Introduction

“What is your religion?”

When asked this question, most Japanese people answer: “I don’t have one.” Statistically, roughly 70 to 80 percent of Japanese classify themselves as “non-religious” (mushūkyō).

Taken at face value, this would make Japan one of the most atheistic nations on earth.

But these same Japanese visit Shinto shrines on New Year’s Day, hold Buddhist funerals, and marry in Christian-style wedding chapels. Many households maintain both a Buddhist altar (butsudan) and a Shinto shelf (kamidana). They take their children to shrines for the shichi-go-san blessing, celebrate Christmas, and light welcoming fires during the Obon festival in the belief that the spirits of their ancestors return home.

Western observers, seeing this, sometimes conclude that the Japanese are “religiously lazy” or “unprincipled.” Or they interpret it as going through the motions without genuine faith.

This essay argues that both interpretations are wrong. The problem lies not in the Japanese attitude toward religion but in the concept of “religion” itself.

In the previous essay in this series, “The Ultimate Reality Is Order Itself,” I argued that the Western concept of God and the Japanese concept of kami are fundamentally different. This essay develops that argument and, for a broader readership, unpacks why the Japanese religious attitude cannot be understood within a Western framework.

1. “Religion” Did Not Exist in the Japanese Language

The first fact to establish is this: the Japanese word shūkyō (宗教, religion) is a modern translation term imported from the West.

Before the Meiji Restoration (1868), Japanese had no word that precisely corresponded to the English “religion.” Words like shūshi (denomination), shūmon (sect), hō (dharma/law), and oshie (teaching) existed, but each referred to a specific teaching or school. None functioned as an overarching concept encompassing belief, doctrine, practice, and community in the way “religion” does.

The scholar of religion Jason Ānanda Josephson demonstrated in The Invention of Religion in Japan (2012) that the very concept of “religion” was politically constructed during the Meiji government’s treaty negotiations with Western powers. For Japan to be recognized as a modern nation-state on equal footing with the West, it needed to guarantee “freedom of religion.” But to do that, it first had to define what “religion” was.

In this process of definition, Japanese religious practices were radically reclassified. Buddhism and Christianity were recognized as “religions.” Shinto, however, was placed outside the category of religion, redefined as “not a religion but the innate national morality of the Japanese people.” Folk practices — shamanism, the work of female mediums — were excluded as “superstition.” This classification was carried out using the Western concept of religion (an organized system of belief with doctrines) as its criterion, and did not reflect the actual landscape of Japanese religious life.

Here lies the fundamental problem. When Japanese people answer “I’m not religious,” what they are denying is this Meiji-era imported concept of “religion” — an exclusive commitment to a specific doctrinal system. What they are saying is: “I am not a Christian, I am not a Buddhist in the sectarian sense, I do not belong to a specific religious organization.” They are not saying: “I believe nothing transcendent exists.”

In fact, surveys by the NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute (2018) found that a majority of those who said they “do not believe in religion” simultaneously affirmed that “ancestral spirits exist,” “protective charms have power,” and “there is something sacred in nature.” The religious studies scholar Ama Toshimaro argued in Why Are the Japanese Non-Religious? (1996) that this condition should not be called “non-religious” but rather “natural religion.” What the Japanese are denying is “religion” (shūkyō), not faith.

2. The Western God and the Japanese Kami Are Not the Same Thing

This was discussed at length in the previous essay, but the key points bear repeating here because they are indispensable to this essay’s argument.

God in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) possesses the following attributes: singularity; being the creator of the universe; existing transcendently outside the universe; possessing personhood — having will, issuing commands, and being capable of responding to prayer; being the lawgiver of moral law; and demanding exclusive worship.

What is decisive in this structure is exclusivity. “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). This commandment means that believing in God and believing in other gods are incompatible. Faith in God demands the exclusion of all other faiths.

Given this premise of exclusivity, “having a religion” means “choosing one God and rejecting all others.” And “being non-religious” means “not making that choice — that is, not believing in God.” Western atheism is understood within this framework. Does God exist, or not? Do you believe, or not? It is a binary.

The Japanese kami does not fit this framework.

Kami are plural. As the expression yaoyorozu no kami (eight million gods) suggests, kami are inherently multiple. Kami are not the creators of the universe. Kami do not exist outside nature but exist as nature itself. A mountain is kami; a river is kami; thunder is kami; ancestors are kami. And crucially, kami do not demand exclusive worship. To revere one kami does not mean denying another.

Within this structure, the meaning of “having a religion” is entirely different from its meaning in the West. There is no need to choose one god. All kami can be equally acknowledged. And buddhas, too, can exist alongside kami. As I discussed in the previous essay, Japan maintained the system of shinbutsu shūgō (the syncretism of kami and buddhas) for over a thousand years, in which shrines and temples coexisted within the same religious ecosystem.

