Politics and Religion in Modern Japan: Red Sun, White Lotus

Politics and Religion in Modern Japan

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd i

6/30/2011 12:56:48 PM

Also by Roy Starrs: AN ARTLESS ART: The Zen Aesthetic of Shiga Naoya ASIAN NATIONALISM IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS: China, Japan and the West (Co-edited with Soren Clausen and Ann Wedell-Wedellsborg) DEADLY DIALECTICS: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima JAPAN AND KOREA: Contemporary Studies (Co-edited with Bjarke Frellesvig) JAPANESE CULTURAL NATIONALISM: At Home and in the Asia Pacific NATIONS UNDER SIEGE: Globalization and Nationalism in Asia SOUNDINGS IN TIME: The Fictive Art of Kawabata Yasunari MODERNISM AND JAPANESE CULTURE RETHINKING JAPANESE MODERNISM

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd ii

6/30/2011 12:56:48 PM

Politics and Religion in Modern Japan Red Sun, White Lotus Edited By

Roy Starrs Coordinator of Japanese and Asian Studies, University of Otago, New Zealand

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd iii

6/30/2011 12:56:48 PM

Editorial matter, selection, introduction and chapter 9 © Roy Starrs 2011 Preface © Roger Griffin 2011. All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–24073–5 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Politics and religion in modern Japan : red sun, white lotus / [edited by] Roy Starrs. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–24073–5 (hardback) 1. Religion and state – Japan. 2. Religion and politics – Japan. 3. Japan – Politics and government – 1945– I. Starrs, Roy, 1946– BL2211.S73P65 2011 201⬘.720952—dc23

2011018668

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd iv

6/30/2011 12:56:48 PM

Contents List of Tables and Figures

vii

Preface: The Transdisciplinary Significance of Red Sun, White Lotus Roger Griffin

viii

Acknowledgements

xiii

Notes on Contributors

xiv

Introduction: Politics and Religion in Japan Roy Starrs 1

2

3

4

5

6

Ritual, Purity, and Power: Rethinking Shinto in Restoration Japan Yijiang Zhong The Mikado’s August Body: ‘Divinity’ and ‘Corporeality’ of the Meiji Emperor and the Ideological Construction of Imperial Rule Kyu Hyun Kim Does Shinto History ‘Begin at Kuroda’? On the Historical Continuities of Political Shinto Klaus Antoni

1

28

54

84

Sada Kaiseki: An Alternative Discourse on Buddhism, Modernity, and Nationalism in the Early Meiji Period Fabio Rambelli

104

Carry the Buddha out into the Street! A Sliver of Buddhist Resistance to Japanese Militarism Brian Daizen Victoria

143

The Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan Alan Tansman

162

v

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd v

6/30/2011 12:56:48 PM

vi

7

8

9

Contents

A Naked Public Square? Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan Kevin M. Doak

185

‘The Gakkai is Faith; the Kōmeitō is Action’: Sōka Gakkai and ‘Buddhist Politics’ Erica Baffelli

216

From Mishima to Aum: Religio-political Violence in Late Twentieth-Century Japan Roy Starrs

240

10 Voices of Rage: Six Paths to the Problem of Yasukuni John Breen

278

Afterword: A Comparative Glance at Politics and Religion in Modern Japan Prasenjit Duara

305

Index

315

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd vi

6/30/2011 12:56:48 PM

Tables and Figures Tables 4.1 7.1

Sada Kaiseki’s comparative summary of Japanese and Western people Violations of the Peace Preservation Law by category and result

128 198

Figures 4.1 Portrait of Sada Kaiseki 4.2 Entsū’s representation of Mount Sumeru 4.3 Sada Kaiseki’s model showing the identity of visual and true phenomena 4.4 Model of economic flows

106 112 116 120

vii

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd vii

6/30/2011 12:56:48 PM

Preface The Transdisciplinary Significance of Red Sun, White Lotus Roger Griffin

This collection of essays on ‘politics and religion in Japan’ is a happy event for the extended family of comparative studies in the Humanities, welcome not just for the insights it offers specialists into a crucial aspect of Japanese culture and politics in the modern era, but also for students of fascism, political religion, and modernity as generic phenomena. Its genesis lies in the enthusiastic response of Professor Roy Starrs to an email I wrote while still co-editor of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions. In it I suggested that a special issue dedicated to the relationship between politics and religion in Japan over the last 150 years would be particularly fascinating to non-specialists, and fill a glaring gap in a journal that had so far concentrated almost exclusively on Nazism, Fascism, Russian (and Korean) totalitarianism, and Islamism. Born of a productive synergy between the cutting-edge Japanists drawn to the project, the resulting volume is more comprehensive and significant than anything I could have envisaged at its conception. Indeed, it is academia’s gain that, when plans for the special issue were well advanced, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions publishers chose to dispense with the services of the academic editorial team who would have acted as its midwives, thus smothering in their infancy plans to explore other schemes for total renewal whereby modern politics became endowed with an aura of the sacral. As a collection of essays in book and e-book form Red Sun, White Lotus has every prospect of exerting a more sustained impact on a number of fields in the long term than could be achieved in the pages of a relatively obscure journal. First, these ten essays offer students of Japanese culture the chance to become aware of a ‘red thread’ of profound continuity in a society that, in little over a century, underwent an extraordinary transformation from feudalism to hypermodernity and from isolationism to fanatical expansionism. In doing so, they make historically intelligible some of the key generative structures of present-day Japanese social and political culture which the non-initiated can find so baffling. Cumulatively, they reveal how facile it is to assume that Japan’s defeat in 1945 marked

viii

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd viii

6/30/2011 12:56:48 PM

Preface

ix

the decisive turning point at which its peculiar imperial and religious tradition was definitively ruptured and the country finally entered ‘our’ modern world. They suggest, instead, that what emerged after the war was yet another peculiarly Japanese variant of modernity, capitalist rather than militarist in its imperialism and national mission, undoubtedly ‘Western’ phenomena but refracted through native precepts about spirituality, individuality, duty, and sacrifice, with a taproot plunged deep into archaic, pre-modern layers of a unique cultural tradition. Another merit of the book is that it casts narrow but revealing beams of light on the nature of the regime which allied itself to the Third Reich and Mussolini’s Italy during their onslaught against Western liberalism and Soviet Communism. It shows how far removed Axis Japan was from the two fascist regimes, both of which pursued in their own unique ways a secular (though extensively sacralized) vision of national renewal in a post-feudal and post-liberal new order inconceivable in interwar Japan. A profound gulf thus separates the cult of Hirohito as divine emperor presiding over Japan’s expansion of the holy fatherland from the charismatic dictatorships of the social parvenus Mussolini and Hitler, who, as personal dictators, had to find an accommodation with existing elites where they could not replace them. Nor is the ethos of Japanese military elites directly comparable to that of the Blackshirts or the SS. If, as Alan Tansman, editor of the recent collection of essays The Culture of Japanese Fascism, suggests, Axis Japan is to be classified as fascist, this is clearly only by way of analogy once its relation to traditional Japanese social and religious structures has been taken into account. For taxonomic purposes it is perhaps more productive to regard it as belonging to a different genus of politics, practically sui generis, than anything spawned by European history, no matter how much ‘cultural transfer’ from Nazism can be detected. It is a situation reminiscent of the way in which the tree known as the ‘Australian Oak’ in fact belongs to the genus Eucalyptus peculiar to Antipodean fauna, and is not a species of Quercus, despite its superficial affinities with it to the untrained eye. It is thus only to be expected that the relationship of the sacralization of politics under Hitler to orthodox Christianity contrasts radically with Showa Japan’s relationship to Shinto, a point made abundantly clear by Walter Skya’s Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism. The contribution of Red Sun, White Lotus to comparative political studies does not end there, for it also adds a new dimension to the study of the ‘religious’ component of Western extremism in general. For too long the extensive ritualization and theatricalization of revolutionary

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd ix

6/30/2011 12:56:52 PM

x

Preface

right-wing and left-wing politics in inter-war Europe, its recurrent myth of rebirth through sacrifice, purification, and ‘creative destruction’, have been treated as descendants and travesties of Christian topoi, summoning up references to millenarianism, salvation, redemption, and apocalypticism (sometimes with allusions to the triadic historical scheme of the twelfth-century monk Joachim of Flore thrown in for good measure). Alternatively, they have been explained by invoking Eric Voegelin’s thesis of modern forms of religious politics as the secularized variant of gnosticism, a highly culture-specific form of Greek mysticism. But, as Red Sun, White Lotus demonstrates so powerfully, there is a universal tendency for politics to become sacralized in the modern age, inevitably drawing on local religious traditions for its formulation and ritualization, but tapping into a primordial human need to locate the mundane sphere of secular power and authority in an eternal symbolic frame which endows it with transcendent legitimacy and value. Certainly Christianity has no monopoly of the discourse of service to a higher morality, sacrifice, or the quest for immortality through heroic deeds, and it would be a welcome development if this book led to equivalent studies of the cross-fertilization of religion and politics in societies shaped by other religious traditions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Islam, and Judaism. These essays throw into relief the peculiarly Japanese forms of religion that have been incorporated into a wide variety of political systems and movements that have emerged all over the world since the late nineteenth century. In doing so, they demonstrate the heuristic value of ‘political religion’ as a truly global genus which can be used to illuminate phenomena which might otherwise be dismissed as forms of ‘reactionary politics,’ ‘anti-modernity,’ ‘state propaganda,’ or ‘totalitarian social control.’ In the process the exclusively Christian connotations of ‘religion’ are significantly expanded to embrace ‘monistic’ cultural traditions which neither postulate a gulf between nature and heaven, between mundane reality and heaven, nor cultivate belief in a supra-temporal God, Redeemer, Messiah, or Prophet as the lynchpin of faith in a sacred world order. In the light of this book the subtle interplay of the profane and the religious within ‘Western’ politics could be profitably re-examined without analyses being excessively distorted by narrow Judeo-Christian assumptions concerning the sacred. Once reinvigorated by being placed on a sounder, more comparative, less Eurocentric basis, the application of the term ‘political religion’ to a phenomenon such as Nazism may not be so lightly dismissed by even the most pre-eminent historians as ‘a currently voguish revamping of

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd x

6/30/2011 12:56:52 PM

Preface xi

an age-old notion, though no less convincing for being repeated so persistently.’1 Hopefully Red Sun, White Lotus will help move scholarship in this direction, ‘converting’ even the most recalcitrant historians to the heuristic value of treating the sacralization of politics and the politicization of religion as possible causal factors in producing some of the constitutive events of the modern era. In exploring examples of the symbiosis in Japan of state religion with state politics, and anti-state politics with New Religion, these essays also offer a rich case study in the nature of modernization itself – a phenomenon no less dominated by Euro- and US-centred perspectives in much Anglophone scholarship than ‘political religion.’ They are particularly effective in highlighting a variety of ways in which Japanese society, which for 215 years had been almost hermetically sealed from contact with the outside world, counteracted the pent-up tide of decentring, disenchanting tendencies of globalizing technology, commerce, and communications unleashed by the nation’s forced opening up in 1854. The rich variety of movements showcased in this book document not eruptions of ‘anti-modernity’ as such, but some of the elaborate mythopoeic strategies evolved by ruling elites and dissidents to maintain the homogeneity of society or create an entirely new society by blending an edited version of traditional spirituality and religious practice with currents of modernization. The subliminal aim was to produce a new ‘nomos’ capable of neutralizing the threat of anomie and nihilism carried by secularization and globalization, a new sacred canopy under which Japan could embark on intensive modernization without losing its unique identity, roots, and soul. This creative act of anti-nihilistic cultural reconstruction (which I have elsewhere referred to as a form of ‘socio-political modernism’2) took place through ingenious, sometimes epic, acts of syncretism, ritualization, and the invention of tradition, in which theoretically incongruous elements were combined into a cohesive ideological myth. It is a process that I have described as ‘mazeway resynthesis’,3 the ‘mazeway’ being the map which offers a way out of the labyrinthine anarchy and chaos of the present. This process allows religions, both traditional and ‘new’ to be blended in unique ways with essentially secular social and political aspirations in ways that preserve a sense of transcendent meaning and purpose to the individuals involved, thus protecting them from absurdity and an existential void, even at the cost of waging a holy war to the death against the present decadent world order to regenerate History or Time itself. In conditions of acute social and ‘nomic’ crisis (anomie), syncretic forms of ‘religious politics’

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd xi

6/30/2011 12:56:52 PM

xii

Preface

can unleash sufficient mass-mobilizing force to engineer a new type of society with its own redemptive mission to renew the world, the Nazi and Bolshevik revolutions being supreme examples of this in the West. Seen from this perspective, there are obvious areas of kinship – beyond chasms of cultural difference – between the way Europe and Japan responded to the crisis of modernity in the interwar period at the height of Axis power. Both saw the emergence of powerful movements of ‘creative destruction’ that changed the course of history in catastrophic ways far removed from the utopias they pursued. I would also suggest that the Islamist backlash against Western modernity that is now obsessing political scientists becomes far more intelligible once considered in the light of the sporadic eruptions of counter-cultural religious politics in post1945 Japan. All in all, Professor Starrs and his team have made a major contribution to understanding of a phenomenon misleadingly known as post-secularity, suggesting that, at least in Japan, secularity never gained sufficient hegemony for there to be a post-secular age. In the West, too, the death of God has been greatly exaggerated. Perhaps religious, like thermodynamic, energy can be neither created nor destroyed: it can only be changed from one form to another.

Notes 1. Ian Kershaw (2004) ‘The Uniqueness of Nazism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39 (2), 250. (Kershaw also claims that the Third Reich was unique in being a ‘modern state system’ based on ideas ... of a ‘mission’ (Sendung) to bring about ‘salvation’ (Rettung) or ‘redemption’ (Erlösung) — all, of course, terms tapping religious or quasi-religious emotions. An assertion implicitly challenged by the Japanese case.) 2. Roger Griffin (2007), Modernism and Fascism. The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave Macmillan). 3. Ibid.

