Depressing facts of academic life

Fukase-Indergaard, Fumiko or Michael Indergaard. 2008. “Religious Nationalism and the Making of the Japanese State.” Theory and Society 37: 343-374.

This article explores the role of religious nationalism in the making of the modern Japanese State. We describe a process of adaptation featuring bricolage, as an alternative to imitation accounts of non-Western State formation that privilege Western culture. The Meiji State, finding it could not impose Shintô as a State religion, selectively drew from religio-nationalist currents and Western models for over two decades before institutionalizing State Shintô. Although we see some similarities to Europe, distinctive features of the Japanese case suggest a different path to modernity: a lack of Separation between State and religion, an emphasis on ritual and a late (and historically Condensed) development of popular religious nationalism, which was anchored by State Shintô disciplinary devices including school rituals and shrines deifying the war dead.

This could be the abstract of an entirely respectable, if somewhat niche, history article. But it's not. Instead it just summarizes well-known (and frankly, mostly out of date) secondary sources on Tokugawa-era religion and the Meiji state and its religious policies. There are some vague attempts to differentiate the argument, but frankly from the thinness of the research and evidence I'd bet on the authors they criticize being right. Despite nods to negotiation, the story in the end is all about state initiatives, which hit obstacles at first but eventually settled into hegemony. Why? Who knows? Is it supposed to be our job to figure that out? And despite claiming to be comparative, there's not actually any specific contrast between the development of "religious nationalism" or its manifestation in "ritual" elsewhere--Peasants into Frenchmen, anyone? Tacked onto this is an unfocused 7-page literature review that seems to amount to an attempt to ride Philip Gorski's coattails (when it's not just reproducing arguments made by Ikegami without any attempt to differentiate that I can see whatsoever). I am perfectly happy to add blame for this onto his ledger.