Early Postwar Religious Scene. Religious life in early postwar Japan continued much as it had before: as an admixture of Buddhism and Shintō, with elements of Confucianism, Daoism, and folk beliefs. Japanese, at different times in their lives or in different circumstances, had practiced elements of both main religions in what scholars call a syncretic co-existence. In addition, loyalty to superiors and reverence for parents, in part derived from Confucianism, remained as family and social values, although somewhat undercut by the confiscation of ethics textbooks in 1946 and the withdrawal of the Imperial Rescript on Education in 1948. Weddings were governed by Shintō rites; funerals by Buddhist ceremonies. In addition, religious life and consciousness were much affected by spiritual and philosophical questioning in the aftermath of defeat and loss. Death was all around, as Japanese mourned for the many killed in battle and on the homefront. Established religions were freed from government controls but lost official financial support. New religions made a surprisingly successful debut. Some of these groups were revivals from prewar days; others were secession movements from mainstream religion. Wherever possible amidst ruins and poverty, the butsudan, or Buddhist family altar, continued to adorn most homes. Increasingly, as life returned to some semblance of normality, the responsibility for maintaining the altar would fall upon housewives, especially in emerging salaryman households. Although religion was a vital undercurrent in daily life, only a few Japanese women emerged at this time as influential religious leaders and philosophers.

Religious Reforms. Among the first reforms of the Occupiers was to decree religious freedom in the Civil Liberties Directive of October 1945. Officers in the Civil Information and Education Section, GHQ, moved quickly to depoliticize State Shintō in December 1945 and to ask the emperor publicly to renounce his divinity, New Year's Day, 1946. As a result, Shintō shrines were cut off from government funds; priests were removed from government payrolls; families were no longer required to register with local shrines. The intent was to foster a return to Shrine Shintō, which was perceived as a nature religion with an emphasis on purity and simplicity. Japanese Buddhism was not well understood by the occupiers. Although some of the land confiscated by the Japanese military was restored to temples, Buddhist priests regarded GHQ's legal and economic reforms as destructive to income and an invitation to the creation of new and competitive sects. In early 1946, Japanese history texts and ethics readers were confiscated, pulped, and within a year replaced by completely revised democratic readings devoid of ancient Sun Goddess mythology and Confucian driven ethics. Most important, the Constitution of 1947 separated religion and the state.

Among the most important religious landmarks in Occupied Tokyo was the Yasukuni Shrine, where rites were performed to honor Japan's war dead in battles from the 1850s through the Asia/Pacific War. It attracted numerous visitors, especially widows and bereaved families. Under Occupation guidelines, however, public displays or rites for the war dead were frowned upon, and the shrine was denied official funds. Japanese veterans and families of the war dead soon became deeply preoccupied with finding the remains and performing proper rites, such as burning bones, at the sites of death. By the end of the Occupation, searches were widely launched in the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, and wherever politically possible in Siberia and China. They continue to this day.

Women and Established Religion. Shintō, shamanistic in origin and considered to be Japan's indigenous religion, once again became a religion of shrines and festivals. All over Japan, women and men visited local shines to call upon the gods (kami) and to pray. In larger shrines, visitors purified their hands and mouth with water after passing through special gateways (torii) into sacred areas. They burned incense in outdoor cauldrons and bought charms. They paid Shintō priests to bless marriages and new-born babies, remember the aborted, commemorate the opening of neighborhood shops, and pronounce prayers for new factories. But, as before, there was no formal role in the Shinto priesthood for women; they were unfit as creatures subject to menstrual and other pollutions, such as giving birth. If virginal, young women might perform at shrine dances or act as attendants to priests at ceremonies. At Shintō festivals, men carried portable shrines or pulled huge ones while women and children celebrated as onlookers. However, women were much in evidence at shrines stalls as sellers of charms, incense sticks, or souvenirs. As soon as possible, families revived the custom of shichi-go-san: dressing up girls at the ages of three and seven in kimono and boys at age five in a variety of costumes for a festive annual visit to the local Shint_ shrine. In Tokyo, this meant an outing with Mom and Dad at the large and impressive shrine to the Meiji Emperor. Another Shintō custom reaching far back into the past was the renewal or rebuilding every twenty years of the Inner Shrine at Ise, the chief shrine to the Sun Goddess. Occupation authorities frowned upon plans for renewal, but it did in fact take place in 1953, one year after the Occupation had ended (and again in 1973 and 2003). As a form of religious pilgrimage, women and men, especially older people from rural areas, journeyed to Tokyo as a volunteer labor force to clean and maintain the grounds of the Imperial Palace. The Occupation debated but decided not to interfere with this custom.

