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network through which commercial institutions in contemporary urban Japan cultivate their territory and habituate their corporate ideology. According to Aoyagi, idol performance is a form of symbolic self-presentation that encompasses the packaging, characterizing, stylizing, or modeling of self as practiced by adolescent personalities in contemporary urban Japan. Performance here is dened as a behavioral strategy to establish linkages between the self and society. However, the phenomena of idol cult, or idol fetishism, are considered by the author as a secular religious phenomenon that constitutes adolescents performance and selfframing. Given this consideration, how to account for the not-so-homogeneous consumption in idol fetishismthe rites of passage for adolescent consumersremains an unanswered question. The overwhelming capitalization of idol fetishism that is said to perpetuate corporate ideology is always under contestation from the possible variations of behavioral strategies from time to time. How capitalist institutions absorb, regulate, normalize, or even resituate and adjust themselves in order to umbrella these variations should be an interesting point to consider. In doing so, the reductionist conclusion that the idol industry is a belief system could be resolved by a more dialogic perspective on the dynamics between production and consumption. The fth chapter of this book is especially worth noting: it explores the making and remaking of Matsuda Seiko, the super diva. In this chapter, Matsudas decadelong transformation as an idol is outlined. It is interesting to see how the diva manages to transform herself, with the help of media construction, from a pure neighborhood girl into a middle-aged, scandal-ridden superstar. Aoyagi argues that the medias social construction of a legendary idol generates a belief system around an idolized personality. What is missing in this observation is perhaps gender discourse. The several scandalous crises of Matsuda Seikos career were socially debated issues loaded with gender politics, such as how an idol should be, or what kind of female idol is worth worshiping. The media in this case stand more as a site of conict among different social values rather than merely an imposing belief system. In the seventh chapter on idol performance in Asian countries, the author argues that Japanese idols are popular in Asia because they represent a society of economic afuence. Indeed, modernity plays an important factor in the Asian idol industry, but it remains unclear how the economic growth of these societies directly links to the idol industry according to the authors argument about the capitalization of adolescents selves. Urbanization and economic growth are viewed as the determining factors of the idol industry, and popular culture is nothing more than a reproduction apparatus. The overemphasis on economic reasons in this part of the book leads to a lack of analysis of social contexts. Y U -F EN K O National Chengchi University, Taiwan Japanese Temple Buddhism: Worldliness in a Religion of Renunciation. By S TE G. C OVELL . Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005. 330 pp. $50.00 (cloth), $25.00 (paper).

PHEN

Japanese Temple Buddhism opens with snapshots of Covells observations of contemporary temple practices: priests are married, eat meat, drink alcohol. They live in a very real (suburban) world and even have second jobs, even as they sincerely practice the Buddhas teachings in the pursuit of awakening. These vignettes place the com-

