From Matthew 28 to Coca-Cola —A Millennium of Violence, the Masterpiece of Christmas Marketing, and the Horizon of Co-Evolution

(Part IV of a Tetralogy)

Jun Katanuma / officenatura

Introduction — Compressing a Millennial Structure into a Single Question

Across the preceding three essays, we have dismantled a single enormous structure.

In Part I, I showed that much of what is now called “Japanese tradition” is an adaptation of norms imported from Victorian Britain and Puritan-influenced America during the Meiji period. In Part II, I showed that the women activists of modern Japan were not fighting some ancient Confucian patriarchy native to Japan, but the brand-new patriarchal-Christian modern norms that the Meiji government had just imported from the West — and that they were running, in parallel and in solidarity, with the women’s liberation movements of the world. In Part III, I showed that the discourse of “Meiji Restoration” and “civilization and enlightenment” was itself political propaganda, that its substance was a coup d’état and a wholesale copy of the operating system of Western imperialism, that its ghosts have survived into the postwar period in both right- and left-wing forms, and that the alternative timeline Japan was originally on the verge of following — Tokugawa realism — has, a century later, resurfaced as the principle of international cooperation in the Japanese Constitution.

All of this work shares a single spiritual headwater. Matthew 28:18–20 — the final command Jesus gave his disciples after the resurrection.

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. (Matthew 28:19–20)

Known in Christian history as the Great Commission, this text is the source of a vast spiritual architecture that has been operating, in one form or another, for over a thousand years. The theology of crusading holy war, the direct inscription of this commission into colonial charters, the nineteenth-century “civilizing mission,” Meiji Japan’s justification for the rule of Asia, and the post–Cold War thesis of the “clash of civilizations” — all of these are the same spiritual structure, surfacing in different forms in different epochs.

What I want to show in this essay is the current location at which this millennium-old architecture is most exquisitely, and most successfully, still in operation. It carries the name of a winter festival. It is called Christmas.

The intent of this essay, however, is neither to criticize Christianity nor to call for the abolition of Christmas. To do so would simply be to fall into the mirror image of the “Japanese exceptionalism” that I have already dismantled in the previous three essays. What this essay is reaching toward is something else — to open up the millennium-long architecture of Co-Salvation (the asymmetric relation in which one party saves, civilizes, or enlightens the other) onto the horizon of Co-Evolution.

1. A Millennium of Spiritual Headwaters — Matthew 28

The Position of the Text

Matthew 28:18–20 is the foundational text of the modern missionary movement. As the theologian Cedric E. W. Vine has shown, the entirety of the Gospel of Matthew moves toward this climax; for two millennia it has remained at the heart of how Western Christian civilization understands itself.

What is uttered here is at once extremely simple and extremely powerful: go into all the world, and make disciples of all nations.

What deserves close attention is the pair of structural premises that the text contains. First, the world is described as an object to be “discipled.” That is to say, the world is a passive object. Second, against this object, there is a subject that actively “teaches” and “baptizes.”

This is one of the earliest textualized structures that would later become the cosmological and soteriological foundation of the binary opposition between “us” and “them.”

Direct Inscription into the Colonial Charters

What is astonishing is that this structure is inscribed directly into the legal documents of colonial expansion.

The First Virginia Charter of 1606 reads:

propagating of Christian religion to such people, as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God, and may in time bring the infidels and savages, living in those parts, to human civility, and to a settled and quiet government.

The Pennsylvania Charter of 1681 likewise states that the colonists are to “reduce the savage Natives by gentle and just manners to the Love of Civil Societie and Christian Religion.”

That is: from the very beginning of Anglo-American colonial expansion, the equation “Christianization = civilization” was written into law itself. This was not a post-hoc justification. It was embedded in the design philosophy of empire. As Ed Gaskin notes in The Times of Israel, “The Great Commission, a biblical mandate instructing Christians to ‘go and make disciples of all nations,’ significantly influenced European colonial ideology. Colonizers framed their territorial expansions as morally justified missionary expeditions.”

The Secularized Great Commission — “The Civilizing Mission”

In the nineteenth century, this theological architecture was translated into a secularized form. As the Wikipedia entry on “Civilizing mission” summarizes the scholarly consensus, “By the mid-nineteenth century, liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville endorsed empire on the basis of the civilizing mission.”

And in 1899, Rudyard Kipling crystallized this structure into perhaps its most finished poetic form as “The White Man’s Burden.” The theological proposition “go and make disciples of all nations” was now fully translated into the secular imperialist ideology of “it is the duty of the advanced among us to save (i.e., improve) the backward.”

