Spiritual therapies in Japan

Abstract

As the media-driven "spiritual boom" that hit Japan in the last decade starts to fade away, the therapies that this phenomenon popularized among fans of everything termed "spiritual" continue to be carried out in small circles of practitioners and their most fervent clients. This article places these "spiritual therapies" within the long history of healing rites in Japan by showing that their current appeal can be explained by two factors. First, these therapies are conspicuously similar to techniques used by New Religious Movements in Japan. Secondly, the cultural criticism promoted by these therapies remains characteristic of modern occult theories and practices and has only been readapted today to suit the peculiar symbolic vacuum of post-Aum Japanese society. Finally, the author focuses on the self-cultivation element that remains central in Japanese healing methods, and argues that spiritual therapies seem to have simplified self-cultivation to such an extent that they reinforce a generalized discourse about ethnicity and about whose way of life (Japanese or American) is best suited to a Japanese clientèle. © 2012 Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture.