by Hisako Kinukawa

Many of the ideas raised by the keynote speakers, such as ‘theology is contextual” (Dr. Sub), “Christianity in relation” (Dr. K. C. Abraham), and Hybridization as a praxis of post-colonial theory” (Dr. Wong), struck me strongly. Doing theology for me has been focused on interpreting biblical texts from a triply complex perspective: Christian, feminist and Japanese. I will soon explain why and how complex my position is. I am teaching theology at three Christian colleges in which most students are without particular religious affiliations. I am an active member of the Faith and Order Committee and the Women’s Committee of the NCC in Japan. I have been interacting with women at the YWCA and the Temperance Union of Christian Women, giving new eyes to interpreting biblical texts from a feminist perspective.

I. An Asian not identified as an Asian

I have had the experience of being excluded from the Asian group at a meeting of feminist theologians because Japan could not be identified as belonging to the “Third World.” This experience highlighted for me the complexities of my own identity. First, I am put in an awkward “theological” position because of the past and present political and economic relations of my country with other Asian countries. Although located in Asia, Japan has a peculiar history which sets it apart from other Asian countries. Secondly, I find it very difficult to identify myself with my own country Japan, when it is named an economic power. Thirdly, I find that Christians in our country, as a minority of the minority, are in dire need of being in solidarity with Christians in other Asian countries.

Through my dialogue with other Asian feminists, I realized my identity is linked to my particular Japanese context. As it became clear to me who I am in my Asian context, I was led to the awareness that I cannot practice my theology without painfully acknowledging the “relational” history of Japan with other Asian countries. To look at history from a politically relational perspective means that I must understand the pain and suffering of other Asians, and acknowledge the guilt of our country. This humbling perspective has become a part of my methodology as I bring my experiences to bear in discovering the world described in scriptural texts.

I learned that one’s perspective cannot be derived from a naive view of one’s cultural and social context but rather from the careful process of critical analysis of one’s cultural and social contexts in their political relations to other parts of the world. To be politically critical in this sense involves the question of advocacy and commitment. For whom should I be an advocate and to whose rights should I commit myself? I would like to name this praxis “contextual analysis in political relations.”
It has been a while since we were challenged to search for an Asian methodology to be applied when we do our interpretive work of scriptural texts. We have been asked many times: “What kind of new light can we shed from our Asian cultural and social experiences on scriptural texts?”

I do not think the “contextual analysis through political relations,” which I suggested above and which I practice will become the “distinctive Asian mode of reading,” but I argue that the need for such analysis will increase as we realize the intricacy of our worldwide web of relations in which even a small regional dispute or instance of economic oppression can have a multinational cause. This must also be kept in mind as the economies of more Asian countries are growing affluent and their political situations changing.

At least for myself, excluded from one group even though I am Asian, I would like to search for a spirituality that will create among us solidarity in spite of differences in political or economic contexts. I sincerely hope such boundary-breaking praxis as that which CATS is doing now will become a powerful witness that can integrate all of us as Asians. I saw a hope in Dr. Wong’s paper, when she talked about her identity from “post-colonial” perspective; a hope in the sense that we may be able to search for a way to overcome the dichotomy between those with power and the oppressed through creating a new identity which holds us together as Asians.

II. A Christian in a multi-religious country

I encountered the Christian faith though a church movement which was initiated 150 years ago by a Japanese, Kanzo Uchimura, who found the colonial methods missionary evangelization very problematic. Kanzo Uchimura started his own church, Mu-Kyokai (Non-Church), by rereading scriptural texts from his perspective as a Japanese. His strong emphasis on reading scriptural texts through Japanese eyes became a distinctive characteristic of this indigenous community of faith.

Although Uchimura claimed that his approach was “biblical,” his views were strongly influenced by the patriarchal “warrior spirit” of our feudal culture that had shaped the mentality of traditional Japanese people. Thus, when my church found out I was doing feminist theology, it could not tolerate it. As a result, I was pushed out of the church circle.

Another issue which imported Christianity faced was the Japanese acceptance of a multi-religious society in which Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism and other religious practices were fused in people’s lives, rather than separated from one another. For many Japanese, each religious tradition has its own role in different phases of people’s lives and in different aspects of society. For example, people do not consider it unusual to have their weddings at a Shinto shrine or Christian church and their funerals at a Buddhist temple or Christian church.

Japanese people grow up in an inclusive cultural and religious milieu, shaped by the interaction and fusion of different religious practices and teachings. These religious practices are often viewed as social conventions rather than as something religious, ascetic or spiritual. In this sense, they are more concerned with life here and now than with life after death. As a matter of course, they have been more ritualistic and festive rather than demanding engagement or commitment from followers. However, there is also a recent trend in many Japanese religions for followers to become actively involved in grassroots political or social movements.