What is decisive here is that even as values shifted, the structure remained identical. In the medieval era, it was “the one true faith of Christ.” In the nineteenth century, it was “civilization and progress.” In the second half of the twentieth, it was “freedom and democracy.” In the twenty-first, it is “human rights and tolerance.” The asymmetric binary of saved and saver, civilized and barbaric, advanced and backward, light-holder and benighted, has persisted intact for over a thousand years.

2. The Cool-Headed Asymmetry of the Historical Record

The Scale of Religious Violence Over the Past Millennium

Against the contemporary Western conservative discourse that takes for granted the binary “Muslims = essentially violent / Christians = essentially loving and peaceful,” the historical record needs to be laid out coolly.

Comparing the scale of religious violence across the past millennium, Christian civilization is one-sidedly overwhelming: the Crusades (1096–1500, four centuries); the Reconquista (over seven hundred years); the conquest of the New World and the extinction of Inca and Aztec civilizations; the African slave trade (carried out by Christian nations, approximately twelve million people); the Thirty Years’ War (which killed roughly twenty percent of Europe’s population); the Inquisitions; the witch-hunts; the two World Wars (between Christian nations); and the colonial wars.

Against all of this, the death toll attributed to “Islamic jihad” is, as a historical matter, smaller by orders of magnitude. This is a fact acknowledged in common by Oxford historian Christopher Tyerman, the religious-history scholar Karen Armstrong, and the theologian Hans Küng.

And what is decisive is that this asymmetry continues into the present. The major wars of the twenty-first century — the invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraq War, the bombing of Libya — were all initiated by states that self-identify with Christian civilization. In terms of death tolls, the casualties caused in Muslim-majority regions by these twenty-first-century wars far exceed, by orders of magnitude, the casualties caused by “Islamic extremist” terrorism in the same period.

The Textual Truth — Greater and Lesser Jihad

In Fighting for Christendom, Tyerman confirms a fact of decisive importance:

Unlike the crusade, under Islamic law derived from the Koran, jihad — struggle — is enjoined on all members of the Muslim community. Unlike the crusade, according to classical Islamic theory, the jihad takes two forms: the greater (al-jihad al-akbar), the internal struggle to achieve personal purity, and the lesser (al-jihad al-asghar), the military struggle against infidels.

That is: in the classical Islamic legal tradition, the primary meaning of “jihad” is internal spiritual struggle. The military struggle is the lesser jihad — al-jihad al-asghar — literally the smaller one. Tyerman himself describes this as “a distinction and restraint,” and judges it “laudable by comparison with the ‘oxymoronic’ Western holy war.”

And yet, in contemporary Western conservative discourse, this has been inverted entirely. The equation “jihad = violent terror” has penetrated every corner of the news, political speech, and conservative media, while the primary meaning of inward spirituality has been completely erased.

The Architecture of “Religious Violence” Discourse Itself

In Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), Karen Armstrong offers a perspective that turns our argument one full turn deeper: the claim that “religion is the root of violence” is itself a piece of propaganda intentionally constructed in a specific historical period (after the Enlightenment).

As Armstrong shows, “The modern Western conception of religion — as a ‘coherent system of obligatory beliefs, institutions, and rituals, centered on a supernatural God, whose practice is essentially private and hermetically sealed off from all secular activities’ — is both historically and culturally unique.”

The very binary of “religious versus secular” and “private versus public” was itself invented in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. It did not exist in pre-modern societies. In medieval Islamic civilization, the Qur’an was at once law, politics, and a complete way of life — these were not separable. In Edo-period Japan, similarly, shinbutsu shūgō (the syncretic fusion of Shinto and Buddhism) was inseparable from politics, society, and cosmology.

Here is the enormous structural deception: the post-Enlightenment Western modern state — the very actor whose Victorian, imperialist, and secularizing of the Great Commission we have spent the past three essays anatomizing — has wielded a near-monopoly on the classifier that sorts its own violence (colonial wars, two World Wars, the use of nuclear weapons, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya) as “secular, rational, in the national interest,” and the violence of others as “religious, irrational, fanatical.”

The Real Profile of the 9/11 Terrorists

The study by Marc Sageman that Armstrong cites is decisive: of 500 9/11 terrorists and their close collaborators, only 25 percent had a traditional Islamic upbringing. Two-thirds had been secular until they encountered al-Qaeda, and the rest were recent converts.