3. Not “Lazy” but “Non-Exclusive”

Here we return to the opening question.

That the Japanese visit a Shinto shrine on New Year’s, hold Buddhist funerals, and marry in Christian-style ceremonies: if one takes the Western definition of “religion” as a given, this is a contradiction. Three different religions practiced by a single person. Within the framework of the exclusive God, this can only be interpreted as either “having no faith” or “having no principles.”

But once one understands the structure of Japan’s religious tradition, there is no contradiction at all.

The New Year’s shrine visit (hatsumōde) is the act of greeting the local deity (ujigami) at the start of the year. A Buddhist funeral is the act of mourning the dead and sending them into the lineage of ancestors. A church wedding is the act of making a lifelong vow within an atmosphere of white solemnity. When the Japanese do all three, they are not wandering unprincipled between three “doctrinal systems.” They are selecting the ritual form appropriate to each different phase of life.

This attitude is possible because there is no exclusivity at its foundation. There is no premise that believing in one god forbids believing in another. The judgment “this form is fitting for this occasion” takes priority; the exclusive commitment “only this way is correct” is not required.

This is the core of what Ama Toshimaro called “natural religion.” The Japanese religious attitude appears “non-religious” in the sense that it lacks exclusive commitment to a doctrine. But in the sense that it finds sacredness in nature, mourns the dead, and performs rituals at the turning points of the seasons, it is deeply religious. These two descriptions contradict each other within the Western definition of “religion,” which presupposes the exclusive God. Within Japan’s religious tradition, they do not contradict at all.

4. The Invention of “Religion” and the Separation of Kami and Buddhas

Here, I add the historical background.

As discussed at length in the previous essay, the Meiji government issued the Shinbutsu bunri rei (Edict for the Separation of Kami and Buddhas) in 1868, forcibly dismantling the system of shinbutsu shūgō that had been maintained for over a thousand years. To establish State Shinto as the spiritual foundation of the emperor-centered nation-state, Shinto was redefined as “not a religion but national morality,” and Buddhism was purged from shrines.

This operation carried a double significance.

First, it artificially split into two what had been a single ecosystem of kami and buddhas. Second, in carrying out this split, it used as its criterion the concept of “religion” imported from the West. Adopting the definition that “religion” meant an organized system of belief with doctrines, it classified Buddhism and Christianity within that category, placed Shinto outside it as “not a religion,” and excluded folk beliefs as “superstition.”

As a result of this double operation, a fundamental distortion was introduced into the Japanese people’s religious self-perception. What they actually do — visiting shrines, placing their hands together before a Buddhist altar, feeling sacredness in nature — does not fit inside the definition of “religion.” Yet they do not believe in nothing. The result is the self-declaration “non-religious” (mushūkyō).

In other words, the proposition “the Japanese are non-religious” is not a description of fact. It is an expression of conceptual mismatch — the Meiji-era imported concept does not fit Japanese reality.

5. What Einstein Saw in Japan

In 1922, Albert Einstein visited Japan and lectured across the country over six weeks. His travel diary was published by Princeton University Press in 2018, edited by Ze’ev Rosenkranz (The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein).

In the diary, Einstein wrote of the Japanese:

“Pure souls as nowhere else among people. One has to love and admire this country.”

In a letter to his sons (December 17, 1922), he described the Japanese as “appealing to me better than all the peoples I’ve met up to now: quiet, modest, intelligent, appreciative of art, and considerate.”

These remarks could be filed away as a traveler’s favorable impressions of a foreign culture. But what deserves attention in this essay’s context is Einstein’s intellectual preoccupations at the time of his visit.

As discussed in the previous essay, Einstein rejected the personal God and found the ultimate reality in the order of natural laws itself, which he called “cosmic religious feeling.” In his 1930 essay “Religion and Science,” he wrote that Buddhism contains this cosmic religious feeling “more strongly”:

“Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.” (Einstein, “Religion and Science,” New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1930)

Einstein visited Japan in 1922; he published this essay in 1930. There is no firm evidence that the experience of visiting Japan directly led to this recognition. As Einstein himself stated, his understanding of Buddhism came through Schopenhauer’s writings.

However, a structural affinity can be identified. The personal God that Einstein rejected is precisely the Western God described in Section 2 of this essay: a being that transcends nature and demands exclusive worship. And the ultimate reality Einstein found in its place — awe before the order of natural laws itself — runs in the same direction as the attitude within Japan’s religious tradition of finding the sacred within nature.

