This workshop (9/23) and symposium (9/24) emerged from two prior initiatives:

Symposium organizer Jolyon Thomas coordinated a panel at the 2016 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies on a similar theme, featuring papers by Thomas, Chika Watanabe, Sarah Thal, and University of Chicago PhD student Kanahara Noriko. Attendees engaged in a robust conversation about the meaning and limits of Shintō as it relates to Islam, public school education, bushidō, and overseas development aid projects.

The student participants in this symposium all took Thomas’s Spring 2016 course, “The Politics of Shintō.” In that course, students read cutting-edge secondary scholarship on Shintō while also engaging with primary sources such as kamishibai, manga, anime, political tracts, nationalistic screeds, newspaper articles, and material ephemera.