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Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history
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Agents of World Renewal - The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan (Hardcover)
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Agents of World Renewal - The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan (Hardcover)
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This volume examines a category of Japanese divinities that
centered on the concept of "world renewal" (yonaoshi). In the
latter half of the Tokugawa period (1603-1867), a number of
entities, both natural and supernatural, came to be worshipped as
"gods of world renewal." These included disgruntled peasants who
demanded their local governments repeal unfair taxation, government
bureaucrats who implemented special fiscal measures to help the
poor, and a giant subterranean catfish believed to cause
earthquakes to punish the hoarding rich. In the modern period,
yonaoshi gods took on more explicitly anti-authoritarian
characteristics. During a major uprising in Saitama Prefecture in
1884, a yonaoshi god was invoked to deny the legitimacy of the
Meiji regime, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, the new religion Omoto predicted an apocalyptic end of
the world presided over by a messianic yonaoshi god. Using a
variety of local documents to analyze the veneration of yonaoshi
gods, Takashi Miura looks beyond the traditional modality of
research focused on religious professionals, their institutions,
and their texts to illuminate the complexity of a lived religion as
practiced in communities. He also problematizes the association
frequently drawn between the concept of yonaoshi and
millenarianism, demonstrating that yonaoshi gods served as divine
rectifiers of specific economic injustices and only later, in the
modern period and within the context of new religions such as
Omoto, were fully millenarian interpretations developed. The scope
of world renewal, in other words, changed over time. Agents of
World Renewal approaches Japanese religion through the new
analytical lens of yonaoshi gods and highlights the necessity of
looking beyond the boundary often posited between the early modern
and modern periods when researching religious discourses and
concepts.
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