List of Figures Acknowledgements Note on Text/Translation Introduction 1: Resurrecting the Great Lord of the Land, 1653-1667 2: The Month without the Gods, 1600-1871 3: True Pillar of the Soul, 1792-1846 4: Converting Japan, 1825-1875 5: Competing Ways of the Gods, 1872-1889 Conclusion The Izumo Gods, Nation, and Empire Notes Bibliography Index
Questions basic assumptions about the formation of Shintoism, overturning its long-assumed relationship with Japanese nationalist ideology, and reconstructs the history of Shintoism.
Yijiang Zhong is Associate Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo, Japan and a Research Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Monotheistic Religions at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan.
Zhong’s book maintains a refreshingly wide gaze, focusing
simultaneously on local, transregional, and transcultural flows
that, by his argument, all impacted the internal developments of
the Izumo Shrine and its shifting position within the nascent
intellectual and political fields of early modern and modern Japan.
Such a dynamic framework is new, and its expanding scope is
yielding exciting results.
*American Historical Review*
Zhong moves away from the traditional understanding of Shinto
history as something completely internal to the nation of Japan,
and instead situates the formation of Shinto within a larger
geopolitical context involving intellectual and political
developments in the East Asian region and the role of western
colonial expansion.
*Reading Religion*
Fills a prominent hole in the existing literature by addressing the
early modern and modern history of Izumo Shrine and its deity …
Zhong’s volume is timely, well researched, and focused … An
important contribution to our understanding of Shinto in the Edo-
and early-Meiji periods.
*Japanese Journal of Religious Studies*
This volume contains a collection of insightful materials for those
scholars, students, and practitioners who are in Japanese studies,
or the fields of history, philosophy, ethnology, cultural studies,
sociology, anthropology, and religious studies.
*Journal of Religion in Japan*
This book presents a stimulating case study of the interdependent
relationship between the secular and the religious. Yijiang Zhong
convincingly argues that the establishment of the public and
secular Japanese nation-state was possible only by consigning some
Shinto schools to the private, religious sphere. Highly recommended
for anyone interested in Shinto and Japanese history as well as
critical study of religion and secularization.
*Jun'ichi Isomae, Professor, International Research Center for
Japanese Studies, Japan*
With this rich, nuanced, carefully researched and deeply thoughtful
work, the sophistication and maturation of Shinto studies
continues. Too long over-looked, Izumo, its grand shrine, and
complex tradition, are illuminated by Zhong in ways that nothing
else in English gets close to. A tour de force, this work sets new
standards for works in Japanese religion and thought.
*James E. Ketelaar, Professor of Japanese History, East Asian
Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, USA*
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