Harvard East Asian Monographs 443. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2021. xxiv, 371 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$59.95, cloth. ISBN 9780674260153.
Religion is a “private affair” that is supposed to be for the “public benefit,” Adam Lyons explains in this theoretically complex and clearly written study of the changes not only in prison chaplaincy, but in Japanese religions more broadly over the last 150 years. A chaplain is constantly struggling with the tension between her/his duty to “tend to the private realm of … an inmate’s ‘problems of the heart’ (kokoro no mondai) … [while also concerning her/himself with] the state’s goals of inmate docility and correctional reform” (8). While there are certain limitations to this study (some understandable), it is an important book for those working on civic religion, socially engaged Buddhism, regimes of care, religion and law, and religion and modernity. It is also essential for those studying both personal and social ethics in Japan and how institutional reform and political influence have transformed Buddhist roles since the Meiji period.
Lyons draws on theorists such as Foucault (of course) and Asad, as well as Yoshida Kyūichi, Michael Jackson, and Jolyon Thomas, among others, in order to formulate two major arguments: first, that Japanese models of prison chaplaincy are “rooted in the Pure Land Buddhist concept of ‘doctrinal admonition’” in order to purify a prisoner’s “heart” (10–11); and second, that the “political ideal undergirding the prison chaplaincy is the notion that the right kind of religion can harmonize private interests with the public good” (12). Through supporting these arguments he also advances an important interpretation of karma as “en” or the “bonds of relationships” or “intersubjective connections” that determine the way individuals make decisions. Karma isn’t just the choice between “good” or “bad,” the author reveals, but a web of obligations that determines most human actions. He supports these arguments mainly through a close two-year ethnographic study of the meetings to revise the prison chaplain’s manual through the help of Reverend Keondō Tetsujō (the chairman of the National Chaplains’ Union). While he mainly focuses on the policies and practices of the Jōdo Shinshū lineage, he also looks at Shingon, Rinzai, and Sōtō lineages, as well as Shinto, Tenrikyō, Sōka Gakai, and even Christian approaches to prison chaplaincy. He reflects on gendered approaches to chaplaincy as well and the active debates among chaplains both past and present.
In Karma and Punishment, Lyons illustrates doctrinal admonition’s role as the guiding principle of Japan’s prison chaplaincy. In the face of anti-Buddhism and the Shinto-centred Great Promulgation Campaign, Shin Buddhist priests developed this practice as a way of demonstrating both their loyalty and Buddhism’s value to Meiji leaders. They employed Buddhist doctrine to force Urakami Christians to repent for their banned beliefs, harnessing the “private” realm of religion for the sake of the “public” good. These efforts, alongside a new, non-sectarian Shin Buddhist doctrine that emphasized “sect-state complementarity” (79), elevated Buddhism’s status and led to Shin Buddhists becoming national instructors and, ultimately, prison chaplains.
Rather than remaining a static practice, Lyons explains, doctrinal admonition has transformed according to societal notions of “the public good.” While Shin priests first employed the practice to force religious conversions, by the 1930s Shin Buddhist chaplains used it to exhort so-called thought-criminals (such as Marxists and leftists) to disavow political activism and focus on “private, soteriological goals” (143). With the 1947 Constitution, Shinto, Christian, and Tenrikyō chaplains joined Shin Buddhists in using doctrinal admonition to implore Japanese society to denounce militarism and embrace pacifism.
Throughout, the modern Shin Buddhist doctrine of “state-sect complementarity” has reinforced the expectation that chaplains would serve government interests, “mold[ing] the hearts of the incarcerated” (80) and forming them into docile subjects rather than alleviating their suffering. Lyons’ interviews with contemporary prison chaplains underscore the challenges many face as they develop relationships with incarcerated people but remain beholden to state goals.
With Karma and Punishment, Lyons does not attempt to assess “whether or not chaplaincy programs have an impact on the recidivism rate in Japan” (17). While this decision itself is not necessarily a flaw, Lyons does not explain the choice, thereby obscuring the book’s theoretical relationship to a prevalent topic in fields such as psychology, criminology, and social work.
The book also offers few insights into incarcerated people’s experiences with the chaplaincy. This is understandable to the extent that prison privacy laws prevented Lyons from contacting incarcerated people through prison chaplains. Privacy laws may also explain his foregrounding of chaplains’ perspectives in ethnographic accounts of prison chaplaincy sessions. But incarcerated people’s accounts add nuance to doctrinal portrayals of prison chaplaincy, and Lyons misses opportunities to include more of them. For instance, he mentions that prisoners’ memoirs from the 1910s portray “chaplains as condescending and out of touch” (121), but he does not examine these sources further or quote from them. The stakes of sidelining—out of necessity, choice, or oversight—the perspectives of the people marginalized by prisons and even the prison chaplaincy are also given little attention.
Finally, only in discussing the Occupation does Lyons consider the ways Shin Buddhist chaplains made sense of the differences between Shinran’s twelfth-century teachings and the modernized, rationalized doctrine “tailored for the Meiji era” (74). Without more details about the ways pre-war prison chaplains negotiated soteriology as they admonished prisoners, their religious approaches appear largely homogenous and wholly functionalist.
Despite these limitations, Lyons breaks new ground with Karma and Punishment, contributing meaningfully to the study of prison religion by looking beyond Foucault and analyzing a non-American and non-European modern prison system, while drawing attention to the significance of religion in global prison studies. Carefully researched and cogently argued, scholars interested in modern Japanese religious history, religion-state relations, or global prison and penal studies will find this a worthy read.
Justin McDaniel and Kirby Sokolow
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia