Japan Not in WWII

[Alex1guy]

Amphibious has hit the nail on the head with that one. God is actually a very loose term to describe the Kami. Even using the Pope as an analogue for the Emperor is... Weak. It's not as simple as people think and Japanese Theologists and Scholars rarely like to use the term god when trying to explain Japanese divine tradition purely because of the Western connotations attached to the word. It's not as simple as drawing comparison to something in Western culture because the relationship and understanding gets... Muddled.

 

[amphibulous]

Amphibious has hit the nail on the head with that one. God is actually a very loose term to describe the Kami. Even using the Pope as an analogue for the Emperor is... Weak..

Yes. It's just better than saying he is a god. The whole idea of what Christians mean by a god is alien to the Japanese; Christian missionaries couldn't "deal" and preferred the Emperor-is-god to "Whole societies can manage to maintain moral order without the idea of God!"

 

[mrmandias]

Yes. It's just better than saying he is a god. The whole idea of what Christians mean by a god is alien to the Japanese; Christian missionaries couldn't "deal" and preferred the Emperor-is-god to "Whole societies can manage to maintain moral order without the idea of God!"

That sounds like you've replaced one quite crude and ahistorical conception with another one (the motives and thoughts of Christian missionaries and sole unitary cause for misunderstandings of Japanese beliefs)

 

[amphibulous]

That sounds like you've replaced one quite crude and ahistorical conception with another one (the motives and thoughts of Christian missionaries and sole unitary cause for misunderstandings of Japanese beliefs)

That isn't what I wrote, but I can understand a sloppy reader thinking that was I had written. However, even such a reader would *not* be guilty of anything like the distortion that the "The Emperor Is Just Like a Judeo Christian God!" meme represents.