RT Article
T1 Secularization and the Jōruri Plays: The Decline of Religious Belief and the Search for Secular Salvation in Early Modern Japan
JF Journal of Religion in Japan
VO 8
IS 1/3
SP 76
OP 97
A1 Kawata, Koh
LA English
YR 2019
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1698775164
AB This paper aims to show, primarily through analysis of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century jōruri 浄瑠璃 plays, the radical changes in the vision of salvation shared among ordinary people, focusing especially on Jōruri monogatari 浄瑠璃物語, Sonezaki shinjū 曽根崎心中 and Kinpira jōruri 金平浄瑠璃, and highlights how such changes are related to contemporary social processes of secularization. José Casanova famously claimed that the classical concept of secularization as the decline of religious belief is not adequate for the task of understanding general historical processes. Nevertheless, an equivalent to this process of religious decline is an important phenomenon in early modern Japan. In this secularization process, Japanese people of the early modern period sought more secular visions of salvation. Strong, persistent attention to kokoro 心 (mind or spirit), regarded as the means of realizing secular values such as wealth or happiness, was an expression of these concerns. Analyzing jōruri plays reveals how the increasing power of the centralized state, defeating religious powers one by one, became the key to changing people’s visions of salvation and thus, of secularization processes.
K1 Chikamatsu Monzaemon
K1 Goddess
K1 Jōruri
K1 Salvation
K1 Secularization
K1 state power
DO 10.1163/22118349-00801003