That is: what we call “religious violence” and “Islamic extremism” is, structurally, secularized political violence dressed in religious clothing — something that has departed from, rather than inherited from, the actual religious tradition. And yet it is presented as “the essence of the religion.”

3. The “Clash of Civilizations” — A Post–Cold War Propaganda Apparatus

The figure who furnished this propaganda architecture with an academic vestment was Samuel Huntington, with his thesis of the “Clash of Civilizations” (1993, 1996). And the thinker who most sharply dismantled its deceptions was Edward Said, in Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993).

As the journal Crossings notes:

Huntington shares Orientalism’s fundamental perceptions of what it characterizes as the ‘Other,’ who traditionally happens to be the Arab-Muslim subject of analysis. … The real agenda underlying the thesis presented by Huntington is perpetuating Western dominance and hegemony on the globe after the Communist enemy had been vanquished, through the creation of a new enemy and the generation of fear and hatred against it in the public mind.

As E-International Relations puts it, the Huntington thesis is nothing other than “the same Cold War methodology rebranded for maximum impact, a contrived clash that the US was pursuing for several decades by converting an old ally into foe post–World War Two. This repackaging for a new era was necessary because the old enemy, the Soviet Union, no longer existed.”

The true function of the contemporary propaganda of “Muslim = extremist,” then, is to be the successor of the Cold War ideology of “the Communist threat” — to manufacture a permanent enemy required for the maintenance of Western hegemony. This is exactly what Said wrote.

4. Invisible Religion — Nationalism as a New Religion

What is particularly important in Armstrong’s argument, and what connects directly with this essay’s three predecessors, is this: “Nationalism has become very religious. Nations have created rituals to make our hearts swell and make us feel as if we are one.”

That is to say: the rituals of the modern nation-state — the raising of flags, the singing of anthems, the commemoration of the war dead, independence days, victory days, presidential inaugurations, royal ceremonies — are all, structurally, religious rituals. The system of Yasukuni Shrine; Arlington National Cemetery; the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe; the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey — these are structurally identical religious devices.

Here, then, is the greatest deception of contemporary Western conservative discourse: “We are a secular, rational, liberal state; they (Muslims) are a backward religious state.” The Western “secular” is, in fact, itself an enormously powerful, ritualized, emotionally binding new religion.

Only it is a religion that does not recognize itself as a religion — an invisibilized religion. And it is precisely this invisibility that gives it its strongest propaganda function.

Christmas is the largest festival of this very invisibilized civic religion. Whether one is Christian or not, people around the world participate unconsciously. And they understand this participation as “commercial and cultural, not religious.” But its actual structure — the emotional imprinting of childhood, the repetition of visual symbols, the simultaneity of global participation, the swelling of collective feeling — is in no way distinguishable from religious ritual.

5. The Invention of Christmas — Victorian Britain in the 1840s

A Deliberate Nineteenth-Century Reconstruction

Nearly everything we now call “Christmas” — the warm family gathering, the tree, Santa Claus, the exchange of gifts, the Christmas card, the snowscape, the songs — was deliberately reinvented in Victorian Britain in the nineteenth century.

As History Tools summarizes: “the Victorians essentially invented a new kind of Christmas, one heavily influenced by Germanic traditions and focused on the nuclear family.”

Lined up chronologically: in 1647–1660, under Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan government in England, Christmas was banned as dangerously pagan and disorderly. In America, the Puritans made it illegal not to work on Christmas Day. In 1800, the German-born Queen Charlotte introduced the Christmas tree into the British royal household. In 1840, Queen Victoria’s German-born consort, Prince Albert, further popularized it. In 1843, Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol, selling six thousand copies in five days. In the same year, Sir Henry Cole commissioned the first commercial Christmas card. In 1847, Tom Smith invented the Christmas cracker. In 1848, the Illustrated London News published an engraving of the royal family decorating their tree at Windsor Castle, igniting a public craze.

Nearly every basic element of the modern Christmas, in other words, was invented intensively in the 1840s. This is the very same era as the invented traditions of Meiji Japan that this trilogy has analyzed, and it shares the same structure of an “invented tradition” in Hobsbawm’s sense.

Dickens — Designer of the Image “Christianity = Love, Family, Kindness”

Here, a figure of decisive importance for this essay enters the stage. Charles Dickens (1812–1870).

What A Christmas Carol (1843) inscribed into the hearts of the world is the story of Ebenezer Scrooge: a miser who, by contact with “the spirit of Christmas,” undergoes conversion and returns to the warm family table. This is, structurally, a secularized conversion narrative. The sinner (Scrooge) is redeemed by Christian virtues (charity, kindness, love of family) — a translation of Matthew 28’s “make disciples” into emotional and narrative form.

