Foreigner Asks: “If Japanese People Have No Religion, What Do They Live For?”

Background and Key Points

Japanese religious identity has puzzled outside observers for over a century, and the numbers behind it are genuinely contradictory. Government-adjacent surveys of religious affiliation (via the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ annual report) often count more claimed adherents than there are people in Japan, because temples and shrines both tally “parishioners” by household or region rather than individual belief. Meanwhile, opinion polls asking “do you personally believe in a religion” routinely show 60-75% saying no. The reconciling fact is that Japanese religious life is largely practice-based rather than belief-based: New Year’s shrine visits (hatsumode), Buddhist funeral and ancestor rites (soshiki bukkyo, “funeral Buddhism”), Shichi-Go-San child blessings, and Christmas-as-a-secular-holiday all coexist without anyone treating them as competing faiths requiring exclusive commitment.

The thread’s actual fault line wasn’t over whether Japanese people are religious, but over whether that even matters — whether an irreligious society is “empty” (post 33) or whether diffuse, low-commitment participation in shrine and temple customs already constitutes a functioning belief system (post 51, 38 on the “eight million gods” framing). Posts 80 and 84, tying the Imperial Family to a Pope-like unifying role, and post 88’s claim that Buddhist residue explains resistance to “shady new religions,” show posters groping toward historical explanations without agreeing on one.

What the thread never mentions, and what a non-Japanese reader would likely miss, is the specific historical rupture behind this ambivalence: the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack. That event is widely credited by scholars with turning “religion” (shukyo) into a loaded, suspect word in postwar Japanese public life, which is a large part of why “mushukyo” (no religion) became the default self-description even among people who visit shrines every New Year.