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

October 28, 2026 by Ken Chitwood

Continued from Page 2

The answer depends, in part, on what we mean by religion.

This is why the Japanese case is so useful. It does not demonstrate that Japanese people are “secretly religious,” nor that Japan is somehow an unusually secular country. Both conclusions impose our categories on someone else's experience.

Instead, Japan shows how religion can be lived through habit, place, family, aesthetics, memory, bodily practice and seasonal rhythms without necessarily being experienced as membership in a particular tradition.

It also shows that secularism is not simply what remains after religion disappears.

The categories of religion and the secular developed together, as the modern Japanese state had reasons to classify some practices as religion, others as superstition and still others as national custom. Those classifications were not neutral, as they helped determine what could be tolerated, regulated, marginalized or celebrated.

Japan can therefore look intensely religious to a visitor while appearing remarkably secular in a survey.

And both observations can be true at the same time.

For the astute student of religion, this is perhaps what Japan can teach us. Before we ask how religious a society is, we should first consider what its people are being asked to count as “religion” in the first place.

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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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