Religion, Sport, and Cultural (Mis)understanding: Japan and the United States in Religio-Imperialist Rivalry

Abstract

In the 1930s and 1940s, American authorities surveilled members of the Dai Nippon Butokukai in the United States. Upon the outbreak of war with Japan, the FBI and other American agencies began arresting Butokukai members as religious subversives and even enemy informants. Operating under Enlightenment assumptions of a hard divide between the secular and the sacred, the Americans could not make sense of the Butokukai, which was predicated upon different, non-Enlightenment views of society and religion. Drawing on recent research about the nature of pre-Enlightenment societies in the West, in this paper I argue that the Dai Nippon Butokukai was caught up in a much broader misunderstanding between Japan and the United States over religion, society, and the role of the individual in relation to the wartime state.