Marginalized Myths and Modern Japan: The Interpretive History of Doroumi kōki and Reikai monogatari

This article examines the process by which two marginalized religions, Tenrikyo and Omoto, negotiated their relationship with the modern Japanese state through their mythmaking projects in the early twentieth century. Previous studies have framed the relationship between national myths and the myths of the so-called “new religions” in terms of a dichotomy between orthodoxy and heresy. This approach is too essentialist and static to account for the complexity of modern myths, as these myths took on diverse characteristics and meanings as they were revised and retold within the shifting political and social contexts of modern Japan. The myths of new religions were not only the outcome of the members’ religious imaginations, but also highly political texts that served as the grounds for engaging with the modern Japanese state and the official national mythology that legitimized it. Through a comparative study of Tenrikyo’s Doroumi kōki and Omoto’s Reikai monogatari, I argue that through their efforts to defend the legitimacy of their own myths under adverse circumstances, these marginalized religions became deeply entangled in the logic of modern Japanese nationalism. Rather than constituting a challenge to the state and its foundational myths, these marginalized religions developed hybrid discourses that I call “popular religious nationalism.”