Contents List of Tables and Figures Preface: The Transdisciplinary Significance of Red Sun, White Lotus Roger Griffin Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors vii viii xiii xiv Introduction: Politics and Religion in Japan 1 Roy Starrs 1 Ritual, Purity, and Power: Rethinking Shinto in Restoration Japan 28 Yijiang Zhong 2 The Mikado s August Body: Divinity and Corporeality of the Meiji Emperor and the Ideological Construction of Imperial Rule 54 Kyu Hyun Kim 3 Does Shinto History Begin at Kuroda? On the Historical Continuities of Political Shinto 84 Klaus Antoni 4 Sada Kaiseki: An Alternative Discourse on Buddhism, Modernity, and Nationalism in the Early Meiji Period 104 Fabio Rambelli 5 Carry the Buddha out into the Street! A Sliver of Buddhist Resistance to Japanese Militarism 143 Brian Daizen Victoria 6 The Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan 162 Alan Tansman v
vi Contents 7 A Naked Public Square? Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan 185 Kevin M. Doak 8 The Gakkai is Faith; the Kōmeitō is Action : Sōka Gakkai and Buddhist Politics 216 Erica Baffelli 9 From Mishima to Aum: Religio-political Violence in Late Twentieth-Century Japan 240 Roy Starrs 10 Voices of Rage: Six Paths to the Problem of Yasukuni 278 John Breen Afterword: A Comparative Glance at Politics and Religion in Modern Japan 305 Prasenjit Duara Index 315
Introduction: Politics and Religion in Japan Roy Starrs Shinto and politics In May 2000, at the very dawn of the twenty-first century, the then Prime Minister of Japan, Mori Yoshirō, caused a storm of protest, both domestically and internationally, with his declaration before a meeting of lawmakers belonging to the Shintō Seiji Renmei (Shinto Political League) that We [have to make efforts to] make the public realize that Japan is a divine nation centering on the Emperor. It s been thirty years since we started our activities based on this thought. 1 Although some foreign observers may have been genuinely shocked by Mori s reactionary, atavistic stance, no one who knew Japan or Japanese politics well was particularly surprised. Indeed, members of his own party generally did not challenge the validity of his remark; they merely regretted its indiscretion as a public pronouncement. As the unintentionally revealing excuse offered by the Secretary General of the party explained: the comment was probably a platitude for the religious group. 2 In other words, in the circles in which Mori and his colleagues moved, the belief that Japan is a divine nation centering on the Emperor was merely an accepted truism, so that nothing much should be read into the Prime Minister s remark in the context in which it was given, it certainly did not represent any revolutionary departure from the norm. As Klaus Antoni has pointed out, despite the Emperor Hirohito s renunciation of his divine status in 1946, the Japanese emperorship receives its whole spiritual and religious authority, now as before, from the religious-political ideology of Shintō. 3 But, as Antoni also notes in his chapter herein, there are actually serious disagreements among scholars of Shinto over the question of whether political Shinto is largely a modern invention, dating from only the early Meiji period, or whether it has developed in 1
2 Roy Starrs an unbroken continuity since the very beginnings of Japanese history, more than a millennium earlier. And he also makes it clear that he himself adheres strongly to the latter view, arguing that it is in fact the political aspect of Shintō thought which forms a constituent frame for the whole system of Shintō throughout history. 4 This is no doubt, broadly true but, as Kyu Hyun Kim also points out in the present volume, the precise nature of the emperor s divinity as, indeed, of his humanity or corporeality was by no means a simple matter of an accepted and traditional article of faith to the Meiji political establishment; rather, it was an issue that was widely and intensely debated amongst them. Drawing on sources such as Meiji tennōki (Chronicles of the Meiji Emperor) and the collected papers of Meiji state leaders, bureaucrats and thinkers, he analyzes their prolonged struggles to define the precise nature of the emperor system for modern Japan, finding that there was considerable conflict between those traditionalists who saw the emperor as a divine presence above the clouds and those modernists who called for a more up-to-date sovereign who was actively engaged with his people and with national affairs. As Kim writes, by the 1880s many concessions were made to expand the emperor s position beyond that of a sacerdote. Indeed, some historians of Japan have persuasively shown us that the Meiji emperor signified neither a return to ancient, traditional Japanese culture nor a capitulation to the hastily put-together state Shinto program, but a complex amalgamation of the traditional and the modern, and for the majority of the Japanese public, no less important a symbol of Japanese modernity than, say, the steam locomotive. Some analysts have presented Mori s gaffe as yet another symptom of Japan s move to the right in the late twentieth century and, more specifically, as yet another challenge to the strict separation of church and state mandated by Japan s (American-imposed) post-war Constitution. 5 There may be some truth in their contention that the economic doldrums of the 1990s made the Japanese public more receptive to open expressions of nationalistic sentiments and resentments. But, as Mori s own comment makes clear, throughout the post-war period such sentiments have never been far from the mainstream of Japanese political life. Indeed, the thought on which Mori had based his political actions for thirty years is a good deal older than that: as already noted, in its most fundamental form at least, it has been at the heart of the Japanese polity since Japan first became a nation some sixteen centuries ago. The tradition of sacralized politics may be traced back at least as far as the Asuka period (592 645), when Prince Shōtoku
