Program in Early Cultures

Janine Sawada specializes in the religious and intellectual history of early modern Japan. She has recently completed a study of the religious movement dedicated to Mt. Fuji (later called Fujikō) that emerged in Japan during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Janine Sawada has worked on the popularization of Zen Buddhist and Neo-Confucian ideas and practices among the working classes of early modern Japan, including various forms of personal cultivation that emerged in the early nineteenth century and the early Meiji period (Shinto-type new religions, Confucian-inspired revival movements, divination practitioners, lay Rinzai  communities, etc.). More recently she has focused on the late medieval to early Tokugawa development of popular religious life as documented in pilgrimage mandalas, talismans, sermon texts, and hagio-narratives generated by lay ascetics and pilgrims dedicated to Mount Fuji. She is currently preparing to translate Zenkai ichiran, a nineteenth-century Zen interpretation of classical Confucian texts.