{"id":3576,"date":"2018-06-22T13:00:04","date_gmt":"2018-06-22T04:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/sgu\/?p=3576"},"modified":"2018-06-22T14:03:08","modified_gmt":"2018-06-22T05:03:08","slug":"workshop-okinawas-shrine-problem-reconfigurations-of-okinawas-religious-landscape-1879-1945-79","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/sgu\/news-through-2023\/2018\/06\/22\/3576\/","title":{"rendered":"[Workshop] Okinawa’s shrine problem: Reconfigurations of Okinawa’s religious landscape, 1879-1945 (7\/9)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This presentation examines the interaction between Okinawa\u2019s 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\u2019s presence in Okinawa was always-already caught up in a complex encounter with the prefecture\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n