Introduction 3 wrote his Seventeen-Article Constitution and adopted both Shinto and Buddhism as nation-protecting religions. As with the ingrained articles of faith found in all nations or cultures, the people who subscribe to this belief do not usually feel called upon to justify themselves by scriptural reference. Nonetheless, if they were pressed to do so, there is only one work to which they could point: the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), a collection of diverse mythical and historical materials compiled by the imperial court in 712 (making it the oldest extant Japanese book). In this sense, the Kojiki is sometimes popularly described as the Bible of Shinto and of Japanese nationalism in general; it is presented as the ultimate scriptural authority for the two central and related principles of Japanese nationalism as enunciated by Mori: that Japan is a divine nation and that it is centered on the Emperor. By pre-war nationalists these two articles of national-shinto faith were referred to as the kokutai (national essence or polity), the now rather notorious doctrine which, as Shirane Haruo has said, used imperial mythology to legitimize a modern imperial system and to establish the Japanese people as a distinct race. 6 Even today, it is Mori s two principles that give Japanese nationalism that special religious quality which distinguishes it from the modern, secular, state-centered nationalisms of the West although, as we shall see, it does have something more in common with the pre-war political religions constructed by European fascist regimes. Despite more than a century of modernization and the assurances of the post-war Constitution that sovereignty lies with the people and that politics should not be mixed with religion, Japanese nationalists have not yet broken the habit of putting the emperor, rather than the people at the center of their national polity and they are not likely to do so in the foreseeable future. For them the emperor, rather than the people or the land itself is the sine qua non of the Japanese nation; without the emperor the nation would lose its unique divine status, the very basis of their national pride. This premodern, theocratic dimension of Japanese nationalism is difficult for contemporary Westerners to grasp, and easy for us to underestimate. We are accustomed to thinking of Japan as an advanced modern or postmodern nation, a first-world country at the cutting edge of high-tech global capitalism, and thus it is hard for us to believe that its political leaders subscribe to such an archaic way of thought. And, of course, it is entirely possible that Mori, as the comment by the Secretary General of his party suggests, was merely paying lip-service to a belief system still venerated by a significant portion of his electorate just as an American politician might nod in the direction of Christian fundamentalists.
4 Roy Starrs Nonetheless, even the fact that he would feel the political need to do so shows that this belief system still has widespread currency. At any rate, this eruption of pre-war-style State Shinto in recent Japanese political discourse is only one example of how that religio-political ideology continues to survive like hot lava below the surface of Japanese political life and to cause political and diplomatic problems when it occasionally erupts. As Kevin Doak writes in his chapter here, this may be identified as the continuing dilemma at the heart of the modern Japanese body politic, with its uneasy and paradoxical conflation of the sacred and the secular: Recently, some Japanese historians have begun to emphasize that the Meiji government was not a unique Shinto theocracy, but a kind of modern secular state that put a primacy on political controls over religion, even while especially while declaring the monarch himself sacred and inviolate. Herein lies the informing dilemma in the relationship of religion and politics in modern Japan. Two other significant recent manifestations of this dilemma in action, for instance, are the ongoing debate over the appropriateness and constitutionality of the official patronage of the famous Shinto shrine, Yasukuni, as a national war memorial (mainly in the form of official visits by Japanese prime ministers to commemorate the war dead), and the official use of Shinto rites at the enthronement ceremony of the new emperor, Akihito, in 1990. Because of the historical and symbolic significance of Yasukuni, much more is involved here than merely the political or religious repercussions of Japanese prime ministerial visits to a Shinto shrine. As Phillip Seaton states: At the beginning of the twenty-first century, no issue has been more emblematic of Japan s struggles with the history of the Second World War than Yasukuni. 7 The core problem is that not only are A-class war criminals (as defined by the Tokyo War Crimes Trials) enshrined in its inner sanctum, but also the shrine includes in its grounds a war museum, the Yūshūkan, that proudly and defiantly justifies the wartime actions of Imperial Japan in Asia, presenting the Japanese Imperial Army as the glorious liberator of Asia from Western imperialism. Taken together, these two factors seem to make Yasukuni a bastion of Japanese right-wing ideology and of the whitewashing of Japan s record of aggression and atrocity in Asia. It is hardly surprising, then, that the principal victims of that aggression, Japan s Asian neighbours, take offense when Japanese politicians officially worship
