The Invention of a New Religion | Page 3

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Etext editor's notes: A few diacritical marks have had to be removed,
but Chamberlain did not use macrons to represent lengthened vowels.
What were footnotes are numbered and moved to the end of the
relevant paragraphs.

THE INVENTION OF A NEW RELIGION BY B. H.
CHAMBERLAIN, EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF JAPANESE AND
PHILOLOGY AT THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO,
JAPAN 1912

The Invention of a New Religion [1]
[Note 1] The writer of this pamphlet could but skim over a wide subject.
For full information see Volume I. of Mr. J. Murdoch's
recently-published "History of Japan," the only critical work on that
subject existing in the English language.
Voltaire and the other eighteenth-century philosophers, who held
religions to be the invention of priests, have been scorned as superficial
by later investigators. But was there not something in their view, after
all? Have not we, of a later and more critical day, got into so inveterate
a habit of digging deep that we sometimes fail to see what lies before
our very noses? Modern Japan is there to furnish an example. The
Japanese are, it is true, commonly said to be an irreligious people. They
say so themselves. Writes one of them, the celebrated Fukuzawa,
teacher and type of the modern educated Japanese man: "I lack a
religious nature, and have never believed in any religion." A score of
like pronouncements might be quoted from other leading men. The
average, even educated, European strikes the average educated
Japanese as strangely superstitious, unaccountably occupied with

supra-mundane matters. The Japanese simply cannot be brought to
comprehend how a "mere parson" such as the Pope, or even the
Archbishop of Canterbury, occupies the place he does in politics and
society. Yet this same agnostic Japan is teaching us at this very hour
how religions are sometimes manufactured for a special end--to
subserve practical worldly purposes.
Mikado-worship and Japan-worship--for that is the new Japanese
religion--is, of course, no spontaneously generated phenomenon. Every
manufacture presupposes a material out of which it is made, every
present a past on which it rests. But the twentieth-century Japanese
religion of loyalty and patriotism is quite new, for in it pre-existing
ideas have been sifted, altered, freshly compounded, turned to new uses,
and have found a new centre of gravity. Not only is it new, it is not yet
completed; it is still in process of being consciously or
semi-consciously put together by the official class, in order to serve the
interests of that class, and, incidentally, the interests of the nation at
large. The Japanese bureaucracy is