Posted: Wed Dec 13, 2006 4:19 am
I have to disagree. Adherents.com has very detailed information about the religious practises of Japan (and everywhere else), and I don't see any support for this .01% figure. Relevant text on Buddhism:
Relevant text on Shintoism:Estimates of the percentage of Japanese who are Buddhist vary widely. Perhaps 85% of the population will cite Buddhism is asked what their preferred religion is, but 75% of the population claim to be nonreligious -- to practice and believe in no religion. Frequently seen high figures of 85% or 90% of Japanese being Buddhist come primarily from birth records, following a longstanding practice of family lines being officially associated with a local Buddhist temple. Japan has a large and thriving Buddhist community, but surveys indicate it to be closer to 20% of the population.
"Atheist" doesn't automatically preclude general belief in the supernatural (ghosts, spirits, charms, etc.) -- only in gods. So yes, there's plenty of superstition, but I don't count that as "religion". Sorry to divert the thread, though... I just had the figures handy.Shinto is one of the "classic" eleven or twelve "major world religions." But adherent counts for this religion are problematic and often misunderstood. [...] The number of adherents of Shinto are often reported as being around 100 million, or around 75 to 90% of the Japanese population. These figures come from the Shukyo Nenkan (Religions Yearbook), put out by the Ministry of Education & Bureau of Statistics, and they obtain their figures by asking religious bodies for statistics. The Shinto religious bodies have on record most Japanese citizens because of laws established in the 17th Century which required registration with the Shinto shrines. Essentially everybody within local "shrine districts" were counted as adherents. This is comparable to certain Catholic and Protestant nations in Europe where the majority of people have been Christianed or otherwise counted as a member of the state church, but where large proportions of the population are non-practicing.
The difference is that in those European countries, those people are at least nominally adherents of the religion that claims them. "Nominally" here means if asked their religion, they can recall the name of the church they were baptized into as an infant, and don't mind citing that as their religious preference. In Japan, the majority of adherents of Shinto, as claimed by the Shinto organizations, don't even consider themselves adherents, even nominally. In polls, only about 3.3% of the Japanese people give Shinto as their religion. A high world-wide figure for people who consider themselves primarily practitioners of Shinto would be about 4 million. Certainly most Japanese people participate in holidays which have Shinto roots, but in this list we are trying to track self-identification, not general vestigial influence.