Occult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan: Book Reading

Graduate students in EALC and others will read from and comment on select passages from Dr. Laura Miller’s book Occult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan, to be followed by comments from the author. Dr. Miller will discuss her inspiration for this book and the many steps she took along the way to research and publish.

In Japan today, women are the primary drivers of religious re-enchantment, and they are exerting pressure on shrines, temples, and the media industries to accommodate their interests and aesthetic tastes. Employing a semantically broad meaning of “occult” to include the mysterious or supernatural, Laura Miller examines how it manifests to offer avenues of self-exploration and spiritual capital that fundamentally appeal to women. Female seekers have had a major impact on the fashioning and marketing of spiritual sites, texts, and objects, often through encoding the kawaii, or cute, aesthetic. Miller makes the case that the gendered nature of occult hunting has been neglected in research and that greater attention to gendered perspectives reveals significant facets of sociality and recreation.