And yet what is decisive here is this: the Victorian Britain that Dickens depicted was, at exactly the same time, executing imperialist violence around the world. In 1843 — the year A Christmas Carol was published — Britain already effectively ruled India, had defeated China in the Opium Wars (1839–1842), and was advancing the colonization of Africa.

“Within the home: family love, charity, warmth. Beyond the borders: violent exploitation.” This dual structure was established in the Victorian era. And Christmas became the device that broadcast the “family love and warmth” side of it to the world.

6. Coca-Cola’s Santa — The Globalization of Co-Salvation in the Twentieth Century

And then, in the twentieth century, the most exquisite case study in global propaganda emerges: Coca-Cola’s 1931 Santa campaign.

According to The Coca-Cola Company’s own official record: in the 1920s, Coca-Cola faced a commercial problem in that its sales fell in winter. In 1931, Archie Lee of D’Arcy Advertising Agency conceived a campaign featuring “a wholesome Santa Claus who was both realistic and symbolic.” He commissioned the illustrator Haddon Sundblom. From 1931 to 1964, for thirty-three consecutive years, Sundblom painted Santa for Coca-Cola.

The decisive detail: Santa’s red-and-white costume was conveniently designed to match Coca-Cola’s brand colors.

That is to say: the visual image of the modern “Santa Claus” was, purely, a marketing device designed by a corporate advertising agency to sell soft drinks in winter. This figure was then severed entirely from the simple folkloric tradition descended from Saint Nicholas, the fourth-century Christian saint, and became a globally distributed “global Santa.”

Coca-Cola’s Sundblom Santa was exhibited at the Louvre, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the Isetan Department Store in Tokyo, and the NK Department Store in Stockholm. Worldwide, including in Muslim-majority countries, Santa advertisements flood the public sphere every winter. The message “Christianity = family, warmth, gift, love” is renewed, on a planetary scale, every December.

The Perfect Architecture of Christmas as Soft Power

Structurally, what is happening here can be set out in layers.

The first layer is emotional anchoring. Christmas is located at the time of year when human beings are most emotionally exposed — when they are with family, when they give, when they want warmth and hope. Rational discrimination weakens, and emotional memory is most deeply engraved.

The second layer is visual dominance. Through Dickens in the 1840s and Coca-Cola in the 1930s, the visual standard of “the Christmassy” was established — snow, hearth, tree, warm light, family table, gifts, the red-and-white Santa. These images repeat themselves planet-wide every year through films, advertisements, shop windows, street decorations, and music.

The third layer is sonic penetration. “White Christmas,” “Jingle Bells,” “Silent Night” — Christmas songs play in shopping malls of Muslim-majority countries, on the streets of Buddhist nations, in hotel lobbies of Hindu nations. This music is an emotional anchor of extraordinary power, eliciting the same feelings, over decades, in the same way.

The fourth layer is childhood imprinting. What is most decisive is that this festival is tied to the most joyful memories of early childhood. Children all over the world internalize, in the formative period of life, the emotional experience of writing letters to Santa, of the excitement of presents, of the family table, as “Christmas = happiness.”

And then, when these children grow into adults — even when they intellectually learn the historical facts that Christian civilization carried out the Crusades, colonialism, slavery, and two World Wars — December activates, unconsciously, the happy emotional memories of childhood. This emotional memory has the power to overwrite intellectual and historical recognition.

This is a masterpiece of psychological operation. Why? Because the victims of this strategy do not realize that they are the targets of a strategy. They actively, joyously, voluntarily re-administer the dose to themselves every year.

7. What Christmas Renders Invisible

Here, the true function of Christmas as marketing comes into view at a deeper level.

Christmas does not merely update the message “Christianity = the religion of love.” It simultaneously performs the function of rendering invisible every other spiritual tradition.

Overwhelming Sensory Occupation

In December, in shopping malls, airports, hotels, and on streets the world over, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” plays. White Christmas. Jingle Bells. Silent Night. Visually, too, Santa, tree, snow, hearth, and family table repeat themselves.

What this overwhelming sensory occupation does is cut off sensory access to every other spiritual tradition. In the same month of December, Sufi orders around the world perform dhikr, Hindus celebrate the festival of light Diwali, Jews light the candles of Hanukkah, Buddhists deepen the meditation of the winter solstice, and in Shinto purification begins toward the new year. None of these is meaningfully present in the global media space.

