In his monograph Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine: Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan, G. Clinton Godart challenges dominant assumptions in the scholarship that suggest that nineteenth‐century Japan readily adapted to Darwinism and Western science. For although the appropriation of Darwin's evolutionary theory happened rapidly in Japan, within a few decades of the late nineteenth century the process was one of many frictions and adaptations to local social norms and expectations. Like elsewhere in the world, evolutionary theory was a controversial theory that gave rise to ideological and religious polarization. Evolutionary theory offered a new and unfamiliar framework from which explosive political and ideological interpretations of the world arose and were debated, but it also led to constructive developments, which, read into a specific historical framework, allow for an interesting insight into a particular part of modern Japan's cultural and religious history. In his book, Godart deals with a topic that has been investigated before, but not in the same detail and never before in English. In six chapters, stretching to 341 pages (including a Japanese and English‐language bibliography), Godart introduces the reader to an intriguing universe of Japanese academics, journalists, intellectuals, activists, and religious thinkers and their response to the new evolutionist ideas that flowed into Japan from the West with the Meiji restoration from 1868.

From the first chapter on, Godart manages to demonstrate the complex field of thoughts and ideas against whose backdrop the religious transmission of Darwin's evolutionary theory took place, and throughout the book the author gives excellent examples of the fuzzy and often ambiguous relationship that characterized the categories of science and religion in late nineteenth‐century Japan.

Ideas based on both evolutionary‐like theories and religious criticism did exist in Japan before the arrival of Darwin's theory (pp. 22–23). As Godart shows, however, it was the American zoologist Edward Morse who first introduced Darwin and his evolutionary theory to Japan, in a series of talks held at Tokyo University in 1877. Along with American scholar Ernest Fenollosa, Morse spoke highly not only of the biological aspects of evolutionary theory, but also of the social implications of Darwin's theory. Especially Fenollosa's lectures on Spencer's The Principles of Sociology in 1878 allowed for the first phase of evolutionary theory to seamlessly be accepted by the religious elite of Japan, including Buddhist scholar Enryō Inoue. One of the central arguments for the “natural adaption” of evolutionary theory was, according to Inoue, that Buddhism (in contrast to Christianity's incommensurable relationship to evolution theory) had been teleologically determined by modern science. By introducing scientific ideas related to evolution, such as the idea of uniformity of nature and the conceptualization of the “organic,” Inoue and other scholars disseminated their ideas about Buddhism's compatibility with modern science and evolutionary theory and used it to attack Christianity for the lack of the same (pp. 78–79). But while Japanese Buddhists used evolutionary theory as an anti‐Christian theory, Christians in Japan were also interested in pursuing the irresistible discourses of modernity and argued that their religion was also in line with Darwin. Evolution was understood based on literal interpretations of the Bible, specifically as an expression of God's creation. In addition, many Christian missionaries could point out the important influence of Christianity in the modern education system of Japan with its establishment of both schools and universities; Christianity, civilization, and science, they argued, were inextricably linked together (pp. 73–74). And that the first known Japanese text about Darwin was written by Aoiyama Nobuchiku, a Shinto priest, makes the history of the religious reception of Darwin's evolutionary theory in Japan even more interesting. According to Aoiyama, the two religions (Christianity and Buddhism) were both completely wrong in their assumption of evolutionary theory. Shinto, with its chronicles Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, its creation stories, and its family genealogies, had demonstrated it to be the “fittest” of them all and the only rightful religion to lead Japan into the modern age (pp. 23–24).

The struggle of the different religions in integrating evolutionary theory within their belief systems was thus part of a general modernization discourse that took place in the late nineteenth century. The universities had introduced the theory in the late 1870s, and religious voices showed interest in the different rhetorical possibilities it enabled: which religion was most modern and most fit to survive? Historically, this question was of great importance. For 200 years Buddhism had dominated the religious landscape, which had led to the persecution of Christianity and to a minimized role of Shinto (pp. 72–73). In the Meiji Era, however, the transmission of Darwin, evolutionary theory, Enlightenment theories, modern science, nation building, and internationalization destabilized the religious landscape of Japan and became the modern ideals against which each religion in Japan was to be evaluated.

Interestingly, as Godart luminously demonstrates in the succeeding chapters, political and social events in the Taishō (1912–26)—and especially Shōwa period (from 1926 to WWII)—turned many things around. A daunting and strong culture‐defining nationalism infected several aspects of the reception of evolutionary theory in Japan. Was evolutionary theory not basically just a Western argument for individualism? Could it be combined with the national Shinto ideology? Religious agents in the Japanese landscape sought new arguments from biology, sociology, and religious history to argue for the social and ethical relationship between individuality, the state, progress, and adaptation. Buddhists such as Nishida Imanishi were especially creative in their negotiation and adaptation of evolutionary theory, and Buddhist ideas such as organic and holistic cosmology, fluid identity, and a less individualistic ethic were linked with Darwin (pp. 216–19). Agnostics, materialists, and anarchists, on the other hand, associated with the radical evolutionism of the 1920s, were ostracized and criminalized unless they supported the arguments held by the State Shinto. This could be seen when members of the Japanese state started to proclaim themselves as “fittest” in a reverse orientalist social Darwinist teleology, exemplified when a soldier after the annexation of Singapore in 1942, with reference to evolution theory, stated: “Europeans descend from the apes, the Japanese from the gods” (p. 157). In the 1930s and 1940s, State Shinto became the ideological bulwark against evolutionary teachings, and hints of demythologization of Shinto myths became punishable. Evolutionary theory was now identified with “individualism, materialism, western imperialism, Marxism, consumerism, capitalism, and even promiscuity” (p. 194). The aftermath's “embrace of science and democracy” (p. 251) was in many ways a return to the prenationalist acceptance of Darwin and his theory, with a general acceptance of his scientific, philosophical, and religious frameworks.

In many ways, Japanese modernity was a success story. That Darwin's On the Origin of Species was still on the bestseller list in 1903 says something about the general curiosity about the new science of the West. Godart ascribes the general acceptance of Western science in Japan to the fact that it was a country characterized by religious pluralism, without a monopoly of one dominating orthodox doctrine. There existed at the time, he argues, almost a synergy between evolution and religion (p. 234)—not least because State Shinto, according to him, in a sense never really became a state religion. The challenge for the Japanese was not evolutionary theory and the transformation of species, but the social and ethical consequences that such theories awoke, or as Godart puts it, “The perceived disenchantment of the world by Darwin proved just as threatening in Japan as everywhere else in the world” (p. 235). Interesting thoughts, which in no way can be said to be fully exhausted, as the author also himself mentions in the last three pages of the book. It would perhaps have given the book a meta‐historical and theoretical boost if these plausible claims could have been unfolded further, perhaps by addressing additional and relevant thinkers and patterns (such as the role university scholars or Christian missionaries played in these developments). However, this is a negligible criticism of an otherwise interesting and relevant book.

Godart has in this book managed to give a good and broad overview of a complex field, which formed an essential part of modern Japanese history. The book is a fine corrective to the past's oversimplified works and stories and will contribute significantly to two of the most debated topics in the history of evolutionary theory: religion and the sociopolitical legacy of evolutionary theory. It is a valuable read for students and scholars interested in Darwin studies and Japanese intellectual history, religion, and philosophy.