Introduction 5 at Yasukuni. From a Chinese or Korean perspective, it is almost as if the German Chancellor were to pay annual visits to a war memorial with attached museum glorifying the anti-communist struggle of the Third Reich s Wehrmacht to pray for the repose of the souls of the Nazi dead, including Hitler and Goebbels! But, as Franziska Seraphim points out, the nationalist right has always contested Japan s official acceptance of the Tokyo trial verdict... 8 One proposed solution has been to build a non-religious memorial to the war dead. But, as Seaton discovered from his extensive research into nationalist writings about the Yasukuni issue, they would never accept this, because of the extraordinary emotional bonds between nationalism and the Yasukuni Shrine. 9 Seaton neatly encapsulates the emotional and ideological nexus of core elements that make this national Shinto shrine so important and irreplaceable to Japanese nationalists: The nation as family, the emperor as a father to his children the people, Yasukuni as a spiritual home, self-sacrifice for the nation as the protector of one s family, ancestor worship as integral to Japanese culture: these are the core elements of nationalist and Yasukuni doctrine. 10 To suggest the depth and intensity of the emotions involved, he also borrows a telling phrase from the Tokyo University philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya, author of Yasukuni mondai (The Yasukuni Problem, 2005): the nation as a religion. 11 There can be few modern nations of which this phrase rings truer than Japan and, of course, State Shinto is what makes this so. I will return to this point presently. As Helen Hardacre has shown, the intimate relationship between State Shinto and the Yasukuni Shrine may be traced back to the Meiji period (1868 1912), and since that time, as she points out, Nowhere else in modern history do we find so pronounced an example of state sponsorship of a religion in some respects the state can be said to have created Shintō as its official tradition, but in the process Shinto was irrevocably changed.... In the end, Shintō, as adopted by the modern Japanese state, was largely an invented tradition... 12 Further evidence for this modern, invented nature of State Shinto emerges when we survey the religious situation in Japan prior to the Meiji Restoration of 1868: a separate Shinto religion was virtually non-existent at that time; rather, it existed inextricably as part of a syncretic mix with Buddhism. And its ties with the state were, likewise, ill defined. As Hardacre writes: Shintō s ties with the state before 1868 were obscure and limited for the most part to the rites of the imperial or shogunal courts, always coordinated with, and usually subordinated to, Buddhist ritual. After 1868, Buddhism lost its former state patronage, and Shintō was elevated
6 Roy Starrs and patronized by the state. 13 And she also emphasizes that it was not just the state that exploited Shinto for nation-building purposes the Shinto priesthood was also eager to build, maintain, and strengthen ties to the state as a means of raising its own prestige. 14 Thus, the priesthood became involved for the first time in the systematic inculcation of state-sponsored values, a role it has tried to preserve down to the present day. 15 In his chapter in the present volume, Yijiang Zhong adds more nuance to this point, showing how the original, purely religious fervour of the mid-nineteenth-century Shinto revivalists was co-opted and transmogrified by the Meiji state for its own political and nationbuilding purposes: After the Meiji Restoration, this imagined ritual order, signified by the term Shinto, informed the construction of the state ritual structure. First it offered a ritual model of relating local communities to the imperial state via a nationalized shrine hierarchy that was mobilized to implement the project of transformation of the population via ritual participation and doctrinal edification; second, the figuring of death and afterlife in the ritual order not only provided a counter theory for the Meiji state to resist the Christian salvation doctrine, but also enabled the construction of institutions, most spectacularly the state-operated Yasukuni Shrine, wherein death ritual served to link individual Japanese with the nation-state. Enshrining the spirits of dead humans as the kami constitutes a form of purification but when this purity is overlaid with the significance of the imperial authority, purity functioned to precipitate the creation of an ethnic, politicized nation. Indeed, Hardacre sees the Meiji government s patronage of Yasukuni and its newly invented Shinto rituals as an attempt, largely successful, to control the religious life of virtually the entire nation by the early decades of the twentieth century. 16 More specifically, the creation of a cult of fallen military combatants apotheosized as glorious war dead its center in the Yasukuni Shrine, has, of all the invented traditions of State Shinto, most profoundly colored the character of popular religious life and remains an issue at the end of the twentieth century. 17 An interesting recent counter-view on the Yasukuni problem is provided by Kevin Doak, who sees the issue primarily from a religious rather than a political perspective. Noting that the Catholic Church has long sanctioned visits by Japanese Catholics to Shinto shrines when regarded as a purely civic duty, he concludes that: From my perspective
Introduction 7 as a Catholic the visits to Yasukuni Shrine by successive prime ministers do not constitute a challenge to the constitutional separation of church and state. 18 Basically Doak argues that such visits are civic gestures honouring the war dead rather than expressions of religious conviction. Obviously this issue is still far from settled (see Breen [2008] for the most up-to-date debates both in favour and against the shrine s status as an official memorial ). In the present volume John Breen offers a comprehensive (and I would think definitive) analysis of what one might call the problematics of Yasukuni, ranging from the constitutional and diplomatic to the religious and moral issues raised by this national war memorial. As Breen writes: Since Yasukuni is not just any religious corporation, but one entrusted with the nation s war dead, it can hardly be understood uniquely in state-religion terms. Yasukuni is inseparable from issues about the Pacific War and about war memory. As such, it is bound tightly to very contemporary questions about Japan s relationship with its former enemies, especially in Asia, and about postwar Japanese society as a whole. Yasukuni has, for these reasons, been a problem of daunting complexity. State Shinto in all its pre-war glory seemed (for many observers) to have been resurrected again in November 1990 in the form of the mystical daijōsai rite that was part of the lengthy and elaborate enthronement ceremony of the new emperor, Akihito. 