That is: Christmas simultaneously broadcasts the message “Christianity = love” and, by mute sensory dominance, the message “no other tradition exists.” This is the most exquisite form of soft power. The object of critique is neutralized in advance — because the alternative is sensorially invisible.

Rendered Invisible — A Millennium of Sufism

Here a decisive fact must be brought into view. There exists, at the very heart of Islamic civilization, a spiritual tradition that is the exact opposite of the image of Muslims projected by contemporary Western conservative discourse — “violent, intolerant, extreme, irrational.” That tradition is Sufism (Islamic mysticism, tasawwuf).

It was already established in the eighth century during the Abbasid period, and it gave the world such great spiritual masters as Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (1207–1273), Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), and al-Ghazālī (1058–1111).

A fact of extraordinary significance: Rūmī is currently the best-selling poet in America. A thirteenth-century Persian Muslim mystic continues to occupy top rankings in American bookstores in the twenty-first century.

And what is the central theme of Rūmī? Love (ishq):

The lamps are different, but the Light is the same.

A cosmology in which all religions are different paths to the same God. Ibn Arabi taught the “oneness of being” (wahdat al-wujūd): all beings are manifestations of God, and God is immanent in all things.

And what is decisive: in the Sufi tradition, the primary meaning of jihad is the inward struggle (jihad al-nafs). What the Qur’an calls al-jihad al-akbar, the “greater jihad,” is the struggle against the arrogance, greed, and heedlessness within the self. What al-Ghazālī expounded in The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Ihya Ulum al-Din) is precisely this path of inward spiritual life.

This tradition of inner jihad has been continuously transmitted, for more than a millennium, from the thirteenth century when Rūmī wrote down to the present-day Sufi orders: the Mevlevi Order (the whirling dervishes) of Turkey, the Chishti Order of India and Pakistan, the Tijani Order of North Africa, the Naqshbandi Order of Bosnia. There are, even today, tens of millions of Sufis around the world who recite dhikr daily, who read Rūmī’s poetry, and who turn in the Sema ritual.

And yet — and this is the very core of this essay — contemporary Western media report almost nothing about these tens of millions of Muslims. The Muslims who appear on the news are always ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Boko Haram. Sufism circulates only as “an exotic minority” or as a Hallmark-card-thin form of spirituality.

Structurally, then, the most refined spiritual tradition of a thousand-year lineage has been rendered almost completely invisible in global media — while the most extreme and distorted minority of the same religion is exhibited daily as “the essence of Islam.”

This is the most sophisticated contemporary deployment of Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism. “They” are portrayed not in the form they themselves have chosen, but in the form convenient for “us.”

8. Christmas in Japan — A Double Adaptation, a Double Invisibility

Here we arrive at the point where this fourth essay connects most directly with the core of the previous three. Christmas in Japan.

The KFC Campaign of 1974

KFC’s campaign began in 1974 — a full century after the invented traditions of the Meiji period that the earlier essays examined. As Atlas Obscura and Time Out Tokyo record, the manager of KFC Japan’s HQ, Takeshi Okawara, claimed to have overheard a foreign customer lamenting the unavailability of turkey in Japan (or, more bluntly, simply lied) and then advertised to the Japanese public that “fried chicken is what Americans eat at Christmas.” In reality, Americans were eating turkey.

Structurally, this is perfectly homologous with the Meiji-era manufacture of “same-surname marriage = Japanese tradition” or “the Shintō wedding = Japan’s ancient ritual.” A commercial campaign of the 1970s is experienced, within a single generation, as “Japanese tradition.”

As Milwaukee Independent records, “‘Kentucky for Christmas’ is now taught in business schools and marketing textbooks worldwide” as the textbook case of how a purely commercial campaign can define the visual and material content of how a country celebrates an entire holiday.

KFC Japan today earns one-third of its annual revenue during the Christmas season. December 24 is ten times busier than an ordinary day.

Nathan Hopson’s Decisive Observation — “Empty Symbols”

Nathan Hopson, professor of Japanese history at Nagoya University, captures the essence of Christmas in Japan in a striking comment to Atlas Obscura:

Christmas has an association with a kind of exotic and romantic view of “the West” that is entirely divorced from history, religion, or any other inconvenient facts. … Christmas cakes and KFC make sense both in terms of the constraints of the typical Japanese home and as empty symbols — like Christmas itself — into which everyone can pour their own hopes and dreams.

