Regulating chance: Buddhist temple lotteries, government oversight, and anti-Buddhist discourse in early modern Japan

Abstract

This article outlines the history of lotteries in Japan, why and how Buddhist temples used them to raise funds for temple repairs in the early modern period (c. 1600-1868), and the larger moral-economic debates in which they became embroiled. It shows that while lotteries are worth examining for their importance to the maintenance of Buddhist temples in the early modern period, their study also provides a window into the competing values and interests at play in Japan in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. This affected how and when temples could use lotteries to raise funds and would eventually come to inform how modern scholars came to view Buddhism in early modern Japan. Attention to this kind of 'politics of value,' I suggest, might also provide useful insights for both historical and historiographical studies of religious fundraising in other times and places.