Buddhism, one of the great transforming forces in Japanese history and culture from early to modern times, continued to play an important role in postwar Japan as an organized religion and as an influence on thought, literature, the arts, and architecture. It existed in several forms, from small and esoteric sects to ones with mass followings. The largest were the salvation sects of the Pure Land (Jōdō) and True Pure Land (Jōdō Shinshū), dating back to the 12th and 13th centuries. The latter, founded by Shinran and featuring a married priesthood, had a postwar following in the millions, but in the early 17th century had split into western (original) and eastern branches, centering on their main temples in Kyoto—respectively the Nishi Honganji and Higashi Honganji (Western and Eastern Temples of the Great Vow). Women had played important but subordinate roles since the beginning as laypersons, worshippers, temple volunteers, and wives and daughters of head priests—also as nuns. However, women could not ascend to the priesthood, or, except in rare instances, become heads of temples. Technically, women upon death could aspire to rebirth into the Pure Land by calling upon the grace of the Amida Buddha; however, orthodox theology implied that rebirth was in the form of a male body.

In Occupied Japan, such religious teachings and practices tended to remain in place, though not without question. To the chagrin of the Occupiers, the western branch of the True Sect was dominated from behind the scenes by a political purgee, Rev. Ōtani Kōshō, the hereditary chief abbot and a relative of the imperial family by marriage to a sister of the Empress. He was rumored at the time to have been somehow involved in the looting of China during the war and to have urged believers to support the holy war. Attempts to remove him from office were constrained by pledges not to interfere unduly with religion. One of the best known women Buddhist leaders in Japan in the early postwar period was Akamatsu Tsuneko (1897-1965). The daughter of a Buddhist priest, she became an officer in the All Japan Association of Buddhist Women but was otherwise famous as a labor union activist, socialist, and member of Parliament. Another activist, atomic bomb muralist, Akamatsu (Maruki) Toshiko, also came from a family of Buddhist priests in Hokkaido.

Otherwise in Buddhism, the practice continued of barring women worshippers from the sacred precincts of Mt. Kōya, fifty miles from Kyoto and home to the eighth century Shingon Sect (True Words); this did not change until after the Occupation years. Nichiren Buddhism, a sect devoted to the Lotus Sutra and dating from the medieval period, had a strong following, including women, but would reach greater heights after the Occupation when it benefited enormously from the leadership and aggressive conversion tactics of Sōka Gakkai (Value Creation Society), a lay organization sometimes called a new religion. The founder had died in jail, 1944, as a political prisoner, and Sōka Gakkai's remarkable postwar resurgence as a force in Japanese religion and politics came in the 1950s and 1960s under new and energetic male leadership. It grew to 8 million in Japan and perhaps as many as 300,000 members in the United States. Zen Buddhism, though smaller in numbers and in temples, held the greatest fascination to foreigners, especially for its emphasis on mediation, its aesthetics, and its beautiful temple gardens. Little was known at the time of Zen's administrative difficulties and quarrels. Buddhist discourse on war memory and responsibility, in particular the participation of the Zen and the True Sects in Japanese aggression, has been the subject of recent scholarly and media attention but was overlooked or neglected at the time. In 2004, for example, the True Sect publicly denounced directives from Chief Abbot Ōtani in 1931-1945, asking worshippers to cooperate in Japan's imperial wars and giving a nationalistic interpretation to the 13th century tenets of founding priest Shinran. Zen has not been particularly forthcoming in admitting to its wartime past.

