Karma and punishment: Prison chaplaincy in Japan

In this captivating book, Adam J. Lyons takes us behind bars to offer two important arguments about prison chaplaincy in Japan. First, that prison chaplaincy in Japan was, and continues to be, doctrinally rooted in Pure Land Buddhist thought; and second, that it remains undergirded by the longstanding Japanese political ideal of religion serving to harmonize private interests with the public good. Put most broadly, this book offers a valuable and fascinating case study through which to analyze religion-state relations in modern Japan. But it offers a lot more than just that.

Before saying more about the depth of this book’s offerings, in the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I am deeply indebted to Lyons’ work. Our fields of research have often intersected: his research (on prison chaplaincy in Japan), and mine (on chaplaincy and spiritual care in hospitals in Japan), seemingly go hand in hand. But as I discuss below, these activities are also worlds apart.

Drawing on both archival research and fieldwork, Lyons tells a story about how religious organizations and the Japanese state historically negotiated their relationship in a way that assigned religious groups some responsibility for managing crime. This relationship was based on the belief that “doctrinal admonition,” or kyōkai (教誨), could help the state achieve its correctional objectives. In chapter 1, Lyons traces the origins of doctrinal admonition practices to the cooperation between temples and the state to persecute and remonstrate underground Christians in the early 1870s. In chapter 2, he then turns to consider the state’s efforts to subsequently unify Japan under a national creed during the Great Promulgation Campaign, which helped shape the early contours of prison chaplaincy into a form of moral education that aimed to rectify the hearts of prisoners to become good citizens. These first two chapters form the backbone of his argument that prison chaplaincy in Japan was not only doctrinally influenced by these key historical moments, but it was also deeply rooted in them, as many of the first prison chaplains in Japan also served as key figures in these earlier campaigns.

Chapter 3 goes on to show how Shin Buddhists then solidified their hold on prison chaplaincy in the early 20th century by driving out Christian chaplains from prisons, building prison chapels, and developing guidelines for prision chaplaincy that reflected Buddhist doctrinal principles. These principles were centered on the belief that crime was ultimately a “matter of the heart” that required the moral expertise of religious groups to rehabilitate prisoners into good citizens.

In chapters 4 through 6, he takes us through the rest of the 20th century by showing how each successive generation of chaplains fulfilled their roles as guardians of the public good, or in Buddhist terms, as fulfilling the complementarity between the Buddhist Dharma and the Law, like two wheels on a cart. As Lyons shows in fascinating detail, although definitions of what constituted the “public good” changed drastically over time (from supporting war, to promoting peace, to civic volunteerism), within the prison walls, the shared responsibility for correctional work between religious groups and the state never went away.

Lyons remains careful to show that prison chaplains today are not mere cogs in the correctional machine. In chapter 7, he draws on ethnographic fieldwork to introduce three different contemporary chaplains who all care for prisoners in ways that go beyond their official duties of remonstration. The ethnographic vignettes in this chapter are riveting, even as they insert some confusion into the official narrative about the goals of prison chaplaincy. For example, the chaplains he introduces all practice attentive listening to prisoners and empathize with their unfortunate karmic lot in life. While these practices suggest that a kind of spiritual care might actually be taking place, Lyons makes clear that the fundamental goal of chaplaincy is still focused on doctrinal remonstration. Importantly, the chaplains themselves by no means think of what they are doing as a form of spiritual care. By way of an addendum, I would say another fundamental difference between spiritual care and prison chaplaincy is their relationship with authority. In the prison, religions are expected to quietly support the state’s correctional interests at all times. In contrast, spiritual care in hospitals is predicated on challenging the medical gaze and holding the surveilling power of medicine accountable.

Lyons’ archival evidence for the enduring statist orientation of prison chaplaincy, and by extension, the orientation of modern Japanese Buddhism in the public sphere, is extensive and compelling. By the time I reached the end of his book, I was in fundamental agreement with his conclusion that “despite personal costs and internal tensions, statism is an enduring feature of mainstream religious life in modern Japan” (p. 271). But it is the implications of his second argument about the Buddhist doctrinal roots of prison chaplaincy that I found particularly groundbreaking. As he notes, prison chaplaincy in Europe and North America is frequently associated with “spiritual care,” a type of care in which the chaplain’s job is to comfort, empathize with, and “be there” for suffering prisoners, patients, soldiers, and others who need care. According to Lyons, what makes Japan unique is that this ethos of care is largely absent in the Japanese prison. Instead, to this day, chaplains remain focused on rectifying the errant hearts of prisoners. This contrast with spiritual care is important because it cuts against the grain of scholarship (including my own) that highlights the rise of spiritual care in hospital chaplaincy, counseling, and disaster relief work as representative of how religious groups are attempting to show their social contributions in Japan. Lyons holds this narrative about the growth of spiritual care accountable by showing that behind bars and out of the media spotlight, a different logic of chaplaincy remains at work, even if the ultimate goal of serving the public good remains. His findings are all the more important when we consider that prison chaplaincy in Japan is not an outlier in the fields of religiously motivated social welfare. Lyons counts over 1,800 chaplains in Japan serving a population of over 50,000 prisoners. In contrast, the total number of hospital chaplains providing spiritual care in Japan remains in the low hundreds.

