Toyohiko Kagawa Lecture

The title of this year’s lecture presented by Dr. Mark Mullins is “Religious Minorities and their Impact on Japanese Society: The Case of Toyohiko Kagawa and the Friends of Jesus Movement”.

Mark R. Mullins is Professor of Japanese Studies & Religious Studies and serves as Director of the Japan Studies Centre at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Prior to this appointment in 2013, he was engaged in academic work in Japan for twenty-seven years. Initially he served for eight years under joint appointment by the PCUSA and two institutions historically related to the Presbyterian Church, Shikoku Gakuin University and Meiji Gakuin University, and for the last decade taught at Sophia University, a Jesuit institution in Tokyo. He completed his postgraduate studies in the sociology of religion and East Asian traditions at McMaster University (PhD 1985). He is the author and editor of a number of works, including Religious Minorities in Canada: A Sociological Study of the Japanese Experience (1989), Christianity Made in Japan: A Study of Indigenous Movements (1998), Religion and Social Crisis in Japan, co-edited with Robert Kisala (2001), Handbook of Christianity in Japan (2003), Critical Readings on Christianity in Japan (2015), Disasters and Social Crisis in Contemporary Japan, co-edited with Kōichi Nakano (2016), and Yasukuni Fundamentalism: Japanese Religions and the Politics of Restoration (2021). He has been President of the New Zealand Association for the Study of Religions (2018) and served on the Executive Council of the East Asian Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (2019-2022). Since 2016 he has been a Senior Research Fellow at Leipzig University’s Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies (HCAS), engaged in work on their “Multiple Secularities” Project, and is currently serving on the East Asia Advisory Board for Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. In 2019, he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, by the Japanese Government in recognition of his contribution to the sociology of religion in Japan, the promotion of Japanese studies research in New Zealand, and the development of academic exchanges and mutual understanding between Japan and New Zealand.