The Becoming of Japanese Religious Studies as a Discourse of “Western” and “Japanese”

The purpose of this article is to characterize the history of Japanese religious studies within the context of Western and Japanese discourses. We mean to consider here not only the diff erences in academic approaches in studying religion, but also the specifi c subject matter of Japanese religious studies. The novel aspect of this work lies in the fact that contemporary Russian scholarship on the history of religious studies practically does not explore the development of this fi eld in Southeast Asia, and the history of Japanese religious studies remains unknown in Russia at all. This article provides an overview of original works from the formative period of Japanese religious studies. The study employs a methodology based on Laclos-Mouff e discourse analysis, the essence of which is to determine the formation of social reality, in our case religious studies, by means of discourse. That is, the work is based on a post-structuralist approach that incorporates analytical philosophy, structuralism, and phenomenology. Also, ideographic and chronological methods are involved in the work. The paper traces the way the discipline has institutionalized itself, emerging from Buddhology and later evolving into its current form. The author refl ects on the problematic discurse of Japanese religious studies, which consisted in the confl ict between Masahara Anesaki and Nishida Kitaro regarding their approaches to psychology and history of religion, as well as their respective philosophies of religion. However, the central issue of the study is the discourse between the “Western” and “Japanese” traditions, which encompasses both methodological diff erences and political engagement.