The “Invisible” Impact of Phenomenology?: The Reception of Luckmann’s The Invisible Religion in Japanese Sociology of Religion

<title>Abstract</title> <p> This paper examines the interpretation and use of <italic>The Invisible Religion</italic> in Japanese sociology of religion, its impact, and the background to that impact. Luckmann’s work was introduced in discussions of “secularization” through the reception in Japan of sociological theories developed in Europe and the United States. It was later cited as a theoretical framework for “privatization,” especially in analyses of the emergence of spirituality. During the initial stage of its reception, attention was paid to Luckmann’s functional conception of religion as an anthropological condition. Subsequently, however, his work came to be treated primarily as one perspective among others on secularization or privatization. Moreover, although his functional definition derives from phenomenology and his work was later placed under the rubric of “phenomenological sociology,” the question of what made this perspective phenomenological, or what significance it derived from phenomenology, was not raised. Despite limited examination of the distinctiveness of his theory, Luckmann’s argument continued to be cited because theories of secularization and privatization had become familiar and widely shared. As a result, the radical significance of this definition became invisible—namely, its potential to identify the religious function of phenomena that appear nonreligious and thereby call into question the distinction between religion and nonreligion. This paper proposes two hypotheses regarding this process. First, privatization became commonplace, leaving little occasion to question either the concept of religion or the boundaries of what counts as religion in modern Japanese society. Second, the term “phenomenological sociology” became sufficiently established to be taken for granted. </p>