The phrase “empty symbols” is decisive. Christmas in Japan functions as an emotional container with no content of its own. Precisely for that reason, it is universally accepted.

Double Invisibility

There is, however, a double invisibility at work here.

The first invisibility: Japanese people do not recognize that the “Christmas” they are experiencing is an adaptation of the Victorian invention of the 1840s, the Coca-Cola marketing of 1931, and the KFC campaign of 1974.

The second invisibility: Japanese people do not recognize that the “Christmassy” thing they are experiencing (spending the night with one’s lover, eating cake and chicken, viewing the illuminations) is structurally an unconscious participation in the emotional package of Christian civilization.

And what is decisive is this: this experience is, year by year, eroding the sensory access of Japanese people to their own native spiritualities — Obon, Shōgatsu (New Year’s), the first shrine visit, Setsubun, Higan.

In December, the streets are bathed in Christmas illumination. In January, there is the first shrine visit. But the sound of the shrine’s bell, the warmth of oshiruko, the stillness of New Year’s — these are not visualized in global media even at one-tenth the scale of Christmas. For the younger generation in Japan, Christmas feels “emotionally richer” than New Year’s — because the overwhelming bulk of global cultural resources is poured into Christmas.

This is an ongoing update of the very structure traced in the earlier essays. Just as the Victorian patriarchy was disguised as “Japanese tradition” in the Meiji period, in postwar Japan the Victorian–Coca-Cola Christmas has been internalized, unconsciously, as “a fun year-end event.”

9. The Horizon of Co-Evolution — A World Where Many Lamps Stand Together

Beyond the Logic of Co-Salvation

Here, finally, the full scope of this essay comes into view.

From Matthew 28:18–20, through the Crusades, the colonial charters, the civilizing mission, the rule of Asia by Meiji Japan, the post–Cold War “clash of civilizations,” and Christmas as marketing — what runs through all of these is the structure of Co-Salvation.

One side “saves / civilizes / enlightens / disciples” the other. One side is an active subject; the other is a passive object. One side holds the lamp; the other stands in the dark.

Against this stands the structurally opposite worldview of Co-Evolution. Bidirectional. Mutually transformative. No one “saves” the other; instead, both “co-transform with each other.” Many lamps stand together, illuminating each other, each shining with its own different light, together illuminating a shared darkness.

Traditions Around the World Have Already Said This

Astonishingly, this horizon of Co-Evolution is at once an original contemporary thought constructed in our work, and a recovery, in modern form, of another human spiritual possibility that traditions around the world have been speaking of in their own languages all along.

Rūmī’s line, “The lamps are different, but the Light is the same,” is the medieval-Islamic articulation of Co-Evolution.

Ibn Arabi’s wahdat al-wujūd, the oneness of being, is the metaphysical foundation of Co-Evolution.

Dōgen’s “the mountain is the mountain, the water is the water” is its articulation in Japanese Buddhism.

And the Tokugawa shogunate’s Bankoku Kōhō line — not one side saving or civilizing the other, but parties negotiating with one another as equals and walking forward together — was its diplomatic articulation.

These are written in different languages, in different eras, in different cultural regions, and yet they point, structurally, at the same horizon: that being is constituted, essentially, in plurality and mutuality.

The True Scope of “Critique of Christmas”

Let me state the basic message of this essay clearly.

The true scope of “critique of Christmas” is not to deny Christmas. To argue that Christmas should be abolished would simply be the mirror image of the logic of Co-Salvation, falling structurally into the same trap of “Japanese exceptionalism” that the earlier essays have already dismantled.

What this essay reaches toward is this: to dismantle the world in which only one kind of “Christmas-like thing” circulates emotionally and visually, and to open a world in which the diverse festivals and the diverse spiritualities of the world circulate as equals, resonating with one another.

Diwali’s light circulates in the same visible form as the Christmas illumination. The crescent of Ramadan becomes an emotional anchor on the same scale as the Christmas tree. The Sufi turn circulates with the same visual repetition as Santa Claus. The stillness of Japanese New Year’s possesses the same sonic penetration as Christmas music.

This is not the surface multiculturalism of “everyone is different, and that’s fine.” It is a structural redistribution of sensory, emotional, and visual resources. And it is the very concrete shape of the future that Co-Evolution envisions.

10. Japan as Laboratory — A Rare Plural Possibility

And here, finally, the tetralogy as a whole finds its landing point.

