This presentation examines the interaction between Okinawa’s indigenous religion and mainland shrine Shinto and practices of kami worship in the prewar period. It begins by tracing the history of shrine Shinto in prewar Okinawa in broad strokes, which may be described as a slow, but distinct, evident, and visual spread of mainland kami worship practices and shrines that were intimately linked to the Japanese state and nationalism. However, shrine Shinto’s presence in Okinawa was always-already caught up in a complex encounter with the prefecture’s indigenous religion, where contestations to delineate the relationship between them was a way that negotiations between national-Japanese and local-Okinawan identity played out. Importantly, those negotiations transpired in ways that unsettle commonplace understandings of and assumptions about the Japanese state’s rule of Okinawa, the role that Okinawans played in that process, and the power relations between the Japanese mainland and Okinawan periphery. This presentation will discuss two elements that demonstrate the complexity of that encounter: how local Okinawan intellectuals and communities actively wrote Okinawa’s indigenous religion into the world of shrine Shinto, as well as how shrine Shinto served as a means through which Okinawan communities pursued local agendas that were unrelated to the concerns of the mainland Shinto establishment and Japanese state.
- Date & Time: July 9 (Mon.), 2018, 18:15-19:45
- Venue: Room 960, Bldg.#14, Waseda Campus, Waseda University
- Lecturer: Tze M. Loo, Associate Professor of History, University of Richmond
- Title: Okinawa’s shrine problem: Reconfigurations of Okinawa’s religious landscape, 1879-1945
- Coordinators: Naoyuki UMEMORI (Professor, Faculty of Political Science and Economics); Yoshihiro NAKANO (Junior Researcher, ORIS)
- Language: English
- Open to: Students, faculty, staff and the general public
- Admission: Free
