421.2
The Establishment of Religious Practice and Institutions in the Pre-Second World War Japanese Canadian Diaspora
The Establishment of Religious Practice and Institutions in the Pre-Second World War Japanese Canadian Diaspora
Friday, 20 July 2018: 17:50
Location: 717A (MTCC SOUTH BUILDING)
Oral Presentation
Japan is often seen as a site of the postmodern, either inherently or as a result of its postcapitalist economy. Those who see Japan’s culture as essentially postmodern often point to its Buddhist, and especially Zen, philosophical traditions. Satori, as Roland Barthes states in his The Empire of Signs, “is a more or less powerful…seism which causes knowledge, or the subject, to vacillate: it creates an emptiness of language.”[1] Nagarjuna’s “emptiness/void” (sunyata), can be seen as reflected in what he calls the “empty center” of Tokyo, “decentered” Japanese food, and the “breach of meaning” in haiku. Marilyn Ivy notes that the Japanese philosopher Karatani Kōjin, “maintains that in Japan there is essentially no structure…because there is no preexisting logocentric structure.”[2] This paper will examine whether such interpretations of Japan as a country with a “decentered” religious tradition can account for the way the Japanese diaspora in Canada in the early 20th century came to adapt to Canadian religious traditions and help to understand how they practiced “religion” in their new home.