Books by Justin B. Stein
In the second half of the twentieth century, Reiki went from an obscure therapy practiced by a fe... more In the second half of the twentieth century, Reiki went from an obscure therapy practiced by a few thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans to a global phenomenon. By the early twenty-first century, people in nearly every corner of the world have undergone the initiations that authorize them to channel a cosmic energy—known as Reiki—to heal body, mind, and spirit. They lay hands on themselves and others, use secret symbols and incantations to send Reiki to distant recipients, and strive to follow five precepts to cultivate their spiritual growth. Reiki’s international rise and development is due to the work of Hawayo Takata (1900–1980), a Hawai‘i-born Japanese American woman who brought Reiki out of Japan and adapted it for thousands of students in Hawai‘i and North America, shaping interconnections across the North Pacific region as well as cultural transformations over the transwar period spanning World War II.
Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific analyzes how, from her training in Japan in the mid-1930s to her death in Iowa in 1980, Takata built a vast trans-Pacific network that connected Japanese American laborers on Hawai‘i plantations to social elites in Tokyo, Hollywood, and New York; middle-class housewives in American suburbs; and off-the-grid tree planters in the mountains of British Columbia. Using recently uncovered archival materials and original oral histories, this book examines how these relationships between healer and patient, master and disciple, became deeply infused with values of their time and place and how they interplayed with Reiki’s circulation, performance, and meanings along with broader cultural shifts in the twentieth-century North Pacific. Highly readable and informative, each chapter is structured around a period in the life of Takata, the charismatic, rags-to-riches architect of the network in which Reiki spread for decades. Alternate Currents explores Reiki as an exemplary transnational spiritual therapy, demonstrating how lived practices transcend artificial distinctions between religion and medicine, and circulate in global systems while maintaining strong connections with the practices’ homeland.
Edited Volumes by Justin B. Stein
The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health, 2022
The relationships between religion, spirituality, health, biomedical institutions, complementary,... more The relationships between religion, spirituality, health, biomedical institutions, complementary, and alternative healing systems are widely discussed today. While many of these debates revolve around the biomedical legitimacy of religious modes of healing, the market for them continues to grow. The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty-five chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into five parts:
- Healing practices with religious roots and frames
- Religious actors in and around the medical field
- Organizing infrastructures of religion and medicine: pluralism and competition
- Boundary-making between religion and medicine
- Religion and epidemics
Within these sections, central issues, debates and problems are examined, including health and healing, religiosity, spirituality, biomedicine, medicalization, complementary medicine, medical therapy, efficacy, agency, and the nexus of body, mind, and spirit.
The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as sociology, anthropology, and medicine.
Journal Special Issues by Justin B. Stein
Japanese Religions vol.44, 2021
Encyclopedia Entries by Justin B. Stein
Co-authored with Robert C. Fuller. In in Bioethics, 4th Edition, Vol. 1, edited by Bruce Jennings... more Co-authored with Robert C. Fuller. In in Bioethics, 4th Edition, Vol. 1, edited by Bruce Jennings (Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2014), 163-172.
Papers by Justin B. Stein
Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies, 2024
The Japanese term ki 氣/気 (Chinese qì) is a fundamental concept in East Asian religions, medicine,... more The Japanese term ki 氣/気 (Chinese qì) is a fundamental concept in East Asian religions, medicine, and martial arts. In Euro-American settings, the dominant way to understand ki is in terms of vital energy or life force. However, when the martial art aikido (aikidō 合氣道) was introduced to the United States following World War II, ki was not explained in terms of “energy,” but rather as “mind” or “spirit.” This article examines the transnational development of ki discourse in aikido from pre-war Japan to the post-war United States, including its entanglement with religion and state power. It also compares aikido’s development and circulation in the North Pacific with that of the healing practice of Reiki 靈氣/レイキ.
Japanese Religions, 2023
Reiki レイキ has become a common practice in Japan’s spiritual therapy subculture. However, at the t... more Reiki レイキ has become a common practice in Japan’s spiritual therapy subculture. However, at the time it was originally developed in 1920s Japan (under the name Usui Reiki Ryōhō 臼井霊気療法 ), it was not nearly as widespread as it has become since its “re-importation” from the United States in the 1980s. Why did Reiki flourish more in late-twentieth-century Japan than it did in the early part of that century? This article examines Japanese texts about Reiki from two periods with close attention to how
their authors position Reiki vis-à-vis the category of religion. It concludes that, while authors in both periods placed their practice in an ambiguous “third space” that was neither religion nor non-religion, the authors in the latter period exhibited more ease drawing on religious vocabulary without explicitly distancing Reiki from religion. It argues that this helps demonstrate how the “spiritual world” (seishin sekai 精神世界 ) / New Age subculture of the 1980s and 1990s was a more institutionalized “third space” where the curious could safely engage with spiritual therapies without the stigma of new religious movements than the “psychospiritual therapies” (seishin ryōhō精神療法 ) / “wondrous techniques” (reijutsu 霊術 ) subculture of the prewar decades. The article concludes with some reflections on how Reiki’s relationship with religion has continued to change along with Japan’s religious landscape.
Journal of Global Buddhism, 2021
In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, Buddhists in imperial Japan, the British... more In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, Buddhists in imperial Japan, the British Raj, and the American empire developed lay-oriented youth groups. These groups’ members developed intertwined ethnoreligious and national identities informed by Buddhists’ relative status in these three empires. This article describes the trans-imperial development of early Buddhist youth groups, examines how these groups developed nationalist politics that were often intertwined with ethnic identity, and considers how the concept of “Buddhist youth” flattened differences unite lay Buddhists across various divides.
Japanese Religions, 2019
As with the relationships between shūkyō and “religion” and supirichuariti and “spirituality,” th... more As with the relationships between shūkyō and “religion” and supirichuariti and “spirituality,” the Japanese term okaruto is embedded in a global network of practice and discourse around “occultism,” but is also informed by the politics of local practitioners and the media, and by scholarly narratives that try to make sense of them. In this introduction, we present: 1) an overview of the varied relationships between Japanese religions and “the global occult,” 2) an analysis of the Japanese-language scholarship on occult phenomena from sociological, cultural studies, and intellectual historical perspectives, and 3) a brief chronology of modern Japanese occultism. We conclude with some theoretical considerations about how to conceive of the Japanese occult vis-à-vis a transnational community of practice, including the roles of media, translation, and affect.
Reiki practitioners commonly claim to channel a power called reiki that is capable of physical, m... more Reiki practitioners commonly claim to channel a power called reiki that is capable of physical, mental, and spiritual healing. Prior scholarship has assumed that the concept of reiki has remained similar from Reiki’s founding in 1922 Japan to the present day, when it is practiced worldwide. This article presents a genealogy of reiki from Reiki’s early days in Japan to its adaptations for the Japanese American community of Hawai‘i in the 1930s and for white Americans in the postwar decades, and its return to Japan in the 1980s. It shows that, over time, reiki became understood as “energy,” in part as an appeal to scientific authority, and as “universal,” in the dual sense that it pervades the cosmos and is accessible to all people. In the back-translation of “universal energy” into Japanese, this double meaning of “universal” in English was lost but, as “universe energy” (uchū enerugii), took on new, extraterrestrial connotations.
Japanese Journal for the Study of Esotericism, 2018
The set of spiritual healing practices called Usui Reiki Ryōhō (hereafter, “Reiki”) were systemat... more The set of spiritual healing practices called Usui Reiki Ryōhō (hereafter, “Reiki”) were systematized in 1920s Tokyo, but it was not until Reiki became a global phenomenon in the 1990s that it became widely taught in its land of origin. This paper compares narratives by Japanese Reiki practitioners from these two times: Reiki’s early years and its popularization period. It analyzes their efforts to distinguish Reiki from “religion” and relates this phenomenon to larger issues for the study of religion and modernity.
