72% irreligious; 56% believe in supernatural

[ZombieHorde]

Seventy-two percent of Japanese do not have any specific religious affiliation, but many still believe in supernatural forces, according to a recent Yomiuri Shimbun survey.

According to the survey, 26 percent of respondents said they believed in a religion, virtually unchanged from a similar survey conducted three years ago. Only 37 percent said religion was important for living a happy life.

Views of people's religious sentiment were split, with 45 percent of respondents saying Japanese had little religious faith while 49 percent thought otherwise.

However, 94 percent of respondents said they respected their ancestors, and 56 percent claimed to have had some form of supernatural experience.

The results suggested that many Japanese feel little affinity to a particular religion, but many do harbor feelings of respect for things that are scientifically unproven.

The Yomiuri Shimbun interviewed 3,000 randomly selected people across the country face-to-face on May 17-18, of whom 1,837 gave valid answers.

Asked about what happens to people's spirits after they die, 30 percent said they believed they would be reincarnated, 24 percent said they would go to another world and 18 percent answered they would vanish.

The recent popularity of new forms of spirituality and other new age-related beliefs, such as an interest in previous lives and guardian angels, was particularly prominent among female respondents. Although 21 percent of all respondents said they were interested in such thinking--far below the 75 percent who were not--27 percent of women saw the appeal of such beliefs, whereas only 13 percent of men said they felt this way.

To the question about what should be taught as religious education at school, 71 percent said students should be taught about "respect for life and nature," 31 percent said "histories of major religions," and 21 percent selected "the meaning of religion" and "tolerance for people of other faiths." Only 7 percent preferred not to have religion taught at school.

Respondents were allowed to give more than one answer to this question.

Views on religious groups were somewhat standoffish, with 47 percent saying these groups' activities were unclear, and 43 percent believing they use fear-mongering and other aggressive approaches to disseminate their beliefs. Thirty-six percent said they felt these groups were good at raising large amounts of money.

These three answers occupied the top three slots to the same question in Yomiuri surveys in May 1998 and August 2005.

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http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20080531TDY02303.htm

[elleng]

1. Proper caption?

"To be irreligious means “to lack religion or to be heedless of it”; it suggests, however, a deliberate posture, not an inadvertent one. Nonreligious is matter of fact, simply an opposite of religious, meaning “secular.” Unreligious may be a synonym of either irreligious or nonreligious, but its overtones suggest the overtness or deliberateness we find in irreligious. In the predicate adjective position, not religious is matter of fact and closer in meaning to nonreligious."

Bartleby

[ZombieHorde]

2. Japanese to English translations can be tricky sometimes.

The subtleties between irreligious, nonreligious, and not religious could be especially tricky.

[MrModerate]

3. Interesting that, despite a preponderance of nonreligious feelings . . .

Survival after death still enjoyed a substantial majority.

[ZombieHorde]

4. The numbers on afterlife beliefs are wierd.

Reincarnation 30%
Another world 24%
Vanish 18%

Total 72%

Does this 72% strictly represent the irreligious, and therefor the remaining 28% are the religious?

What exactly does vanish mean in this context? Does it mean no afterlife? I think that it may, since only 56% are superstitious.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. Japan's religious scene is exceptionally complicated

You've got Shinto, which is the institutionalized form of various regional and folk belief systems. Then you have Buddhism, which was imported in about the 5th Century C.E., which was already split into several factions before it arrived and which developed a few more branches in Japan.

After the expulsion of the Jesuits in the early 17th century, all Japanese were required to register at a Buddhist temple. Even today, a lot of families maintain their ancestral grave sites at some temple or other.

When Buddhism first came in, the belief systems that eventually gave rise to Shinto were on the level of agricultural fertility rituals and a few myths to explain natural forces. Buddhism was already about 1,000 years old and had a sophisticated philosophical tradition, so it immediately appealed to the educated people, who at the same time held on to their traditional beliefs.

Eventually, Buddhism and Shinto worked out a compromise--not officially, though. It just evolved. Shinto would handle weddings, blessings of children, and agricultural rites. Buddhism would handle funerals and anything else that wasn't covered by Shinto. Most Buddhist temples have a Shinto shrine on their grounds.

Since neither Buddhism nor Shinto has a weekly holy day, there are an awful lot of people who use them in the same way that a lot of Europeans use churches, i.e. strictly to mark major life events. But some people are quite devout, more so in Buddhism than in Shinto. Many people have Buddhist altars in their homes, where they keep mementos of deceased family members, but some people have Shinto altars as well. Some go so far as to become monks or nuns. A couple of sects of Buddhism allow priests to marry, so that the priesthood of a given temple may be a hereditary position.

Making this even more complicated are the so-called New Religions, most of which developed in the last two centuries. They are founded by charismatic figures and often involve faith healing, positive thinking, or beliefs similar to the "prosperity gospel." Examples are Tenri, Sekai Kyusei Kyo, and Byakko, all of which, by the way, have won adherents outside Japan.

Interestingly enough, few of these new religions are exclusivist. If you want to practice two or three, it's not a problem.

There's also a tiny Christian population, but for the majority of the population, the trappings are more important than the theology. For example, for the past twenty years or so, it's been fashionable to have a Christian wedding, probably because people are attracted to the "look" of it. I've even seen ads in the English-language press asking for Caucasian men to pose as ministers and perform wedding ceremonies at hotels. (It's all perfectly legal, since it is only the act of registering at the city hall that makes a marriage valid.)

And on top of this is a centuries-old tradition of stories about ghosts and demons and fortune telling and Chinese astrology. Its latest incarnation is J-Horror, but there were gory ghost stories in medieval Japan.

As to what happens to the dead, opinions vary. The Buddhist belief, of course, is reincarnation until you accumulate enough merit to earn nirvana, which many varieties of Buddhism interpret as being a heaven-like state. There's a folk belief that the dead become stars in the sky. In the movie Afterlife, made ca. 1999. the premise is that the recently deceased stop off to choose one memory that they will carry with them into the next phase of their existence. However, the movie cleverly leaves open the question of just what that next phase is.

So yes, it's quite possible for a Japanese person to have only a loose or practically non-existent religious affiliation and still believe in ghosts.