In this series of “Faculty Spotlight” posts, we celebrate our Center’s faculty members, who achieved much in 2020 despite the many challenges they have faced.
Professor Takashi Miura is an Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on Japanese religions in the early modern and modern periods. He is the author of Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan (2019, University of Hawaii Press). In this book, he examines the spread of the concept of "world renewal" (yonaoshi) in Japanese society from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries and highlights the rise of "yonaoshi gods," a new category of divinities that emerged during this time period. He is currently working on his second book, in which he analyzes the practice of "peasant deification" in the early modern period and its impact on subsequent religious practices in Japan. At the University of Arizona, he teaches courses on Japanese religions and Buddhism. He received his B.A. (Religion & Japanese-English Translation) and M.A. (Asian Religions) from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and his Ph.D. (Asian Religions) from Princeton University.
In 2020, Prof. Miura was promoted to Associate Professor and his monograph Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan was released in a new paperback edition by University of Hawaii Press. He also published an article “The Filial Piety Mountain: Kanno Hachiro and the Three Teachings” in Japan Review 34 (2019). Prof. Miura was set to give a lecture titled “Defining a Proper Religion: Deguchi Onisaburō and His Use of the Discourse of ‘Superstition’ in Japan” at the Association for Asian Studies conference in Boston in March 2020, which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In November, he gave a virtual talk for the American Academy of Religion conference titled “Fearing the Powerless: Sakura Sōgorō and the Rise of Peasant Onryō in Early Modern Japan.”
For more information about Prof. Miura’s interests and publications, please visit: https://eas.arizona.edu/people/tmiura.