Japanese Religions Panel
The Survey is closed and here is what my responses would have been:
1. What name do you prefer to be cited as? What is your current age? What is your gender identification?
Kitsula, 25, Male
2. Where do you presently live (City/town, State/Provence/other division (if applicable), Country)? Have you at any time lived in Japan? If you have lived in Japan at what ages and for how long?
Columbus, Ohio. I have never lived in Japan.
3. What do you consider your socioeconomic status to be? (Lower, Middle, or Upper) Working Class, (Lower, Middle, or Upper) Middle Class, or (Lower, Middle, or Upper) Upper Class?
Lower Middle Class.
4. What is your highest level of education completed? (Ex. Junior High School, High School, Some College, Associate's Degree, Bachelor's Degree, Post-Graduate Degree)
Bachelor's Degree
5. What is your current occupation? (Ex. Student, Office Worker, Sales Clerk, et cetera)
Sales Clerk
6. What political party do you support, if any? What label do you use to describe your political view point? (Ex. Libertarian, Conservative, Liberal, Moderate, et cetera)
None, I don't actually current support any political party. I consider my political viewpoint moderate/other with a slight libertarian bent at times.
7. How do you label your Primary Path/Tradition/Folkway/Religion/et cetera? If you have any additional affiliations, list these as well. (Ex. Roman Catholic, Pagan, Soto Zen Buddhist, Kemetic Orthodox, Mormon, Reform Jew, Follower of Mahikari, et cetera)
Pagan & Buddhist (Soto Zen inspired).
8. What are your primary religious/spiritual practices, if any?
Prayer, Meditation, Sacrifices, Trance, Some Energetic work.
9. In a short summery what are your views on God(s)/the divine/spirits? Ethics? Impurity/Pollution/Sin? and Death?
My view of the ultimate reality is that of flux, the whole of reality taken together, and yet also empty.
I tend to see gods as a different class of being who, while long lived are still caught up in the cycles of birth and death and are also fallible. I tend see gods of different cultures in a hard polytheist manner unless there is good evidence to the contrary. There are also spirits inherent in things and a raw spiritual power which can possibly be called loosely 'numen'.
My ethics are derived from Buddhist ethics and focused around the law of Karma - every action has consequences. Impurity is important in some instances and unimportant in others but I do purify myself physically and mentally before religious action - if I am able to do so.
Following death rebirth happens based upon Karma.
10. If were born into a different religious tradition than you currently practice, what was the religious tradition of your birth community? (Ex. Roman Catholic, Pagan, Soto Zen Buddhist, Kemetic Orthodox, Mormon, Reform Jew, Follower of Mahikari, et cetera)
Christianity - Church of the Nazerine (Mother), Christian Hermeticism with some Shamanic Practices (My Grandfather on my Materiel side), Agnostic/Non-Religious (father).
11. What was your first exposure to Anime, Manga, and/or Japanese Pop Culture?
High School - Ranma ½ episodes in Computer & Chess Clubs followed by a friend of mine showing me Star Blazers (Space Battleship Yamato Dub) and pulling me into the Fandom by association.
12. How many hours do you estimate that you are exposed to Anime, Manga, and/or Japanese Pop Culture in a given day? A given week?
Hard to say, I don't actually seek it out very much but living in a house devoted to Anime makes it impossible to not be at least passively exposed to it. Conservatively, I'd say 30-40 hours a week of exposure.
13. Do you consider yourself to be part of the Anime/Manga fandom? If so, would you consider yourself a casual fan or an 'Otaku' - a serious fan?
There are certain things I like in Anime/Manga but they are the type of things I would seek out in other media as well. I don't like things simply because they are anime or manga but because of plot & subjects. Some examples here would be martial arts Animes and Mecha - I really dislike martial arts animes and thus I really cannot get into any animes/mangas like the Drangon Ball series or Naruto. In Mecha on the other hand there are some shows that I have enjoyed like the orginial Gundam series but that was more in spite of the Mecha than because of it.
In short I am a fan but not an zealous one.
14. Do you interact or participate in any Anime/Manga fandom groups ether online or in your everyday life? If so describe your level of participation and activities.
