14:45-16:00 | Room B Monday Onsite Presentation Session 4

Religion

Session Chair: Lorenzo Pompeo

14:45-15:10

68825 | Renewing Religious Landscape: Moscow Buddhism as a Converted Religious Phenomenon in a Global City Aleksandra Sechko, HSE University, Russia

In this paper I’d like to track the ways in which Moscow's religious landscape is being renewed by the developing community of Buddhism's followers, framing this case within the optics of “global”. The new religious movements and alternative spirituality has been recently coming into the focus of urban landscape researchers (De Boeck, Fawaz, Srinivas). Thus, this paper is aiming to observe the emergence and functioning of new religious spaces in the dynamic global city in order to identify its origin, position and form as a part of the local landscape. As for the empirical material of the research, I’m concentrating on the sites and spaces – both physical and imaginary – created by non-ethnic Buddhist converts in Moscow, a global city having no historical ties with the religion. My fieldwork was carried out both in offline- and online-communities of all the Buddhist schools represented in the city, all of which emerged from five to ten years ago. Brad Weiss’s concept of imagination and Anna Tsing’s concept of circulations provide a conceptual background for exploring the specifics of religion’s migration from Japan to Moscow and its nature in the new state. I assume that the landscape of Moscow – physical and imaginary – is being transformed by a new religious community.

15:10-15:35

67353 | Jesus the Ineffecutal: The Maternal God of Shūsaku Endō and Christian Traditions Between East and West Lorenzo Pompeo, University of Trieste & University of Udine, Italy

The aim of this proposal is to reflect on how the novelist Shūsaku Endō (1923-1996) presents the Christian message and the person of Jesus Christ to his fellow countrymen.

In his life Endō has experienced the complex relationship between Japanese roots and his Catholic faith: consequently, in his works he avoids to focus on the image of a judging and condemning God, as is evident both in the story of the life of Jesus, called “the Ineffectual” in his fictionalized biography "Jesu no Shōgai" (1973), and in the novel "Silence" ("Chinmoku", 1966).

Described as someone who shares the human experience of suffering and who understands human weaknesses, Christ therefore ends up assuming maternal traits. As evidenced by the studies of Emi Mase-Hasegawa, author of "Christ in Japanese culture: Theological Themes in Shusaku Endo’s Literary Works" (2008), it is plausible that Endō drew on traditions rooted in Koshintō (ancient shintō), such as the "Amae" (the feeling that binds the child to the mother), to inculturate the Christian message in Japan.

In light of the above, these aspects of Endō’s literary works will be compared with some enlightening examples of Western Christian culture, in particular with the idea of the "foeminea forma" as it emerges from the work of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). This analysis would represent a fruitful challenge to explore intercultural dialogue between Christianity of West and of the East and to highlight similarities and differences underlying the different philosophical-religious traditions.

15:35-16:00

68039 | Exploring the Social Space of Filipino Catholics in Japan: De/Ghettoization

Willard Enrique Macaraan, De La Salle University, Philippines

Filipinos go to Japan for economic reasons but as they migrate for work, they bring along with them their ethnoreligious identity and heritage. Situated as "guests" in the Church of Japan, Filipino Catholics' (FCs) ecclesial presence is marked by narratives of seclusion, marginality, and negotiation. Data are drawn from a qualitative field research on selected church communities in the Archdiocese of Tokyo in Japan, namely, Koiwa, Matsudo, Akabane, and Kasai.

In an attempt to explore and nuance these contested spaces, I would make use of Loic Wacquant's theorization of urban ghettos and Pierre Bourdieu's ideation of "field". To illustrate this, the paper proposes a 'diamond-quadrant' (DQ) plane that may serve as a heuristic device for analytical purposes. Results from this study suggest that the early years of FCs' negotiation (1979-1990s) locate the players in the right plane of contested space defined by exclusionary tendencies of swording and shielding. In the mid-2000s, there has since been a major shift of negotiation to the left plane that is characterized by inclusionary attempts of fishnet and graftage. Despite this shift, it is still a negotiated space. The vision of full integration remains an ideal objective that if unmasked of its ambiguity and hegemonic nuances may be a welcome solution to the problems that affect the Church of Japan as a whole.