We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (Class 200: New Studies in Religion)
Share Tweet
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom In
Product Description Religious freedom is a founding tenet of the United States, and it has frequently been used to justify policies towards other nations. Such was the case in 1945 when Americans occupied Japan following World War II. Though the Japanese constitution had guaranteed freedom of religion since 1889, the United States declared that protection faulty, and when the occupation ended in 1952, they claimed to have successfully replaced it with “real” religious freedom. Through a fresh analysis of pre-war Japanese law, Jolyon Baraka Thomas demonstrates that the occupiers’ triumphant narrative obscured salient Japanese political debates about religious freedom. Indeed, Thomas reveals that American occupiers also vehemently disagreed about the topic. By reconstructing these vibrant debates, Faking Liberties unsettles any notion of American authorship and imposition of religious freedom. Instead, Thomas shows that, during the Occupation, a dialogue about freedom of religion ensued that constructed a new global set of political norms that continue to form policies today. Review "Thomas draws on an impressive array of important sources to argue that although religious freedom solves problems of inequity and oppression, it creates new problems and is inherently coercive." ― Choice "Given that the last decade has seen a number of scholarly works detailing the establishment of 'religion' as a concept in early Meiji Japan, Thomas’s efforts to show how the category of religion was negotiated in Japan during the entire first half of the twentieth century represents a welcome move forward in time. Meticulously researched, theoretically sharp, and elegantly written, Faking Liberties is an excellent study not only of how religious freedom was constructed as a transnational ideal through mutual negotiation during the period of American occupation, but also of how various actors interacted with religious freedom during the interbellum period. Faking Liberties is a welcome addition to the field of Japanese religious studies as well as to the critical study of religion and law." ― H-Net Reviews " Faking Liberties is a challenging intervention into not only the historiography of modern Japan, but religious studies more generally." ― New Books Network "Through archival prowess and intra-textual paradox, Thomas offers a well-timed reminder: to stake out ground in the capacious is to take a partisan position. It is to recognize, again, the ways that our critical projects remain enmeshed with hard-won visions of social good and with so many ambivalent projects of humanism that—still, somehow—we cannot manage not to want." -- Lucia Hulsether ― Reading Religion "By looking at the ways discourses about religious freedom regulated race, gender, and ritual practices in occupation-era Japan, we can see the double-standard of what America has advocated for abroad versus practiced at home. Thomas calls for deeper scholarly engagement with the category of 'freedom' and how freedom of religious expression has been racially coded as white in the United States. It is a cautionary tale with important pedagogical and institutional lessons. If we find that discussing 'diversity looks like activism,' he suggests, then 'we have a huge problem' that reveals why diversity in the academy is essential for discussing secularism, religious freedom, and religion today." ― Religious Studies Project "Excellent . . . [the] connection to contemporary policy debates makes Faking Liberties an enormously valuable read beyond the scholarly world of Japanese studies. . . . Faking Liberties is an engrossing and valuable read for anyone involved in, or simply interested in, the interaction of scholarship and policy at the intersection of religion and international affairs." -- Judd Birdsall ― The Review of Faith & International Affairs "Jolyon Thomas’s book serves as an astute religious history of the Us occupation of post-WWII Japan
