries of religions, notwithstanding the attempts made by their officials and spokespersons in the past decade to police them more efficiently, are noticeably much more porous than was the case only 50 years ago. This change is due as much as anything else to the developments in information technology and communications, large scale economic migration and the new forms of religious pluralism that have emerged as a result of these developments. Thus, although the labels Western/Occidental and Eastern/Oriental, or African or Middle Eastern are still sometimes applied to religions, these labels are becoming increasingly obsolete.

The model of habitat segregation

Hawaii is the first place where Japanese religions started their overseas missions. At first, priests from the home prefecture of emigrants carried out their missionary work sponsored by the immigrants. Then, Japanese religious organizations themselves supported missionaries who they sent from Japan to strategically expand their overseas activities. In those days, Japanese emigrants in Hawaii faced many hardships in working on the sugar-cane plantations. Each plantation community built its own Buddhist temple (which came to resemble a Buddhist ‘church’) or else a Christian church (see below). Compared to Buddhist temples, there were fewer Shinto shrines built. Shamans and mediums from a Japanese cultural base also started their activities. New religions such as Tenrikyō and Konkō Kyō also commenced their diffusion to Hawaii. In the Japanese diaspora communities, however, it was Jōdo Shinshū and Protestantism which struggled for supremacy. There was severe competition between the leader of Honpa Hongwanji, Emyo Imamura, and that of the Makiki Holy Castle Church, now called Makiki Christian Church, particularly through the establishment of Japanese language schools. A strike involving employees of sugar-cane plantations brought them into conflict, though the two leaders addressed the workers together to persuade the Japanese to return to work (Hunter 1971: 66, 87, 92).

The main basis of this conflict was the differing orientation of Japanese community members; towards America or towards their homeland (Nakamaki 1978: 20-22).

This chapter focuses on the rise and fall of a Malaysian Islamic movement, Arqam, and in doing so, contributes three unusual perspectives: Islamic movements in Asia, (in this case, one of revitalization of a traditional religion), a global religious movement originating from a developing economy, Malaysia, and finally a case of failure.

A cursory browsing of digital and paper-based material on Asian globalized religious movements reveals the fact that the successful examples, especially new religious movements (NRMs), are overwhelmingly from Japan. Their success is often explained with reference to their style of organization which is highly corporate in nature and is measured, along with membership size, by their global reach made possible by good management, leadership, and a compact internal bureaucracy. Some well-known Japan specialists – local and foreign – have noted the parallels between Japanese multinational corporations (MNCs) and the Japanese NRMs (Matsunaga 2000; Nakamaki 1991, 2003; Smith 2008), which began to expand their international push around the same time, in the 1970s. Hence an epistemological focus on organization theory is now emerging more strongly in studies of NRMs to explain their success, as indeed was revealed in the case of Japanese NRMs. However, the task of accumulating sufficient and relevant ethnographic detail on organizational structures of each of the NRMs is not an easy one, especially if questions are asked about accounting and finance systems.

Japanese Buddhist denominations launched their foreign propagation [kaikyō] programmes [opening the (Buddhist) teachings] in the late nineteenth century, and Japanese priests subsequently crossed the Pacific to Hawaii and mainland United States to conduct kaikyō. The word kaikyō was coined in the Meiji period (1868-1912) to describe the spreading of the teachings of Buddhism to non-Buddhist local residents in a foreign country. Early on, one critical view actually held that the word should be tsuikyō [teachings following (immigrants)] because the priests were following the Japanese immigrants (Kojima and Kiba 1992). The latter term denotes the clear contrast between this propagation of Buddhism by Japanese Buddhist denominations and the enthusiastic proselytization by Christians missionaries which had converted a significant number of non-Christians in Asia and Africa. One kaikyōshi [missionary priest] who had served in pre-war North America for eighteen years admitted that he had conducted mainly traditional propagation to Buddhist immigrants from Japan, while maintaining his desire to disseminate something more than just the ‘extension of Japanese Buddhism’ or ‘religion affiliated with immigrants’ (Uchida 1930: 20). This statement reflects the situation at that time, in which the Buddhist missionaries actually preached mostly among the Japanese immigrants, although a proportion of priests held out the ideal of spreading Buddhism to the local people in the New World in the manner of the Christian missionaries.