Introduction

This chapter explores some of the distinctive ways in which Japanese religions and their practitioners reposition themselves within global society following processes of relativization at three different levels. Religion made an early appearance in the debate on globalization and culture through the work of Robertson, who addressed the role of religious factors in his analysis of Japanese globality. As Doreen Massey aptly observes, such application of economism to globalization is ultimately based on the neo-liberal expectation that in time all societies will be inevitably drawn into a global community whose core unifying principle is economic growth. The dynamics of transnationalism as deterritorialization and reterritorialization have also been explored in the work of Tulasi Srinivas on the Sathya Sai movement. The global spread of Pentecostalism and Charismatic Christianity are generally listed among the important factors that have contributed to the growing interest in religion under globalization since at least the early 1990s.