First, it describes how these spiritual healing practitioners in Taishō and post-Aum Japan situated their practice between, yet distinct from, both medicine and religion. It briefly explores how each of these eras saw the flourishing of unorthodox medicine despite moral panics surrounding alternative religions that used healing practices. Next, it considers how the narratives of the latter era make employ “spirituality” to represent a “third space,” at once “religion” and “non-religion.” This “spirituality” is produced at the nexus of popular culture, mass media, market forces, and academic commentary. Like the “spiritual, but not religious” identification in the postwar West, the “spiritual world” (seishin sekai) and “spiritual boom” allow practitioners to engage in transmundane activities without sacrificing modern secularity or identifying with any particular religion, including the stigmatized “new religions.” “Spirituality” allowed later Japanese Reiki practitioners to see their activities as socially valid in a manner that was unavailable to Taisho practitioners, who struggled to describe their techniques in the language of religion and medicine. The paper ultimately argues that the rise of “spirituality” constitutes a key rupture in the conceptualization of “non-religion” between the wave of early twentieth-century “psycho-spiritual therapies” (seishin ryōhō or reijutsuka) and that of late twentieth-century “spiritual healing therapies” (supirichuaru hīringu serapī).
Japanese Religions 37: 1-2, 2012
In generalizations about the healing practices of the new religions, Jōrei and Okiyome, the purif... more In generalizations about the healing practices of the new religions, Jōrei and Okiyome, the purification rituals of Sekai Kyūseikyō, Shinji Shumeikai, and Mahikari, have been mislabeled as forms of faith healing. According to the cosmologies, leadership, and membership of these groups, these techniques do not require faith, but in fact are the source of faith due to their empirically verifiable results. This paper contextualizes these practices and their underlying cosmologies and etiologies, by placing them in a history of Japanese religious thought and practice and by contrasting them with yogic healing, qigong, and Reiki: other Asian spiritual practices that also claim to heal the sick through the manipulation of invisible, cosmic energies. It concludes that these religions' conceptions of purity and pollution, inherited from Ōmotokyō, is significantly different from those of the dominant Japanese religious traditions, and that the emphasis on purity distinguishes these practices from the other spiritual healing practices, which emphasize balance.
Book Chapters by Justin B. Stein
The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health, 2022
In the late twentieth century, practitioners of a variety of healing methods began promoting thei... more In the late twentieth century, practitioners of a variety of healing methods began promoting their practices as ‘energy medicine.’ This chapter focuses on a group of energy therapies in the US at the turn of the twenty-first century in light of claims that they are both spiritual practices and forms of medicine. Contemporary energy healing draws on earlier healing traditions that use the hands, gaze, breath, and visualization, as well as an established rhetoric of applying ‘scientific’ approaches to spiritual practice, but is also characterized by two relatively new features: 1) affiliation with a widespread ‘spiritual but not religious’ identity and 2) the assertion that it is capable of integration into biomedicine, creating new, more holistic forms of healthcare. Claims that energy healing is ‘spiritual but not religious’ may allow access to certain spaces but deny access to others. Undeterred, energy healers continue to integrate their practices into twenty-first century biomedical spaces, giving hope to believers and infuriating sceptics.
The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health, 2021
近現代日本の民間精神療法、栗田英彦／塚田穂高／吉永進一編 (東京：国書刊行会), 239-265, 2019
https://www.kokusho.co.jp/np/isbn/9784336063809/
Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Voices, edited by C. Pierce Salguero (New York: Columbia University Press), 38-44, 2019
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/buddhism-and-medicine/9780231189361
In Eastspirit: Transnational Spirituality and Religious Circulation in East and West, edited by J... more In Eastspirit: Transnational Spirituality and Religious Circulation in East and West, edited by Jørn Borup and Marianne Qvortrup Fibiger (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 36-60.
Translations by Justin B. Stein
Tomabechi Gizō (1880–1959), a chemical magnate and politician, was one of twenty shihan (Master-l... more Tomabechi Gizō (1880–1959), a chemical magnate and politician, was one of twenty shihan (Master-level) students trained by Usui Mikao (1865–1926), the founder of Usui Reiki Therapy (Usui Reiki Ryōhō). The final chapter of Tomabechi's (co-authored) memoir describes his experiences with Usui Reiki Therapy, his theories of health and disease, and his recommendations to maintain health.
This is the first time this text has been fully translated from Japanese. It is under a Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 license, which means you can freely share part or all of this work, so long as you attribute the translator.