Japan is an odd and rare experimental ground. With more than 99 percent of the population identifying as non-Christian, it celebrates Christmas most flamboyantly. People marry at Shinto shrines, hold funerals at Buddhist temples, hold weddings in churches, celebrate Christmas at year-end, and visit shrines at New Year’s.

Seen from the West, this looks like “confusion,” “a lack of standards,” “a lack of religious seriousness.” From the logic of monotheism, it is a contradiction.

But invert the angle of view, and what appears is something different. Japan may be an incomplete, but already-ongoing, implementation of Co-Evolution. Multiple spiritual traditions coexist — not as mutually exclusive — and mutually transform each other while being used in different seasons and different scenes of human life.

This is not “lack of standards.” It is, possibly, an unconscious but structural resistance to the logic of Co-Salvation, in which one truth excludes the others.

That said, an important qualification. Japan’s contemporary reception of Christmas is not yet Co-Evolution. It is still the passive, unconscious reception of Co-Salvation. Christmas is being absorbed, but Diwali, Ramadan, and Sufi poetry are not. This is not a choice; it is the consequence of sensory domination by global media.

And yet — if Japan were to become conscious of this rare experiment of its own (the coexistence of multiple traditions) and to construct a sensory space in which Diwali, Ramadan, the Sufi turn, and Jewish Hanukkah all circulated as equals — that would be a world-historical implementation of Co-Evolution.

Beyond the “Victorian adaptation” dismantled in Part I and beyond the further “Victorian–Coca-Cola adaptation” currently underway in postwar Japan, Japan steps out onto the genuine horizon of Co-Evolution. This is the final message of hope that this tetralogy puts forward.

Conclusion — Where the Tetralogy Arrives, and From Where It Begins

What this tetralogy has traced is, in the end, a single anatomy of a structure on a millennial scale.

In the first essay, we showed that much of what is called “ancient Japanese tradition” is an adaptation, imported during the Meiji period, of Victorian norms.

In the second, we showed that the women activists of the Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa periods were fighting not Japan’s ancient patriarchy but the brand-new norms the Meiji government had just imported from the West — and that they were comrades who ran in parallel with the global women’s liberation movement.

In the third, we showed that the discourse of “Meiji Restoration” and “civilization and enlightenment” was itself a coup and a copy of the operating system of Western imperialism, that its ghosts have survived into the postwar period on both the right and the left, and that the alternative timeline Japan was originally on the verge of following — Tokugawa realism — has, a century later, been resurrected as the principle of international cooperation in the postwar Constitution.

And in this fourth essay, we traced the spiritual headwaters of that operating system of Western imperialism — the Great Commission of Matthew 28:18–20 — and showed that this structure has been at work, in changing forms, for over a thousand years: through the Crusades, the colonial charters, the civilizing mission, Meiji Japan’s rule over Asia, the “clash of civilizations” thesis, and finally Christmas as marketing.

Us and Them — Dismantling a Thousand-Year Spiritual Architecture

What runs through all of this is the same thousand-year asymmetric binary: “us” and “them,” “civilization” and “barbarism,” “savior” and “saved,” “those who hold the lamp” and “those who stand in the dark.”

And the device that most quietly, most cunningly, most successfully maintains this binary today is Christmas as marketing. This is not a conspiracy. No one designed this with bad intent. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol from his heart, Coca-Cola’s advertising agency worked to sell soft drinks, and Mr. Okawara of KFC ran his campaign to save his company.

Yet the cumulative effect of all this good intention and ordinary commercial activity is that, today, the sensory space of the entire planet is monopolized by a single spirituality. Children all over the world internalize “December = red, green, white.” Streets the world over fill with essentially the same music. Around the world, people store their childhood memories of happiness intertwined with the emotional package of a specific civilization.

This is the most successful implementation of Co-Salvation that has ever existed — for it neutralizes its own critique. The alternative is, sensorially, invisible.

The Concrete Implementation of Co-Evolution

The horizon of Co-Evolution is not the negation of any one civilization or festival. It is the construction of a world in which many lamps stand together.

You may enjoy Christmas. Make it a world in which you can also enjoy Diwali. You may love Santa Claus. Make it a world in which you can also see the Sufi turn. You may listen to Christmas songs. Make it a world in which you can also listen to the morning rāgas of Indian classical music.

Concretely, this means redistributing every cultural, sensory, and economic resource — film, television, music, fashion, food, education, tourism, street decoration — not by the logic of Co-Salvation, but by the logic of Co-Evolution. This is more than expanding consumer choice; it is the structural restoration of a human spiritual possibility.

From the Horizon of Japan

And Japan, more than any other society, is favorably situated for this implementation.

