Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan

Ioannis Gaitanidis

This book critically analyses the creation and effects of spirituality as both discourse and practice in Japan. It shows how the value of spirituality has been sustained by scholars who have wished for a more civic role for religion; by the publishing industry whose exponential growth in the 1980s fashioned those who later identified as the representatives of this "new spirituality culture"; by "spiritual therapists" who have sought to eke out a livelihood in an increasingly professionalized and regulated therapeutic field; and by the cruel optimism of an increasingly precarious workforce placing its hopes in the imagined alternative that the supirichuaru represents.Ioannis Gaitanidis offers a new transdisciplinary conceptualisation of 'alternativity' that can be applied across and beyond the disciplines of religious studies, media studies, popular culture studies and the anthropology/sociology of medicine.

Offers a new transdisciplinary conceptualisation of "alternativity" that can be applied across and beyond the disciplines of religious studies, media studies, popular culture studies, and the anthropology/sociology of medicine

List of FiguresList of GraphsAcknowledgmentsNote on Naming ConventionsIntroduction1. Spiritual Therapists2. Spiritual Academia3. Print Spirituality4. Alternative Therapies in the Age of Attention5. Precarities in the Spiritual Business6. Spirituality on TrialConclusion: Spirituality and the 'Alternative'List of Japanese Terms and NamesNotesReferencesIndex