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Japan Didn’t Just Import ‘Religion.’ It Reinvented It

October 28, 2026 by Ken Chitwood

Continued from Page 1

Islam is increasingly part of the country’s religious landscape as well. Japan's Muslim population has grown substantially over the past several decades, driven largely by migration for work, study and family formation. A 2025 estimate by Waseda University professor emeritus Hirofumi Tanada put the number of Muslims living in Japan at roughly 420,000 at the end of 2024, including an estimated 55,000 Japanese Muslims. There are now more than 160 mosques across the country and an increasing infrastructure catering to culinary, sartorial and other daily needs.

More religion than people

So, Japan is not simply a country of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples.

But this is not the religious marketplace familiar to those who live in the United States, where choosing a religion can imply choosing one tradition over another. Nor does it necessarily correspond to the European assumption that religious belief is primarily a matter of private conviction.

A person might say, “I don't have a religion,” while visiting a shrine, participating in an ancestral memorial, making an offering or observing a seasonal ritual. That does not necessarily mean the person is secretly religious. It may mean that “religion” is simply not the category through which these activities are understood.

A 2016 study by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs makes the point almost comically well. In its survey, it counted more religious adherents than there were people in Japan.

The reason is not that Japanese demographers discovered a hidden population. It is that religious organizations count their members according to different criteria, and people may participate in both Buddhist and Shinto institutions.

Did Japan invent “religion?”

The problem is, in other words, not merely counting religion, but defining it in the first place.

In his remarkable book The Invention of Religion in Japan, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm makes the provocative argument that the problem is not simply that Westerners misunderstood Japanese religion upon their arrival in the nineteenth century.

Instead, he suggests the category of “religion” itself was constructed in Japan through encounters with colonial powers.

Before the arrival of American warships in 1853, there was no straightforward Japanese equivalent of the concept “religion.” Japan certainly had temples, shrines, priests, rituals, cosmologies, sacred texts, spirits, pilgrimages and systems of ethical and ritual practice. What was missing was the idea that these diverse phenomena belonged together as something called “religion” as a distinct sphere of life.

That distinction became increasingly important as Japan confronted foriegn powers, however.

American and European governments demanded, among other things, religious freedom and the protection of Christianity. Japanese officials therefore had to determine what counted as a “religion” and what did not. In doing so, they did not merely import a Western category. They instead adapted and reconstructed it for their own purposes.

Some forms of Buddhism could be classified as religions. Christianity could be recognized as religion. But Shinto was treated differently. Rather than being classified as another religion alongside Buddhism and Christianity, it was presented as a national tradition, a civic ideology and an expression of simply being Japanese.

At the same time, practices associated with shamans, mediums and local traditions were relegated to the category of “superstition.”

Josephson Storm's main point is that “religion,” “secular” and “superstition” did not simply exist as universal boxes waiting for Japan to place its traditions inside. They were boxes constructed for the purpose of categorizing a wide range of phenomena.

Secular ≠ absence of religion

This process matters beyond Japan, too.

Modern societies the world over often imagine a spectrum where on one side you have “religion” with its beliefs, rituals, sacred places, deities, priests and institutions. On the other is the “secular,” with a focus on ordinary life, politics, science, culture and the absence of formal religious trappings or institutions.

But the reality in Japan makes that division difficult to sustain.

Consider the shrine visited on New Year's Day. Is that religion? What about a family memorial ritual? A pilgrimage to Shibuya Crossing? A jizō statue beside a road or at the entrance to a boat dock? A blessing for a new building or a bullet train? A visit to a temple primarily because it is beautiful? A Japanese person who says they have no religion but still observes these practices?

Article Continued On Next Page

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10/28/2026 1:59:21 AM

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About Ken Chitwood

Ken Chitwood is a religion nerd, writer and scholar of global Islam and American religion based in Germany. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Salon, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Religion News Service, Christianity Today, and numerous other publications. He is the author of The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean. Follow Ken on Twitter @kchitwood.

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