19 As John Breen has pointed out, the ceremony went ahead in the face of fierce opposition from various liberal groups, who protested that state funding for it breached the constitutional separation of state and religion. The Daijosai, after all, is a mystical rite that celebrates the emperor s unique relationship with the Sun Goddess. 20 And Breen also pointed to the possibly serious repercussions of the victory of the right-wing political establishment in this case: it stands as a warning that Japan s constitutional monarchy is not quite so secure as it appears; it serves also as a much-needed reminder of an essential continuity between the pre- and postwar imperial institutions. 21 Although the pre-war official state doctrine that the emperor was a living deity was supposedly abrogated by Emperor Hirohito in 1946 (under pressure from the Allied Occupation authorities, of course), the fact is that Hirohito continued to perform all those rituals which, before the Occupation, defined him as both deity and high priest and Akihito performs the same rites today. 22 As Felicia Bock writes: Today,
8 Roy Starrs the postwar constitution purports to separate church and state, religion and government, but the distinction between the two areas, like other concepts introduced from an alien culture, is far from clear. 23 And Eric Seizelet sees it as symptomatic of les ambigüitiés du rapport que les Japonais entretiennent avec leur passé. 24 Of course, what makes many nervous about present apparent attempts by the political establishment to resurrect State Shinto is the immediate pre-war and wartime history of this political religion. Walter Skya has shown how dangerous this particular conflation of state and religion proved to be in his in-depth account of the development of pre-war State Shinto nationalist ideology (2002). He demonstrates how, during its fascist phase, it aimed at the creation of mass man with total devotion to the emperor. 25 It tried to accomplish this through teaching a kind of mystical unity between the individual and the emperor, thus precluding the possibility of any independent moral will in the individual the emperor (meaning, of course, the state) was owed absolute loyalty and obedience as well as religious veneration. Thus, State Shinto ideology had become ultranationalist and totalitarian. 26 In a more recent book (2009), Skya demonstrates how this transmogrified religious ideology convinced many Japanese in the 1940s that they were engaged in a holy war against Western civilization. In the immediate pre-war period, one might say, national Shinto became imperceptibly but progressively less Shinto and more national, not just a state religion but a religion of the state that is, to put it rather bluntly, with the state itself rather than any traditional Shinto gods as the principal object of worship. Even the emperor became an increasingly abstracted empty sign of the state a process that, as Kyu Hyun Kim shows herein, had already begun in the late Meiji period. But, as Walter Skya has demonstrated, the emperor system ideology of the 1930s was significantly different from that of late Meiji it was an Imperial Way ideology that was adjusted to accommodate the rising political power of the masses and the fascist response to this from the right. In this newly reconfigured version of the kokutai or national polity, as already mentioned, the masses were urged to submerge themselves in a mystical union with the emperor through total submission to his sacral state; in this way their lives and their deaths would attain to a larger, transcendental value, a kind of semi-secular, semireligious version of salvation. In his chapter here, Alan Tansman clarifies the sacral or religious qualities of this Japanese nationalism and fascism of the 1930s, showing how in Japan, as in Germany and Italy at about the same time, nationalism itself became a kind of new religion.
Introduction 9 More specifically, this was a new form of political religion similar to that which emerged in Europe after the First World War, involving, as Emilio Gentile has pointed out, the sacralization of politics and the construction of a lay religion of the nation inspired by the battlefield experience of a new sentiment of national communion imbued with lay religiosity. 27 As Roger Griffin has noted in the European context: By the twentieth century international forces of völkisch nationalism generated throughout Europe by the revolt against Modernity had led to the theological obscenity of God s conflation with country, and the perversion of the Christian concept of sacrifice into a patriotic duty. 28 Arguably, the violence done by nationalism to Shinto was less of a theological obscenity than that done to Christianity (and Klaus Antoni might seem to lend support to that argument here). Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that the political religion constructed by the militarist and fascist government of 1930s Japan was radically different from earlier forms of Shinto and of emperor-system ideology, although it is certainly also true, as Antoni points out, that Shinto was exploited for political purposes from the very beginning of its recorded history (as, indeed, was Christianity). Needless to say, not all forms of political exploitation of religion are of equally egregious effect and some might be regarded as harmless or even beneficent. But that of the 1930s Japanese fascist regime was designed to produce a generation of dedicated holy warriors for its wars of imperial conquest. Tansman gives us, among other things, a very useful account of the most influential sacred text of this new religion, what might be called the sacral secular bible of Japanese fascism, the 1937 Essentials of the National Polity (Kokutai no hongi). Tansman analyzes not only its contents but its literary style, in particular the rhetorical techniques it uses to sway its readers as much on an emotional as on an intellectual level. Indeed, as Tansman also makes clear, the style of this piece of culturally sophisticated propaganda is at least as important as, perhaps more important than, what it actually says, and he points out its instructive affinities with the pseudo-religious language of superlatives and of the eternal deployed in Nazi propaganda, as so tellingly anatomized by Victor Klemperer. For instance, the ultimate mystery of the national essence was emphasized in phrases such as: Our National Essence is vast and unfathomable (kōdai shin en) and cannot be fully captured. This pseudo-religious language was designed to induce religious-style conversions to the new political religion, mass conversions of the whole population that would bind them to the nation-state. The Essentials of the National Polity was the public document to which individuals were
