This conclusion of foreigner observers is rendered the more convincing to the average reader when he learns that such an influential man as Mr. Fukuzawa declares that “religion is like tea,” it serves a social end, and nothing more; and that Mr. Hiroyuki Kato, until recently president of the Imperial University, and later Minister of Education, states that “Religion depends on fear.”  Marquis Ito, Japan’s most illustrious statesman, is reported to have said:  “I regard religion itself as quite unnecessary for a nation’s life; science is far above superstition, and what is religion—­Buddhism or Christianity—­but superstition, and therefore a possible source of weakness to a nation?  I do not regret the tendency to free thought and atheism, which is almost universal in Japan, because I do not regard it as a source of danger to the community."[CA]

If leaders of national thought have such conceptions as to the nature and origin of religion, is it strange that the rank and file of educated people should have little regard for it, or that foreigners generally should believe the Japanese race to be essentially non-religious?

But before we accept this conclusion, various considerations demand our notice.  Although the conception of religion held by the eminent Japanese gentlemen just quoted is not accepted by the writer as correct, yet, even on their own definitions, a study of Japanese superstitions and religious ceremonies would easily prove the people as a whole to be exceedingly religious.  Never had a nation so many gods.  It has been indeed “the country of the gods.”  Their temples and shrines have been innumerable.  Priests have abounded and worshipers swarmed.  For worship, however indiscriminate and thoughtless, is evidence of religious nature.

Furthermore, utterances like those quoted above in regard to the nature and function of religion, are frequently on the lips of Westerners also, multitudes of whom have exceedingly shallow conceptions of the real nature of religion or the part it plays in the development of society and of the individual.  But we do not pronounce the West irreligious because of such utterances.  We must not judge the religious many by the irreligious few.

Again, are they competent judges who say the Japanese are non-religious?  Can a man who scorns religion himself, who at least reveals no appreciation of its real nature by his own heart experience, judge fairly of the religious nature of the people?  Still further, the religious phenomena of a people may change from age to age.  In asking, then, whether a people is religious by nature, we must study its entire religious history, and not merely a single period of it.  The life of modern Japan has been rudely shocked by the sudden accession of much new intellectual light.  The contents of religion depends on the intellect; sudden and widespread accession of knowledge always discredits the older forms of religious expression.