Description:
The United States and Japan both subscribed to secularism as modern nation-states, but the sphere in which Shinto shrines were legally located—religious or secular—differed between them. This article takes Hilo Daijingū, an overseas Shinto shrine in the periphery of Territorial Hawaii, as a case study to examine how its Japanese community adapted to differing secularisms. This local shrine was largely conceived of and treated in a manner similar to secular shrines in Japan by its Hawaii-Japanese community, but was also translated into the religious sphere of an American context. The community's Japanese secular conception of its shrine helped connect the Hawaii-Japanese in the periphery to the Japanese center and locate them within the Japanese sphere. This legitimized local customs as Japanese rather than foreign and became the framework through which many Hawaii-Japanese interpreted their reality.