As before, women, but apparently not in great numbers, became Zen or Pure Land Buddhist nuns. They entered nunneries for various reasons: some to escape marriage; others, either single or widowed, to search for enlightenment or to follow a religious vocation. Through the centuries, institutional relations between monks and nuns had been patriarchal. Nuns had to do cooking and cleaning for monks as well as carry out their own devotions. Much remained the same in early postwar Japan, but it is difficult to know precisely what was happening at the time without consulting the records of nunneries. They were private and off the beaten track. We do know that rules were revised somewhat for Sōtō Zen nuns in 1946, allowing them to chant sutras at funerals and to wear colored robes. In 1949, Sōtō nuns were permitted to serve as masters to disciples, although the master-disciple relationship still favored monks. Not until 1970 could nuns become abbots and then only of middle-ranking temples. The number of Buddhist nuns has greatly declined in postmodern Japan, but one of today's great celebrities is Setouchi (Harumi) Jakucho (1922- ), a divorced mother, author of sensual novels, translator of the Tale of Genji into modern Japanese, and since 1973 a Buddhist nun in one of Japan's oldest sects, Tendai (Lotus Platform), founded in the early 9th century.

Women and the New Religions. In the chaos of early postwar Japan, many new religious groups sprang up at the grassroots level and quickly attracted converts, women and men alike. These breakaway movements from organized Shint_ and Buddhism have been given the term, “new religions” (shinkyō shukyō, newly arisen religions), but some in fact had prewar or even earlier origins. In general, the new religions retained selected elements from established religions in combination with folk beliefs. Under the banner of religious freedom, Occupation authorities and mainstream religions could not suppress them unless they were overtly ultra-nationalistic. One of the oldest of the new religions, Tenrikyō (Teaching of Divine Reason), dated back to the early nineteenth century. It was founded by a charismatic peasant woman (safe childbirth was one of the appeals) but taken over by male relatives after her death. In the 1930s, its head was jailed as a political prisoner but released under General MacArthur's Civil Liberties Directive of October 1945. Tenri gained in numbers and independence from Shintō and located its main temple and private university in Tenri City near Nara in the 1950s. Another important prewar sect was Ōmotokyō (Great Foundation), which was hounded almost to destruction by a hostile Japanese state. It had been founded in the 1890s by a poor peasant woman who claimed possession by a Shintō deity and re-founded in the early 20th century by her son-in-law.

Within the rapidly proliferating new religious groups after 1945 (over 500 by one count in 1948), women played significant roles but again generally as followers or laypersons and not as founders or leaders. An exception was Kitamura Sayo (1900-1967), founder of Tenshō Kōtai Jingukyō, which was named for a male-female deity but was much better known as the Dancing Religion (odoru shūkyō). Kitamura, a farm woman from a village in Yamaguchi Prefecture, southeastern Honshu, began having success with her sermons in 1946-47. Intolerant of other religions, she claimed to be the daughter of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, and promised faith healing. Followers, women and men alike, engaged in frenzied dancing to reach a state of muga or non-self. At her death, a grand-daughter took over as successor, but the reach of the sect, which retained only 40,000 adherents in the 1980s, had owed much to the personality of its deceased founder. Another exception was Naganuma Myōkō (1889-1957), co-founder of the Risshō Kōsei Kai (Society for the Establishment of Righteousness and Friendly Relations) and often characterized as a spirit-medium. This movement had split off from an earlier “new religion” associated with Nichiren Buddhism in 1938 and had grown from a few thousand in 1945 to over a million by the late 1950s. The sect's counseling services drew many women into this religion, especially in the Tokyo area, and it opened a great Sacred Hall there in 1964. Other new religions preached revisionist theologies; engaged in services for the war dead; or offered hope, healing, and wealth to the disadvantaged, outcaste, and impoverished. Seichō no Ie (House of Growth, or Truth of Life Movement), a Buddhist lay group dating back to 1930, would become powerful on the religious right in 1980s Japan and mount opposition to legalized abortion. Charlatans too were around to take advantage of the gullible and desperate. To critics and the media, some of the new religious groups seemed little more than cults. One of the most recent, Aum Shinrikyō (Supreme Truth Group), launched a sarin gas attack on the Yokohama and Tokyo subways in 1995 and is regarded as a terrorist or doomsday group.

Women and Christianity. In 1945, Christianity had only a small following in Japan. The estimate is less than one percent. Since the late 19th century, however, its followers had occupied prominent positions as intellectuals, writers, and teachers. The Bible, which had been banned during the war, was well-known in religious, intellectual, and literary circles. Christianity existed in the form of dozens of small Protestant denominations and Roman Catholic churches, convents, and monasteries. The Russian Orthodox Church too had Japanese adherents and a cathedral in Tokyo. There were a few Japanese practitioners of Judaism and Islam, but generally these were the religions of resident foreigners in Japan. There was much for postwar Japanese Christianity to reflect upon. During the Asia/Pacific War, the Japanese Christian Council of Protestant Churches was pressured to support state militarism. The Vatican had allowed Japanese Catholics to interpret certain Shinto ceremonies as civil rites. It was not until 1967 that the United Church of Christ in Japan, a Protestant organization, issued a confession of World War II responsibility.

