Religious Influences on Japan’s

estant ethic and the spirit of capitalism remains an important starting point in considerations of the relationship between religion and modernization in any society. This is primarily because of the following two points he makes: 1. In the background of Western modernization, especially in capitalistic industrialization, there rushes a torrid current of popular ethical reform that supported that modernization. 2. This popular ethical reform movement is linked to Western religious tradition and to the modernistic reform movements within that tradition, and was given direction by both. In other words, Weber’s essay is an attempt to interpret the Western “human fundamentals of modernization ” (Otsuka 1948) from the background of religious history, and we cannot ignore its perspec tives even when we are studying the modernization of non-Western societies. When one attempts to apply the ideas in "Weber’s essay to non Western geographical areas, however, several problems arise, and we can easily see that it is necessary to make several adjustments in Weber’s theoretical framework. In this sense Japan should prove a particularly interesting case in point. Weber thought that the “human fundamentals of modernization ” developed only with the concurrent evolution of Western religion, and he attempted to Translated by W. Michael Kelsey and Jan Swyngedouw from “Nihon no kindaika katei to shGkyo ” 日本の近代化過程と宗教 ， ジュリスト21(1981), pp. 66