Research Projects

Heart of a Heartless World

Heart of a Heartless World examines the relationship between compassion, alienation, and liberal secularism in contemporary Japan. That relationship is poignantly expressed in the experience of religious professionals working to "get close to the hearts of others." For those professionals, as for many scholars, sharing suffering is meant to overcome isolation in a society characterized by suicide, economic stagnation, and an aging population. However, after three years of fieldwork at a wide variety of sites ranging from Buddhist temples to temporary housing complexes in disaster-stricken parts of Tōhoku (Northeastern Japan), I found that sharing suffering hurts on multiple scales, from the deeply personal to the institutional. Heart of a Heartless World explores ways that compassion binds religious professionals to secularist ontologies, partially by forming a category of “religion” that does not cater to the particular religions out of which it is purportedly composed. More broadly, this project investigates processes by which people tie themselves to systems that vitiate long-term forms of belonging.

Local Welfare, World Peace

My ethnographic work suggests that the exhaustion of religious professionals and their ways of life in compassionate work is a transnational phenomenon. My second major research project builds upon Heart of a Heartless World to investigate how religious professionals from all over the globe are working together in Japan to create “world peace.” I look at how defining religion in relation to secularized notions of suffering in a “there-and-then” motivates religious professionals to transform and neglect their “here-and-now,” often bringing suffering into their own lives and organizations. At the same time, I research ways in which work toward local welfare and world peace can be complimentary rather than conflicting or in opposition.

Translations

Translating scholarly works is not only a way to spread knowledge. It can also be a way to challenge inequalities in academic discourse and epistemologies. I translate scholarship from Japanese into English as a way to redress the asymmetrical production of international academic discourse whereby the “non-West” tends to provide “data” for “Western” scholarship, which subsequently counts as universal “theory.” In other words, I translate to give my Japanese colleagues a voice in English-speaking academia — a voice that is not reducible to that of the translator.