Dear Friends and Colleagues,


This is a REMINDER for our upcoming Abe Fellowship Colloquium, "Difficult Subjects: Religious Freedom, the Allied Occupation, and Postwar Education," featuring speaker Dr. Jolyon Thomas from the University of Pennsylvania. It will be held next Thursday April 18th, from 6 pm to 8 pm, at the International House of Japan.


Link (English): https://www.jpf.go.jp/cgp/e/fellow/abe/news/colloquium190418.html

Link (Japanese): https://www.jpf.go.jp/cgp/fellow/abe/news/colloquium190418.html


To register, please contact our staff at abetokyo[at]ssrc.org with your name, affiliation, telephone number, and email.


Thank you and we look forward to seeing you there.


Social Science Research Council

Abe Fellowship Program Tokyo Office

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ABE FELLOWSHIP COLLOQUIUM

"Difficult Subjects: Religious Freedom, the Allied Occupation, and Postwar Education"

Notes: Admission is free. Presentation in English with Japanese questions accepted.


When: Thursday, April 18, from 6pm to 8pm

Where: International House of Japan, Seminar Room 404

（5-11-16 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0032）

http://www.i-house.or.jp/eng/access.html


Speaker:

Jolyon Baraka Thomas, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania /Abe Fellow（2017）

Assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a PhD from Princeton University, an MA from the University of Hawaii, and a BA from Grinnell College. Current projects investigate who gets to define religious freedom and with what political effects, how conceptions of "religion" and "the secular" appear in debates about public school education in postwar Japan and the United States, and what sort of relationships exist between religion, capitalism, and sexuality. His first book, Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan, is available from University of Hawaii Press. His second book, Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan, was published by University of Chicago Press in March 2019. He is now working on a third book, tentatively titled The Problematic Subject of Religious Education: Debates over Morality, Patriotism, and Security in Postwar Japan and the United States.


For more information, please see his homepage: https://jolyon.thomasresearch.org/

Moderator:

Kate Wildman Nakai, Ph.D.

Professor, Sophia University


Outline:

Americans stationed in occupied Japan at the close of World War II claimed to be bringing religious freedom to a country where it did not exist. They described Japan's 1889 constitutional guarantee of religious freedom as a fake, and they claimed to implant "real religious freedom" in its stead. But in making such claims, the occupiers overlooked inconvenient historical facts. Japanese people had been debating the meaning of religious freedom for decades before the Occupation began, and military government records clearly show that the American occupiers were not nearly as certain about how to protect religious freedom as their triumphalist rhetoric suggested. The concepts and governing practices the occupiers developed in collaboration with influential Japanese scholars in the late 1940s still dictate how academics, journalists, and policymakers working today imagine who deserves religious freedom, what kinds of political practices infringe on religious liberty, and who bears responsibility for protecting religious freedom. Focusing on postwar debates about morality education, changes to the Fundamental Law on Education, and constitutional revision, Thomas argues that disagreements about how religion should be defined are central to understanding Japanese political life today.

*This event is jointly sponsored by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Tokyo Office and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership (CGP). ※Personal information provided will be collected and used for arrangements for the event and evaluation of the event, as well as providing information for future events.