I must also applaud Lyons’ ability to thread the academic needle that all historians and sociologists of religions stab their fingers with at one time or another. That is to say, his ability to achieve a methodological balance in archival and ethnographic research. For example, although Lyons relies extensively on official prison chaplaincy manuals and other documentary sources to explain the doctrinal orientation of prison chaplaincy, he also calls attention to the large gap between the official practices set forward in prison chaplaincy writings and his ethnographic findings. But he doesn’t just recognize the gap. He uses it to challenge both positions. For instance, in analyzing the origins of doctrinal admonition in late 19th century sources that describe how Buddhist priests remonstrated underground Christians, he teases out of these accounts brief mentions of a priest who showed sympathy toward his captives, even defending them at times. As he writes, “this hint of nuance on the part of those appointed as remonstrators merits inclusion in the origin story of prison chaplaincy because it resonates strongly with the situation of subsequent generations of chaplains. In my own interviews, I found that many contemporary chaplains feel conflicted about their assigned role but refrain from preserving these thoughts in writing” (p. 63). By deftly interweaving his ethnographic work with documentary sources, and using both sources to interrogate the other, the picture that emerges is of a prison chaplaincy that is much more complicated than the official line would suggest. Lyons’ ability to hit the methodological sweet spot on more than one occasion is all the more impressive considering the considerable logistical and ethical challenges he faced in conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the first place. To put it mildly: “Trying to learn what goes on in a specific chaplaincy session is like trying to overhear a secret conversation in a sealed room locked away in a fortress behind a barbed wire fence” (p. 16).

I was also delighted to see Lyons’ analysis of religious volunteerism as expressed in the word hōshi (奉仕), a word that is ubiquitous in Japanese religious life. Although prison chaplains were initially employed by the state, the constitutional separation of religion and state in the postwar period mandated that chaplains become unpaid “volunteers.” Yet as Lyons notes, most of these “volunteer” chaplains were given little say in the matter since they were typically appointed by their denominational leaders. In effect, they were unpaid civil servants for the state. In contrast to the individualist connotations of “volunteer” (borantia), hōshi suggests service and duty to benefit something or someone greater. This distinction that Lyons lays out will be particularly helpful for scholars sorting through the many “volunteer” activities by religious groups in Japan today.

But this also brings me to my biggest question. If religious groups remain involved in prison chaplaincy because it is their social and religious “duty”, who exactly is demanding their services? Is it the wardens? The prisoners? The “state”? Themselves? My guess is that it is an ambiguous combination of all the above. This may be why Lyons often falls into using passive language that sometimes obscures who is doing the expecting in passages like “ … religions are generally expected to contribute to the public good” (p. 8), or, “ …… religions are expected to serve as handmaidens of the state” (p. 9), and “ …… religious groups were always expected to offer some form of public benefit …… ” (p. 182), to mention just a few. It would be helpful to know who is doing all this expecting. If the chaplains disappeared, would the prisoners care? How about the wardens? If possible, a clearer parsing of the different stakeholders in this “public good” would enhance his analysis.

I am particulary interested in this question because I have struggled to make sense of a similar narrative in the spiritual care movement. Like prison chaplaincy, conversations about the need for religious groups to play a more active social role in Japan and to demonstrate their modern relevance by working for the public good is also ubiquitous in the writings, conferences, and media representations about spiritual care, but it remains hard at times to pinpoint exactly who is feeling this “need.” In my experience, there is often a large gap between these ambiguous “public” expectations and the private motivations of chaplains themselves, who are mostly largehearted religious professionals that simply want to help out. I speculate that the concept of “hōshi” that Lyons unpacks for us may be one key that could help unlock this puzzle as it nicely captures the ambivalent motivations that underlie religious volunteer work. For instance, religious volunteerism can be also understood as an extension of religious life or as a form of self-cultivation, even as it is ostensibly framed as a service to the “public good.”

Another question concerns the role of gender. As Lyons notes, with the exception of 56 women, the remaining 1,792 prison chaplains in 2018 were all men (p. 24). Why? Does this help explain the statist bent of prison chaplaincy as a whole? These numbers could use clarification since women play such a key role in most types of religious volunteerism, including spiritual care. One final small question regards the short space given to describe the work of “prison visitors.” I was surprised to learn that these individuals are the only other offically appointed group of volunteers besides chaplains and probation officers who can visit prisoners. While the club activities (tea, ikebana, dance, music, etc.) that vistors put on for prisoners do not include religious education, my curiosity was piqued about whether their activities were equally statist in orientation, since these very kinds of activities are often incorporated in the practice of spiritual care. Lyons informs us that one of the chaplains he interviewed is in fact both a prison chaplain and registered visitor. If so, it would be helpful to know more about the differences in these two roles.

Before closing, it would be irresponsible not to mention Lyons’ thoughtful and moving narration of how the lives of prisoners and their families are affected by incarceration and especially the death penalty. While he was not allowed to speak with prisoners during his fieldwork, the stories he tells through the chaplains remind the reader that the karmic bonds that bring the chaplains and prisoners together reach out to touch us, too. Lyons’ honest and beautifully written account of the conflicts prison chaplains feel gives this superb and field-defining history of prison chaplaincy in Japan more than just academic heft.

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Timothy Benedict

Timothy Benedict is an assistant professor in the School of Sociology at Kwansei Gakuin University. His research interests are centered on Japanese religions, death and dying, and spiritual care.