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Books by Justin B. Stein
Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific analyzes how, from her training in Japan in the mid-1930s to her death in Iowa in 1980, Takata built a vast trans-Pacific network that connected Japanese American laborers on Hawai‘i plantations to social elites in Tokyo, Hollywood, and New York; middle-class housewives in American suburbs; and off-the-grid tree planters in the mountains of British Columbia. Using recently uncovered archival materials and original oral histories, this book examines how these relationships between healer and patient, master and disciple, became deeply infused with values of their time and place and how they interplayed with Reiki’s circulation, performance, and meanings along with broader cultural shifts in the twentieth-century North Pacific. Highly readable and informative, each chapter is structured around a period in the life of Takata, the charismatic, rags-to-riches architect of the network in which Reiki spread for decades. Alternate Currents explores Reiki as an exemplary transnational spiritual therapy, demonstrating how lived practices transcend artificial distinctions between religion and medicine, and circulate in global systems while maintaining strong connections with the practices’ homeland.
Edited Volumes by Justin B. Stein
- Healing practices with religious roots and frames
- Religious actors in and around the medical field
- Organizing infrastructures of religion and medicine: pluralism and competition
- Boundary-making between religion and medicine
- Religion and epidemics
Within these sections, central issues, debates and problems are examined, including health and healing, religiosity, spirituality, biomedicine, medicalization, complementary medicine, medical therapy, efficacy, agency, and the nexus of body, mind, and spirit.
The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as sociology, anthropology, and medicine.
Journal Special Issues by Justin B. Stein
Encyclopedia Entries by Justin B. Stein
https://wrldrels.org/
https://wrldrels.org/japanese-new-religions/
https://wrldrels.org/2017/01/24/reiki-japan/
https://wrldrels.org/2016/10/08/reiki/
Papers by Justin B. Stein
their authors position Reiki vis-à-vis the category of religion. It concludes that, while authors in both periods placed their practice in an ambiguous “third space” that was neither religion nor non-religion, the authors in the latter period exhibited more ease drawing on religious vocabulary without explicitly distancing Reiki from religion. It argues that this helps demonstrate how the “spiritual world” (seishin sekai 精神世界 ) / New Age subculture of the 1980s and 1990s was a more institutionalized “third space” where the curious could safely engage with spiritual therapies without the stigma of new religious movements than the “psychospiritual therapies” (seishin ryōhō精神療法 ) / “wondrous techniques” (reijutsu 霊術 ) subculture of the prewar decades. The article concludes with some reflections on how Reiki’s relationship with religion has continued to change along with Japan’s religious landscape.
First, it describes how these spiritual healing practitioners in Taishō and post-Aum Japan situated their practice between, yet distinct from, both medicine and religion. It briefly explores how each of these eras saw the flourishing of unorthodox medicine despite moral panics surrounding alternative religions that used healing practices. Next, it considers how the narratives of the latter era make employ “spirituality” to represent a “third space,” at once “religion” and “non-religion.” This “spirituality” is produced at the nexus of popular culture, mass media, market forces, and academic commentary. Like the “spiritual, but not religious” identification in the postwar West, the “spiritual world” (seishin sekai) and “spiritual boom” allow practitioners to engage in transmundane activities without sacrificing modern secularity or identifying with any particular religion, including the stigmatized “new religions.” “Spirituality” allowed later Japanese Reiki practitioners to see their activities as socially valid in a manner that was unavailable to Taisho practitioners, who struggled to describe their techniques in the language of religion and medicine. The paper ultimately argues that the rise of “spirituality” constitutes a key rupture in the conceptualization of “non-religion” between the wave of early twentieth-century “psycho-spiritual therapies” (seishin ryōhō or reijutsuka) and that of late twentieth-century “spiritual healing therapies” (supirichuaru hīringu serapī).
Book Chapters by Justin B. Stein
Translations by Justin B. Stein
This is the first time this text has been fully translated from Japanese. It is under a Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 license, which means you can freely share part or all of this work, so long as you attribute the translator.
Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific analyzes how, from her training in Japan in the mid-1930s to her death in Iowa in 1980, Takata built a vast trans-Pacific network that connected Japanese American laborers on Hawai‘i plantations to social elites in Tokyo, Hollywood, and New York; middle-class housewives in American suburbs; and off-the-grid tree planters in the mountains of British Columbia. Using recently uncovered archival materials and original oral histories, this book examines how these relationships between healer and patient, master and disciple, became deeply infused with values of their time and place and how they interplayed with Reiki’s circulation, performance, and meanings along with broader cultural shifts in the twentieth-century North Pacific. Highly readable and informative, each chapter is structured around a period in the life of Takata, the charismatic, rags-to-riches architect of the network in which Reiki spread for decades. Alternate Currents explores Reiki as an exemplary transnational spiritual therapy, demonstrating how lived practices transcend artificial distinctions between religion and medicine, and circulate in global systems while maintaining strong connections with the practices’ homeland.
- Healing practices with religious roots and frames
- Religious actors in and around the medical field
- Organizing infrastructures of religion and medicine: pluralism and competition
- Boundary-making between religion and medicine
- Religion and epidemics
Within these sections, central issues, debates and problems are examined, including health and healing, religiosity, spirituality, biomedicine, medicalization, complementary medicine, medical therapy, efficacy, agency, and the nexus of body, mind, and spirit.
The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as sociology, anthropology, and medicine.
https://wrldrels.org/
https://wrldrels.org/japanese-new-religions/
https://wrldrels.org/2017/01/24/reiki-japan/
https://wrldrels.org/2016/10/08/reiki/
their authors position Reiki vis-à-vis the category of religion. It concludes that, while authors in both periods placed their practice in an ambiguous “third space” that was neither religion nor non-religion, the authors in the latter period exhibited more ease drawing on religious vocabulary without explicitly distancing Reiki from religion. It argues that this helps demonstrate how the “spiritual world” (seishin sekai 精神世界 ) / New Age subculture of the 1980s and 1990s was a more institutionalized “third space” where the curious could safely engage with spiritual therapies without the stigma of new religious movements than the “psychospiritual therapies” (seishin ryōhō精神療法 ) / “wondrous techniques” (reijutsu 霊術 ) subculture of the prewar decades. The article concludes with some reflections on how Reiki’s relationship with religion has continued to change along with Japan’s religious landscape.
First, it describes how these spiritual healing practitioners in Taishō and post-Aum Japan situated their practice between, yet distinct from, both medicine and religion. It briefly explores how each of these eras saw the flourishing of unorthodox medicine despite moral panics surrounding alternative religions that used healing practices. Next, it considers how the narratives of the latter era make employ “spirituality” to represent a “third space,” at once “religion” and “non-religion.” This “spirituality” is produced at the nexus of popular culture, mass media, market forces, and academic commentary. Like the “spiritual, but not religious” identification in the postwar West, the “spiritual world” (seishin sekai) and “spiritual boom” allow practitioners to engage in transmundane activities without sacrificing modern secularity or identifying with any particular religion, including the stigmatized “new religions.” “Spirituality” allowed later Japanese Reiki practitioners to see their activities as socially valid in a manner that was unavailable to Taisho practitioners, who struggled to describe their techniques in the language of religion and medicine. The paper ultimately argues that the rise of “spirituality” constitutes a key rupture in the conceptualization of “non-religion” between the wave of early twentieth-century “psycho-spiritual therapies” (seishin ryōhō or reijutsuka) and that of late twentieth-century “spiritual healing therapies” (supirichuaru hīringu serapī).
This is the first time this text has been fully translated from Japanese. It is under a Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 license, which means you can freely share part or all of this work, so long as you attribute the translator.
Dies ist das erste Mal, dass dieser Text vollständig aus dem Japanischen ins Englisch , bzw. weiter in Deutsch,übersetzt wurde.
Sie können einen Teil oder die gesamte Arbeit frei teilen, solange Sie die Quelle, bzw. den Übesetzer klar benennen.
Mein besonderer Dank für die Korrektur gilt Nicole Wittig.
