TY - JOUR AU - Löffler, Beate PY - 2018/12/18 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Acculturated Otherness. Christian Churches and Wedding Chapels in Modern Japanese Society JF - Entangled Religions JA - ER VL - 5 IS - SE - Articles DO - 10.13154/er.v5.2018.312-346 UR - https://er.ceres.rub.de/index.php/ER/article/view/7367 SP - 312-346 AB - <p>During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Japanese government&nbsp;ended the centuries-long Japanese policy of isolation and initiated a rapid modernization&nbsp;effort that aimed to create a competitive Japanese nation state. In addition to such changes&nbsp;as new family law, compulsory education, and redistribution of property, the government&nbsp;contracted foreign experts with the goal of importing western knowledge. As a result, civil&nbsp;engineers, artists, and physicians started moving to Japan, as did missionaries. This resulted in&nbsp;intense cultural encounter and negotiation, in the course of which Christian faith and Western&nbsp;church architecture became acculturated in Japan. This article sketches the socio-cultural and&nbsp;technological parameters shaping Japanese Christian church buildings from the 1860s onwards&nbsp;as well as the transfer of meanings and forms from an explicitly Western tradition into a&nbsp;Western-looking and yet entirely Japanese tradition of Christianity. It sketches a second line&nbsp;of transfer as well, that reinterpreted the ‘church’ as an architectural form into the Wedding-Chapel-Romanticism of the non-Christian Japanese mainstream wedding industry.</p> ER -