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd xii

6/30/2011 12:56:53 PM

Acknowledgements First and foremost I would like to express my profound thanks to Professor Roger Griffin of Oxford Brookes University, the ‘onlie begetter’ and energetic supporter of this project over its lengthy and sometimes difficult process of inception, construction, deconstruction, reconstruction, incubation and, at long last, birth. At moments when there were some ‘defections’ from the original group of contributors and I thought the book in your hands might never see the light of day, Roger’s enthusiastic support encouraged me to soldier on. I would also like to thank the anonymous publisher’s reader of this manusucript for a number of very helpful suggestions for its revision. Many thanks too to Professor Prasenjit Duara of the National University of Singapore for agreeing to write an Afterword which, in a very illuminating way, situates our findings in a wider Asian and world context.

xiii

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd xiii

6/30/2011 12:56:53 PM

Contributors Klaus Antoni took over the chair for Japanese Cultural Studies at the Institute for Japanese Studies of Tuebingen University in 1998, after professorships at the universities of Hamburg (1987) and Trier (1993). Antoni’s main research interests lie in the area of the spiritual and religious history of Japan. He particularly inquires into the question of relationships between religion (‘Shinto’) and ideology in pre-modern and modern Japan. He is also interested in theories concerning Japanese culture (e.g., cultural stereotypes of Japan) as well as in the historical and present relationship between Japan and Asia. His major publications include Shinto Und Die Konzeption Des Japanischen Nationalwesens Kokutai: Der Religiose Traditionalismus in Neuzeit Und Moderne Japans (Brill, 1998). Erica Baffelli is Lecturer in Asian Religions at the University of Otago (New Zealand). Both her doctoral research (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, 2005) and her postdoctoral research project as fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS, 2005–2007) investigated the relationship between the media and Japanese ‘New Religions.’ She recently co-edited the volume Japanese Religions on the Internet (Routledge, 2010), and she is currently working on a manuscript on Japanese ‘New Religions’ and media in contemporary Japan. John Breen is Professor at Nichibunken, Kyoto, where he edits the journal Japan Review. His recent publications include Girei de miru: tenno no Meiji ishin (Heibonsha, 2011), A New History of Shinto (with Mark Teeuwen) (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), ‘Resurrecting the Sacred Land of Japan: The State of Shinto in the 21st Century’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 37 (2) (2010), and Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (ed.) (Columbia University Press, 2008). He is currently researching the modern history of the Ise shrines. Kevin M. Doak holds the Nippon Foundation Endowed Chair in Japanese Studies at Georgetown University, where he is also Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. He is the author or editor of five books, most recently of Xavier’s Legacies: Catholicism in Modern Japanese Culture (University of British Columbia Press, 2011). His current work explores the Catholic jurist Tanaka Kōtarō’s theory of xiv

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd xiv

6/30/2011 12:56:53 PM

Notes on Contributors xv

Global Law, and he is translating Sono Ayako’s Kiseki. Doak also serves as co-editor of The Journal of Japanese Studies. Prasenjit Duara is Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director of Research, Humanities & Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore and Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Chicago. His research interests include social and cultural history, problems of development, nationalism and imperialism, religion, historical thought and social theory. His books include The Global and Regional in China’s Nation Formation (Routledge, 2009), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (Routledge, 2003), and Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 1995). Roger Griffin is Professor of Modern History at Oxford Brookes University. His major publications include The Nature of Fascism (1991), Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Palgrave, 2007), and A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin (Palgrave, 2008). He is presently editing for the Palgrave Macmillan monograph series, Modernism and ... . He has also edited the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions and, more recently, a new political religion section of the Blackwell-Wiley online journal Religion Compass. Kyu Hyun Kim teaches history at the University of California, Davis. His research interests include early modern and modern Japanese history, colonial modernity in East Asia, modern Korean history, Japanese popular culture, and Japanese and Korean cinema. His publications include The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan (Asia Center Publication Series, Harvard University Press, 2008). Fabio Rambelli teaches Japanese religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Vegetal Buddhas (Italian School of East Asian Studies, 2001), Itaria-teki (Kodansha, 2005), and Buddhist Materiality (Stanford University Press, 2007), and the co-editor of Reconfiguring Cultural Semiotics (Versus, 1999) and Buddhas and Kami in Japan (Routledge, 2003). He is currently working on the place of India in the cultural imagination of pre-modern Japan and on the relations of Buddhism with local cults in Asia. Roy Starrs teaches Japanese and Asian Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He has published widely on Japanese literature,

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd xv

6/30/2011 12:56:53 PM

xvi

Notes on Contributors

art, and culture, including books on Yukio Mishima (Deadly Dialectics), Yasunari Kawabata (Soundings in Time), and Naoya Shiga (An Artless Art). He has also edited three books on Japanese and Asian nationalism and globalization: Asian Nationalism in an Age of Globalization, Nations under Siege, and Japanese Cultural Nationalism. His latest book, Modernism and Japanese Culture, is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. Alan Tansman is Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Berkeley, where he is a professor of modern Japanese literature and culture. He is the author of The Writings of Kōda Aya (Yale, 1993) and The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism (California, 2009), and the editor of The Culture of Japanese Fascism (Duke, 2009). He is now writing a history of Japanese literature for Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series, as well as a study comparing Japanese and Jewish responses to atrocity. He co-edited Studies in Modern Japanese Literature (Michigan, 1997) and co-translated the forthcoming Tokyo as an Idea: Isoda Kōichi’s Essays on Literature and Space (California). In addition to literature, Tansman has published on topics including Japanese cultural criticism, popular culture, film and Area Studies. He has translated Japanese fiction and criticism. Brian Daizen Victoria is Professor of Japanese Studies at Antioch University and Director of the AEA Japan and its Buddhist Traditions Program. In addition to his most recent book, Zen War Stories (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), Brian’s major writings include Zen At War (Weatherhill, 1997 / enlarged second edition by Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); an autobiographical work in Japanese entitled Gaijin de ari, Zen bozu de ari (As a Foreigner, As a Zen Priest), published by San-ichi Shobo in 1971; Zen Master Dogen, co-authored with Prof. Yokoi Yuho of Aichigakuin University (Weatherhill, 1976); and a translation of The Zen Life by Sato Koji (Weatherhill, 1972). Yijiang Zhong is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of Japan. His dissertation, ‘Gods without Names: The Genesis of Modern Shinto in Nineteenth Century Japan’, retraces the history of the largest Shinto shrine in Japan, the Izumo Shrine, and examines how competing forms of divine authorities were constructed and transformed during the Tokugawa and early Meiji periods.

9780230_240735_01_prexvi.indd xvi

6/30/2011 12:56:53 PM

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

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 1

6/30/2011 12:57:26 PM

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

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 2

6/30/2011 12:57:27 PM

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.

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 3

6/30/2011 12:57:27 PM

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

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 4

6/30/2011 12:57:27 PM

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

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 5

6/30/2011 12:57:27 PM

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

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 6

6/30/2011 12:57:27 PM

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,

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 7

6/30/2011 12:57:27 PM

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.

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 8

6/30/2011 12:57:27 PM

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

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 9

6/30/2011 12:57:27 PM

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

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 10

6/30/2011 12:57:27 PM

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

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 11

6/30/2011 12:57:27 PM

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

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 12

6/30/2011 12:57:27 PM

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

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 13

6/30/2011 12:57:28 PM

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

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 14

6/30/2011 12:57:28 PM

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

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 15

6/30/2011 12:57:28 PM

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

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 16

6/30/2011 12:57:28 PM

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

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 17

6/30/2011 12:57:28 PM

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

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 18

6/30/2011 12:57:28 PM

Introduction 19

resort to traditional Zen sokuhi logic and say: the correct answer to the question, ‘Does satori have a moral value’, is both yes and no, and neither yes nor no. No doubt the issue will be debated both within and without the Zen world for many years to come; because, also, the fact is that Zen Buddhism cannot simply be dismissed as if it were just another ‘evil religious cult’. First of all, it has inspired some of the greatest creative achievements of East Asian culture; second, the spiritual or psychological value of meditation practices such as those central to Zen is widely recognized now even in the West – and, indeed, many who have known Zen masters (again, the present writer included) will testify that they can be extraordinarily impressive people, deeply grounded in themselves as few people are. But, of course, this does not mean that they are omniscient or right about everything; in worldly terms, they may actually be quite naïve, wrong-headed, even ignorant. So what is enlightenment?

Critical Buddhism Of course, the dubious or problematical relation of Japanese Buddhists with the political establishment is by no means confined to the Zen sects. It must be said that, throughout most of their history, Japanese Buddhists in general have seen little problem in the close relation of their religion to state power, or to the nationalist ideologies and even militarism associated with state power. The tradition of ‘nationalist Buddhism’ is as old, at least, as the middle ages, when the prophet Nichiren (1222–1282) claimed that Japanese Buddhism was superior to all others, and would protect the nation from foreign invasion. The general Buddhist ideological support of the militarist state in the 1930s and 1940s, and the excesses of ‘Imperial Way Buddhism’, were only the latest episodes in a long history of such collaborations with the regime in power. Indeed, as already mentioned, the origins of this uncomfortably close relation between church and state in Japan can be traced right back to the ‘father of Japanese Buddhism’, Prince Shōtoku. The third injunction of the Prince’s Constitution of 604 calls for absolute obedience to imperial commands, equating the emperor with ‘heaven’ and consequently claiming for him a divine right to rule. Thus, a good Buddhist must also be a good imperial subject. As Brian Victoria also points out, ‘this emphasis on the supremacy of the ruler ... set the stage for the historical subservience of Buddhism to the Japanese state’.56 In the present volume, however, Victoria – like Rambelli – gives us a countervailing, albeit rare, instance of courageous Buddhist resistance to the

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 19

6/30/2011 12:57:28 PM

20

Roy Starrs

state during the period of modern Japanese history when such resistance was most dangerous: the 1930s, when fascism and militarism were on the rise. More recently some strong dissenting voices have been heard from certain Japanese Buddhist intellectuals – in particular, from the leftleaning scholars who presently advocate a so-called ‘critical Buddhism’. The most influential figures in this movement are Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shirō, who consciously oppose the mainstream of modern Japanese Buddhist scholarship, much of which has been right-wing nationalist – the above-mentioned ‘Kyoto school’ being the leading example. Critical Buddhism, according to Hakamaya, ‘discusses how some ideas traditionally thought to be at the core of Mahayana Buddhism in fact eviscerate Buddhism’.57 Among these ‘anti-Buddhist’ ideas, in his view, is none other than that old staple of Japanese cultural discourse, reputably first enunciated by Prince Shōtoku in his Constitution: the idea of the social value of wa or ‘harmony,’ which the great scholar of Asian thought, Nakamura Hajime, called the ‘spirit that made possible the emergence of Japan as a unified cultural state’.58 Of course, every age has tended to interpret this wa ideal according to its own ideological predilections, but almost always with a positive connotation within the context of its particular value-system.59 Now, however innocent the simple idea of ‘harmony’ might seem, Hakamaya severely indicts it as ‘anti-Buddhist and nothing more than political ideology pure and simple’.60 As Stewart McFarlane says, ‘[Hakamaya] is particularly critical of Prince Shōtoku’s Constitution. ... He sees Shōtoku’s embracing of the value of harmony and Ekayana Buddhism, as a strategy for maintaining bureaucratic control and conformity’.61 Hakamaya is also severely critical of those present-day Japanese scholars who try to make use of ‘Prince Shōtoku’s Buddhism’ for nihonjinronstyle assertions of Japanese uniqueness and superiority.62 As a typical example, he points to Umehara Takeshi’s claim that Prince Shōtoku’s Ekayana ‘philosophy of equality and unity’, which extends equality even to ‘mountains, rivers, grasses, and trees’ is ‘unique to Japanese Buddhism’ and ‘is truly important, for it can stave off the destruction of nature resulting from the anthropocentric ideas so strong in European thought’. Thus, Umehara claims further: ‘Ours is a doctrine essential to the future of humanity’.63 Hakamaya’s response to this is quite caustic: If we follow his line of argument, we may well end up in the deluded notion that the Japanese alone, thanks to the [Ekayana Buddhist]

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 20

6/30/2011 12:57:28 PM

Introduction 21

doctrine of original enlightenment, have enjoyed a history of peace and equality, free of war and slaughter. This kind of blithely authoritative attitude, completely indifferent to the facts of the matter, combined with a loose logic that mixes indigenous religiosity with Ekayana Buddhism ... are all typical of the abuse perpetrated by a group of influential intellectuals who conceive of everything in terms of the doctrine of original enlightenment.64

Questioning the alliance of politics and religion The most deadly mix of religion and politics in recent Japanese history has come not from traditional Shinto or Buddhism but from one of the multitude of ‘new religions’ that have sprung up in the post-war era, the notorious ‘doomsday cult’ that called itself ‘Aum Shinrikyō’ (Om Religion of Truth). Finding that it was unable to acquire sufficient political power by ‘legitimate’ democratic means, the group became increasingly hermetic, paranoid, and violent until finally, on March 20, 1995, it staged one of the most horrific terrorist attacks of recent times, releasing lethal quantities of sarin gas simultaneously on five trains of the Tokyo subway system, killing twelve commuters and injuring many hundreds more.65 As might be expected, this shocking incident has provoked intense debate as to its ultimate ‘meaning’ for contemporary Japan. Was it a terrible ‘one-off’ or an augury of things to come? Was it a symptom of a widespread malaise among a well-educated younger generation disenchanted with modern-day Japan’s materialistic ‘economic animal’ lifestyle? (Some of the Aum members were products of the country’s most elite universities.) What would be its long-term impact on the Japanese people’s (already rather lukewarm) attitude to religion? In my own contribution to the present volume, I draw some analogies between the ‘Aum incident’ of 1995 and an earlier and equally infamous event, the ‘Mishima incident’ of 1970 (in which the major post-war writer, Mishima Yukio, launched a terrorist attack of sorts against the Japanese military and ended up committing seppuku), and consider whether the different character of these two incidents of latetwentieth-century religio-political violence – and the different characters of their principal perpetrators, Mishima and Asahara – tell us something about the changes a ‘postmodern’, ‘globalized’ Japan has undergone in the intervening quarter century, and more specifically about the changing nature of the relation between politics and religion in contemporary Japan.

