Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan. By Jolyon Baraka Thomas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. 336. $32.50 (paper); $31.99 (digital). ISBN: 9780226618791.

Faking Liberties is an impeccably researched and compelling account of the development of religious freedom in Japan both before and during the US occupation. Jolyon Baraka Thomas does amasterful job researching and analyzing an array of Japanese and US sources from the Meiji Era through the US occupation. He argues that there wasmore religious liberty inMeiji Era Japan than manyWestern and Japanese scholars have suggested and that the concept of religious freedom that came to the fore during theUS occupation, which is reflected not only in Japan today but also in many Western democracies, was invented somewhat on the fly. The story he weaves is historically and theoretically compelling. Moreover, Thomas grapples with the underlying problem of defining what constitutes “religion” and what constitutes “not religion,” and with the myth that “religious freedom” exists as a metaphysical concept for which there is some Archimedean point outside of given societies, periods of time, or contexts that can demonstrate true religious freedom. On the first topic—religious liberty during the Meiji Era—Thomas makes many compelling points. First, he argues that contrary to many accounts there was robust debate about religious freedomduring theMeiji Era, and that various stakeholders both inside and outside of government took the concept of religious liberty seriously. Second, he argues that despite the many abuses of religious liberty, especially by modern standards, Meiji Era conceptions of religion and religious liberty were par for the course in many European countries and elsewhere at that time. Thirdly, he argues that “State Shinto” was an invention of the US occupiers.Without denying themany abuses by Japanese authorities during the colonial and wartime periods, he argues that the Meiji Era government’s view of what later became known as “State Shinto”was secularist practically and perhaps theoretically. This is the least convincing argument in the book both at a practical and at a theoretical level, but there are still important insights in Thomas’s discussion of the malleable and theoretically troubling line between the secular and the religious, and the historical sources he masterfully assembles and discusses. In fact, one of the great strengths of this book is that one can agree or disagree with a given point and yet come away far more knowledgeable about all sides of an issue and with fresh, important insights.