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mercial realities of performing funeral ceremonies and selling talismansmass produced but nevertheless properly blessedin the context of priests utterly dedicated to the task at hand and sincerely working to bring benet to the laity (p. 3). They deftly capture the theme of the book: the tension inherent in reconciling Buddhist ideals and the rhetoric of what a priest ought to be with the lived experience of priests in Japan today. Covell surveys the problems of small rural temples run as family businesses based on the support of the danka (its registered lay members). The very existence of temple familiesthe priests wife and childrenis of course a major source of tension if the ideal is that of a priest as a celibate renouncer. He also looks at the large institutions in Kyoto that are intrinsic to the citys lucrative tourist industry. The issue shared across the spectrum is the relevance and survival of a religion of renunciation in a world ordered by economics and consumptionthe tension inherent in a system that demands that temples be economically viable, and then criticizes them for being overly concerned with making money. But how accurate and fair are the expectations against which contemporary Buddhist practice is being measured? Japanese Temple Buddhism is an excellent companion to Tanabe and Readers groundbreaking work, Practically Religious: Worldly Benets and the Common Religion of Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), which showed how praying for worldly benet, or purchasing talismans, was not in conict with sincere religious belief but rather an intrinsic aspect of lay practice. Both books show us how Buddhism functions in everyday life, and both challenge assumptions of what proper Buddhist practice ought to be. In each chapter Covell traces the origins of the present dilemmas, explaining how such assumptions have developed or have been introduced into Japan through the projects of reform and modernity. He explains, for example, how the creation of a modern Buddhism in the Meiji period effectively denied the Buddhism practiced by the majority of Japanese and by all Japanese temples, how the effort to align Japanese Buddhist practice with the expectations of meditation and philosophy cast off funerals and other rituals conducted by priests as embarrassing vestiges of a less than pure Buddhism. Another persistence of the Meiji reforms is the government decree that priests marry. The consequences of this underlie much of the study but constitute the particular subject of chapter 6. How does a priest differ from a householder if he has a wife and children? How does the father-son relationship compare with the traditional master-disciple basis in training future priests? If the priesthood is hereditary, what happens to the concept of renunciation? The life of a child brought up in the temple does not change. Against this is the reality of the increasing difculty of attracting young men to become priests. Three-quarters of the current priests were born into temple families. If a priests wife takes the ordination the Tendai institution created in recognition of the work such women contribute toward the running of the temple, how does she compare with a nun? Though the wife of a priest has very important functions in the temples, the position is still considered somehow improper. In particular, she has no protection, and no rights to the family house (the temple) after the death of the husband. The only security comes from producing a son or son-in-law as successor (pp. 11013). Those who fail to do this face expulsion, penniless, from the home in which they have spent their adult lives. Tendai attempts to recruit new priests, and to strengthen socially relevant work, is discussed in chapter 5. I recommend the history of social welfare in Japanese Buddhism that backgrounds this chapter as an interesting antidote to those who think

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Engaged Buddhism is a Western invention. The problem is how to balance contemporary relevance without offending danka sensibilities regarding traditional roles. Financial issues are the basis of much of the tension. Temples no longer have the nancial independence afforded in times long past by their extensive landholdings; the law of the secular democratic state eliminates the other traditional source of funding, the patronage of ruling classes. Temples now must be self-supporting. The priests activities must produce sufcient income to support himself and his family; to educate his children; to run a car; and to pay for insurance for the temple and its artworks, indemnities to cover visitors, and the costs of running, maintaining, repairing, and developing the temple and its gardens. By Covells calculation, if performing funeral ceremonies and memorial services is the main source of income, and it usually is, a small temple with 250 danka members, which might therefore might expect about seven deaths a year, will not produce sufcient income to make ends meet. The problem is based in modern interpretations that portray Buddhism as a philosophy and see priests as essentially practitioners of meditation and upholders of the precepts, but also entrenched by danka expectations. Religious specialists who perform funerals and memorial services is precisely what they require priests to be. Covells account of the mid-1980s standoff between the large heritage temples of Kyoto and the city government illustrates the entanglement of temples in the current nancial world. They not only have the responsibility to be self-supporting, to act as museums and custodians of national heritage, but also carry responsibility for the prosperity of retail establishments in the nearby streets, the local hotels, restaurants and transportation systems of the tourist industry, and the city government itself. The mayor planned to boost the citys desperately low coffers by levying a tax on temple visitors. Temples responded by shutting down. This had widespread consequences. From the temples point of view, while the tourist income is welcome, the real purpose of attractions they come to see is the dissemination of the Buddhas teachings. Tourism is not commodication of the sacred but the action of expedient means. There is, of course, much more in the book, and I recommend it to everyone interested in Japanese history and culture, and particularly to students of Buddhism. It is engagingly written. Covells eldwork is well-grounded in both Japanese and English-language scholarship. While the book has much to offer scholars in the eld, it is readily accessible to nonspecialists. It provides all the statistical data and historical background required for undergraduate teaching. I have already introduced it into my classes. J UDITH S NODGRASS University of Western Sydney Discourses of SeductionHistory, Evil, Desire, and Modern Japanese Literature. By H OSEA H IRATA . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. x, 304 pp. $50.00 (cloth). Hosea Hiratas Discourses of Seduction ranges over a series of A-list authors in modern Japanese literature and carries on a cumulative argument that the eld needs to recapture a sense of limit and danger in encountering literature. The premise is that historical and quasi-social scientic exposure of the complicity of literature with asymmetrical power relations has been routinized (in East Asian