When the Occupation began, Kawai Michi (1877-1953), an educator with early training at a Presbyterian school in Hokkaido and higher education at Bryn Mawr in the United States, was probably closest to the Occupation power center. She enjoyed an old friendship with General Bonner Fellers, a psychological warfare officer and one of the figures in MacArthur's inner circle during the opening months of the Occupation. She had also been the first general secretary of the Japanese Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA). Kawai gave trusted advice to GHQ on the pros and cons of retention of the emperor and on higher education for women.

The leading Christian woman was Uemura Tamaki (1890-1982). Daughter of a famous Meiji Protestant minister, Uemura was herself the ordained pastor of a Presbyterian church in Tokyo and also active in the Japanese and international YMCA. She had been educated at Wellesley College and the University of Edinburgh and had the trust of Occupation officials as a much needed sympathizer in fulfilling the goals of democratization and demilitarization. In 1946, Uemura was the first Japanese to be allowed to travel abroad; few others did so until 1948. She attended YWCA meetings in Canada and the United States and met old friends; the following year, 1947, she helped to host the World YWCA conference in Japan. Uemura supported efforts to restore YWCA contacts with Chinese women and, in essence, to denounce Japanese aggression, something she and other Japanese Christian women had failed to do or could not do during the Asia/Pacific War. From 1947 to 1952, at the invitation of the Emperor, she gave Bible lessons to the Empress and the Imperial Couple's three unmarried daughters. At the same time, Crown Prince Akihito, his mother and sisters, and schoolmates, received special English language tutorials from Elizabeth Gray Vining, a Quaker. Neither she nor her successor, Esther B. Rhoads, also a Quaker and director of the Friends School in Japan, attempted to convert their students, at least not openly. In 1955, Uemura became a founding member of the Committee of Seven to Appeal for World Peace. Two other famous women members were Hiratsuka Raichō, founder of the feminist literary group, the Bluestockings, in 1911; and Jōdai Tano, president of Japan Women's University—a former student at Wells Women's College in New York with graduate training in English literature at the University of Michigan and Cambridge University in England.

Another prominent Christian woman was Takeda Kiyoko (1917- ), who was baptized in a Japanese Protestant church in the late 1930s and embarked on further studies at the Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University in New York. Repatriated to Japan on a Red Cross ship six months after Pearl Harbor, she was mobilized for factory work with women students, later becoming at war's end a high officer and eventually director of the Japan YWCA. Takeda would also make a mark as an intellectual figure in postwar Japan. In 1946, she was one of two woman among the seven founding members of the Institute for the Science of Thought (Shisō no Kagaku Kenkyūkai), which began publishing a highly regarded antiwar journal, Shisō no kagaku, devoted to the philosophical exploration of human problems and the culture of ordinary people.

The other woman, not a Christian but deeply interested in folklore, shamanism, and Shintō, was Takeda's friend, Tsurumi Kazuko (1918-2006), who was a student at Vassar College when war with the United States broke out in 1941 and had returned to Japan on the same ship with Takeda. Well connected through her famous father, a politician and author, she was a cousin of birth control activist and Diet member Katō Shizue (the former Baroness Ishimoto) and a friend of American Nobel prize winner Pearl Buck. It should also be noted that Tsurumi's brother, philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke, then a student at Harvard, had joined the two women on the ship returning to Japan in 1942. He would be among the seven founding members of the Institute for the Science of Thought, 1946, and editor of their journal. In 1948, Takeda and Tsurumi were once again the only Japanese women invited to join the Tokyo branch of the otherwise male-dominated Peace Problem Discussion Society (Heiwa Mondai Danwakai). Both women published extensively in this period and after, Takeda becoming, among many things, an expert on the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, and Tsurumi emerging as a specialist on John Dewey and Pearl Buck in addition to problems of working class women and environmental pollution.

