Hosted by the Comparative Religion Program, Jackson School of International Studies
Sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies
Join us for an afternoon online lecture with Dr. Helen Hardacre, “Shinto Shrines in Prewar and Wartime Japan,” a discussion of the social position of Shinto shrines in prewar and wartime Japan, with a study of the activities of a wartime priest.
Date: Thursday, November 2, 2026
Time: 4:30 – 6 p.m.
Location: Online via Zoom | Register for the talk
Helen Hardacre is Reischauer Institute Research Professor of Japanese Religions and Society, Harvard University. Her publications include The Religion of Japan’s Korean Minority (1984), Lay Buddhism in Contemporary Japan: Reiyukai Kyodan (1984), Kurozumikyo and the New Religions of Japan (1986), Shinto and the State, 1868-1988 (1989), Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan (1997), Religion and Society in Nineteenth-Century Japan (2002), Shinto, A History (2016), Constitutional Revision and Civic Activism in Japan (lead editor and contributor, 2021), and Shinto Shrines in Prewar and Wartime Japan (2025). Her current research concerns Shinto shrines in prewar and wartime Japan. She earned her Ph.D. from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago in History of Religions in 1980. Among her academic awards since 2000 are the following: John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow (2003-04), Walter Channing Cabot Fellow (Harvard University, 2017), and Order of the Rising Sun (2018).