A thousand-year experience of receiving multiple spiritual traditions, not as mutually exclusive, but as coexisting (shinbutsu shūgō). The technique, developed in the Meiji period, of adapting and internalizing imported norms. The flexible cultural absorption of the postwar period. And a tradition of international cooperation running from Tokugawa realism through to the Japanese Constitution.

If all of this is turned not toward the passive reception of Co-Salvation but toward the active implementation of Co-Evolution, Japan can make a profoundly concrete and beautiful contribution to the world.

Not pushing “our Christmas” onto the world. Not selling “our New Year” to the world. Rather, constructing — first in Japan itself — a space in which the world’s many spiritualities circulate as equals, in mutual resonance. That is the quietest and most revolutionary response to the thousand-year architecture of Co-Salvation.

The horizon at which the Tokugawa intellectuals read the Bankoku Kōhō. The horizon at which Tsuda Umeko and M. Carey Thomas walked side by side. The horizon at which Hiratsuka Raichō and Emma Goldman were fighting together for the women of the world. And the horizon at which Rūmī wrote “the lamps are different, but the Light is the same,” at which Dōgen wrote “the mountain is the mountain, the water is the water,” at which Ibn Arabi taught the oneness of being.

All of these horizons are the final destination of the tetralogy. The timeline that the Meiji propaganda severed, and the possibility that the millennium-long spiritual architecture of Western imperialism has been covering over — we are now, once again, weaving these back together.

Many lamps, standing together. Each burning with its own different color, its own different temperature, its own different rhythm. And together illuminating the shared darkness.

This is the world of Co-Evolution.

Major References

The Great Commission and Colonialism

Vine, Cedric E. W. Jesus and the Nations: Discipleship and Mission in the Gospel of Matthew. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick, 2022.

Gaskin, Ed. “Biblical Colonialism and Imperialism: Beyond the Doctrine of Discovery.” The Times of Israel.

Sugirtharajah, R. S. The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Comparative History of the Crusades and Jihad

Tyerman, Christopher. God’s War: A New History of the Crusades. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006.

Tyerman, Christopher. Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Madden, Thomas. The New Concise History of the Crusades. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

Dismantling the Discourse of Religious Violence

Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

Cavanaugh, William T. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Sageman, Marc. Understanding Terror Networks. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Orientalism and Critiques of the Clash of Civilizations

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. (Referenced as object of critique.)

Bottici, Chiara & Benoît Challand. The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations. London: Routledge, 2010.

Sufism and Islamic Mysticism

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition. New York: HarperOne, 2007.

Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.

Rūmī, Jalāl al-Dīn. The Masnavi. Translated by Jawid Mojaddedi. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ibn Arabi. The Bezels of Wisdom (Fusus al-Hikam). Translated by R. W. J. Austin. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.

Al-Ghazālī. The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Ihya Ulum al-Din). Multiple translations.

Chittick, William C. The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination. Albany: SUNY Press, 1989.

The Invention of Christmas and the History of Christmas Marketing

Hawksley, Lucinda. Christmas: A Biography. London: Hutchinson, 2017.

Restad, Penne L. Christmas in America: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843. (Primary source.)

Forbes, Bruce David. Christmas: A Candid History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

The Coca-Cola Company. “Haddon Sundblom and the Coca-Cola Santas.” https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/history/haddon-sundblom-and-the-coca-cola-santas

Christmas in Japan and the KFC Campaign

Hopson, Nathan (commentary in Atlas Obscura). “How a White Lie Gave Japan KFC for Christmas.” https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-japanese-kfc-christmas

Milwaukee Independent. “A Kentucky Fried Christmas: How the 1974 Marketing Gamble Transformed KFC into Japan’s Holiday Tradition.”

Time Out Tokyo. “What’s the Deal with KFC and Christmas in Japan?”

Rath, Eric C. Japan’s Cuisines: Food, Place and Identity. London: Reaktion Books, 2016.

Nationalism as an Invisibilized Civic Religion

Bellah, Robert N. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus, 96(1), 1967: 1–21.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Smith, Anthony D. Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Foundational Works from the Earlier Essays (Also Referenced Here)

Hobsbawm, Eric & Terence Ranger (eds.). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Vlastos, Stephen (ed.). Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Hardacre, Helen. Shinto and the State, 1868–1988. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Koyama, Shizuko. Ryōsai Kenbo: The Educational Ideal of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ in Modern Japan. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

Benesch, Oleg. Inventing the Way of the Samurai. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.