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 21

6/30/2011 12:57:28 PM

22

Roy Starrs

As Kevin Doak points out herein, the Aum incident had serious religious – or anti-religious – repercussions: ‘The horrific sarin gas attacks in Tokyo in 1995 by the new religious cult Aum Shinrikyō had the effect of enhancing the allure of the secularization thesis among broad segments of Japanese society who inferred from that tragedy that religion only leads to intolerance and indiscriminate killing’. Certainly, at the very least, the Aum incident induced many in Japan to take a colder and harder look at the political activities of other religious groups, especially the so-called ‘new religions’. Among these, the most politically active and successful by far over the past few decades has been the Sōka Gakkai (Value-Creation Society), which began as an independent lay organization of the Buddhist Nichiren sect. In 1964, the Sōka Gakkai actually founded its own political party, the Kōmeitō (Clean Government Party) – based, as Erica Baffelli explains in her chapter here, on Nichiren’s principle of ‘ōbutsu myōgō (the fusion of Buddhism and politics)’, which was inspired by the medieval Buddhist leader’s belief that ‘the salvation of the nation depends on its conversion to a pure form of Buddhism’. The political goals of the modern Buddhist party are no less lofty – or ambitious. As Baffelli also points out, the party’s founder, Ikeda Daisaku, proposed ‘a politicised sacrality, affirming that religion, Sōka Gakkai’s interpretation of Nichiren Buddhism in this case, would serve as the basis of politics and that for Japan’s attainment of “true democracy” a conversion to the “True Buddhism” is necessary’. His party was disbanded in 1994 but then resurrected in 1998 as the ‘New Kōmeitō’ and remains a major player in Japanese politics – it is the third largest party, and its support has recently kept the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in power. After the Aum incident most of the other major political parties advocated a proposal to revise the Religious Corporations Law, with its absolute guarantees of religious freedom (and tax reductions), in order to ‘give the authorities greater leeway in monitoring potentially dangerous religious organizations’.66 The Sōka Gakkai and other religious groups strongly opposed any such revision, and Einosuke Akiya, the Sōka Gakkai President, vigorously defended the ‘right of religious organizations to be actively involved in the political process’.67 His opponents, however, pointed out that the tax reductions granted to religious organizations amounted to a public subsidy for their political activities.68 Thus, the question of the proper relation between religion and politics continues to be a thorny and divisive issue even in twentyfirst-century Japan.

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 22

6/30/2011 12:57:28 PM

Introduction 23

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

Japan Times Online (2000). Ibid. Antoni (2002), 274. Ibid. McCormack (2002), 156. Shirane (2000), p. 20. The important and highly charged term kokutai is translated both as ‘national essence’ and ‘national polity’ by the authors herein. Both translations are feasible, depending upon whether one wishes to emphasize the word’s general ‘religious/metaphysical’ meaning (similar to ‘national soul’) or its more specific political implications (the emperor system, etc.). Another option, of course, also employed herein, is to leave the word untranslated, in consideration of its powerful cultural, historical and emotional specificity. Seaton (2008), 164. Seraphim (2006), 245. Seaton (2008), 172. Ibid. Ibid., 172–3. Hardacre (1989), 3. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8. Ibid. Ibid. Doak (2008), 52. For an excellent description of this ancient and mysterious rite, see Ellwood (2008: 23–25). Breen (2008), 3. Ibid., 3–4. Ibid., 4. Bock (1990), 37. Seizelet (1991), 41. Skya (2002), 247. Many authors in the past have argued against the notion of a ‘Japanese fascism’, urging the particularity or uniqueness of Japanese history and political culture. But a number of recent in-depth studies of the issue (e.g., Heisig and Maraldo 1995; Reynolds 2004; Tansman 2009) have shown that the totalitarian ultranationalism of 1930s and 1940s Japan was different enough from earlier forms of Japanese nationalism, and close enough to the totalitarian ultranationalism of its allies, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy – including in its political use of religion and myth – to be properly regarded as part of the ‘international fascist movement’ that was somehow a product of the early twentieth century Zeitgeist. Ibid., 247. Gentile (2003), 61–62 and Gentile (1996), 38. Griffin (2007), 157. Hitler is reported to have asked: ‘Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good?’ (Quoted in Victoria 2003: viii, from Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich).

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 23

6/30/2011 12:57:28 PM

24

Roy Starrs

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Kitagawa (1990), 26. Ibid., 34. In the last sentence, Kitagawa is quoting Nakamura (1964), 455. For a discussion of the issue in a larger Asian context, see Borchert (2007). See Grapard (1999), 528–31. See the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, special issue on Kuroda Toshio, Teeuwen and Scheid (2002). Dobbins (1996), 217. Collcutt (1981) 103. Ibid. Ibid., 99. See Tamamuro (2001). Heisig and Maraldo (1995), vii. Quoted in Ives (1995) 34. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 38. Sharf (1995), 48. Kirita (1995), 61. Maraldo (1995), 351–6. Victoria (2003), 66–91. Ibid., 83. Ibid. See, for instance, Downing (2001). Hirata (1995). Ives (1995). But even in the West there were some significant exceptions. American Zen teacher Bernie Glassman, for instance, argues that, since Yasutani Rōshi was an anti-Semite and a rabid Japanese ethnic nationalist, then obviously such prejudices are, in fact, compatible with enlightenment (see Victoria (2006), XI). Suzuki (1970), 63. See Victoria (2006), 148–9. Ibid., 212. Hakamaya (1997), 60. Nakamura (1964) 387. See Itō (1998),. Hakamaya (1997), 60. The implications of the term ‘Ekayana’ are both sectarian, implying that ‘Mahayana Buddhism’ is the ‘one true vehicle’ superior to all earlier forms of Buddhism, and philosophic, implying that in this ‘one, final version of Buddhism,’ as Bielefeldt writes, ‘all beings were metaphysically grounded in the cosmic body of the Buddha. ... ’ McFarlane (n.d.) 12. ‘Nihonjinron’ (literally, ‘theories or theoretical writings about the Japanese’) are popular essayistic works that purport to reveal the secrets of Japanese psychology or national character and are notorious for ill-founded essentialist and nationalistic claims about the superiority and absolute uniqueness of a monolithically conceived ‘Japanese culture’. Quoted in Hakamaya (1997), 339–40. Ibid., 340.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63. 64.

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 24

6/30/2011 12:57:29 PM

Introduction 25 65. For an efficient and dramatic journalistic account of the incident, see Brackett (1996), which also provides some analysis of the group’s background and ideology. 66. Mullins (2001), 77. 67. Ibid., 85. 68. Ibid., 86.

Works cited Antoni, Klaus (2002) ‘Shintō and kokutai: Religious Ideology in the Japanese Context’, in Klaus Antoni, Hiroshi Kubota, Johann Nawrocki and Michael Wachutka (eds.), Religion and National Identity in the Japanese Context (Munster, Germany: Lit Verlag), 263–87. Bielefeldt, Carl (1990) ‘The One Vehicle and the Three Jewels: On Japanese Sectarianism and Some Ecumenical Alternatives’, Buddhist-Christian Studies, 10, 5–16. Bock, Felicia G (1990) ‘The Great Feast of the Enthronement’, Monumenta Nipponica, 45 (1) (Spring), 27–38. Borchert, Thomas (2007) ‘Buddhism, Politics, and Nationalism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries’, Religion Compass, 1, (5), 529–46. Brackett, DW (1996) Holy Terror: Armageddon in Tokyo (New York: Weatherhill). Breen, John, (ed.) (2008) Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (New York: Columbia University Press). Collcutt, Martin (1981) Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Doak, K (2008) ‘A Religious Perspective on the Yasukuni Shrine Controversy’, in J Breen (ed.), Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (New York: Columbia University Press), 47–69. Dobbins, James C (1996) ‘Kuroda Toshio and His Scholarship’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 23 (3–4), 217. Downing, Michael (2001) Shoes outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint). Ellwood, Robert (2008) Introducing Japanese Religion (New York: Routledge). Gentile, Emilio (1996) The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). ——, (2003) The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (New York: Praeger). Grapard, Allan G (1999) ‘Religious Practices’, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 2, Heian Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 517–75. Griffin, Roger (2007) Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Hakamaya, Noriaki (1997) ‘Critical Philosophy versus Topical Philosophy’, in Jamie Hubbard and Paul L Swanson (eds.), Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press), 56–80. Hardacre, Helen (1989) Shintô and the State, 1868–1988 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 25

6/30/2011 12:57:29 PM

26

Roy Starrs

Heisig James W and Maraldo, John C (eds.) (1995) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press). Hirata, Seikō (1995) ‘Zen Buddhist Attitudes to War’, in James W Heisig and John C Maraldo (eds.), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press), 3–15. Itō, Kimio (1998) ‘The Invention of Wa and the Transformation of the Image of Prince Shōtoku in Modern Japan’, in Stephen Vlastos (ed.), Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press), 37–47. Ives, Christopher (1995) ‘Ethical Pitfalls in Imperial Zen and Nishida Philosophy: Ichikawa Hakugen’s Critique’, in James W Heisig and John C Maraldo (eds.), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), 16–39. Japan Times Online (2000) ‘Mori’s “divine nation” remark spurs outrage’, The Japan Times Online, 17 May 2000. Accessed April 29, 2011. http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20000517a1.html Kapleau, Philip (1965) The Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice, and Enlightenment (New York: Harper and Row). Kirita, Kiyohide (1995) ‘DT Suzuki on Society and the State’, in James W Heisig and John C Maraldo (eds.), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), 52–74. Kitagawa, Joseph M (1990) Religion in Japanese History (New York: Columbia University Press). Maraldo, John C (1995) ‘Questioning Nationalism Now and Then: A Critical Approach to Zen and the Kyoto School’, in James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (eds.), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), 52–74. McCormack, G (2002) ‘New Tunes for an Old Song: Nationalism and Identity in Post-Cold War Japan’, in R. Starrs (ed.), Nations under Siege: Globalization and Nationalism in Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 137–67. McFarlane, Stewart (n.d.) ‘Nature and Buddha-nature: The Ecological Dimensions of East Asian Buddhism Critically Considered.’ Available from the Digital International Buddhism Organization website: http://kr.buddhism.org/zen/koan/stewart_mcfarlane.htm. Mullins, Mark R (2001) ‘The Legal and Political Fallout of the Aum Affair’, in Robert J Kisala and Mark R Mullins (eds.), Religion and Social Crisis in Japan: Understanding Japanese Society through the Aum Affair (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan), 71–86. Nakamura, Hajime (1964) Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India, China, Tibet, Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press). Reynolds, E Bruce, (ed.) (2004) Japan in the Fascist Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Seaton, P (2008) ‘Pledge Fulfilled: Prime Minister Koizumi, Yasukuni and the Japanese Media’, in J Breen (ed.), Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (New York: Columbia University Press), 163–88. Seizelet, Eric (1991) ‘La démocratie Japonaise à l’heure de la transition monarchique’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 31, 41–50.

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 26

6/30/2011 12:57:29 PM

Introduction 27 Seraphim, Franziska (2006) War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center). Sharf, Robert H (1995) ‘Whose Zen? Zen Nationalism Revisited’, in James W Heisig and John C Maraldo (eds.), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), 16–39. Shirane, Haruo (2000) ‘Introduction’, in Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki (eds.), Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Skya, Walter (2002) ‘The Emperor, Shintō Ultranationalism and Mass Mobilization’, in Klaus Antoni, Hiroshi Kubota, Johann Nawrocki and Michael Wachutka (eds.), Religion and National Identity in the Japanese Context (Munster, Germany: Lit Verlag), 235–48. ——, (2009) Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Suzuki, Daisetz T (1970) Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Tamamuro, Fumio (2001) ‘Local Society and the Temple-Parishioner Relationship within the Bakufu’s Governance Structure’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 28 (3–4), 261–92. Tansman, Alan (2009) The Culture of Japanese Fascism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Teeuwen, Mark and Scheid, Bernhard (2002) ‘Tracing Shinto in the History of Kami Worship’ [Special Issue], Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 29 (3–4). Victoria, Brian Daizen (2003) Zen War Stories (London, UK: RoutledgeCurzon). ——, 2006, Zen at War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield).