10 Roy Starrs to be bound, and the most concise and disseminated artefact of binding (or conversion?) as it emanated from the state. As Tansman notes, The book is a speech act, calling into existence through declaration, tapping into the ancient belief in kotodama, the magical power or the spirit of words, of whose existence it reminds its readers.... By simply speaking of that which did not in actuality exist as if it did, it was calling it into being through the act of enunciation, the magical power of words (kotodama), a concept it also argued was at the basis of the harmonious binding of the Japanese people to their Emperor, State, and History. Also, the sense of the eternal is not only evoked by the meanings of the words themselves, but is deepened by an incessant repetition that makes its words as though they were coming from a source that cannot be depleted, and not going into a future that ends, but returning in an endless cycle. Through repetition the words become talismanic beats in a chant, functioning like prayer to instil belief in the body by bypassing the filter of the mind. Generally speaking, as we can see from the above, Japanese fascism appropriated and exploited the traditional East Asian religious philosophy of monism, which is especially strong in Buddhism and Daoism, just as European fascism assumed a kind of false cultural legitimacy by clothing itself in certain Christian-style practices and ideals (as Roger Griffin notes above). We can speak of this as a misuse because, of course, in the traditional East Asian religions, human beings transcend their egos by achieving mystical union not with the emperor or the state but with nature, humanity as a whole, nothingness, the ground of being, or buddhahood in other words, some broadly universal rather than some narrowly national reality, however that is conceived. In moral terms, the ultimate outcome is supposed to be a more tolerant, serene, and compassionate human being quite the opposite, one would think, of a holy warrior ever ready to achieve unity with the Emperor by death in battle. As Tansman notes, the Essentials of the National Polity ultimately bursts out into a paean to the nation s martial spirit, stretching back to its origins. The paean is paradoxical: in the martial tradition, war was never for the sake of war, but war was for the sake of peace; it was sacred war. And he rightly observes: Reading the call to war here, we are aware that we are in the realm of propaganda meant to promote violent action or at least ease acceptance of it. Furthermore: The power of binding resolves social contradictions (as it effaces rhetorical ones): master and servant are bound through indebtedness, and such binding effaces the individual, becoming a spirit of self-abnegation transcending duty. Ultimately, salvation comes from dying for the state: This then allows
Introduction 11 facing death and respecting it for its true nature, fulfilling the true life through death, and putting oneself to death in order to give life to the whole. As Tansman writes: The book can be compared to Hitler s Mein Kampf as a foundational document of aggression, and in its style of repetitive assertion.... Obviously the new man envisioned by the Japanese fascist ideologues was more a Nazi-stereotype version of the Nietzschean Übermensch than an exemplar of any traditional East Asian religion. Little wonder that even Hitler professed to be jealous of Japan s national religion! 29 But what the Führer did not realize was that State Shinto, as restructured in the 1930s, was as much a product of the age as his own Nazi political religion. In other words, Shinto per se is not what distinguishes the Japanese political system of the 1930s from European fascism; rather, it is exactly in the way they used or misused Shinto and other traditional religions to construct a new political religion that the political establishment of the time showed their close affinities with their European fascist contemporaries. In a somewhat countervailing vein, Kevin Doak, in his chapter herein, interestingly reconfigures the whole debate about the relation between religion and politics in imperial Japan in terms of a struggle between secularism on the one side and Shinto and Buddhist forms of radical religious totalitarianism on the other. The rather surprising upshot of this perspective is that the state comes to be seen as the defender of secular political values against those religious radicals who agitated, sometimes violently, for an even stronger sectarian bias in the body politic. Thus, perhaps not so surprisingly, even some leading members of the small but influential Christian minority came to regard the Tōjō government as the lesser of two evils. From the 1920s onwards, Doak writes,... the cooperation between government and religious officials stemmed from their shared interest in checking the rise of secularism and atheism, but there was also a growing concern with religious terrorism from the extreme right that rejected the compromise the government had struck with religious pluralism under the Meiji constitutional system. Furthermore: The Japanese state itself remained secular insofar as no religious test was required for office, and religious minorities, including Christians, held important public positions throughout the war. The politics of Japanese Buddhism It might be expected that Buddhism, as a universal religion of foreign origins, would have been far less subservient to the state or complicit
