Chicago shukyo kaigi no sutoratejii : bukkyo to joyaku kaisei

The delegation to the World’s Parliament of Religions was no less a part of Japan’s demonstration of her equality with Europe than her display of industrial and material progress in the exhibition halls of the Columbian Exposition, the textbooks on education, or the display of architecture, art and gardens in the Hôôden. Japanese Buddhism was the embodiment of Japanese culture, evidence of the antiquity and endurance of a sophisticated and intellectual civilization in Japan, a civilization worthy of recognition among world powers. But more than this, it was also the rational, scientific religion of the future, the shortest route to the pinnacle of religious evolution. Since spiritual development was assumed to accompany social evolution in general, this claim to religious superiority supplemented the bid for world status. The delegates also engaged in the debates on racial hierarchy that pervaded the Columbian Exposition. Their claim that Japanese Buddhism was the universal religion for the modern world challenged assumptions of white, Christian supremacy. The connection between the representation of Buddhism and treaty revision was most particularly addressed by the two Buddhist laymen, Noguchi and Hirai, but the themes they introduced were elaborated and given authority by the Buddhist specialists, the four priests of Noguchi’s gift to the West. Their presentations protested against American imperialism and Christianity’s complicity in it, and their rejection of the Western religion was reinforced by Japanese Christian delegates who argued for the superiority and universality of the Japanese interpretation of Christianity. Japan may have been grateful to the United States for its contribution to the modernization of Japan but emphatically rejected the foreign religion. Not only was it inferior to the local product, it epitomized the designation of inferiority Japan was striving to shed: the civilized send missions to the uncivilized.