8-15 March, 1994
Leiden, the Netherlands

JAPANESE CORPORATE CULTURE AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION IN
RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVE

by Jan van Bremen

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The T“shiba International Foundation enabled the Centre of
Japanese and Korean Studies in the University of Leiden to
invite Hirochika Nakamaki, of the National Museum of Ethnology
in Osaka, to lead an intensive six-day seminar, 8 - 15 March
1994, about the corporate culture, social organization, and
religious activities of Japanese firms. Nakamaki is a pioneer
in this field. He has studied so-called new religions in
Japan, and in Japanese immigrant communities in the Americas.
The support of the T“shiba International Foundation is
gratefully acknowledged, and our thanks are duly extended to
its senior managing director.
It was also possible for four other anthropologists to take
part, read a paper, and chair a session. The Centre for
Non-Western Studies in the University of Leiden, the Isaac
Alfred Ailion Foundation, and the Nordic Institute of Asian
Studies, are also thanked for their support.
Our deepest gratitude is due to Hirochika Nakamaki for leading
the seminar in an exemplary fashion, sharing the fruits of his
research, and presenting his thoughts clearly in lectures and
debates. The afternoon speakers are also thanked for their
papers and for chairing a session. They have to share the
thanks which they so amply deserve for their contributions to
the discussion with all those who took part and helped to make
the seminar such a success.

MOTIVATION
The seminar met to discuss an important but under-explored
topic, namely the religious activities of Japanese firms
today, and the historical and religious dimensions of Japanese
corporate social organization and culture. It brought together
anthropologists with a good knowledge of the field, who could
contribute new data and formulate new questions. Nakamaki's
lectures on the religious activities of firms in Japan
contained a great deal original material, most of it gained by
participant observation. The same is true for his lectures on
Japanese religions abroad. The afternoon papers were also
based on original research. They focused on related themes.
The corporations studied in the seminar ranged from large to
small. They included the private firms, government bodies, the
educational and religious institutions which dominate Japanese
society today.

PARTICIPANTS
About thirty persons took part in the seminar every day, half
members of staff, half graduate students, among them students
in the Erasmus Programme of the European Union. Others
attended one or more sessions. Participants came from some ten
universities and countries: the National Museum of Ethnology
in Osaka, the Kyushyu Institute of Design in Fukuoka, and the
Tokyo University of Foreign Languages in Japan, the University
of Leiden, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, and the
University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, the �cole des
Hautes �tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, Oxford
and Cambridge Universities in England, the Nordic Institute of
Asian Studies, and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark,
the Institut f�r Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens in the
™sterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and the Institute
of Japanese Studies in the University of Vienna in Austria,
and the Institute of Japanese Studies in the University of
Venice, Italy.
Hirochika Nakamaki proved the ideal scholar to lead the
seminar. As mentioned briefly above, he is the author of many
works about so-called "new religions" in Japan. The 'Handbook
of New Religions in Japan' (in Japanese), compiled with
others, is a sound attestation to the depth and breadth of his
knowledge. Nakamaki's studies of Japanese religions in Hawaii,
on the North-American West Coast, and in Brazil, published in
books and articles, contain a great deal of new material. His
articles published in English are found mostly in the
'Japanese Journal of Religious Studies' (Volume 10, No. 1,
1983; volume 13, nos. 2-3, 1986) and in the 'Senri
Ethnological Studies' (no. 16, 1984; no. 29, 1990). Nakamaki's
books are in Japanese, including 'Japanese religions in the
new world' (1986) and 'Studies in Japanese religions and
religions of Japanese descent in Japan, America, and Brazil'
(1989). Nakamaki's studies of religious activities in Japanese
firms have resulted in the book (in Japanese), 'Of old the
domains; of new the corporations: enterprise and religion'
(1992). Nakamaki based his lecture material on his research,
and a few studies of corporate religion in Japan by others.
The interpretations are indebted to Tadao Umesao and other
authors.
Nearly all anthropologists present were members of the Japan
Anthropology Workshop (JAWS). They formed the core of the
workshop: Hirochika Nakamaki's morning lectures, and the
afternoon lectures and chairing of session by Emiko Namihira,
Arne Kalland, Patrick Beillevaire, Jan van Bremen, and Roger
Goodman, while Ken Vos showed the ethnologists the important
Japanese collection kept in the National Museum of Ethnology
in Leiden. Thomas Crump and Sepp Linhart were among the JAWS
members who attended, but unfortunately, Theodore Bestor and
Peter Post were detained at the last minute.
There were others present with first-hand knowledge and
experience of Japan, and knowledge of other societies in the
region. The presence of scholars and students of disciplines
other than anthropology helped to enlarge the scope of the
discussion. Thus it was possible to discuss questions from a
number of angles: in the Japanese context, in the context of
Japanese communities abroad, in corporations found in other
Asian countries to name but a few.