12 Roy Starrs with Japanese nationalism than the native religion of Shinto. For a number of historical and cultural reasons, however, examples of such nation-transcendence and political independence or even opposition on the part of Buddhists have been the exception rather than the rule although, as Fabio Rambelli argues here, some significant examples of such opposition do exist. On the whole, however, the Japanese Buddhist establishment, throughout its entire history, has allied itself closely with political power and has loyally served the interests of conservative and nationalist social forces. The perfect symbol of this inseparable union between the Buddhist church and the Japanese state and nation is Prince Shōtoku (573 621), the semi-legendary imperial prince regarded as the father of Japanese Buddhism: it was he who, according to the oldest Japanese national history, the Nihon shoki (The Chronicles of Japan, 720 A.D.), authored the founding document of the Japanese imperial state, the Seventeen-Article Constitution, in which he calls for the official patronage of both Buddhism and Shinto as nation-protecting religions. This inseparability of Buddhism from the state in premodern Japan may seem regrettable both from a modern secular and a modern religious viewpoint today we tend to believe that the separation of church and state is a healthier state of affairs for both parties. And, indeed, there are Buddhist scholars and practitioners who take a strong moral and political position on this issue. Joseph Kitagawa, for instance, in his classic study, Religion in Japanese History, states that Buddhism was quickly transformed into the religion of the throne and the empire. 30 And he goes on to express regret that the Buddhist community (sangha), as such, had no opportunity to develop its own integrity and coherence, because from the time of Prince Shōtoku onward the state functioned not as a patron (Schutz-patronat) but as the religious police (Religions-polizei) of Buddhism. 31 Similar regrets have been expressed more recently, as we shall see, both by Japanese scholars of the so-called Critical Buddhism school and by some Western critics of Zen s role in Japanese fascism and militarism both of whom trace the origins of this uncomfortably close church state collaboration all the way back to Prince Shōtoku. But, of course, we must also recognize that there is something anachronistic and ahistorical in such decidedly modern viewpoints. As a number of other, more historically minded, scholars have pointed out, no such entity as Buddhism as a separate, autonomous religion in the modern sense ever existed in ancient Japan or, for that matter, anywhere else in ancient Asia. 32 Thus, for instance, to imply that Buddhism was co-opted by the state for its own nefarious purposes does not
Introduction 13 make much sense historically. From the very beginning, Buddhism offered itself, and was adopted, as an arm of the state, and operated as an essential part of the governing apparatus. In other words, there was no Buddhism other than state Buddhism in ancient Japan, and it should be noted that, even much later, in the middle ages, an outsider sect such as Nichirenism nonetheless aspired to become the national religion and place itself at the centre of state power. As its founder, Nichiren, himself proclaimed in his Risshō Ankoku Ron (On Securing the Peace of the Land through Adopting the Correct Teaching), it was the duty of Japan s rulers to officially accept his teachings, based on the Lotus Sutra, as the one true form of Buddhism in order to free the country of wars and natural disasters. More mainstream Buddhist sects also invariably represented their teachings and religious practices as indispensible for the protection of the state, and governing elites shared this conviction. The chingo-kokka ( protection of the state ) and ōbō-buppō ( mutual support between the state and Buddhism ) theories adopted as official state ideology during the Nara (710 794) and Heian (793 1135) periods made this explicit. 33 And the ōbō-buppō ideology, explicitly uniting the interests of church and state, continued to play a supporting role in what the leading medieval historian Kuroda Toshio called the kenmitsu (exoteric-esoteric) system of rule. 34 As James C. Dobbins explains: [Kuroda] asserted that it was not Buddhism s new schools but the old ones, what he called kenmitsu (exoteric-esoteric) Buddhism, that pervaded the medieval scene and set the standard for religion. Moreover, Shinto did not exist as a separate medieval religion, but was submerged in this kenmitsu religious culture. Furthermore, the entire kenmitsu worldview functioned as an ideological foundation for the social and political order, providing it with a rationale and giving it cohesion. Thus religion did not stand apart from the world as a realm of pure ideas, but was fully integrated into all levels and dimensions of medieval Japan. 35 In the later middle ages, too, there was a close working relationship between some government-sponsored and government-controlled Zen monasteries the so-called gozan or Five Mountains and the ruling Ashikaga dynasty of military dictators or shoguns. As Martin Collcutt points out in his seminal study of the issue, Ashikaga Tadayoshi, the younger brother of Takauji, the dynasty s founder, saw most clearly the political advantages to the bakufu [shogunal government] of creating
14 Roy Starrs a powerful nationwide system of government-sponsored Zen monasteries. 36 Under his, and later Ashikaga, patronage, these monasteries flourished to such an extent that they played a major role in the political and economic as well as in the religious and cultural life of medieval Japan. 37 And Collcutt also points out that, for the Zen monasteries themselves, this Ashikaga patronage brought unprecedented prestige, wealth, and influence. 38 Under the Tokugawa shogunate, the next and last of the shogunal dynasties (1603 1868), neo-confucianism was adopted as the official state ideology and Buddhism lost some of the high official status it had enjoyed since the days of Prince Shōtoku; nonetheless, the state continued to find important uses for the church. Most notably, Buddhist priests and temples were used by the regime to enforce its system of household registry (danka seidō), whereby every family was compelled to register with its local Buddhist temple. Anyone who could not provide an identity paper that showed their temple affiliation was treated as a secret Christian (which was illegal) or as a non-person (hinin) and subjected to discrimination, and sometimes even arrest and execution. Thus, from the viewpoint of the Tokugawa state, the Buddhist temples were an indispensable tool for controlling the population. On the other hand, the Buddhist clergy themselves seemed to relish, and profit by, the life-and-death power this apparently innocuous registry system gave them over those compelled to become their parishioners. 