Okay… well… Japan has a complicated history with religions.
Most people in Japan consider themselves “non-religious” and have negative views on organized religion.
This has always been the case but it’s been becoming more of a thing in recent years. People have been even more vocal about this after Abe was assassinated because of his political affiliation with the Unification church.
Also there’s a horrible association of shinto being the religion of Japanese nationalism and militarism…. but we’re not going there right now lol.
There is an annual survey that is done of all the religious institutions in Japan and a lot of the Japanese people hate it because they don’t have a say in it. It’s only a servery of the shrines/churches and who they say is affiliated with them. Every year the servery finds that the combined total of people who are considered “shinto” and “buddhist” is higher than the total population of Japan.
Servery total = 179,560,113 people (2021)
Population of Japan = 125,700,000 people (2021)
Some people might interpret this as that people identify as both shinto and buddhist, but really it’s just showing that people have interacted with a shrine in a way that got their name recorded. And if so it doesn’t usually go away. Shrines don’t remove people from their records often. Most people don’t even know they’re “affiliated” with any of them.
When they ask the population directly they get much different results.
68% of the people asked said they aren’t religious at all.
Even a good portion of the people who said they were religious said they thought of it negatively or didn’t care about it at all.
But having said that, Japan has a lot of traditions that are tied to religion and people have no problem participating in these activities. Most festivals are because of a shinto or buddhist holiday. They buy omamori. They visit shrines on new years. They have altars in their houses for dead family members. There’s a lot of outward signs of religion that seems to just be people following along with traditions rather than being believers in the religion.
Old graph but still true today. People have shinto babies, christian style weddings, and buddhist funerals. They’re just the popular ways to do things.
So the question of are the characters religious? The answer is probably that they wouldn’t say they are.
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