9780230_240735_02_int.indd 27

6/30/2011 12:57:29 PM

1 Ritual, Purity, and Power: Rethinking Shinto in Restoration Japan Yijiang Zhong

Ever since the Japanese religious historian Murakami Shigeyoshi (1928–1991) published his groundbreaking Kokka Shintō (State Shinto) in 1970, the work has remained the basic point of reference for post-war studies on modern Shinto.1 Murakami argues that modern Shinto from 1868 to 1945 was a state religion created by the authoritarian ‘emperor system state’ (tennōsei kokka) to indoctrinate the Japanese people for imperialist expansion and Fascism.2 While his analysis has since been challenged by scholars of different orientations, almost all the major works have to frame their arguments with the basic categories and concerns articulated first by Murakami.3 Temporally, State Shinto is defined in this schema as specifically a post-Meiji Restoration (1868) phenomenon. The lack of attention to pre-Restoration history may have been reinforced by the methodological assumption that State Shinto is fundamentally an ‘invented tradition’ by the modern Japanese state for the purpose of building a centralized imperial nation-state.4 In that sense, State Shinto as an interpretive paradigm is concerned primarily with the state rather than with Shinto, whatever the term means. As a political invention, ‘Shinto,’ then, is part of the modern state whose life starts in 1868. In a recent study, the Japanese scholar of religious studies Shimazono Susumu questions the assumption of Shinto as a modern phenomenon and looks at State Shinto within a longer temporality. He traces the ‘intellectual genealogy’ of State Shinto back to the Confucian scholar Aizawa Seishisai of the Mito domain, who, in response to the sense of crisis heightened by increasing presence of Western ships and the possibility of Christian conversion, composed in 1825 an essay called Shinron, or ‘New Thesis,’ in which he articulated a political theory of 28

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 28

6/30/2011 12:58:22 PM

Ritual, Purity, and Power 29

imperial authority that came to be summed up with the epithet of the Unity of Ritual, Governance, and Doctrine (saiseikyō itchi).5 The theory was then rearticulated by the Kokugaku6 theorist Ōkuni Takamasa of the Tsuwano domain, to be eventually implemented by the Meiji government. Shimazono points to the abiding concern of this genealogy with conceptions of a centralized and ritualized imperial political order and argues that the political philosophy embodied in the slogan of the Unity of Ritual, Governance, and Doctrine (or Indoctrination) served as a blueprint for the Meiji construction of State Shinto.7 Tracing the ‘intellectual genealogy’ of State Shinto back to late Tokugawa discursive production avoids attributing to the modern state complete agency in the genesis of modern Shinto. On the other hand, while the ideas of the emperor, ritual, and doctrine did occupy central importance in the Mito and Kokugaku discourses, identifying these notions with a continuous prehistory of State Shinto risks homogenizing and naturalizing these terms, the meanings of which were actually in constant flux. As much as ‘Shinto,’ such terms as ‘ritual,’ ‘doctrine,’ and ‘governance’ were the very signifiers which Aizawa, the Nativists and the Meiji leadership tried hard to stabilize, precisely because these terms refused to cohere into a docile theory of the imperial authority. Denaturalizing the link between Shinto and ritual, doctrine, and political authority necessitates critical attention to the ways in which the very term ‘Shinto’ was constructed, deployed, and contested in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji period. Once the history of ‘Shinto’ is reconceived as a process of construction and contestation, it becomes clear that ‘Shinto’ cannot be thought about as merely an ideological construct by and for the modern state. It is certainly true that the new Meiji state marked its genesis by consolidating Shinto shrines into a national hierarchy, and mobilized it for ideological indoctrination through 1945. At the same time, the establishment of the new Meiji political order was accompanied by explicit anti-Buddhist policies deemed necessary in order to restore a reputedly pure Shinto, that is, cleansed of Buddhist elements; legalization of a funeral ritual claimed as Shinto (shinsōsai); creation of public cemeteries designated for Japanese choosing to die a ‘Shinto’ death; along with the establishment of Yasukuni Shrine (that is, a Shinto shrine) to enshrine the spirits of dead soldiers. This latter set of policies saw different extents of actual implementation, but the very fact that these were government policies and yet related to the theme of death raises the question as to why they needed to be claimed specifically as ‘Shinto’ and deemed necessary in modern nation-state building (and why and how some of these policies turned out to be short-lived).

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 29

6/30/2011 12:58:22 PM

30 Yijiang Zhong

The presence of many claims made in reference to Shinto points to an agency possessed by that very term in Meiji Japan, and the relevance of this agency to the project of State Shinto is not immediately clear. This raises questions as to how this agency is to be understood, where it was from and how it changed in Meiji Japan. In this chapter I follow Shimazono in extending examination of Shinto to late Tokugawa decades, but trace the discourse of Shinto outside what he identifies as the ‘intellectual genealogy’ of State Shinto. Specifically, I use the metaphor of purity to read some of the ways in which certain concerns were enunciated and modes of action and reaction were formulated with the consciously deployed idiom of Shinto in the 1850s and 1860s. Then I look at how these ‘Shinto’ formulations in the immediate post-Restoration period both offered models for the new state to deal with its pressing problems of nation-building, especially the threatening scenario of conversion of the populace to Christianity, and generated tensions that needed to be regulated for the same purpose of nation-state building. In other words, I identify Shinto as an active discourse that contributed to early Meiji state-building yet at the same time needed to be domesticated in the creation of what was known later as State Shinto. As a mode of discursive articulation, purity both conditioned the fulfillment of Shinto as distinct from the ‘defiled’ forms of knowledge and culture – Buddhism, unorthodox popular beliefs, and Christianity – and structured the themes making up the discourse of Shinto. More specifically, I identify a widely circulating ‘Shinto’ discourse that articulated a ritual order of purification grounded on an intimate kinship with the indigenous gods (kami), a relationship accentuated with a Shinto way of death realized via the Shinto funeral ritual that connected humans to the kami. The enactment of such a ritual-mediated relationship was thought to result in purification of individual and community, neutralizing the danger of defilement posed first by Buddhism and then by the Western nations demanding trade, treaty, and freedom to preach Christianity. The ritual logic of purity and power was articulated with a cluster of interrelated themes which the chapter examines in detail: consolidation of local tutelary shrines troubled by Buddhist and miscellaneous vulgar gods into a national ritual system, reviving the long defunct imperial ritual institution, the Ministry of Divinity (Jingikan), and implementing a Shinto funeral ritual. Rituals enacted at the Ministry of Divinity and at local shrines across the land functioned to purify and thereby enable a properly lived, committed individual life, while the funerary rite constituted the critical step of purification by transforming departed human

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 30

6/30/2011 12:58:22 PM

Ritual, Purity, and Power 31

spirits to ancestral kami rather than Buddhist saints. The process of purification, then, related the individual, both in this and in the next life, to family and the imagined national community. 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 functions to precipitate the creation of an ethnic, politicized nation. However, if ‘Shinto’ in early Meiji provided a metaphor for imagining the new nation-state, the term soon demonstrated it had an agency in need of regulation and suppression. Was ‘Shinto’ a religion? Did it possess a creed if it could be used for popular indoctrination? How to define ‘Shinto’ doctrines and rituals, especially the funeral ritual, in relation to the imperial polity of the Meiji state? These issues directly impinged upon the very nature of the imperial nation-state under construction. In this context the construction of State Shinto is better viewed as coming to terms with the limited capability of the state in domesticating the signifiers of Shinto: ritual (saishi), doctrine (kyō), and indeed political governance (sei). This chapter, then, maps the articulations of the ritual logic of purity in the 1850s and 1860s, alternative to but intersecting with the Mito– Ōkuni–Meiji state genealogy, and traces the playing out of some of the themes that simultaneously contributed to and undermined the ideological formation of State Shinto. The transformation of the ‘Shinto’ logic of purity from late Tokugawa to early Meiji lends a perspective to understanding the intrinsic ambivalence and tension in modern ideological formation as the limited agency of the state was exposed vis-à-vis the logic of ‘Shinto,’ which refuses to be domesticated into state-sanctioned homogeneity.8 Mapping the ritual logic of purity in terms of discourse – that is, devoid of an internal coherence – rather than as the thought of a historical figure or a structured system of ideas allows me to trace the above-mentioned constitutive themes by locating various forms of articulations, be they tracts written by Shinto priests, a campaign to

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 31

6/30/2011 12:58:22 PM

32 Yijiang Zhong

revive the state ritual institution Jingikan, or the movement to institute a Shinto funeral. The relevance of these various forms of articulation to the ritual logic of purity, rather than their inherent coherence or direct causal influence on later events, warrants their presence in this chapter. Along this line of thinking, I start by examining the writings of a prominent Kokugaku scholar cum Shinto priest, Mutobe Yoshika (1798–1864), which help reveal the ways in which ‘Shinto’ was consciously deployed to reiterate anxieties and concerns shared by many of his contemporaries, especially shrine priests.

Imagining a purified Shinto nation Nothing is more serious than present-day priests’ ignorance of their missions and duties. Not only do they betray the vital responsibility of ritual and praying [ ... ], they go to extreme in their irreverence for our gods and lack of filial devotion to our ancestors. [ ... ] I write down the following words in an effort to restore the true meaning formed in the ancient past and clarify what makes up the priest’s job, from the miscellaneous duties to the significance of rituals, offerings, and funeral.9 These lines are quoted from Junkō shinji den, a text of admonition and explication authored by Mutobe Yoshika. Serving at the Muko Shrine near the imperial court of Kyoto, Mutobe inherited the Kokugaku teachings of Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane and lectured in his private academy Shinshusha in Kyoto. The Mutobe family enjoyed the prestige of lecturing the emperor at the imperial court; Mutobe Yoshika gave private lessons on classic texts to emperor Komei (r. 1846–1866) and had close associations with courtiers who later played leading roles during the Meiji Restoration.10 The above passage reveals a strong sense of anxiety about how to resurrect what Mutobe called a ‘pure’ (junsui no) Ancient Way (kodō) of the Gods (i.e., a pure Shinto practiced in the ancient past).11 Mutobe lamented that priests had alienated themselves from the true Shinto teaching by indulging in Confucian classics and Shinto rituals had been ‘adulterated (konkō) with Buddhist teachings (buppō).’12 Without proper understanding of priests’ duties, shrines across the country had become defiled with unorthodox elements and fallen into ineptitude. To correct this grave situation, Mutobe advised instituting a purification plan of shrines to reactivate the beliefs and rituals centering on shrines that possessed appropriate histories, that is, conforming to the vision of the Ancient Way prescribed by his Kokugaku teachers.

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 32

6/30/2011 12:58:22 PM

Ritual, Purity, and Power 33

Mutobe’s consolidated or purified ritual framework was spelled out most explicitly in a text entitled Ubusuna kodenshō (1857), for which he later wrote extensive commentaries. In both the main and commentary texts he explicated on his pivotal concept, the local tutelary ubusuna god. Building upon the popular belief in ujigami (literally, clan gods) which in the Tokugawa period carried the conflated identities of communal protector and clan deity, Mutobe essentially rearticulated the ubusuna gods by prescribing a coincidence between a local community and a tutelary ubusuna god for that community. The ubusuna god shouldered the task of protecting the local community from Buddhist gods, which had infiltrated into many Shinto shrines and caused misfortunes to local people.13 Besides offering protection for their local human lives, the ubusuna god held the critical responsibility of bringing departed human spirits (tama) to the Izumo Shrine, where Ōkuninushi, the kami in command of the invisible world of gods and ancestors, meted out judgments and elevated these human spirits to ancestral gods. These spirits were then to be escorted by their tutelary gods back to their original locality and settle in tombs from where they would perform the ancestral duty of offering protection for their offspring and relatives.14 However, since Buddhism’s infiltration into the ‘imperial land,’ ‘its theory of paradise and hell deceived everybody and by now things have reached disastrous extremity where our afterlife has become completely trusted to Buddhists.’15 Against the imagery of defilement engendered by Buddhist teaching, Mutobe’s plan, then, prescribed a ‘nationalized’ system of shrines in which a liturgical structure administered by priests would bring every individual in the archipelago into relationships with the kami and afterlife on the one hand and with local community, the imperial court, and the nation on the other. With the Ubusuna gods Mutobe reconfigured the Japanese archipelago into a homogeneously organized Shinto nation.16 The purifying roles of the ubusuna gods would not be possible without the liturgical roles of priests attending local tutelary shrines. Other than the duties of maintaining the shrines, the nationally shared ritual events hosted at the shrines by priests were critical means of cultivating the values of kindness (jinji) for fellow humans and sincerity (seichū) toward the kami in every member of the community, thereby reproducing purified individuals, communal orders, and indeed an authentic nation.17 The most important ritual, Mutobe argued, was none other than the Great Purification Ritual (Ōharae), performed twice a year in the sixth and twelfth months, on which occasion defiled and evil deeds and thoughts were cleansed by the power of Kindness and

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 33

6/30/2011 12:58:22 PM

34 Yijiang Zhong

Sincerity transmitted through the enunciation of the Heavenly Prayer (amatsu norito) bequeathed by gods at a time immemorial.18 The Great Purification Ritual had been in the liturgical repository of the imperial court from the Nara period (710–784), officiated by the Jingikan, or the Ministry of Divinity, and participated in by all major court officials, to evoke the power of the gods to cleanse evils and secure the imperial rule.19 By prescribing the Great Purification Ritual to the local ubusuna shrines, Mutobe in effect established a ritual logic that connected the imperial court with the local communities the tutelary shrines stood for. Mutobe made it clear that, for both the Ministry of Divinity and the shrines across the land, the defining ritual was precisely the Great Purification Ritual.20 Ritualized purification administered by priests across the land, then, linked individual Japanese, and their departed spirits in afterlife, to kami, to the imperial court, and to the archipelago as a Shinto nation. The anxiety about being defiled by Buddhist and popular gods and the imperative for purification provided the logic for articulating these connections. The imperative for purification gained a new dimension when Commodore Perry of the US Navy lined up his black ship fleet on display in front of Edo and demanded the opening of the country in June 1853. In a short tract entitled ‘A Word on the Way’ (Michi no hitogoto) a month after Perry’s visit, Mutobe responded by connecting the logic of purity with its conversion to power. ‘The foreign barbarians may come in warships to disturb our divine country again. As long as we the brave and wise people of the Imperial Land [Japan] focus minds (shii o korashinaba), [ ... ] things will be as easy as pointing to your palm (tanagokoro o sasu).’21 By focused minds, Mutobe was referring to a state of unity between learning and practice, in which the cultivation of Sincerity and Kindness would transform a purified mind into strength of conviction. This would lead to the unity of the nation and solidification of the national polity (kokutai), which would then be capable of overcoming the foreign barbarians. The latter were actually not even worthy of worry as their guns could only fire filthy and evil (akue fujō no) powder, in no way comparable to the pure powder made from water and fire generated by the august kami in Japan.22

