2025/12/24 by Orion Klautau · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Chinese history and philosophy #Indian and Buddhist Studies #Japanese History and Culture
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/0048721x.2025.2598066
openalex created_date 2025/12/24 · openalex publication_date 2025/12/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
This article re-examines how the ‘new’ Buddhist movements of the Kamakura era (1185–1333) – the opening phase of what we now consider Japan’s ‘medieval’ period – were cast as a counterpart to German Protestantism and how that analogy helped forge a global vocabulary of ‘Reformation’ and ‘Middle Ages.’ Focusing on the scholarship of Hara Katsurō (1871–1924), it reconstructs the intellectual currents that enabled him to place Buddhist figures such as Hōnen (1133–1212) and Shinran (1173–1263) alongside Luther and Calvin, thereby globalizing Japan’s past while coining a native medieval age. In other words, this article argues that Hara’s idea of ‘Reformation’ reflects a broader contemporary trend to situate Japan’s past in relation to European historiography while devising new origin stories of national identity. The study also offers brief insights into the analogy’s afterlives: its postwar refashioning under Weberian modernization theories and persistence in school textbooks and right-wing popular histories.