Women and religious volunteering in Japan at the start of the new era

Most female members of modern Japanese new religious organizations engage in a variety of service-oriented volunteer initiatives where they tend to provide help and support to individuals directly, outside of organized volunteer organizations and civic associations. Such volunteer behaviour is defined in the literature as informal volunteering. In this respect, this paper addresses three main questions: 1. What aspects of religiosity relate to women’s tendency toward informal volunteering sponsored by Japanese religious organizations? 2. What specific volunteer models of women’s social engagement are articulated through informal volunteering and what is the dominant background neoliberal ideology? 3. How do these models foster women’s citizenship and social participation? This paper draws upon two sets of qualitative data (2010-12 and 2015-17) of religious-based volunteer activities performed by women belonging to four Japanese religious organizations.