The PSU Center for Japanese Studies presents
Professor Levi McLaughlin, North Carolina State University
Turmoil following the shocking murder of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō on July 8, 2022 by a gunman who bore a grudge against the Unification Church (UC) has reinforced the fact that we must attend to religion in order to understand politics in Japan. In this talk, Dr. Levi McLaughlin will contextualize popular and political reactions to revelations about the UC and its connections to lawmakers as he surveys how religions and religion-connected activists in Japan exert a decisive impact on vote-gathering, policymaking, and party politics. McLaughlin will draw on his ethnographic engagements to provide an overview of Shinto-affiliated nationalists (including the lobby organization Nippon Kaigi and its signatories), Buddhists (including Soka Gakkai and its affiliated party Komeito), and the Unification Church to reconcile the incommensurate image of Japan as non-religious with the persistence of Japan’s religion-inspired political engagements. Dr. McLaughlin will also discuss precedents for the moral panic that has surged in the wake of Abe’s assassination to interpret ways Japan’s religion/politics nexus is now developing.
Levi McLaughlin is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University. He is co-author of Kōmeitō: Politics and Religion in Japan (IEAS Berkeley, 2014) and author of Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution: The Rise of a Mimetic Nation in Modern Japan (University of Hawai`i Press, 2019), as well as numerous book chapters and articles on religion and politics in Japan.
Please enter Smith Memorial Student Union at the Broadway Entrance (other doors will be locked).