THE INTENSIVE SEMINAR
The sessions followed a set pattern: Nakamaki's two-hour
lectures in the mornings, followed by one hour of discussion
in the afternoons, the one-hour lecture on a related topic,
and the one and a half hours of discussion that closed the
sessions. Each session focused on a topic. In the first
session, chaired by Jan van Bremen, Nakamaki's focus was,
"Corporations and the sacred: corporate memorial monuments". A
detailed twelve-page hand-out and a one-hour video of his
research showed some of the religious activities in Japanese
firms, namely the memorial services and the memorial monuments
in companies. These activities are new and date back only a
few decades. In the afternoon, Emiko Namihira presented the
paper, "The identity of the dead and the concept of 'person'
among the Japanese: cadaver organ transplant and memorial
ceremony." It looked at commemoration in a brand new context,
and subjected it to a penetrating scrutiny.
In the second session, chaired by Patrick Beillevaire,
Nakamaki's theme was, "Society and the sacred: Japanese
festivals." An eight-page hand-out and one-hour video provided
details. Since the late 1980s firms have been participating in
festivals in urban wards suffering from depopulation, for
instance the Kanda Matsuri in Tokyo, where male and female
workers of companies help to carry the sacred palanquins.
Examples of corporate festivals given were those of Chichibu
Cement and Matsushita Electric. In the afternoon, Arne Kalland
traced conflicts about shrines and the use of festivals in
political contests in the nineteenth century, in his paper,
"Religion in a Japanese fishing village". He proposed a
"matrix model" of Japanese religions as combinations of
different elements manipulated by various stake-holders.
Session three, chaired by Arne Kalland, heard Nakamaki lecture
on, "Monopoly and symbiosis: habitation segregation of
deities." Nakamaki argued that it is misleading to see
Japanese religion as syncretistic. He advanced the notions of
'sumi-wake' (habitat segregation) and 'tsukai-wake' (function
segregation) and contended, with a detailed hand-out to
support his argument, that Shintoism and Buddhism have their
separate functions, places, and times in Japanese religion:
permanent as in house altars; temporary as in All Souls'
altars. In the discussion, a division of offerings to gods and
Buddhas into sweet and bitter tasting foods was found to be
empirically untenable. Raw and cooked foods were thought to be
a more suitable division. After the discussion, the visiting
ethnologists made an excursion to the National Museum of
Ethnology at the invitation of Ken Vos, curator of the
Japanese collection, who showed them parts of the Philipp
Franz von Siebold collection.
In session four, chaired by Roger Goodman, Nakamaki discussed,
"Makers and users: epidemiology of Japanese religion."
Following his outline given in the hand-out, Nakamaki
presented the rise, spread, and change of religions in terms
of ecological and epidemiological models, in which notions
like "endemic religion", "epidemic religion", "epidemization
of religions" were used to describe and explain social
phenomena. Case material was taken from Hokkaido in 1871-75,
the period of colonization of that island, and from Brazil. It
included a report of the annual ceremonies that commemorate
the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants in Sþo Paulo,
over a hundred years ago in 1888, and case studies of Japanese
religions like Seich“ no Ie, and its Japanese and non-Japanese
congregations. A model of religion in Brazilian Japanese
communities was proposed. An analysis in terms of makers and
users of religions closed the lecture. In the afternoon,
Patrick Beillevaire presented the paper, "Permanence and
adaptation in the cult of Inari", showing how wide-spread the
cult is in companies large and small, and its important place
in divination. He gave instances of Inari cults in the Ginza
district in Tokyo. It is striking that in company and village
shrines alike, the elite and not the general public, perform
the rites.
In session five, chaired by Emiko Namihira, the theme was,
"Knights and ghosts: sober and intoxicating culture."
Nakamaki's analysis dealt with light and darkness, envisaged
in popular belief as knights (mononofu) and wizard-technocrats
(monoshiri) subjugating ghosts (mononoke). It was argued that
warriors in pre-industrial Japan and today's corporate men are
functional equivalents. There is a similar division in their
worlds: the salaried men's hell for the hard-working many, and
the salaried men's heaven for the privileged few. Images of
these strata, poor (marubi) and rich (marukin), were shown in
hand-outs, e.g items such as cartoons in the popular press. In
the afternoon, Jan van Bremen read the paper, "The myth of the
secularization of industrialized Japan." The hypothesis was
that ritualization and rites have a prominent place in
industrialized Japan. It argued against the division of
society into secular and sacred spheres, and took the view
that rites are no different from other social practices. The
Centre of Japanese and Korean Studies generously invited
participants and members of the academic community to a
reception in the old Arsenal Building, now the Department of
Japanology, after the session.
In session six, chaired by Jan van Bremen, Nakamaki spoke
about, "Work and leisure: the rhythm of corporate culture."
The dichotomy of work and leisure, its ambiguity, and the
industrialization of leisure were discussed. A shift from work
to leisure was now observable in Japanese society, accompanied
by a shift from tightly organized to more loosely structured
corporations, and from tightly controlled to more loosely
supervised religions. This change entails the rise of new
social domains, like those called kehare which mix both common
and unusual elements. In the afternoon, Roger Goodman read the
paper, "Ritual performance in schools and companies:
socialization for work and leisure in Japanese culture." He
argued that ideologies are disseminated through schools and
companies, and that ritual orders are created and learned
there. Religion is brought into play through the association
of incorrect behaviour with ritual pollution.

RECAPITULATION
When the seminar ended, the knowledge of the participants
about the religious activities of Japanese firms, and the
religious dimensions of their social organization and culture,
had been markedly enriched. The seminar was conducted in an
atmosphere of openness. The lectures were lively and
instructive, the debates animated, and there was time for
informal exchanges. The seminar offered new and rare insights
into the religious activities and the place of religion in
corporate culture and social organization in Japanese firms
today, and into Japanese religions abroad. The anthropological
method ensured first-hand data. The seminar showed the need
for further studies of religion in the corporate world, and in
Japanese immigrant communities. The arguments and discussions
pointed to new research agendas, and revealed contentious
issues in method, conceptualization and interpretation. The
exchange resulted in stronger ties between scholars from
Europe and Japan. Everything which could be mustered Ä data,
methods, concepts, explanations, and questions Ä was mustered.
Once more all thanks are due to the sponsors, helpers,
lecturers and discussants.