Although I have been a Christian for thirty years, I have come to realize that my primary spiritual foundation and orientation are rooted in the traditional multi-religious heritage and praxis of Japan in which a person does not belong solely to one single religion. These religions have not been assimilated with one another, but have co-existed in diverse ways.

My life has been formed in a “multi-logue” with these different religions and has been enriched by their spirituality. In contrast to “dia-logue” which means conversational encounters between two parties, I have coined the term “multi-logue” to express the situation in which we live in plural relations, with several religions interacting with one another.

I was not born into the Christian faith nor am I a born-again Christian. My becoming a Christian was a commitment, but not a conversion in the sense that I changed my religion. I identified myself as a Christian by my commitment to the Christian faith, but this commitment did not mean that I wanted to reject or abolish other religions. My spirit has always been open to other religions, whose spirituality has been part of my life since I was born. Thus, I see different religions as relational to one another and this perception shapes the kind of methodological questions I bring to my interpretive work. Here again my methodological background in interpretive work is very relational. Without an interfaith perspective, I could not find legitimacy for my theology.

III. A feminist doing liberation theology

It has been pointed out recently that each of the different religions in Japan has structures which discriminate against women. Therefore, a critical analysis of these religions, which have collaborated in constructing our patriarchal culture, is needed. Women’s voices have been silenced or neglected. Women are among those who have been marginalized, subordinated, segregated and kept poor in our society. The praxis of “Cultural Criticism” and “Cultural Analysis” in my context requires that we expand our perspective to include the inter-relational aspects of religions which may contribute to the violation of women’s human rights. Thus, I name my methodology in scriptural interpretation as “relational hermeneutics of the committed.” It not only requires critical analysis of our political, social and economic contexts, but also that of cultural and religious contexts.

As a feminist, a Christian, and a Japanese, I am an advocate for victimized women and for “others,” and dare to choose to be a minority in our political, social context. Needless to say, if I want to be a conscientious “feminist,” who does not want to oppress other people, I need to be conscious of, and in relation to, the global context, while bearing in mind Japan’s neo-colonial aggression and technological conquest of other countries. I need to be critically analytical about the political situation beyond my national borders in order that I not exclude anyone through the politics of “others” or act as an ignorant accomplice of segregation.

As a feminist, a Christian and a Japanese I choose a holistic approach to the practice of theology. I define myself as one of the real flesh and blood believers who seek integrity between body and spirit. Doing my interpretive work on the basis of biblical texts, I face them as a flesh and blood reader so that they can make sense to us, as seekers of the contemporary faith community struggling for peace and justice. In order to fulfill this purpose, the collaboration and networking in our work as CATS will be most helpful. I would like to introduce a few examples of the diverse methods we feminists in Japan are developing in our rich spirituality. Through those works, each woman touches the question of authority and finds God as struggling with, within and among us for justice and peace, as well as God as empowering the victimized, sacrificed and hidden. We celebrate the new waves of feminist theology arising from our own experiences that embrace our complexities and multiple identities through gender, ethnicity, class, religious and cultural traditions and history.

IV. Diverse hermeneutics of feminists doing theology

The “People Hermeneutics” of CS. Song and the “Multi-faith Hermeneutics of Dialogical Approach” of Kwok Pui-lan have, among others, given new light in our search for hermeneutical tools. I would like to introduce some examples from the circle of my feminist friends who are literally pioneers in their own fields. They are:

(i) “Resonance between Traditional Culture of Noh Drama and the Biblical Stories” by Yuko Yuasa. Yuasa dialogues with the silenced women symbolized by a female demon mask (Hannya) featured in Noh drama . She tries to make the silenced voices heard and finds common themes flowing through the stories of both Noh drama and the Bible. Some of the themes she discovers are: 1) hope produced by clinging to life in a dire situation; 2) the value in life found by people whose lives are unappreciated by the powers that be; and 3) the mediating role of eros between the transient and the eternal. Thus she challenges the theological conception of the cross as the ideal self-sacrifice, that has often been used to legitimize the victimization of women. She has been actively involved with dialogical communication between Christians and the people outside the church, feeling that “Many Christian churches in Japan want to keep the attitude of superiority over other faiths in society, and also maintain their hierarchical control over ‘lesser’ members in the church. . .The task to restore the communication is to be shared by the silenced, too, by their breaking of their silence.” Her life experiences led her to the concrete dialogue with our traditional cultures in our multi-religious society.