Viel Freude beim Lesen
This is the second episode of the Yogascapes in Japan Podcast Series; which is a result of the Yoga, Movement, and Space Conference. In early November 2018, this event occurred at the Institute of Liberal Arts at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan https://www.doshisha.ac.jp/en/international/from_abroad/ila.html.
It was partially funded by the ILA, as well as the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science https://www.jsps.go.jp/. Assistance was also given by the Organization for Identity and Cultural Development https://oicd.net/.
In this episode, Dr Justin Stein discusses his early research on: Yoga in early twentieth century Japan: Self-cultivation, spiritual therapies, and American influences.
You can find more information about the Yogascapes in Japan project: yogascapesinjapan.com and follow us on social media with:
@yogascapesinjap
@yogascapesinjapan
Produced by: @tattooedyogini_ and @psdmccartney
Music by Scott Holmes: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Holmes/
Soundcloud:
To donate: https://gofundme.com/yogascapes-research-project
Kin Cheung (2016, 2017) has traced back this scientific research on meditation roughly a century, from physiological examinations of meditating yogis to the recent explosion of PET and SPECT scans of meditating brains that has attracted prominent critiques from scholars like Cheung, Bernard Faure, Donald Lopez, Geoffrey Samuel, Jeff Wilson, and others. Regardless of scholars' criticisms, neuroscientists and meditation advocates alike continue using the results of these studies to promote meditation as a means of improving physical and mental well-being. Indeed, as some of the scientists and science writers (like Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson) are themselves avid meditators, one common critique is that these researchers are overly invested in supporting a particular conclusion, namely, that meditation positively transforms the health of the mind and body.
This talk extends the scope of medicalized—particularly neuroscientific—understandings of the potential for Buddhist practice to produce positive effects on mental and physical health (which I am calling "modern psychosomatic Buddhist medicine”) back to the 1860s. Building on the research of Shin'ichi Yoshinaga and my recent translations of two of Tanzan's texts, I show how a 19th century Zen priest named Hara Tanzan positioned himself at the vanguard of modern medical science, allowing him to combine aspects of Yogacara Buddhist theories of consciousness with anatomical theories of both Chinese and Western origin to develop a unified theory of the interrelatedness of physical, mental, and spiritual health that was in dialogue with the latest scientific theories of physicians from around the world. Furthermore, Tanzan used his own experiences as experimental data to promote his original, idiosyncratic meditation method as an innovative, effective psychiatric intervention to eradicate disease, calm distress, and produce authentic understandings of ultimate reality. Thus, he is a salient precedent to twenty-first century meditation advocates who mobilize neuroscientific data to promote certain practices as benefitting both mind and body.
Paper was given at the Asian Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, August 7, 2018.
* Paper being prepared as a chapter in an upcoming volume on Buddhist healing in modern Asia
This paper analyzes English- and Japanese-language literature published in the 1930s to investigate how the Buddhist visions of world peace offered by Shin youth and their leaders in Japan, Hawaii, and California engaged with rising nationalism, militarism, and xenophobia in their home countries. It applies a model of “particular universalism” to explain how these actors imagined sectarian teachings would overcome religious divides and national identities could foster international harmony. It describes diverse rhetorical positions under the aegis of “Buddhist democracy,” from ethno-nationalist apologies for colonial projects to post-nationalist renunciations of divisive tribalism. This analysis illuminates the ideologies that drew their nations to war and nearly-forgotten dissents that attempted to forge peace.
Talk was given at Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, Washington, DC, March 23, 2018.
* Paper is being developed for a journal article
This exploratory paper examines the early decades of Buddhist youth organizations—from their first instantiations at the turn of the twentieth century to the outbreak of the Pacific War—with particular attention to the ways they engaged with colonial and nationalist politics. This is historical groundwork for a larger project I am working on regarding a transnational peace movement organized by Shin Buddhist youth groups in Japan and Hawaii in the 1930s. I hope its comparative approach helps bring into relief the role of youth in the world of Buddhist political activity at local and translocal scales in the early twentieth century.