Reviving the ministry of divinity (Jingikan) Mutobe’s purification plan required the pivotal liturgical function of the Ministry of Divinity (Jingikan) of the imperial court. However, the Ministry in the late Tokugawa period was in no position to perform

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 34

6/30/2011 12:58:22 PM

Ritual, Purity, and Power 35

such a role. Originally the Jingikan, or Ministry of Divinity, together with the Ministry of State (Daijōkan), made up the imperial ritsuryō government of the Nara and Heian periods (710–1185). Its main duties were ritual performance as part of political administration. The position of the Jingikan in the ritsuryō state was never as significant as its ministry title suggests, and the ranks of its officials were much lower than those of the Daijōkan officials. The imperial court lost its power after samurai warriors gained political supremacy from the twelfth century on, and by the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), when the imperial court survived only in name, the Jingikan was able to avoid extinction only by being maintained in simplified form at the private house of the Yoshida family, which traditionally held a major liturgical post in the Ministry.23 Mutobe, however, like his Kokugaku teachers and fellow priests committed to the revival of the Ancient Way, read the Jingikan as embodying a pure, ancient (that is, pre-Buddhist and pre-Confucian) ritual practice, the dilapidation of which he attributed not to the samurai’s rise to military and political power but to the influx of Confucian institutions and the inundation of society by Buddhist and vulgar popular gods.24 This imaginary embodiment was expressed with the phrase of the Unity of Rites and Governance, or saisei itchi. A phrase in wide circulation in the final decades of the Tokugawa period, it denoted a specific mode in which the authority of the imperial court was pronounced with the ritual logic of purity. Essentially, imperial authority was enacted in the form of ritual performance: to rule was to purify defilement and evil with rituals which communicated divine intervention in human affairs. To effect the ritualized scheme of things and realize the purified Shinto nation necessitated the revival of the Ministry of Divinity. Mutobe’s vision of the Jingikan was shared by many of his contemporary Kokugaku-sha and Shinto priests. Their shared sense of crisis and exigency, especially after Commodore Perry’s visit, prompted them to petition the imperial court and domain authorities for revival of the idealized ritual institution so that purity derived from ritual performance could be converted to power against the threat posed by the ‘Western barbarians.’ One of the earliest petitions for reviving the Jingikan was submitted by Takahashi Kiyoomi, a priest of a village shrine in Bungo domain (Ōita Prefecture), who in 1847 went all the way to Kyoto to deliver his letter to the court. Following Takahashi, the courtier Tonda Oribe argued in his 1857 letter of opinion (ikensho) that in order to prevent the ‘evil teaching of Western barbarians [Christianity]’ the Jingikan had to be reestablished to purify customs and society. Furukawa Mitsura

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 35

6/30/2011 12:58:22 PM

36

Yijiang Zhong

(1810–1880), a disciple of Hirata Atsutane and the head priest of the Edo branch of the Shirakawa house,25 lamented in his 1862 petition that people in the imperial land had all gone for the Buddhist teaching and forgotten the reverence for the kami. As a result, shrines across the country were becoming increasingly desolate. In face of the encroaching Western barbarians, the most emergent project was to revive the Jingikan under the administration of the Shirakawa house so as to reestablish the Shinto foundation of the imperial rule, the Unity of Ritual and Governance.26 Once this fundamental principle was reestablished, Furukawa further advised, Buddhist funerals, including those for imperial family members, must be terminated and the Shinto funeral ritual, as practiced in the ancient unadulterated times, revived.27 Shirakawa Tadanori, the head of the Shirakawa house, while endorsing Furukawa’s argument, drafted his own petition and presented it to the court along with that of Furukawa.28 Priests Sawatari Hiromori from Musashi (1858) and Watanabe Tadamasa from Osaka (1862) delivered their petitions to the imperial court, both arguing that the revival of the Jingikan was the only means to deal with the foreigners’ demand for opening and trade.29 Nitta Kunimitsu, a priest from the island of Shikoku and later participating in post-Restoration national Shinto affairs, submitted his petition in 1861 and again in 1867, proposing to reestablish the Jingikan in order to implement Shinto across the nation so that ‘morality will be cultivated, mind-hearts strengthened and safety of the nation secured.’30 Like-minded samurai retainers from various domains joined Shinto priests and Kokugaku-sha in their campaign: Uratsuji Kinmochi from Tsu, Amano Shotaro from Yamaguchi, and Naka Zuiunsai from Choshu, among others.31 Mutobe sent his petition in 1862 to Maeda Nariyasu (1811–1884), lord of the wealthy and strong Kanazawa domain, in hope that the reformist lord would push for implementation of his plan. In the petition, Mutobe invoked the thesis of the Unity of Ritual and Governance, arguing that the Ministry represented the site where ‘the most important of the Great Governance’ was conducted and, when restored, could ‘reinforce the human feelings of repaying the original benevolence [of the gods] and people in four directions will respond to the unspoken inculcation with high morale. [ ... ] Our people will understand the fundamental meanings of life and death without being deceived by foreign theories preaching that human spirits will disintegrate or go to heaven or hell.’32 Mutobe further proposed to set up schools in the Jingikan to propagate the fundamental teaching of Kindness and Sincerity so that when ‘the foreign barbarians come again, our people will all stand up

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 36

6/30/2011 12:58:22 PM

Ritual, Purity, and Power 37

to meet the challenge and our nation will be the strongest in the whole world.’33 Mutobe was joined by another prominent Nativist, Yano Harumichi (1823–1887), in petitioning for reviving the Jingikan. Studying under Hirata Atsutane from 1833, Yano devoted his life to the fulfillment of the Ancient Way, and his renown as an accomplished Nativist scholar brought about his appointment from the Shirakawa house as its academy’s head lecturer. Staying in Kyoto, Yano also stayed in close association with Mutobe. In his 1864 petition composed on behalf of Shirakawa Tadanori, Yano connected the necessity to revive the Jingikan to the strength of Japan as a nation enabled by the kami: ‘the first thing to perform the Great Way [of the Gods] is to perform rituals in exhausting our reverence and filial devotion toward the musubi gods and all myriad gods [who created Japan] and praying for the safety of people of the world. The fundamental of the Great Governance (taisei) lies in rituals.’34 The imperial rituals performed by the Jingikan, Yano held, exemplify the cardinal values of loyalty and filial devotion. The populace being cultivated as a part of the ritual process, they would commit themselves to loyalty and diligence during life and ready themselves to depart for the invisible world upon death to receive the blessing of Okuninushi and the ubusuna gods ‘rather than going astray, being deceived by the evil teachings [of Buddhism and Christianity].’35 The campaign for reviving the Jingikan reached a climax in the late 1860s, transforming an idea initially known only to a few committed Nativists to an imperative imagined widely as a solution to the escalating political and social problems. Such a change was catalyzed by the fact that the petition for reviving Jingikan coincided with the desire of a group of courtiers in the imperial court who started to see the possibility of reviving the power of the court long lost to warrior governments. To these courtiers, the revived Jingikan became the symbol for the authority and power to be restored to the emperor and the imperial court. They employed the symbol as a strategic weapon in their negotiations and fighting with the Tokugawa Shogunate and its allies at the court. This group adopted the more radical stance of ‘Revering the Emperor and Expelling the Barbarians’ (sonnō jōi) in consonance with the Kokugaku-sha but in opposition to the conciliatory courtiers advocating alliance between the Bakufu government and the imperial court (kōbu gattai).36 The leading figure of this group, Nakayama Tadayasu, himself advised the revival of the Jingikan in 1859.37 When these radical courtiers gained the upper hand in the late 1860s and started to conceive a restoration of imperial authority, they quickly made it clear

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 37

6/30/2011 12:58:22 PM

38 Yijiang Zhong

that the Jingikan was to be reinstituted as part of the new imperial polity.38 The radical courtiers’ promotion of the Jingikan was continued by the lower-ranked yet shrewd courtier Iwakura Tomomi, who saw the ideological utility of the Ministry in the ostensibly restored Meiji polity. Right after the emperor was returned to power in 1868, the Jingikan was reestablished. The short life of the Ministry (1869–1872) has been interpreted as embodying the fateful failure of an anachronistic attempt to justify a modern government with an old, almost theocratic form. But the significance of the Jingikan should be evaluated in terms of contemporary developments rather than from a retroactive perspective of hindsight. The Ministry marks a critical moment when the Meiji state was conflated with Shinto. That is, not only were Shinto shrines and priests declared as official and organized into the Meiji government, but the government announced itself as based on the Shinto thesis of the Unity of Ritual and Governance. The Jingikan’s nationalization of shrines and priests would generate problems threatening the very ideological basis of the Meiji state when it was pressed in the 1870s and the 1880s to define and institute distinctions between government, ritual, religion, and Shinto. If the short life of the Jingikan reveals the subversive agency of ‘Shinto,’ its demise in 1872, then, points to the beginning of the difficult process of regulating that subversive agency in modern statebuilding.

To die a Shinto death The pre-Restoration imaginary of a purified Shinto was predicated on the representations of Buddhism as defilement and heterodoxy. The construction of such an antithetical image was in many ways a reaction to the actual orthodox position Buddhist institutions enjoyed in Edo Japan. Incorporated into the Tokugawa political structure for the purpose of preventing Christianity, Buddhist temples were delegated the tasks of maintaining the register records of local families as danka, which developed a relationship with temples not unlike that of Christian churches with parishioners. Furthermore, they were designated to perform funeral and memorial services for their danka families, including those of Shinto priests. This official capacity facilitated Buddhist temples’ consolidation into power strongholds in local communities, especially through lucrative funeral rituals. When late Tokugawa Kokugaku discourse took up death and afterlife as central subjects in its propagation of a pure Ancient Way reputedly lost to the Buddhist teaching, the

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 38

6/30/2011 12:58:22 PM

Ritual, Purity, and Power 39

Buddhist way of death became identified as a specific case of defilement. An alternative end-of-life ritual, claimed as the ancient Shinto funeral, came to be promoted as the necessary step to bring the dead to the world of the kami instead of the Buddhist paradise. This specific way of individual dying was tied to the ritualized Shinto nation. For Shinto priests with ambition in local authority or dissatisfied with being subordinated to the overbearing Buddhist temples, the Shinto funeral provided a discursive means to compete for social and cultural power. Once the Shinto way of death attained enough currency, it was mobilized to legitimate political activism in the 1860s, directly contributing to the genesis of state-sponsored death-commemorating institutions that culminated in the Yasukuni Shrine. Funeral and memorial rituals claimed as Shinto can be traced to the late sixteenth century, when Yoshida Kanemi (1535–1610) of the Yoshida priest house composed Yuiitsu Shinto Funeral Procedures (Yuiitsu Shintō sōsai shidai) in an attempt to distinguish his family tradition from the dominant Buddhist theories and practices, thereby claiming a new form of authority.39 The idea of death-related defilement (kegare) had long prevented Shinto priests from performing funeral ritual, but the manual shows an explicit drive to overcome this limitation by including a number of purification rituals in the funeral process. The funeral manual nevertheless shows a heavy presence of the Confucian and Buddhist themes it claimed to overcome. Particularly following Confucian orthodoxy, it explained away death as a return to heaven and earth.40 Yamazaki Ansai (1618–1682), the Confucian scholar who tried to integrate Zhu Xi’s neoConfucian teaching with the Shinto theory he constructed from the narratives of early mytho-historical texts, especially Nihon Shoki, formulated a version of Shinto funeral ritual based on the Confucian ritual protocols of Zhu Zi Jia Li, or ‘Family Rituals of Zhu Xi.’ One critical difference Yamazaki made between his Shinto funeral and the Buddhist one is burial in place of cremation of bodies, and he claimed that burying the bodies was the original funeral ritual performed by Japanese prior to Buddhism.41 Like Yoshida, Yamazaki pointed to a destination for departed human spirits different from the Buddhist Pure Land. According to Yamazaki, depending on individual effort human spirits could all turn into the kami at death.42 The Shinto funeral ritual promoted by Shinto priests with the Kokugaku theory, as we will see, built upon these precedents but, in response to a spreading sense of crisis, developed into a grass-roots ritual discourse wherein the individual’s afterlife (that is, that of every Japanese) became tied to the familial identity of ancestor and to memberships of community and the nation.