(ii) “Collective and Time-depth Hermeneutics of Biography” by Kazue Yano. Yano was led by a desire to learn from the exploration of a World War II survivor’s “life-long meaning-searching and meaning-making actions” by plunging herself into the sea of silence where his memory is deeply sealed. As she followed his life path on which the memory broke out of the silence and became a shared memory, she learned “how to relate to one another as human beings, which in turn reflects on how we relate to God.” For her, a biography reveals a “communal and collective” character flowing through the length of time during which interactions and relationships are developed and deepened.

Furthermore, Yuno arrives at an understanding that she herself as a biographer becomes a joint worker of his life and history. Thus her endeavor to interpret the haunted life in its depth of personal struggle and agony with his “convoys” becomes

(iii) “Autobiographical Hermeneutics of Survivors” by Mayumi Mori Tabuchi. As a survivor of clergy sexual misconduct, aware of the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder caused by the frequent violent incidents which took place at home, Tabuchi has become engaged with the battered women struggle in Japan. In the field she is literally a pioneer, since “battered women’s situations are not yet perceived as a social concern in Japan,” though it is obvious there are numerous cases. Through holding “self-help groups” in residential areas nearby, she has been seeking for ways in which unseen battered women may deal with the issues and resurrect their real lives. The experience and activities have produced in her the hermeneutical tools as she reads the stories in the Bible. She shows that her experiences with battered women themselves are the gospel stories in our contemporary contexts. Those women experience God at work.

(iv) “Hermeneutics of Biblical Texts Based on Cultural Interpretation” by Hisako Kinukawa. As I began to ask questions about women in Jesus’ time, the hiddenness and quietness of women in the scriptural texts, which is so familiar to us Japanese women, led me to analyze both the cultures of my country and the biblical world, and I discovered many patriarchal characteristics in common. In particular, the issues of shame/honor culture, ethnic exclusivism, concern for purity and uncleanness, and projection of sin and guilt onto women found in the biblical world have been also very true in our culture and traditions. Thus the analysis of contemporary Japanese society and culture with its history becomes a lens through which I examined the biblical world. This led me to an unexpectedly exciting encounter with women in the biblical stories who sought to be empowered by a concrete strategy in their struggle against patriarchy in all of its dimensions. I found the experiences that Japanese women have had in our society and history can be a powerful resonator and a hermeneutical tool as we approach the women in the biblical texts. When my relational perspective was added to the lens, infamous incidents such as the “Comfort Women” issue, the gender role issue, segregation against the minority groups such as Koreans, Burakumin and Ainus in Japan; the mentality influenced by the Emperor system and household system were all taken into my concern as I dealt with the issues in the biblical texts.

I set my hermeneutic horizon on the reciprocally influential relationships held between women and Jesus. The perspective, which I named “interactional,” led me to a another discovery of Jesus not only as empowering women but as being empowered by them. In using scholarly tools of historical and literary criticism to construct alternative readings, I was able to demonstrate how historical and theological scholarship have been used to support the status quo of the dominant power structures.

All of us use the “Action/Reflection Theological Spiral” method which was originally invented by a circle of feminists and reformed by Letty Russell. The method sets four different stages in the process of doing our theologies. I add a fifth stage since all of us have a stage that can be named and claimed as another stage. The stages circle around as we proceed with our theologies, yet we never stay on the same horizon. The stages are:

(i) Reflecting Based on Personal and/or Collective Experiences
(ii) Analyzing Social Reality and/or Historical Contexts
(iii) Questioning Religious and/or Philosophical Traditions//Dialoguing with Cultural Traditions and/or Multi religious Inheritance
(iv) Searching for Clues to Consciousness Raising and Transformation
(v) Creating New Horizons for Theology

Reflecting upon the four examples I have introduced, I would like to conclude by pointing out some elements that commonly flow through our praxis and that may integrate us in our works. First, contexts are starting points for each of us and our theologies. The contexts in which each of us lives always involve various “relationships.” Sometimes these are with persons m the present and sometimes with those in the past. They may be with traditions in cultures and religions. And quite often they are related to the history of guilt and the hope of reconciliation. Second, it is our faith commitment that plays an important role as we choose particular relations out of numerous factors to mold our theologies. We cannot step forward without making our advocacy clear. Third, life experiences in each context are our texts and tools to conceive the depth of meaning of the gospel. Different codes, symbols, images, stories, and rituals which we can perceive in people’s lives are the expressions of the divine and all that is meaningful. Interfaith dialogue, intercultural encounter, interactional interpretations of political and economic relations in history all help us celebrate the richness of the gospel. Lastly, therefore, we must see the invisible, feel the hidden, heal the broken, and support the weak, so that we may sing, rejoice and dance with all that is meaningful.