Why Teach Religion?: Scholars of Religion and Education Policy in Postwar Japan

This article examines how scholars of religion attempted to influence education policy after World War ii. Building on the clout they had gained during the Allied Occupation of Japan, some religious studies scholars capitalized on a series of moral panics to argue that their style of teaching religion could contribute to society, experimenting with terminology such as “religious knowledge education,” “religious sensitivity education,” or “religious culture education” as they did so. These attempts to affect how schools taught about religion reflected the orientations of the International Institute for the Study of Religion, established in 1953 by former occupier William P. Woodard and University of Tokyo Professor of Religion Kishimoto Hideo. Because the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies also emerged from this Kishimoto-Woodard collaboration, I invite readers to reflect anew on how scholars of religion can best contribute to policy, both in terms of education and more broadly. I conclude that our strength is not that we have “the answers” about religion, but that we specialize in questions: Who calls what “religion,” why, and with which effects?