39 As Fabio Rambelli argues in his chapter here, however, we should not forget that there was always a latent transgressive potential in Japanese Buddhism, and sometimes it did erupt to the surface. In particular, to counter the usual image of a Japanese Buddhism totally subservient to the state, Rambelli offers the example of the rebellious and outspoken early Meiji monk, Sada Kaiseki, a fascinating figure who did not hesitate to strongly criticize the Meiji government and organize citizens movements to counter its policies. Attacking another stereotype, Rambelli also shows that the usual image of Sada as an arch-conservative anti-modernist, anti-technological Luddite (or the Japanese equivalent of such) is simplistic rather, this activist intellectual made a brave and creditable attempt to achieve a workable reconciliation between the native and the foreign, tradition and modernity: [In] the three central fields of Kaiseki s interventions in the early Meiji public discourse, namely, astronomy and geography (and, more generally, modern Western science), economics, and cultural politics.... [he] tried to formulate original and autonomous intellectual
Introduction 15 positions by recombining traditional knowledge and new Western ideas in ways that were not completely subservient to contemporaneous Euro-American discourses. Despite the fact that Kaiseki is widely regarded by Japanese scholars as an oddball conservative thinker, I attempt a revisionist re-evaluation of the significance of Kaiseki s thought in the cultural history of modern Japan, also in the hope that this could open the way for further investigations on the original and progressive possibilities of modern Japanese Buddhism. In his chapter here, Brian Victoria offers a later and much sadder example of Buddhist opposition to the political establishment of the day: the sliver of resistance put up by a group of Buddhist students of the 1930s, who tried idealistically to stand up to the ruthless fascist/ militarist regime with all-too-predictable results. Fascist Zen That the consequences of this intimate and millennium-long relationship between church and state continue to be felt in Japan today and in contemporary Japanese studies may be seen in two disturbing and provocative recent debates. The first concerns quite a specific issue: the role of Zen Buddhist leaders and thinkers as collaborators with Japanese militarism and fascism in the first half of the twentieth century. The second concerns a larger but in some ways related issue: the alleged misinterpretation of fundamental Buddhist doctrines, for political and nationalistic purposes, by Japanese Buddhist leaders since Prince Shōtoku. (These allegations are made by scholars belonging to the socalled Critical Buddhism school already mentioned.) It is interesting to note that the first debate was provoked by works written mainly in English, and the second by works written mainly in Japanese. The full dimensions of the modern Zen world s collaboration with Japanese fascism was first revealed to Western readers in 1995 by an excellent collection of essays edited by James Heisig and John Maraldo, appropriately entitled Rude Awakenings. The editors acknowledge that, just as revelations about Heidegger s affiliations with Nazism have provoked a serious reassessment of his philosophic legacy, so too revelations about the fascist sympathies of the Kyoto School philosophers (who had much in common with Heidegger) and their Zen associates have come as a rude awakening for Western devotees of Zen and admirers of Kyoto School philosophy. 40 The most famous members of this group were two close friends: Suzuki Daisetsu (1870 1966) and
16 Roy Starrs Nishida Kitarō (1870 1945). Suzuki (or, to use his English penname, D.T. Suzuki) is commonly credited with being the man who introduced Zen to the West, a feat he accomplished in the 1920s and 1930s by writing in eloquent English a series of highly popular books on Zen. Nishida is regarded as the major Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century, and as the patriarch of the Kyoto School who profoundly influenced several generations of Japanese philosophers. In essays written during the Second World War, Nishida seems to abjectly surrender his critical intelligence to imperial mythology and to put his sophisticated Zen-inspired philosophy entirely at the service of an atavistic emperor-worshipping State Shinto in fact, admonishing his readers that we must not forget the thought of returning to oneness with the emperor and serving the state. 41 As Christopher Ives notes, these essays served to provide a philosophical basis for the state, the national polity, and the holy war, and in this way helped dispel the doubts of students bound for the front and provide a foundation for resignation to death. 42 (Ives quotes here from Ichikawa Hakugen, the only significant post-war Zen figure to criticize the wartime role of Nishida and Zen.) Despite these rather shocking intellectual capitulations on Nishida s part, however, his attitude towards Japanese imperialism was actually somewhat ambivalent, as Ives also points out. 43 This was even more true of D.T. Suzuki, who, while he made nationalistic claims about the superiority of Japanese Buddhism and Japanese spirituality in general, 44 also seemed to express, as much as he could safely do so during wartime, serious reservations about the identification of Zen with the fascist cult of death. 45 The most vociferous and egregious expressions of fascistic thought tended to come from lesser members of the School, such as the junior members who participated in the notorious discussions sponsored by the journal Chūōkōron in 1941, in which strident claims were made about the superiority of the Japanese race and the rightness of imperial Japan s cause as liberator of Asia from Western imperialism. 46 And also, perhaps most shockingly, some of the most fanatic support for fascism and militarism came from the Zen (and other Buddhist) clergy themselves. Thus we might say that, although there had been attempts to separate the red sun of imperial state Shinto from the white lotus of Buddhism, especially by nationalists from the Shinto side, since the 1870s, by the 1930s the lotus had drawn so close to the sun that it was tinted with a blood-red glow (if I may be forgiven a somewhat melodramatic image). This latter point has been brought home most forcefully by Brian Victoria in his case studies of a number of leading Zen masters and