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 39

6/30/2011 12:58:22 PM

40 Yijiang Zhong

One early case of campaigning for a Shinto funeral in pre-Restoration decades is Oka Kumaomi (1783–1851), a priest of a local shrine in Tsuwano domain of western Japan. Oka committed himself to reviving the eclipsed Shinto based on the Kokugaku teachings of Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane.43 His persevering efforts were closely connected to his desire to restore the priest rank daigūji his family lost to changed political patronage in the early Tokugawa period.44 Campaigning for a Shinto funeral in place of the Buddhist one provided Oka a discursive means to argue for the necessity and importance of Shinto for his community and domain. He first petitioned the Yoshida house in 1811 for recognition of the Shinto funeral, but the death of the Yoshida priest then in control meant that his effort led to nothing.45 Oka thereafter remained in close association with the neighboring Hamada domain, where the domain lord and his Kokugaku scholar persisted in their petition for a Shinto way of death. Encouraged by Hamada’s success in obtaining approval from the Tokugawa Bakufu after seven years of petitioning, Oka again submitted his petition in 1842, and obtained at long last in 1843 the right to have the Shinto funeral performed for himself and his male offspring.46 Oka situated his campaign for the Shinto funeral ritual in the Ancient Way discourse of Hirata Atsutane. Echoing Hirata’s anti-Buddhist polemic, Oka Kumaomi directly challenged the orthodox Buddhist theory of posthumous liberation undergirding its funeral ritual by arguing that the Buddhist paradise of Pure Land was no more than an enticing and deceptive mirage: ‘the spirits of those who desire day and night rebirth in the western Pure Land paradise will end up wandering aimlessly in the western sky because there simply is no such thing as a Pure Land. In total loss and sadness, these spirits then commit grave evil deeds to humans. What a misery!’47 The true destination for departed human spirits, Oka told his readers, is to join the Shinto divinity: Upon receiving spirit (tama) from the primal creation kami and as a result of the impregnating mix of water and fire, a human is born. [ ... ] When a person dies, the spirit leaves the corporeal body, conceals itself in the invisible world (yūmei) and becomes a kami. You ask about the location of the invisible world? [ ... ] It is separated from the world of living humans so we can’t see it. But, first of all, tombs are sites of the invisible world because that is where the departed spirits stay. [ ... ] There they serve at the concealed court of Ōkuninushi and enjoy the same clothes, food and life style that we do.48

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 40

6/30/2011 12:58:22 PM

Ritual, Purity, and Power 41

That is why, when the body of the dead is buried, his clothes, utensils, and favorite items should also be buried so that he can continue to use them in the invisible world. Living relatives and offspring must take good care of the tombs so that these ancestral gods can be comfortable and willing to offer protection to living humans.49 By confirming the eventual transformation of departed spirits into the kami, Oka articulated a new relationship between the living and the dead. Deceased family members were long believed to turn into ancestor spirits and maintain a relationship with their family upon receiving memorial services from offspring or relatives. But, when ancestor spirits were transformed to the kami, they remained a part of the familial world but at the same time entered the larger realm of the kami. The elevation from the ancestral spirit to the ancestral kami constituted a critical step of purification (i.e., renouncing the Buddhist death) and furthermore related individuals, both of this life and the next, through the ritual logic of purity to the Shinto nation (that is, Japan as the land of the kami). Oka explicates on this logic in his Sandaikō no tsuikō, or ‘A Reinvestigation of Sandaikō.’50 To understand the afterlife amounted to understanding the Way of the Gods, a whole set of truths long eclipsed by Buddhist theory. At the center of this truth was the very process of the creation of the world by the kami, which amounts to a process of purification, characterized by the upward movement of light, pure materials culminating in the formation of the sun and the downward movement of filthy and heavy materials leading to the moon, the world of death and defilement.51 The fact that Japan is situated at the top of the world in closest proximity to the sun points to the country’s unsurpassed purity, which translates into Japan as the central pillar undergirding the whole world.52 To recover this purity necessitates debunking Buddhist knowledge, particularly its concocted theory of afterlife in the Pure Land paradise. The knowledge and conviction of the purified status of kami in afterlife obtained by way of the Shinto funeral hence secured the actual transformation of human spirits into kami, thereby securing a membership in the pure and superior Shinto nation of Japan. Oka’s success empowered the idea of a Shinto death and encouraged fellow Shinto priests to mobilize the term ‘Shinto funeral ritual’ in their competition for ideological and economic interests. Petitions for Shinto funerals were submitted to the Bakufu and domain lords. Shinto funeral manuals were composed and circulated. We have seen that both Mutobe and Furukawa envisioned a Shinto funeral as constitutive of the revived Shinto. Mutobe prescribed funeral ritual as one of the priests’ duties in the aforementioned Junkō shinji den. When Furukawa Mitsura

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 41

6/30/2011 12:58:23 PM

42 Yijiang Zhong

submitted his Jingikan revival petition, he was also joining other priests in composing Shinto funeral manuals.53 Hatano Takeo, priest of the Hachiman Shrine in Mikawa (Aichi Prefecture), is another central figure in the campaign for the Shinto funeral. Buddhist priests’ arrogance and riches, accrued through charging handsome sums for funeral rituals, dismayed Hatano and many of his fellow priests, who were bent on elevating Shinto priests’ status and gaining communal leadership. Hatano’s Shinto funeral endeavor started in 1838 when he performed a Shinto funeral for his father after the regular Buddhist one had already been given. In the 1850s Hatano allied with seven priests to advocate and petition for the Shinto funeral, and finally received approval in 1856 from the intendant of the Tokugawa bakufu.54 His efforts and success encouraged other priests, who visited and learned from him. The campaign for the Shinto funeral brought priests into alliance with village leaders, who interpreted contemporary social and political situations through the lens of the increasingly popular Kokugaku discourse. In association with Hatano, Kurasawa Gizui (1832–1919), a farmer in the Ina Valley of Shinshū (Nagano Prefecture) and a Shinto priest after the Meiji Restoration, believed that economic and social difficulties in the village could be solved only by reviving a lost Shinto. In the 1860s they fought successfully against Buddhist priests to institute the Shinto funeral.55 It is important to point out that, while these priests shared the term ‘Shinto funeral ritual’ (shinsōsai or shintō sōsai), the actual funeral and cremation procedures, when practiced, differed from each other, as attested by many different versions of funeral manuals compiled at the time. What mattered to the people in the campaign was the recognition of the legitimacy of a ‘Shinto’ form of death. Conversely, once the Shinto way of death attained enough currency, it was mobilized to legitimate political activism in the 1860s, directly contributing to the creation of state commemoration institutions that culminated in the Yasukuni Shrine. For the shishi (or Men with High Purposes) who gathered in Kyoto from all over the country to fight in the name of the emperor and of saving the nation, Shinto or Confucian funerals became the preferred ways of defining death, as the previously orthodox Buddhist funeral came to be closely associated with the Tokugawa Bakufu, perceived as the enemy both of the emperor and of themselves. As a result, Reimeisha, a Shinto funeral performing facility established in the Eastern Mountains (Higashiyama) area by a low-rank courtier, became the funeral and burial site of deceased shishi activists.56 ‘Shinto,’ then, served to associate the death and life of these committed individuals with a particular political imagination (indicated by the slogan ‘Revere the Emperor,

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 42

6/30/2011 12:58:23 PM

Ritual, Purity, and Power 43

Expel the Barbarians,’ or sonnō jōi), the legitimacy of which was reinforced through adopting the specific purified mode and space of death. Toward the end of 1862, encouraged by an edict from Emperor Kōmei ordering the Tokugawa Bakufu to perform commemorative services for those who died for the ‘national cause,’ a group of Kokugaku followers led by Furukawa Mitsura met at the Reimeisha and conducted a shōkonsai for the shishi spirits.57 Literally meaning a ritual to invite spirits for pacification and enshrinement, shōkonsai in this context was deliberately conducted as a memorial service in place of the Buddhist kuyō service, serving both to purify and pacify these unsettled spirits that had died a violent death. Furukawa’s prayer made specific appeal for the interconnectedness of purity and loyalty: ‘[ ... ] We invite all of you to enjoy the food here and entreat your spirit to remain pure and loyal in protecting the emperor and domain lords [ ... ].’58 The political value of the dead was thereby confirmed by tying the ‘Shinto’ forms of death and afterlife unambiguously to the political cause of imperial restoration.59 In January 1868 political power was returned to the emperor, while the new ‘government’ had to fight the Bafuku military forces until June 1869 before its survival was secured. As a mobilization and legitimacy strategy, the new government in early 1868 ordered the construction of shrines devoted to imperial loyalists rediscovered from the past.60 In the rush to institute exemplifiers of loyalty to the emperor, the reestablished Ministry of State (Daijōkan) ordered a shrine to be built on the site of Reimeisha at Higashiyama to house the shishi spirits, and new spirits of soldiers dying in the ongoing battles against the Tokugawa Bakufu were continuously added to the toll.61 This shrine functioned as state endorsement of the project of shōkonsha initiated by Choshu and Kokugaku activists. Thereafter there arose an immediate boom of erecting shōkonsha across the country, as domains eagerly demonstrated their support for the emperor and his new government.62 In 1879, the shōkonsha in the capital Tokyo was elevated to the pinnacle of the stateoperated Shinto shrine network commemorating lives lost in battle, and was renamed Yasukuni Shrine (literally, Shrine for Pacifying the Nation), thus foregrounding the nation-state (kuni) in place of the spirits (kon) of individual soldiers, and unambiguously domesticating the meaning of death for the building of the imperial nation-state.63

Reining in ‘Shinto’ and building the state After the emperor was returned to political power in January 1868, Kamei Koremi, the lord of Tsuwano domain in western Japan, was appointed

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 43

6/30/2011 12:58:23 PM

44

Yijiang Zhong

to lead the re-creation of the state ritual institution, the Jingikan, which had been announced as the embodiment of the Unity of Ritual and Governance, the principle structuring the ‘restored’ imperial polity.64 Kamei’s appointment can be in large part attributed to the ideological significance of those social reform policies that he implemented in the final years before the Restoration in his domain under the slogan of reviving the Way of the Gods.65 As early as 1849, Kamei appointed the priest Oka Kumaomi as the domain academy’s instructor of Kokugaku, which Kamei elevated to the dominant theory for domain education.66 In 1867, as part of the domain financial and social restructuring, Kamei ordered the closing down of Buddhist temples and the renovation of major Shinto shrines, and introduced the Shinto funeral ritual promoted by Oka.67 In the sixth month, Kamei announced to his 40,000 domain subjects: Japan is the land of the kami. It is created by the kami and by the emperor who is also a kami. [ ... ] Buddhism is a teaching that came from outside. Now we are accustomed to follow the kami when alive and to think that we become Buddha at death. But what happened before Buddhism came? Needless to say, after death people became the kami. So it is very important to think about our roots by following the teaching of the kami. This means to revere the kami, [ ... ] fix and maintain shrines where the kami reside to protect us, [ ... ] and practice loyalty and honesty.68 At the same time, Kamei issued directives for ancestral and funeral rituals.69 Kamei attributed an anchoring importance to the Shinto funeral for the domain reform. As he announced in Sōsaishiki kaisei shishu (On Reforming Funeral Ritual): The fundamental of current reforms is to establish the Way of Revering the Kami and purify human hearts. Without following the True Way [of the Gods] based on funeral rituals, rules cannot be straightened and governance will meet obstacles.70 Scholars have emphasized Kamei’s efforts in instituting an emperor-centered ideology in his domain and suggested that this led to his rise to the new government.71 It should be noted, however, that, while extolling the emperor was undoubtedly the dominant theme in Kamei’s policies, the figure of the emperor was articulated within a complexity better understood as what I have called a ritual logic of purity, as evidenced by his anti-Buddhist, death-related policies.

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 44

6/30/2011 12:58:23 PM

Ritual, Purity, and Power 45

In the second month of 1868, when Kamei took the leadership of the Bureau of Divine Affairs (jingi jimukyoku) in preparation for the reestablishment of the Jingikan, he made it clear that he would implement these Shinto revival policies throughout Japan.72 First, the Bureau announced that Buddhist elements must be stripped away from all Shinto shrines so that those shrines could be returned to the pure state of the ancient past.73 At the same time, the imperative of translating purification into policies was further reinforced by a heightened sense of Christianity as an ideological threat to the fragile imperial state. The discovery that the secretly practicing Christians could now seek support from foreign missionaries reinforced the image of Christianity as a serious threat to Japan’s internal unity and external safety in a hostile world. In the third month, Kamei proposed his Shinto revival plan specifically to counter Christianity: At the moment of imperial restoration and Shinto revival, the government made it known that shrines will be respected, the teaching of the imperial land followed and the evil doctrine [Christianity] strictly forbidden. All people will be required to swear at the ubusuna shrines not to follow the evil teaching. They will register at the shrines which will report them to the Jingikan. Funerals will be reformed based on our imperial classics.74 Kamei’s plan addressed the major ideological concern of the early Meiji government, that is, to make sure the imperial authority, upon which the legitimacy of the fragile Meiji government was dependent, would not be challenged by the alternative claim for authority made by Christianity.75 His proposal on utilizing shrines to institute preventive policies, especially ideological indoctrination, provided a means to meet the challenge. While Kamei left the Meiji government in July 1869 to take a local administrative post, the anti-Christian Shinto ritual plan would long outlast his departure from the political scene. Shrines were consolidated into a national hierarchical system serving as the basis for performing state rituals and promulgating a national doctrine, and population registration at local shrines was announced in mid-1871 (but was replaced in May 1873 by the modern civil registration system).76 Instituting the Shinto funeral remained the agenda of the government. The preparatory office for the Jingikan announced in April 1868 that Shinto priests and their families must have Shinto funerals.77 From 1869 the Jingikan also started acquiring Shinto cemetery ground from the Tokyo municipal government.78 In June 1872, the Meiji government announced that funerals must be trusted to Shinto or Buddhist priests,

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 45

6/30/2011 12:58:23 PM

46 Yijiang Zhong

banning in effect the practice of ‘self-burial’ by Christian converts.79 It would not be an exaggeration to say ‘Shinto’ provided a central metaphor for imagining the new Meiji polity.80 It soon became clear, however, that ‘Shinto’ was a force that could jeopardize the project of nation-state building. The early Meiji leadership’s approach of constructing a ‘Shinto’ imperial polity while simultaneously devising a ‘Shinto’ doctrine (kyō) to counter Christianity became untenable once the modern idea of religion began to inform the political imagination of the Meiji polity. The ideological need to counter Christian conversion led to the unexpected realization that preaching a Shinto doctrine about the divinity of the imperial institution put at risk the very authority of the emperor, since a doctrine modeled after the Christian creed put ‘Shinto’ into the category of religion, the belief in which, however, could not be coerced, according to the principle of freedom of religious belief. Furthermore, aiming at the salvation doctrine of Christianity, the popular indoctrination program sponsored by the Meiji government emphasized themes of death and afterlife.81 These themes, however, came to be identified as essential markers of a religious theological creed which should be separated from the state, a practice that was perceived as necessary for Japan to be recognized as a civilized modern nation.82 The plurality and heterogeneity of claims for authority that could be made with ‘Shinto’ also posed an ideological threat to the imperial authority from within. The authority of the emperor was essentially built upon his divinity as descendent of a genealogy going back to the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. ‘Shinto’ possessed the very ability to claim alternative divine authority derived from the same mytho-historical narratives in the two eighth-century texts, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. For example, Ōkuninushi, the deity ruling the invisible world of kami and ancestors, upon which late Tokugawa Shinto funeral discourse was based, was mobilized by the Izumo Shrine, where Ōkuninushi was enshrined, to claim primacy over the authority of the emperor, the ruler of the human world.83 All these threats pointed to the central question as to how to circumscribe a space for Shinto so that the authority of the emperor would not be subject to challenge and relativization. The modern discourse of religion was mobilized by the Meiji state to organize a series of boundaries so that the instability contained in the plurality of themes and concerns under the term Shinto was eventually circumscribed and separated from expressions of the imperial authority.84 In 1875, the Meiji government terminated its sponsorship of the popular indoctrination program and entrusted the project to Shinto

