Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast episode 555, The Gods March Overseas,

Part 1.

We're going to start this week with a bit of a digression, but I promise it's going to be worth it,

despite the fact that it will take up about half the episode, actually.

You see, our episodes on Reiki got me thinking about a question I've been grappling

with on and off for a couple of years now. When you get right down to it, what exactly is

religion? It seems straightforward enough. I imagine if you told most people in the world,

I don't know what you mean by religion, you'd be looked at like you're a bit crazy.

We all know what religion is.

It's some combination of belief, ritual, sacred spaces, all that stuff.

But when you actually dig into it, things become kind of challenging from a definitional perspective.

Just as an example, Reiki, of course, involves a belief in the supernatural, a metaphysical, cosmic order that, as much as Takata Hawaiyo sometimes claimed, various forms of pseudoscience did confirm it, is not actually verifiable scientifically.

So is Reiki a religion?

She would have probably said no, though arguably that is cynically because calling it a religion

would have lessened its appeal to her Christian students.

More broadly, if you look at the history of humanity, the sheer range of beliefs that we

have lumped into the idea of religion is absolutely overwhelming.

From the Roman Republic's practice of, in essence, worship of the state itself, to the largely

secularized religious metaphysics of Confucianism with its generally vague cosmic

order of heaven, to Hinduism, a singular religion incorporating a massive number of belief systems, some of which

are arguably monotheistic, to everything in between.

Our modern notion of what religion is is largely a historically defined one created in the

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