Introduction 17 associates collected together in two volumes, Zen at War (1997, second edition 2006) and Zen War Stories (2003). Among the prominent Zen leaders whose fascist pasts are profiled by Victoria are some of the most influential figures in the post-war transmission of Zen to the West. For instance, the Zen teachings of Yasutani Haku un (1885 1973) feature prominently in probably the most influential book on Zen ever published in the West, Philip Kapleau s The Three Pillars of Zen (1965), the book that inspired generations of Westerners (including the present writer) to practice Zen meditation. In his book, Kapleau presents his teacher as a fully enlightened Zen master, but of course makes no mention of (and perhaps knew nothing about) the darker side of Yasutani s past. Victoria, on the other hand, devotes a whole chapter to exactly that, quoting profusely from Yasutani s wartime writings to prove that he was not only a thoroughgoing fascist, emperor-worshipping imperialist, and militant warmonger but also, rather bizarrely, a rabid anti-semite. 47 Apparently he associated Jews (who were virtually non-existent in Japan) with left-wing or liberal thought and, as Victoria points out, Yasutani and his peers... had wholeheartedly embraced the role of ideological shock troops for Japanese aggression abroad and thought suppression at home. 48 Thus, they fervently opposed all forms of thought, left-wing or merely liberal, that did not completely and totally subsume the individual to the needs and purposes of a hierarchically-constituted, patriarchal, totalitarian state. 49 Coming on the heels of recent revelations about various abuses of power by American Zen leaders over the past few decades, 50 these rude awakenings have had an effect on the Western Zen world comparable, albeit on a smaller scale, to that of the child-abuse scandals on the Catholic Church. Indeed, Victoria s books have had an historical importance in their own right, since, translated into Japanese, they have induced various branches of the Zen establishment to issue formal apologies for their past political misdeeds. But one might ask, attempting now to grab the real Zen bull by the horns: what is the larger significance of his revelations for our understanding of the very heart of Zen, satori or spiritual awakening? For instance, given the fact that Victoria documents the ideological misdeeds of officially recognized rōshi or Zen masters, purportedly enlightened men, rather than of mere intellectuals or philosophers influenced by Zen, one is naturally led to question the ultimate moral value of satori. The traditional Zen position, in brief, is that, because satori reveals the oneness of all creation, the enlightened person naturally feels compassionate towards fellow suffering beings and naturally develops non-discriminative wisdom. Looking
18 Roy Starrs at the rather hateful and discriminatory writings of wartime Zen masters, however, one feels compelled to choose between two possibilities: either they were not really enlightened, or Zen enlightenment lacks the moral value traditionally attributed to it. Such difficult questions are, in fact, confronted by some of the contributors to Rude Awakenings, and their answers tend towards either of the above-mentioned poles: those such as Hirata Seikō, who argue basically that Zen is amoral, concerned as Confucians have always alleged not with society but only with the nature of the self; 51 and those such as the left-wing Zen activist Ichikawa Hakugen, who take a strong moral position and argue that enlightenment is worthless without a social conscience. 52 Ichikawa s position is perhaps far more popular among Western Zennists than among their Japanese counterparts; 53 for better or for worse, Hirata, a Zen Abbot himself, represents the mainstream Japanese Zen view. Certainly he follows in the famous footsteps of D. T. Suzuki, who stated quite categorically: Zen has no special doctrine or philosophy, no set of concepts or intellectual formulas, except that it tries to release one from the bondage of birth and death, by means of certain intuitive modes of understanding peculiar to itself. It is, therefore, extremely flexible in adapting itself to almost any philosophy and moral doctrine as long as its intuitive teaching is not interfered with. It may be found wedded to anarchism or fascism, communism or democracy, atheism or idealism, or any political or economic dogmatism. 54 Although Suzuki s language and logic here are rather loose or inaccurate, perhaps even careless or irresponsible (as sadly was often the case) obviously Zen does have some sort of guiding doctrine and philosophy, for instance nonetheless one can understand what he is driving at. Clearly Zen is extremely adaptable in both moral and philosophic terms as with any deep poetic or mystical insight, its very ineffability leaves it open to a great range of interpretations. This makes it morally ambiguous, sometimes even dangerous. In the wake of Japan s disastrous defeat in the Pacific War, even Suzuki was at pains to point this out: he argued that, if satori was not supplemented with a good secular education and critical intelligence, it was morally worthless. 55 At any rate, this question about the moral value of satori has itself become a kind of Zen kōan or meditation problem, and perhaps ultimately it is as logically irresolvable as any of the traditional kōan such as: What is the sound of one hand clapping? Or perhaps we should