ABSTRACT
The discourse on the ‘post-secular city’ has opened up a more general dispute about leading hegemonic concepts. The very concept of post-secularisation suggests a shift away from secularisation, with the implicit assumption that modernity has become secularised in terms of ‘the disenchantment of the world’. Conversely post-secularisation has to do with the re-emergence of belief, faith and sacredness as collective phenomena, while the idea of the post-secular city suggests the return of the city as scene ‘in which the dynamics of religio-secular change are revealed and expressed with greatest intensity’ (Beaumont and Baker 2011). This discourse offers an opportunity for ‘us’ to go back in time and space. Is modernity really to be understood as disenchanted? Was Europe the only centre for this? What is the role, more precisely, of the city as scene for religion, as well as for the phenomena of secularisation? This chapter takes up the challenge by focusing on early modern Japan. It argues that there are more similarities than we might think between early modern Europe and early modern Japan. It offers an argument for scaling back Weber's historical thesis about secularisation into a more moderate search for secularisation phenomena, not in order to point to some kind of immaturity, as if there were only a single historical continuum, but rather as an experience of ‘similitude’. Secularisation phenomena appeared to be the same but not completely comparable, they were counterparts.