Anime Punch & Animate @ OSU. I live in a house primarily composed of Anime Punch staffers and I staff at Anime Punch events.
15. Do you attend any conventions relating to Anime, Manga, and/or Japanese Pop Culture? If so how many per year?
Yes, usually 3-5 per year depending on availability.
16. What do you consider to be your top three favorite Anime and/or Manga series/titles - If any?
I'll do three greater and give my top six since I think It says a lot about my interests:
1. Kamichu!
2. Wagaya no Oinari-sama
3. Hyper Police
4. Otogi Zoshi
5. Spice & Wolf
6. Master Keaton
17. On a scale of 0-10 (10 being the greatest amount of influence), how much influence do you believe that Anime, Manga, and/or Japanese Pop Culture have had on your personal Religious/Spiritual beliefs and/or practices? If Anime, Manga, and Japanese Pop Culture have influenced you - How exactly has it influenced you?
3 - It would be one or zero but watching Wagaya no Oinari-sama & Otogi Zoshi when I did helped me through several issues since they empathized things that I had been straying from in my practices at the time so that watching them was almost a spiritual practice.
Tangentially however it may have had a massive effect since I first encountered Inari through doing research for a panel on Japanese Fox Traditions for AP-0 and had my religious experience about a month later.
18. What was your first exposure to Japanese Religious Traditions
During High School I had left Christianity (long story involving disagreements about doctrine, hypocrisy, and corruption in the Church I was attending (the pastor was later found to be running a pyramid scheme and near the end he had turned cultish)). So I began to look into various faiths including Judaism and eventually found my way into Paganism after having some experiences in trance and also fumbling my way into Buddhism through a (Soto) zen study group.
19. If you currently practice a religion with Japanese origins (including sects of Buddhism and other religions originating in Japan) and were not born into the tradition, do you feel that exposure to Anime, Manga, and/or Japanese Pop Culture contributed to your decision to follow this path?
I do not think that Anime, Manga, and/or Japanese Pop Culture contributed to my decision to follow Buddhism as I was already beginning to studying Buddhism before I really was introduced to anime and the series I was shown had little to do with Japanese religious ideas.
20. Do you have any personal religious/spiritual practices (outside of those that are formally part of your primary religious tradition) that have originated in Japan or are derived from Japanese practices such as Reiki Healing, Zazen, using Omamori, Performing Misogi under a waterfall, honoring/venerating/worshiping a Japanese Kami and/or Bodhisattva, et cetera? If so, list and describe these practices.
I venerate Oinari/Dakiniten as result of a personal religious experience and I have some interest but no training in Reiki.
21. Do your personal religious/spiritual practices include any practices derived from Anime, Manga, and/or Japanese Pop Culture or involving an characters or mythos derived from Anime, Manga, and/or Japanese Pop Culture? If so describe these practices.
No. I do not believe so.
Right now I'm trying to put together the panel then go through the survey data. My main problem as was last year is explaining Shinto since to explain parts of it one needs to also explain Buddhism and other traditions that have had a mammoth effect on it but one cannot also explain Buddhism and the other traditions in Japan without explaining Shinto since it had a huge effect on the traditions.
I did a historical approach last year but I wasn't too happy with it and it also ran over time so my main problem is distilling the stew that is Japanese Religious Traditions into something that is digestible.
I'm going to do it in parts - Introduction - Shinto Part I - Other Important Traditions (Daoism, Confucianism) - The Buddhist Tradition - Cocktail items such as Shugendo - Shinto Part II - NRMs & the West - Otaku Religion.
I think this is the best way to format things since it minimizes most of the messy aspects such as the takeover of the Confucian cult of the ancestors by Buddhism, and the mixture of Shinto & Buddhism from the Nara period until the Meiji era when they were forced apart again but there are still a lot of messy aspects to explaining the traditions due to the rather fluid boundaries.
I'm part of a good academic bloc and right and before me is a panel on Anime and Psychology so I should have a good turnout.
Also while I'm on a religious studies bent I saw a really interesting article on the core differences between the LDS & FLDS churches from a Mormon source:
The Double-Minded Essence of Mormonism