Helen Hardacre

Helen Hardacre

Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions and Society
Helen Hardacre

BA, Vanderbilt University
PhD, University of Chicago

Helen Hardacre's research concerns Japanese religious history of the modern period. She has done extended ethnographic study of contemporary Shinto, Buddhist religious organizations and the religious life of Japan's Korean minority. She has also researched State Shinto and contemporary ritualizations of abortion. From 1980 until 1989, she taught at Princeton University's Department of Religion, and from 1990 she taught in the School of Modern Asian Studies, Griffith University (Australia). She came to Harvard in 1992. 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), which won the Arisawa Hiromichi Prize, and Religion and Society in Nineteenth-Century Japan: A Study of the Southern Kanto Region, Using Late Edo and Early Meiji Gazetteers (2002), Shinto: A History (2016), and Mizuko KuyōShōhin to shite no gishiki. She is the founding director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute Research Project on Constitutional Revision in Japan. Her current research centers on the effect on religious groups of constitutional revision in Japan and a study of Japanese enthronement ritual.

Contact Information

Harvard University
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Cambridge, MA 02138

office hours: see Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
p: 617-496-5844

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Areas of Study

Methodologies and Approaches