The idea for this book emerged from discussions between Nakamaki and Smith, both anthropologists who have done ethnographic studies of large corporations. Since 1988 Nakamaki has studied corporate rituals such as Japanese company funerals and company tombs (2002). Smith (1994) has studied a Japanese multinational operating in Malaysia. Equally, both have researched Asian new religious movements (NRMs) in depth: Nakamaki has studied the operations of Japanese NRMs in Latin America (2003) and Smith, the headquarters and local centres of a Japanese (2007) and an Indian NRM (Ramsay and Smith, 2008) in Australia and Southeast Asia. From these research experiences, they decided it would be worthwhile to examine the organizational aspects of Asian NRMs. They wished to explore the ways in which their systems of management allow Asian NRMs to meet the same operational challenges faced by multinational corporations (MNCs), while functioning in a global context across memberships with vast cultural diversity. Furthermore, they considered that it would be equally valuable to investigate how NRMs ‘marketed’ themselves, in the sense that they could attract followers in diverse cultural contexts.

Out of these discussions grew an international symposium on ‘Management and Marketing of Globalizing Asian Religions’ at the National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka, Japan, in August 2009. Later, two more anthropologists were co-opted as editors: Louella Matsunaga, who studied the now bankrupt supermarket chain Yaohan, which had endeavoured to become a multinational Japanese company and which was closely and publicly linked with a Japanese NRM, Seichō-no-Ie (Matsunaga 2000, 2008); and Tamasin Ramsay, whose in-depth, longitudinal ethnography of the Brahma Kumaris (2009) and current historical and social inquiry into the organization, has included a posting as their NGO representative to the United Nations (New York).

The ‘Management and Marketing of Globalizing Asian Religions’ conference was jointly funded by the National Museum of Ethnography (Minpaku), in Osaka, Japan, and the Interntional Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), in Leiden, the Netherlands, and organized by Nakamaki in 2009 at his home institution, Minpaku. Significantly, this institution, the National Museum of Ethnology, was inspired by a very early ethnological museum in Japan, the Tenri Sankōkan Museum, which was set up in 1930, in Tenri City, Nara Prefecture, by the earliest global Japanese NRM, Tenrikyō, (founded 1838) to aid missionary activity outside Japan.