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 46

6/30/2011 12:58:23 PM

Ritual, Purity, and Power 47

and Buddhist priests, who were recognized as ‘religious persons’ and had the duty to preach the Shinto doctrine in exchange for protection from the state.85 By so doing, the Meiji leadership distinguished the imperial institution from ‘Shinto’ as a religious doctrine. In 1882 the Meiji government further announced that Shinto priests of state-sponsored shrines would stop preaching the Shinto doctrine and performing funerals.86 They would play the sole role of performing state rituals, which were argued as being devoid of theological significance and hence non-religious. This political, ritual-performing Shinto was given the name Shrine Shinto (jinja Shintō) and thereby declared non-religious. On the other hand, priests choosing to preach doctrines, particularly the creed of death and afterlife, were to do so outside the shrine system, which was responsible only for state rituals. They were recognized as sectarian groups and categorized as Sect Shinto (shūha Shintō).87 As such, the claims made by sectarian ‘Shinto’ fell under the regulatory category of religion, the doctrines of which were relativized, that is, subject to free choices of belief, and no longer threatening to challenge the divine authority of the emperor. Further revealing the arbitrary distinction between non-religious rituals and religious doctrines was the government’s stipulation that priests of local, smaller shrines which received no state economic support were allowed to continue performing funeral rituals,88 both as a means for raising income for sustaining themselves and to meet the need of their ujiko parishioners. The identity of local shrines hence remained ambivalent between religious and state ritual facilities. These reconfigurations constituted the basic structure that was later known as State Shinto. While the threatening ‘Shinto’ was segregated into parts (Shrine Shinto vs. Sect Shinto, official shrines vs. unofficial shrines), thereby being put under quarantined control, the very structure of State Shinto was an unstable ideological formation that based itself on ambivalent distinctions among ritual, doctrine, and political authority, and was able to function only when it was backed by the coercive power of the political state.

Conclusion In this chapter I have traced how the idiom of Shinto was mobilized in the 1850s–1880s for articulating concerns and formulating actions, and how ‘Shinto’ in the post-Restoration period both offered a useful imagery for the new Meiji polity and simultaneously generated tensions that needed to be domesticated for the very purpose of nation-state building. My aim is to complicate the understanding of State Shinto as

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 47

6/30/2011 12:58:23 PM

48 Yijiang Zhong

simply a political invention and to demonstrate that the construction of State Shinto is better viewed as a process of domesticating the conflicting claims and voices of Shinto, which provided resources for ideological construction but nevertheless remained beyond the complete control of political ideological formation.89 In tracing the articulations of what I called the ritual logic of purity, I teased out three themes: the imaginary of a Shinto nation, the revival of the Ministry of Divinity (Jingikan), and the Shinto funeral ritual that tied the living to the dead as ancestral gods. The ritualized purification logic is a discourse alternative to, but intersecting with, the Mito–Okuni–Meiji state genealogy, a genealogy better considered a retroactive projection of scholars than a consistent trajectory of history. Applying the notion of purity helped to bring to the fore themes that contributed to the ideological formation of State Shinto, but it also helped demonstrate the multivalent heterogeneity inherent in the very notion of purity. Pre-Restoration talk of kami, ritual, and moral values cannot be delimited to nationalism, essentialized religiosity, or political ideology, and the open-ended logic of purity points to a mode of conceiving power different from that of the modern discourse of religion and political governance, one with potential both for strengthening political control and also for undermining the authority it helped to construct. Most extraordinarily, the Shinto way of death as a ritual of purification gave rise to the state institution, Yasukuni Shrine, while it also pressed the government to devise the arbitrary distinction between Shrine Shinto and Sect Shinto in order to contain the disruptive force of ‘death’ – that is, after it became identified unambiguously as religious and had to be separated from the state. The transformation of the ‘Shinto’ logic of purity in the period of the 1850s–1880s thus lends a perspective to help us understand the intrinsic ambivalence of modern ideological formation. Indeed, looking into the articulations of various Ways of the Gods, or Shintos, across the temporal divide of 1868 opens up ways to rethink State Shinto as being as much about regulating ‘Shinto’ as about building the State.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

I would like to thank John Breen and Jacob Eyferth for commenting on earlier versions of the paper. Murakami (1970) Kokka Shinto, 1: 78–80. For the latest debate with regard to how to readdress Murakami’s State Shinto paradigm, see intellectual historian Koyasu Nobukuni’s critical review (http://homepage1.nifty.com/koyasu/remark.html, accessed January 2011) of Kokka Shinto to Nihon jin by Shimazono Susumu (Tokyo: Iwanami

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 48

6/30/2011 12:58:23 PM

Ritual, Purity, and Power 49

4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

Shoten, 2010), and Shimazono’s response article (http://shimazono. spinavi.net/?p=137, accessed January 2011). For recent work in English, see Shimazono Susumu, ‘State Shinto and the Religious Structure of Modern Japan,’ Journal of American Academy of Religion, 74 (4): 1077–1098. The phrase ‘invented tradition’ was used in Helen Hardacre (1988) Shinto and the State, 1868–1988 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 3. Shimazono (2001) ‘Jūkyū seiki Nihon no shūkyō kōzō no hen’yō,’ 18–28. It is common now for scholars in English-language Japanese studies to use the term ‘Nativism’ to refer to kokugaku after Harry Harootunian initiated its use in his 1988 book Things Seen and Unseen, Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism. The literal meaning of kokugaku is the learning (gaku) of the land of Japan (koku). John Breen, however, points to the discrepancy between kokugaku as Japanese Nativism and the broader phenomenon referred to as Nativism in Western academia. Breen shows that, when the definition of Nativism as widely employed in sociological studies, that is, the attempt to revive and/or perpetuate one’s indigenous culture, is applied to Japanese history, it ends up encompassing positions in an intellectual spectrum much broader than what is usually referred to in Japanese studies as kokugaku. Subsequently, this paper will retain the Japanese term kokugaku to reduce the discrepancy and use Kokugaku-sha to refer to those who studied, used or identified with the Kokugaku discourse. John Breen (2000) ‘Review: Nativism Revisited,’ Monumenta Nipponica, 55 (3): 429–439, esp. 430–432. Shimazono, ‘Jūkyū seiki Nihon no shūkyō kōzō no hen’yō’, 22. It can be argued that the controversy around the government-funded funeral of the Showa emperor in 1989, with regard to whether the ‘Shinto’ components of the funeral contravened the constitutional clause of separation of state and religion, points to the agency of ‘Shinto’ that remains with, but beyond domestication by, the nation-state. See ‘Funeral’s Shinto Rite: Specters of the Past,’ New York Times, February 23, 1989, http://www. nytimes.com/1989/02/23/world/funeral-s-shinto-rite-specter-of-the-past. html?scp=1&sq=funerals%20shinto%20rite&st=cse, accessed June 2010. Also see Breen and Teeuwen (2010) for an insightful examination of the controversial ‘Shinto’ ritual, not of imperial funeral but of enthronement, Dajōsai, performed by the present emperor Akihito in November 1990. John Breen and Mark Teeuwen (2010) A New History of Shinto (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell), 171–173. Mutobe (1988) ‘Junkō shinji den,’ 186–187. Miwa (2007) Mutobe Yoshika no shōgai to gakumon. Lecture handout; Muko shi shi, 2: 258. Mutobe (1988) ‘Junkō shinji den,’ 186. ‘Shinto’ literally means the Way of the Gods, with shin- referring to Gods and -tō to a Way or Path. What constituted that Way, of course, has been the object of contestations and negotiations both in the past and in the present. In the case of Mutobe, being a shrine priest reinforced the sense of anxiety first enunciated by the Kokugaku discourse and precipitated the foregrounding of purity in his discussion of Shinto. Mutobe (1988) ‘Junkō shinji den’, 186. Hoshino (2004a) ‘Mutobe Yoshika to shinji ni tsuite’, 70. Mutobe (1971) ‘Ubusuna kodensho’, 224, 226–227. Mutobe (1988) ‘Junkō shinji den’, 201.

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 49

6/30/2011 12:58:23 PM

50 Yijiang Zhong 16. Mutobe was not alone in such projects of the refiguration of Shinto. His Kokugaku mode of imagining the archipelago as a Shinto nation shared many features with the kokutai imagery put forward by the Mito Confucian Aizawa Seishisai, most conspicuously their shared deployment of ritual for figuring the nation. See Aizawa Seishisai, ‘Shinron,’ Nihon shiso taikei, 53: 64, 139–144, 147–154. In this sense, the ritual logic of purity intersects with what Shimanozo identified as the ‘intellectual genealogy’ of State Shinto. 17. Mutobe, ‘Junkō shinji den’, 190–202; ‘Ubusuna kodensho’, 225–226. Junkō shinji den has six volumes. Except for the first volume, which was published in volume 27 of Shinto taikei in 1988, the rest of the text is available only in the original text in Kokugakuin University library. I thank Dr Hoshino Mitsushige for providing me a copy of volumes 2, 3, and 4; he transcribed from the original text. They do not have the original pagination. 18. Hoshino (2004b) ‘Bakumatsu ki ni okeru ōharae to kokugakusha – Mutobe Yoshika o chūshin ni’, 60–62. In 1858 Mutobe committed himself to an exegesis project of the Heavenly Prayer, culminating in Ōharae amatsu sugaso in 170 pages (while the prayer itself is about two pages long). His main goals were to determine the exact content of the prayer as inherited from the gods and explicate on its importance for reviving the jingikan and the pure, lost Shinto. 19. Mikanagi (2003) Engishiki norito kyohon (Tokyo: Jinja shinpo sha), 87–88. 20. Hoshino (2004b) ‘Bakumatsu ki ni okeru ōharae to kokugakusha – Mutobe Yoshika o chūshin ni’, 63. 21. Mutobe (1999) ‘Michi no hito goto’, 3. 22. Ibid., 3. 23. ‘Ritsuryo jingikan,’ Encyclopedia of Shinto, http://eos.kokugakuin.ac.jp/modules/xwords/entry.php?entryID=1460, accessed June 2010. 24. Hoshino (2004a) ‘Mutobe Yoshika to shinji ni tsuite’, 73. 25. Shirakawa is another family lineage that held a major position in the defunct jingikan. In the Tokugawa period the Shirakawa house managed to obtain recognition from the Shogunate of its authority to appoint and train priests. By the early nineteenth century the Shirakawa house was able to compete effectively with the Yoshida house, which received the prerogative of investiture of Shinto priests from the Shogunate in 1666, thus projecting its cultural and economic influence across the nation. 26. Furukawa (1967) ‘Jingikan saikō sonota jōsho’, 392–394. 27. Ibid., 398–400. 28. Fujii (1944) Kinsei ni okeru jingi shisō, 146. 29. Ibid., 142, 148. 30. Ibid., 143. 31. Ibid., 141–154. 32. Mutobe (1944) ‘Mutobe Yoshika ikensho’, 305. 33. Ibid., 305–306. 34. Yano, quoted in Hoshino (2006) ‘Bakumatsu ishinki ni okeru saisei itchi kan’, 107. 35. Yano, quoted in ibid., 108. 36. Haraguchi (2007) ‘Osei fukkō e no michi’, 207, 259. 37. Fujii (1944) Kinsei ni okeru jingi shisō, 149.

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 50

6/30/2011 12:58:23 PM

Ritual, Purity, and Power 51 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

Haraguchi (2007) ‘Osei fukkō e no michi’, 280–287. Nishioka (2000) ‘Meiji izen no sōsō girei’, 75. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 92. Zhang (2002) Oka Kumaomi, tenkanki o ikita gōson chishiki jin, 30–31. Ibid., 26. Zhang Xian-sheng argues in his monograph study of Oka Kumaomi that Oka’s lifelong scholarship and activism were motivated by two goals: first to revive the prestige of the family priesthood tradition and second to restore the family’s samurai status. For the latter goal, Oka spent years in military studies. Zhang (2002), 26. Zhang also argues that Oka was little influenced by Hirata’s Nativist theory. Some major writings of Oka, however, follow the themes that are particular to Hirata’s Ancient Way, especially on the question of the afterlife, despite Oka’s unwillingness to recognize Hirata’s influence. I am in agreement with Japanese scholars Kato Takahisa and Kondo Keigo that Oka developed his distinctive Shinto discourse based on those of Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane. Katō (1985), Kondō (1990). Kato (1985) Shinto Tsuwano kyōgaku no kenkyū, 91–92. Ibid., 78–80. Ibid., 358–359. Ibid., 353–354. Ibid., 370–373. Sandaikō is a late-nineteenth-century text by the Kokugaku scholar Hattori Nakatsune, who attempts to supersede Western astronomical knowledge with a theory of cosmological creation by the kami. Oka (1985) Oka Kumaomi shū, 306. Ibid. (325). Kondō (1990) ‘Bakumatsu ishi ki ni okeru shinsōsai to sono jikkō’, 9. Nomura (1995) Bakumatsu ishin ki ni okeru Toyohashi chihō no shinsōsai ka, 20–28. Haga (1957) Sōmō no Kokugaku sha Kurasawa Gizui’, 479–485. Murakami (1974) Irei to shōkon: Yasukuni no shisō, 32. Ibid., 5–7. Ibid., 8. According to Murakami Shigeyoshi, shōkonsai first appeared in the Choshu domain. From the 1850s the domain leadership actively sponsored Buddhist funeral and memorial rituals for past and recent domain loyalists as a means of mobilizing the populace. These rituals were conducted in Buddhist temples (Murakami (1974), 9). At the same time, Choshu devised shōkonsai for the same purpose. But it seems that by the early 1860s shōkonsai had displaced Buddhist kuyō rituals to become the exclusive memorial style in the domain, most likely in response to the increasing use of ‘Shinto’ funeral and memorial rituals. Murakami (1974) Irei to shōkon: Yasukuni no shisō, 8–14. Ibid., 26–29. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 106–108. Jinja kankei hōrei shiryō (1968), 4.

