Zhong's book maintains a refreshingly wide gaze, focusing simultaneously on local, transregional, and transcultural flows that, by his argument, all impacted the internal developments of the Izumo Shrine and its shifting position within the nascent intellectual and political fields of early modern and modern Japan. Such a dynamic framework is new, and its expanding scope is yielding exciting results.

American Historical Review

Zhong moves away from the traditional understanding of Shinto history as something completely internal to the nation of Japan, and instead situates the formation of Shinto within a larger geopolitical context involving intellectual and political developments in the East Asian region and the role of western colonial expansion.

Reading Religion

Fills a prominent hole in the existing literature by addressing the early modern and modern history of Izumo Shrine and its deity … Zhong's volume is timely, well researched, and focused … An important contribution to our understanding of Shinto in the Edo- and early-Meiji periods.

Japanese Journal of Religious Studies

This volume contains a collection of insightful materials for those scholars, students, and practitioners who are in Japanese studies, or the fields of history, philosophy, ethnology, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and religious studies.

Journal of Religion in Japan

This book presents a stimulating case study of the interdependent relationship between the secular and the religious. Yijiang Zhong convincingly argues that the establishment of the public and secular Japanese nation-state was possible only by consigning some Shinto schools to the private, religious sphere. Highly recommended for anyone interested in Shinto and Japanese history as well as critical study of religion and secularization.

Jun'ichi Isomae, Professor, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Japan

With this rich, nuanced, carefully researched and deeply thoughtful work, the sophistication and maturation of Shinto studies continues. Too long over-looked, Izumo, its grand shrine, and complex tradition, are illuminated by Zhong in ways that nothing else in English gets close to. A tour de force, this work sets new standards for works in Japanese religion and thought.

James E. Ketelaar, Professor of Japanese History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, USA