Introduction - Religion and Politics in Contemporary Japan - page 5

media, as has enjo k - sai (compensated dating), in which older men pay teen-
age girls for their company and often for sex. The so-called furiitaa, young
people, often college graduates, who do not take up regular employment but
engage in temporary, part-time work to avoid adult commitments (see
Yamada 1999) have become a hot political topic as well. From such studies,
we might conclude that many young people in Japan today are somehow
indirectly protesting or not living up to the Japanese behaviour por-

trayed in the Nihonjinron (theories on Japanese-ness) that is so pervasive in
Japan (Dale 1986).
Conversely, Sakurai (2004) outlines how it has been common over the last
four decades to view the youth of Japan as a social problem in the face of
changing social realities and concerns. White and Mathews (2004) argue that
despite the media frenzy about these youth problems, the millions of Japanese
young people who live di

' ideal '

generation may indicate
a (healthy) refusal to enter the previously established adult social order. They
go on to argue that while this

erently from their parents '

' lost generation ' face decreased employment

opportunities compared to their fathers ' generation, new lifestyles also have

bene ted young people. The way these young people reject the established

socioeconomic conditions of

generation due to increased
mobility and urbanisation or because of new technologies such as mobile
phones (Ackerman 2004) indicates a di

their parents '

erent social experience from that of
their parents. If this is the case, it seems likely that young people

'

is political

response would also di er compared to earlier generations, some of whom

questioned the status quo by engaging in radical politics (Steinhoff

1984). The
student movements of the 1960s and 1970s were involved in organised politics
with voting rates among 20 year olds at their highest (66.7% in the 1967
Lower House election). These movements ultimately failed in their attempt to
produce desired results, most notably the failure to change the Japan US

Security Alliance. This was part of what gave rise to an inculcated sense of
despondency about achieving social change through political protest and
formal political processes, which still seems present today. Whether new forms for
cultural consumption and di

-

erent lifestyles are evolving into wider social
change is a question for future research, but that is potentially what is happening
according to Mathews and White (2004).
How have new religious movements then been conceived, some of which
have a signi cant number of youth members? In the wake of legal reform

brought about by the Allied forces

occupation of Japan, State Shinto ceased
to be a state-driven public civil religion after 1945. Popular forms for religion

'

flourished (cf. Reader and Tanabe 1998) despite Japan becoming a secular
nation-state. Van Bremen (1995; cf. Reader 2005) has pointed out that wide-
spread religious or ritualistic practices constituted an aberration of the
Weberian theory of secularisation in modern societies (cf. Shimazono 1992,
2004), which makes Japan an example of modernity not coinciding with the
decline of religion, the main premise of the secularisation theory. Instead, a
plurality of old and new religious organisations emerged in post-war Japan.