Japanese New Religions and Their Colonized Proselytes: Tenrikyō in Korea, 1893-1950

Lecture information:
The conflict between Korean Christians and state-mandated compulsory veneration at Shintō shrines lives on as a foundational memory of religious crisis in colonial Korea. This talk reframes that story’s familiar themes of ethnonational and religious identity in a different context: the colonial career of Tenrikyō, a Japanese New Religious Movement founded in the final decades of the Edo period. Despite its suppression by the Japanese state—both in Japan and on the Korean peninsula—and despite its forced registration as a branch of Sect Shintō from 1908 onward, Tenrikyō managed to attract a sizeable number of Korean converts, who sustained the religion even after their Japanese co-religionists left the peninsula in 1945-1946. How did Tenrikyō appeal to its Korean proselytes? Drawing on period sources published by Tenrikyō institutions, this talk proposes that one answer can be found in Tenrikyō’s multiple, and sometimes contradictory, roles within the colonial environment: as broker of Japanese colonial rule; as martyr to Japanese state religious policy; and as prism or crucible for relations between the colonizers and the colonized.

Lecturer information:
Micah Auerback is Assistant Professor of Japanese Religions at the University of Michigan. His primary research interests lie in Japanese religions in the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, with a special focus on Buddhism. His dissertation research and manuscript currently under revision concern the roles played by Japanese Buddhist individuals, ideas, and institutions on the Korean peninsula during this period. Other topics of continuing interest include relations between religious institutions and the Japanese state from the Meiji Restoration onward; the formation of Buddhist Studies as an academic discipline in modern Japan; and the polymath scientist and sometime student of Buddhism, Minakata Kumagusu (1867-1941).