John Breen (scholar)

John Breen at a conference in Tokyo, February 2011

John Lawrence Breen (March 3, 1956–   ) is a British academic and Japanologist. He is a specialist in Japanese religious practices at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (国際日本文化研究センター, Nichibunken) in Kyoto. He collaborates with Dutch scholar Mark Teeuwen, with whom he has published two books.

Early life

Breen was awarded his BA at the University of Cambridge in 1979. He earned a Ph.D. in 1993 at Cambridge. His doctoral thesis was "Emperor, State and Religion in Restoration Japan."

Career

From 1985 through 2008, Breen was a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader in Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He is currently an Associate Professor at the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal Japan Review.

In the course of his academic career, Breen's critical examination of religious practices in Japan has been informed by his historical research. Historicity is construed as a fundamental component of Breen's view of Shinto.

Breen's work is influenced by the writings of Toshio Kuroda. As most contemporary historians, he holds a more moderate position. While Kuroda denied Shinto was more than a japanized version of Buddhism, he and Teeuwen believe that there was a pre-modern, indigenous tradition of worship, mythology and shrines, even if indeed Shinto as an organized religion was yet to be born.

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about John Breen, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 10+ works in 30 publications in 1 language and 1,000+ library holding.

This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

• An annotated translation of the Noh play "Ukifune" (1979), Undergraduate Dissertation.
• Japanese simplified (1987)
• Emperor, State and Religion in Restoration Japan (1993)
• Japan and Christianity: Impacts and Responses (1996)
• Japanese in Three Months (1997)
• Shinto in History: Ways of the kami (2000), with Mark Teeuwen
• Introduction: Death Issues in 21st Century Japan (2004)
• Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan's Past (2008)
• Record in pictures of Yasukuni Jinja Yūshūkan (2009)
• A New History of Shinto (2010), with Mark Teeuween

Chapters

• "The Rituals of Anglo-Japanese Diplomacy: Imperial Audiences in Early Meiji" in Daniels, G. and Tsuzuki, C., (2002). The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1600-2000, Vol. 5: Social and Cultural Perspectives. pp. 60–76.
• "Juyondai shogun Iemochi no joraku to Komei seiken ron" ("The Kyoto Pilgrimage of the 14th Shogun Iemochi and 'Komei Administration' Theory") in Meiji ishinshi gakkai, (2005), Meiji ishin to bunka. pp. 126–155.
• "Meiji tenno o yomu" ("Reading the Meiji Emperor") in Tetsuyuki, U., (2007). Nihon no kindai to wa nanika (What is Japanese Modernity?). pp. 76–92.

Articles

• "The Imperial Oath of April 1868: Ritual, Politics, and Power in the Restoration," Monumenta Nipponica.' Vol. 51, No. 4. (1996). p. 407-429
• "The Japanese Paradox of a Constitutional Monarch: With a Unique Status Between God and Man," History Today. Vol. 48, (May 1998). p. 2.
• "Yasukuni Shrine: Ritual and Memory," The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. June 3, 2005.
• "Resurrecting the Sacred Land of Japan The State of Shinto in the Twenty-First Century," Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. Vol. 37, No. 2, (2010). p. 295.

References

• Rambelli, Fabio. "Dismantling stereotypes surrounding Japan's sacred entities," Japan Times. July 15, 2001; book review excerpted from Monumenta Nipponica, 56:2.