New Graduate School Addresses Spiritual Care and the Role Required of Religion in Contemporary Society

This spring marked a full five years since the Great East Japan Earthquake and accompanying disasters of March 2011. The media invested extra resources in producing special feature articles and television programs that reminded us once again of the scale of the devastation. But the visible damage, including the many lives lost and the towns and villages destroyed, is not the whole story; the invisible psychological damage suffered by the survivors was also immense.

Since the disasters' immediate aftermath, Sophia University's Institute of Grief Care has led efforts to provide spiritual care to people in the regions affected. Sophia took over the operation of the institute from Osaka's St. Thomas University in 2010, and I have served as its director since 2013.

Grief is the profound, acute sadness people feel when they lose somebody dear to them, especially loved ones. And there are ultimately only two ways to assuage grief: offering a shoulder to cry on and listening. This means making ourselves emotionally available to a grieving person and feeling the warmth of that connection, actively listening as that person expresses what he or she is feeling inside.

This sort of listening used to occur naturally within a family or community networks. In modern society, however, where our ties to other people are far fewer and severely weakened, the sense of loss at the time of death when losing one of those ties is even greater, while the mechanisms to heal such a sense of loss have lost their power. That is why it has become necessary to take special action in the form of "grief care."

People first started to talk about the importance of spiritual care in the aftermath of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995. And less than 20 years later the Great East Japan Earthquake revealed that the spiritual crisis within the Japanese population had gone from bad to worse. At that time I myself was teaching a course of lectures on Japanese culture in an Italian university, but when I heard news of the disasters, I hurriedly cut the job short and returned to Japan.

It is natural that religious entities should offer a helping hand to people suffering after a disaster, but many of those approached by such entities may be reluctant to become involved with specific religions. It therefore seemed to me that it is essential to cross boundaries to collaborate among individual religions and sects if religion is to be of real help to victims of disaster. And with the cooperation of numerous individuals including those with religious affiliations and scholars of religion, I set up the Japan Religion Coordinating Project for Disaster Relief (JRPD).

This April saw the launch of a new course at Sophia University, entitled the Graduate School of Applied Religious Studies Master's Program in Death and Life Studies, for which I am in charge of lectures on death and life studies and related subjects.

The main topic of research within this graduate school is exactly the same as that of the Institute of Grief Care mentioned above, and is also the focus of the JRPD's activities. That is, what can and should be done to contribute to contemporary society and the public sphere by specific religions, or groups collaborating across the boundaries between individual religions and sects.

There was, moreover, another real-world imperative that helped to bring the graduate school into being. This was the fact that, in the midst of modernization and the accompanying belief in the supremacy of science, people had started to respond to the ongoing exclusion of the religious and the spiritual by asking anew whether this was the right course to take.

The tendency to exclude religious and spiritual elements is most evident in the medical realm. Modern medicine focuses exclusively on curing illness and delaying death for as long as possible; it lacks a philosophy for engaging with patients who are living with untreatable illnesses and have had to resign themselves to the fact they are dying. Whereas in Christian countries, for example, hospitals have chaplains to compensate for that deficiency, Japanese hospitals do not even provide places where patients can just spend time calmly and quietly to gain inner peace.

This is a major concern not so much for the doctors, but for the nurses and those involved in caregiving and welfare services. And they are becoming more vocal about the fact that something along the lines of spiritual care really is necessary after all.

The new graduate school will be a place to study religion in depth by comparing a variety of religions, as well as to conduct research across multiple fields including theology, philosophy, and art from the broad perspective of death and life studies. It will also train professionals specializing in spiritual care, grief care, and related disciplines who will put the knowledge thus acquired to practical use by helping others and society as a whole.

In this first academic year, despite the classes to be held both in the daytime and evening, the graduate school has also attracted many students who work for a living, including individuals with religious affiliations, those involved in the medical and caring services, and counselors. We are therefore keenly aware of the magnitude of the problems these individuals come up against in their workplaces.

In countries outside Japan, applied theology based on Christianity is well established as an academic discipline, and some Buddhist universities have graduate schools similar to ours. But at the moment, to the best of my knowledge, it is only the endowed department at Tohoku University set up after the 2011 disasters and our own new graduate school that study all religions comprehensively, with "applied (or practical) religious studies" in their name. And I think there is value in the fact that it is Japan that gave birth to this discipline of applied religious studies and will continue to develop it in future.

To illustrate the Japanese religious context using my own background as an example, family members on my father's side would perform funerals according to the Jodo (Pure Land) sect of Buddhism, while my mother's side would do so according to Shinto, although my mother was educated at a Catholic mission school. I myself went to a Protestant kindergarten and became a scholar of religion, but I am not an adherent of any particular faith. Environments such as this, where people naturally come into contact with a wide range of religions, are the norm in Japan.

The reason for this is that the arrival in Japan of systematized and highly influential religions in the form of Buddhism and Christianity did not drive out the existing indigenous religious culture. While this pattern is to some extent typical right across East Asia, it is?not surprisingly?particularly conspicuous in Japan.

What is especially noticeable in Japanese people is their concept of upaya, or "expedient means," which has its roots in Buddhism. According to this way of thinking, in the same way that the summit of Mt. Fuji can be reached by any one of several routes, so there is one "truth" or "ideal" and individual gods or incarnations of Buddha each represent one path, or expedient means, to reach that truth. People just need to find the one that is right for them individually. That is why Japanese people find it very difficult to understand the conflict between different religions that has become such a problem the world over.

In a society where this religious outlook prevails, it is actually not easy to address such issues as the role that religion can play, and how spiritual care might fit into that role. In fact, it is fair to say that from the perspective of applied religious studies, Japan is an extremely challenging area.

As globalization progresses, however, there are more and more societies all over the world in which multiple religions coexist. It is even possible that Japanese society?until now considered to be unique?may in future become a model for the world as a whole.

Sophia University is founded on the twin bedrocks of Catholicism, which is an open-minded religion, and Japanese culture, which takes an open-minded approach to religious faith. Its philosophy of "Men and Women for Others, with Others" expresses exactly what applied religious studies seeks to achieve. That is why I think Sophia is the most appropriate university to act as a worldwide hub for this new academic field.