To follow their careers, shortly after the Occupation ended, Takeda became an instructor at the new International Christian University, which awarded her a doctoral degree in 1961. Known as Chō Takeda after her marriage to economist Chō Yukio in 1953, she was a founder and director for many years of the university's Institute for Asian Cultural Studies and became president of the World Council of Churches. Tsurumi, on reaching her mid-forties, resumed her studies in the United States, earning a Ph.D. in sociology at Princeton University, 1968, and joined the faculty of the Institute for International Relations at Sophia University, a Jesuit institution in Tokyo. She was famous for always wearing a kimono in pubic appearances and for her skill in classical dance. Attired in kimono, she spoke to much acclaim at the University of Maryland in the late 1970s on the status of sociological studies in Japan. These two were among very few Japanese women in the early postwar period who were taken seriously as intellectuals, scholars, and academics in heavily male-dominated discourse. In their cases, however, should we look, as one scholar recently suggested, at both class and gender? They were both highly educated women, they came from relatively privileged backgrounds, and they had independent outlets for their views—indeed, they helped to create their own platforms. They also benefited from supportive males in their lives. Their careers serve as a reminder that Japanese women who aspired to higher education in the prewar period had to go abroad.

Missionaries. General MacArthur, leader of the Occupation, was said to be a devout Episcopalian. Little evidence has been produced for this belief other than rhetoric. Jean McArthur was the church-goer in the family. However, from the beginning General MacArthur welcomed visits by Protestant and Catholic leaders to Occupied Japan. One motive was to fight Communism and bolster democracy. Another was to help fill a spiritual void. To further his goals, MacAthur personally called for the return as soon as possible of Christian missionaries, although they were required to be self-supporting and bring a minimum tonnage of food supplies. A great inspiration to the small Japanese and foreign Christian community at this time was the aged Mary Florence Denton, a long-time missionary teacher at the Dōshisha Girls' High School, Kyoto. She had chosen to remain in Japan during the war while most other missionaries had departed at urgings from their governments. In an open letter to the Japanese in 1949, MacArthur encouraged reading of the Bible. Meantime, there had been hope within GHQ, perhaps “fantasy” would be a better word, that the Emperor and Empress might convert to Christianity. The Empress, as noted, took Bible lessons. Rumors (perhaps inspired by Uemura Tamaki) circulated at one point that the she had been overheard singing Christian hymns. Such hopes, though baseless, revived in later years when Crown Prince Akihito married Shōda Michiko, whose parents were Catholic. Though educated in Catholic schools and a graduate of the College of the Sacred Heart, it is unclear whether she was ever baptized. An offshoot of Christianity, Moral Rearmament (MRA), once called the Oxford Movement and led by American Frank Buchman, developed a following in Japan at the end of the Occupation and into the 1950s, especially among anti-communists of all ages. The theological position of MRA on religion and gender requires research.

International Christian University. By late-Occupation, a movement supported by Joseph Grew, former Ambassador to Japan, and by prominent American and Japanese Protestant Christians was underway to found International Christian University. ICU opened its doors in 1953 to Japanese and foreign students as a co-ed institution, including graduate studies. Its stated mission was to serve God and humanity. Perhaps, too, it was intended as a counterpart to the Jesuit institution, Sophia University, and to act as a bulwark against communism. In common with its counterparts in the United States and Europe, ICU had few women faculty members with the exception of Japanese language instructors. Another exception was the previously mentioned Takeda Kiyoko, professor of history and religious studies at ICU and a future dean. Another highly educated and well-connected woman would join the faculty later, in 1965, Dr. Ogata Sadako, graduate of Sacred Heart University in 1951, recipient of a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963, and Japan's first woman minister to the United Nations, 1978-80.

Reverse Cultural Influence. As part of growing, though as yet small-scale interest in Japanese culture among the Occupiers, there were a few foreign converts to Buddhism even as missionaries worked to convert Japanese to Christianity. In the West, the interest in Zen Buddhism deepened in the 1950s. In the United States, Trappist monk Thomas Merton; writer Jack Kerouac and his circle of Beatniks; and philosopher Alan Watts would arouse further curiosity and study. In the meantime, there was the example of Ruth Fuller Sasaki—prewar student of Zen, postwar acolyte, and eventually priest. Years later, in 1988, Susan Noble, an American from Oregon, would become the first Western woman to be ordained as a priest in the 8th century Shingon Buddhist sect. In Buddhism, Japan had come a long way since the days when women were denied entry to Mt. Kōya.