There is a growing interest in comparison in global history in the field of religious studies. This paper examines interest in the “irrational” in Germany and Japan during the early 20th century from this perspective. In Germany, Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy was published in 1917, and Friedrich Heiler's Prayer in 1918. In this period, religious phenomenologists argued that the “irrational” was at the core of religion. As a result, the oppositional structure between “irrational” religion and rational science was emphasized. Scientific methods were considered to be limited in terms of their productiveness for studying religion, which led to an emphasis on the phenomenological approach. Further, interest in the “irrational” in a broad sense also grew in Japan during the same period; in the early 1910s, scholars conducted experiments to prove the reality of supernatural power. This phenomenon emerged against a popular interest in Spiritualism. It was hoped that science might rationally prove the “irrational,” but those involved in the case were considered to have falsified their results and either took their own lives or were expelled from academia. This is the Senrigan incident. The beginning of the 20th century showed a growing interest in the “irrational” in both Japan and Germany, driven by a backlash against modernism that affected scholarship in both countries. However, the ways that it manifested itself and the responses to the “irrational” were different between the two countries. In Germany, phenomenological religious studies explored the “irrational,” while in Japan, scientism sought to confront it.
Shunichi Miyajima (Sun,) studied this question.