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dangerous in their assumed attempts to control their followers prohibits an
informed discussion about the e
practice. Viewed more
broadly, and in light of ideas taken from a civil society framework that
emphasise the importance of engaging in the public sphere, this deepens our
understanding of democratic processes in Japan as not simply the system but
as entailing conversations at the grassroots level to counter opinion that may be
overly swayed by dominant media reports. In fact, it seems that these con-
versations create another public space where dominant discourses are debated.
The starting point for analysing a religious organisation
ect of
'
religious
'
s political involve-
ment has been one of suspicion because of the label religious. By comparison,
a labour union supporting a political party carries political legitimacy in its
campaign for its members
'
rights as this is seen as a legitimate quest within
twentieth-century concepts of democracy. While an issue such as improved
working conditions for particular workers may be rightfully
'
, it does
not automatically mean that labour unions are not sectarian, an aspect that is
automatically associated with and feared about religious groups, presuming
that religious doctrine makes them narrow-minded. The suspicion about reli-
gion and its role in politics has only intensi
'
public
'
ed since 11 September 2001 and
the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. In Japan, fear about
religion, of course, was pre
gured by the Aum Shinriky
-
Tokyo Subway gas
attack in 1995. However, taking the involvement of religious groups in poli-
tics as generic phenomena, maybe juxtaposing them as comparable to the rise
of a deep intertwinement of the religious right, politics and capitalist enterprise
in the USA (Casanova 1994; Bigelow 2005), or in light of new threats from
radical Islam, is misleading. However, such
has existed
all too easily in Japan with its highly politicised public sphere and the simul-
taneous disappearance of religion from public discourse.
The question that arises is how easily we can assume that religious groups
struggle to control, maintain or promote what they culturally de
'
typological blurring
'
ne as valuable
based solely on sectarian interests, particularly when they get involved with
politics seen as both ruled and undermined by working for stakes. For political
candidates and political parties, political processes are usually recurring situa-
tions, assuming a limited number of universal choices that are subsequently
validated or falsi
ed by the result of these choices (Swartz et al. 1966; McGlynn
and Tuden 1991). As seen here, this does not necessarily mean that pragmatic
decisions simply overrule ideals or normative rules. Adding to the picture of
normative and practical rules (Bailey 1969) may be one outcome of the current
research in terms of political anthropology. It also highlights that the role of reli-
gious philosophy is not only idealist rhetoric, or a symbolic system of meaning
without any real attempt to implement them as social and material objectives.
Internalised ideals through religious practice are signi
cant to political
processes and outcomes, if more so for the individual supporter than is
apparent in wider external circumstances. If through internalisation of the
prevailing discourses people
, the question of how people are able
to encounter and internalise counter-discourses that may create resistance and
'
are ruled
'
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