The reasons Einstein felt an affinity for Japan cannot be reduced to a single factor. But the fact that the exclusive structure of the personal God he spent his life rejecting is largely absent from Japan’s religious tradition is, at the very least, one line of reference for understanding this affinity.

6. The Meaning of “Believe” Is Different

Let me organize this essay’s argument.

In the West, “to have faith” (to believe) means to accept a specific doctrinal system as true and to commit to it exclusively. The question “What do you believe?” is equivalent to the question “Which God have you chosen?”

The Japanese religious attitude does not require “believing” in this sense. When a Japanese person visits a shrine, they are not “believing that Shinto doctrine is true.” In fact, Shinto has no scripture — no equivalent of the Bible or the Quran. There is no doctrinal system to “believe in” in the first place. The act of visiting a shrine is not intellectual assent to doctrine but is grounded in a bodily, seasonal sense that it is fitting to greet the local deity at the start of the year. When they place their hands together before a Buddhist altar, they are not intellectually affirming the doctrinal system of Buddhism. They feel it is natural as an act of maintaining connection with a deceased family member.

To call this attitude “lacking faith” is a judgment made from the position that only exclusive commitment counts as “faith.” It is not a universal description of fact.

The same point applies in reverse. A Western Christian who attends church every week, reads the Bible, and prays to God may strike a Japanese person as oddly devoted to a single thing. This, too, is a natural reaction when a non-exclusive religious attitude encounters an exclusive one. It is not a question of which is right.

7. Conclusion: Answering a Western Question in Western Words

The judgment that “the Japanese are religiously lazy” is a misunderstanding produced by applying the Western definition of “religion” as-is. Stated precisely: the Japanese are indeed not committed to “religion” in the Western sense. But that is because Japan’s religious tradition does not presuppose exclusivity, not because faith does not exist.

The Japanese religious attitude appears “non-religious” if one measures by exclusive commitment to doctrine. It appears deeply religious if one measures by ritual practice and the sense of sacredness in nature. Which is correct depends on which standard one adopts. And as long as the word “religion” tacitly presupposes exclusive commitment, the Japanese will forever remain “non-religious.” But that “non-religious” is something entirely different from the Western atheist’s declaration that “God does not exist.”

Throughout this series, I have examined the problem of recognition structures as they appear within a single martial art: kyudo. Kyudo defines itself as a “clean way” and banishes killing to its exterior. This structure is isomorphic with the Meiji-era separation of kami and buddhas, and, tracing it further back, isomorphic with the conceptual mismatch produced when the Western concept of “religion” was applied to Japan.

To separate what was originally inseparable, and to redefine that separation as “the original state.” The separation of kami and buddhas; the separation of the bow and killing; and the separation of “religious” and “non-religious.” All of these are operations with the same structure, produced in the process of Japan’s adoption of Western conceptual frameworks from the Meiji era onward.

The Japanese are not non-religious. The Japanese are religious in a way that the Western concept of “religion” cannot capture.

And kyudo is one of the places where this conceptual re-importation from the West can be observed most vividly. Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery translated the practice of the bow into the vocabulary of German mysticism; that translation was received in the West; and it was re-imported into Japan as the equation “kyudo = Zen = spiritual cultivation.” The operation of redefining Japan through Western concepts happened concretely, through a single book. In the next essay, I examine this structure of re-importation and ask again why kyudo is the outlier among Japanese martial arts.

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References

• Josephson, J. Å. (2012). The Invention of Religion in Japan. University of Chicago Press.
• Ama, T. (1996). Nihonjin wa naze mushūkyō na no ka [Why Are the Japanese Non-Religious?]. Chikuma Shinsho. (English translation: Ama, T. (2005). Why Are the Japanese Non-Religious? University Press of America.)
• Einstein, A. (1930). “Religion and Science.” New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1930. (Reprinted in Ideas and Opinions, 1954.)
• Einstein, A. (1922–1923). The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine, and Spain, 1922–1923. Edited by Ze’ev Rosenkranz. Princeton University Press, 2018.
• Reader, I. & Tanabe, G. J. (1998). Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan. University of Hawai’i Press.
• Kuroda, T. (1981). “Shinto in the History of Japanese Religion.” Journal of Japanese Studies 7(1), 1–21.
• Teeuwen, M. & Rambelli, F. (eds.) (2003). Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm. RoutledgeCurzon.
• NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute (2019). The 10th Survey on Japanese Attitudes. NHK Publishing.

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This essay is the fourth in a series following “Kyudo Is the Outlier of Martial Arts,” “The Illusion of Pure Kyudo, Born of Willful Blindness,” and “The Ultimate Reality Is Order Itself,” and attempts to unpack the structure of Japan’s religious tradition for a Western readership.