This paper addresses the rise of Buddhist youth organizations in five settings: colonial Ceylon and Burma, Japan, Territorial Hawaii, and California. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the former two places—Ceylon and Burma—were colonized by Britain, the latter two—Hawaii and California—were annexed by the U.S., and Japan became an imperial metropole. As such, Buddhists in these places existed in relation to colonial regimes, whether as colonial subjects or as citizens or resident aliens of a colonizing power. These varied identities are reflected in the politics and social activism of Buddhist youth organizations in these areas. This paper briefly introduces these regions’ colonial histories, the establishment of Buddhist youth organizations there, and the positions of those organizations towards nationalism and colonialism, before reflecting on some general conclusions on the relationship between Buddhist youth groups and nationalist politics.
Paper given at 7th Annual Tung Lin Kok Yuen Canada Foundation Conference, Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhism and Contemporary Society, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, November 4, 2017.
* Note: the content of this talk is being revised for a journal article
This paper examines Reiki Therapy (reiki ryōhō) as a means to explore shifts in successive waves of spirituality discourse in modern Japan, with a particular eye on the role of trans-Pacific cultural exchange. When Reiki Therapy was first taught in the 1920s, Japan was undergoing another period of interest in healing practices described as “spiritual” (reiteki or shinreiteki). These practices were generally based on earlier ones, including several imported from the U.S. By juxtaposing this early period of Reiki Therapy with the period of its “re-importation” from the U.S. in the 1980s–2000s, this paper explores continuities and discontinuities in various “spiritual waves” in modern Japanese history and interrogates the relationship between categories of “the spiritual” and “the modern.”
Talk given at the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, Toronto, ON, March 19, 2017.
* Plan to revise for a journal article
In these investigations, Schwartz has examined a broad range of American religious phenomena, including spirit mediumship, the healing practices of Reiki and Johrei, and the channeling of spiritual entities such as angels, guides, extraterrestrials, or a universal intelligence, sometimes called God. In his popular “Experiments Trilogy”, Schwartz claims that his scientific research has produced evidence for the postmortem survival of human consciousness and personality, the existence and continued activity of God, and the reality and accessibility of spiritual healing powers. As a result, Schwartz’s work has been widely cited by practitioners of channeling and spiritual healing to lend the authority of his Ivy League background and empirical data to their intangible practices.
Adding a further dimension of complexity to the interplay of sacred and secular in Schwartz’s work, his research into the spirit world is partly funded with public monies, both from Arizona’s state university system and the National Institutes of Health. The blurriness of boundaries between science and religion in what the NIH calls “frontier medicine” has considerable precedents in American history, of which Schwartz is well aware: in a 2010 paper, he explores the possibility of engaging with the disembodied consciousness of psychology and psychical research pioneer William James as a “departed hypothesized co-investigator”.
Yet Schwartz aspires not only to further the work of his forerunners in parapsychology, but also to achieve a loftier, transformative, even eschatological goal. By providing empirical evidence for the existence of metaphysical entities, Schwartz believes that his findings are working to bring about a paradigm shift in religion, medicine, law, and education that will resolve global tensions and create an age of harmonious understanding. This paper contextualizes Schwartz’s research and writings in the roles played by science in contemporary American religion.
This paper analyzes the text of the stele in the context of the Taishō’s cultic milieu, a time when leaders of healing-centered new religious movements faced state suspicion, even suppression. Perhaps to avoid this fate, the author used the rhetoric of Confucianism, mountain asceticism, and emperor worship to contextualize Usui’s innovative healing method within these traditions. Through interrogating these narrative choices and the motivations behind them, this paper represents a step towards recreating the early history of Reiki, perhaps the most widespread spiritual healing practice of Japanese origin.
In the 1980s and 1990s, as Japanese and non-Japanese Reiki instructors began to communicate, they discovered conspicuous discrepancies in their belief systems, their healing practices, and the founder narratives they used to validate these systems. This paper describes three contemporary waves of Reiki instructors, both Japanese and non-Japanese, who use historical research to claim that their practices were originally taught by Usui, thus establishing the authority and authenticity of their lineages, their practices, and themselves. These illustrations of the contentious negotiation of “traditional Japanese Reiki” resulting from transnational dialogue constitute a case study of the roles that imagination, exoticism, history, place, and authenticity play in the translocal movement of Asian spiritualities across borders and their “reverse flow” back to their nations of origin.