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 51

6/30/2011 12:58:23 PM

52

Yijiang Zhong

65. In the final years before the Meiji Restoration, Kamei associated the domain leadership with the above-mentioned radical courtiers and the anti-Bakufu Choshu domain, providing them with logistic and information support. These services consolidated Kamei’s relation with these groups into an alliance and, together with his social reforms in the domain, contributed to the Tsuwano leadership’s rise to the Meiji government after 1868. Kabe Iwao (ed.) Odoroganaka, 877–951; Kabe Iwao Mokuen Fukuba Bisei koden, 22–67. Also see John Breen (2000) ‘Ideologues, Bureaucrats, and Priests: on Shinto and Buddhism in early Meiji Japan,’ in Shinto in History, Ways of the Kami (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press), 232. 66. Kabe (1982) Odoroganaka: Kamei koremi den, 179. 67. Ibid., 462–471. 68. Ibid., 471–476. 69. Ibid., 476–490. 70. Ibid., 490. 71. See, for example, Sakamoto Ken’ichi (1983), 378–379. 72. Sakamoto (1983) Meiji Shinto shi no kenkyū, 395–396. Satsuma in Kyushu implemented similar ‘Shinto’ policies in 1868 while almost eliminating Buddhism from the domain. Murakami (1970) Kokka Shinto, 82; Ketelaar (1990) Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution, 55–60. 73. Sakamoto (1983) Meiji Shinto shi no kenkyū, 394–395. 74. Kamei Koremi, quoted in Sakamoto Ken’ichi (1983) Meiji Shintō shi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Kokusho kankokai), 121. 75. Such a concern was expressed by Iwakura Tomomi, the chief minister of state in 1870. Pressed by the foreign diplomats in early 1870 to stop the policy of persecuting Japanese Christians, Iwakura emphasized it was necessary, in order to maintain social order, for Japanese to have conviction in the emperor as the divine descendent of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. Christianity posed a threat to the safety of the nation because it denied the divinity of the emperor. ‘Adamusu shohan ni okeru Iwakura no tennosei kenkai,’ (1870) in Shūkyō to kokka, 314–315. 76. Sakamoto (1994) Kokka Shinto keisei katei no kenkyū, 72–79. 77. Jinja kankei hōrei shiryō (1968), 12. 78. Sakamoto (1994) Kokka Shinto keisei katei no kenkyū, 422–425. 79. Jinja kankei hōrei shiryō (1968), 54. A number of statesmen and celebrities chose the Shinto funeral to define their death, including Okubo Toshimichi (1830–1878), Iwakura Tomomi, Iwazaki Yatoro, Mori Arinori, Ichikawa Danjuro, Hirose Takeo, Futabatei Shimei, and Ito Hirobumi. Their publicized Shinto way of death was more than an issue of personal option; it also translates into an ideological stance. The very possibility and use of marking one’s own death as Shinto foregrounds the ideological valence of Shinto in Meiji Japan. See Koretsune Keisuke (2002) Meijijin no osōshiki (Tokyo: Gendai shokan). 80. The ritual logic of purity was shared by people in the government. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sawa Nobuyoshi, one of the staunch pro-Shinto ideologues, proposed in 1869 to the central government Dajokan to implement the Shinto funeral, both to oppose Christianity and to cleanse Japan of Buddhist influence. He argued that the Buddhist funeral could be allowed only while Shinto was too weak to counter the spread of Christianity, but

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 52

6/30/2011 12:58:23 PM

Ritual, Purity, and Power 53

81.

82.

83. 84.

85. 86. 87.

88. 89.

should eventually be banished from Japan. For Sawa the issue boils down to the question of death – ‘Any person born in the imperial land cannot die to become the ghost of India,’ Nihon gaikō bunsho (1869), 2 (3): 634. His proposal was echoed three years later by the policies proposed by the Chief Minister of State, Iwakura Tomomi, who continued patronizing indoctrination of the populace with Shinto in order to prevent Christianity. Iwakura Tomomi kankei monjo 1: 338–343. The supplementary themes comprising the doctrine of the popular indoctrination program included explicitly those that had become ‘Shinto’: ‘Human spirits do not die’ (shinkon fushi) and ‘The manifest human realm is distinguished from the invisible one of the gods’ (ken’yū bunkai). Yasumaru Yoshio (1980) Kamigami no Meiji ishin (Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho), 183. These are charges waged by Buddhist reformers such as Shimaji Mokurai, who, in their attempt to regain their social and political influence, critiqued the Meiji government’s sponsorship of a national Shinto doctrine as mixing state with religion. ‘Sanjō kyōsoku hikan kenhakusho’ (1872) in Shūkyō to kokka, 234–242. Their critique was powerful and eventually brought down the Ministry of Doctrine (Daikyōin), the ministry responsible for implementing the Shinto indoctrination program, in 1876. Hara, Takeshi (2001) Izumo to iu shisō, kindai nihon no massatsu sareta kamigami (Tokyo: Kodansha). My argument of the Meiji state’s use of religion to domesticate ‘Shinto’ benefited from reading the insightful analysis of the operations of the category of religion in the early Meiji period developed by Trent Maxey in his dissertation, ‘“The Greatest Problem:” Religion in the Politics and Diplomacy of Early Meiji Japan, 1868–1884.’ Maxey’s work argues that the early Meiji concern with religion was an integral part of developing a modern mode of political rule. The Meiji state struggled to contain the potential for shifting loyalties and contestations by separating religion from the domain of political authority. pp. 29, 34–35. See also Trent Maxey (2007) ‘The Crisis of “Conversion” and Search for National Doctrine in Early Meiji Japan,’ in Dennis Washburn and A. Kevin Reinhart (eds), Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology and Transformations of Modernity (Boston, MA: Leiden), pp. 25–26. Jinja kankei hōrei shiryō (1968), 102. Ibid., 119. Ibid., 120. The distinction between non-religious Shinto shrines and religious Sect Shinto was apparently little known as late as 1931 among the populace, as the National Association of Shinto Priests was pressed to include clarification of this distinction in the agenda of its Shrine Investigation Commission. ‘Zenkoku shinshoku kai’ (1935), Zenkoku shinshokukai enkaku shiyō, 50–52. Jinja kankei hōrei shiryō (1968), 119. The popular Shinto religious movement Ōmoto-kyo that was suppressed by the state in 1935 after phenomenal expansion both at home and overseas is an example of ‘Shinto’ that did not conform to the orthodox ideological vision. See Nancy Stalker (2008) Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburo, Oomoto, and the Rise of New Religions in Imperial Japan (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press), 45–75, 170–190.

9780230_240735_03_cha01.indd 53

6/30/2011 12:58:23 PM

2 The Mikado’s August Body: ‘Divinity’ and ‘Corporeality’ of the Meiji Emperor and the Ideological Construction of Imperial Rule Kyu Hyun Kim

How do we characterize the emperor in modern Japanese history? The general outline of the answer may go something like this: the Japanese emperor was hoisted up by the Loyalist coalition – consisting of the mid-level samurai terrorists and activists and their merchant and landlord sympathizers – against the Tokugawa bakufu as an alternative to the latter’s secular authority during the final phase of its rule. When the coalition emerged victorious (symbolically at least, in 1868), they had immediately seized upon this opportunity to plunge the country into rapid modernization. Included among their agendas was adoption and modification of the imperialist–colonialist model of the ruling structure from Europe and the United States. But such efforts went hand-in-hand with the revival of the long-dormant tradition of emperor-worship, for the purpose of integrating the nation into one nation-state. Thus, the Meiji emperor was considered not only the head of the executive branch of the government (and supreme commander of the Army and Navy) but also the ultimate patriarch and a ‘living god.’ Those who stress the particularities of Japanese militarism and fascism in the early part of the twentieth century tend to see them as always imbued with a certain flavour of religious fanaticism. It is implied, but not necessarily proven, that this peculiarly ‘religious’ character of the modern Japanese emperor is traceable to its origins in the Meiji period. During the Pacific War, there was a strong motivation on the part of Allied Powers to portray their ‘Oriental’ enemy as irrational, fanatical, anti-modern, and in some ways overwhelmingly religious, centred on the seemingly absurd 54

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 54

6/30/2011 12:59:03 PM

The Mikado’s August Body

55

notion of the Shōwa Emperor as the divine presence (most memorably illustrated in Frank Capra’s excellently mounted wartime propaganda Why We Fight, in which the clips of the ordinary Japanese taking deep bows at one another out of politeness are accompanied by the narration reassuring the viewers that the Japanese are always ‘worshipping ancestor spirits in everyday life’). Against this old image, which still exercises strong iconic–ideological power over the ‘Western’ imaginary, 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.1 Yet there is much that we still do not understand about the nature of the Meiji emperor’s power, especially in the areas in which his religious, cultural, and political authorities overlapped with one another. For instance, what does it mean exactly that (some, many or most) Japanese regarded him as a ‘living god?’ Did that kind of ‘reverence’ really translate into the identification of the Meiji emperor with the Japanese nation itself, so that a patriotic soldier mortally wounded in the First Sino-Japanese War would feel that he was personally dying for the sake of the emperor? What institutional and ontological features did the Meiji state leaders attribute to the emperor, and for what purposes? In other words, was the Meiji emperor still a puppet figure subject to a much more refined and elaborate web of controlling strings, or a powerful king whose charisma was indeed imbued with a certain religious character? How are we to interpret a set of apparatuses – iconic representations, extensive national tours, the reformulated Shinto rituals performed by the emperor and so on – that bound him to the Japanese people? This chapter seeks to address some of these vexing questions by exploring the ideological construction of the Meiji emperor, with a particular attention paid to his ‘divinity’ and ‘corporeality.’ By doing so, it will also raise some questions regarding the foundational aspects of the so-called emperor system ideology, often alluded to or assumed as always ‘already there’ in most English-language studies of modern Japan, but seldom analyzed beyond its intellectual construct. Some scholars and commentators might think that the Meiji emperor is a stale topic, exhaustively discussed in both Japanese and English, and that therefore nothing fresh can be said about it. They are wrong. Hopefully, even those who are not convinced of the ideas and arguments laid out

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 55

6/30/2011 12:59:03 PM

56

Kyu Hyun Kim

below will find them at least stimulating enough to be encouraged to take a new look into one of the most enigmatic issues of Japanese civilization: the resilience, adaptability, and seemingly paradoxical nature of the emperor, both before and after the Meiji Restoration.

The Mikado as a sacerdote: the Japanese Emperor in the early modern period It is well known that during the late medieval and early modern periods of Japanese history, spanning approximately four-and-a-half centuries from Ashikaga Yoshimitsu’s near-usurpation of the imperial lineage around 14082 to the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the Japanese emperor was a ‘weak’ entity, under the thumb of the Ashikaga and later Tokugawa bakufu and forced to withstand sometimes quite humiliating interventions into and constraints over his will and behaviour.3 Some scholars, however, have argued recently that the Japanese emperor in the early modern period was not completely powerless, and that he (or she) continued to lay claim to a certain level of spiritual and cultural capital – although these scholars have not quite formed a consensus regarding the precise influence of the early modern emperor on the development of the Loyalist nationalism that eventually toppled the Tokugawa regime.4 The emperor’s ‘power’ carried over from the late medieval period was predominantly that of a spiritual or religious authority, not so much as the central figure in Japan’s identity vis-à-vis the ‘West’ (traditionally regarded by the Japanese as the ‘Southern Barbary,’ since Westerners first arrived from the south) or China, but an institutional figure with the ability to confer mostly tradition-bound prestige on his select ‘subjects’ and to help bring order and stability to the empirical universe through fulfilment of his sacerdotal and ritualistic duties. While it would be rash to call this emperor ‘powerless,’ his power still falls greatly short of the authority he was allowed to command after the Meiji Restoration. What is noteworthy is that the Tokugawa bakufu, despite its overwhelming dominance over the imperial institution in Kyoto in terms of political and military power, in the end saw it as beneficial to exploit the latter for its own purposes. This does not mean that the Tokugawa regime did not attempt to extend its power into the domain of the emperor, of course. In a sense, the elevation of Tokugawa Ieyasu, whose body was interred in the Eastern Shining Capital at Nikkō Shrine, to a ‘divine’ status (as Tōshōgū Daikongen) was precisely such an attempt. The Nikkō shrine, in fact, was

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 56

6/30/2011 12:59:03 PM

The Mikado’s August Body

57

said to have kept an internal tradition of ‘teaching’ that put the Sannō deity enshrined in it above the imperial ancestress, the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. (It is hypothesized today that the Sannō deity was never worshipped in ancient times and is, in fact, close to a being fabricated out of whole cloth). The bakufu routinely intervened in not only the court’s decision to determine imperial successors, but also the ruling emperor’s personal relationships with his ‘followers,’ such as his prerogative to bestow titles and honours. One of the most insulting practices by the Tokugawa regime was its directives to the court in 1613 and 1615 that forbade the emperor to bestow purple robes on temple abbots without the shogun’s permission. (The bestowal of these robes, adapted from a Chinese practice, was considered to be the highest honour for Buddhist priests.) When the perennially irritable Emperor Go-Mizu-no-o (r. d. 1611–1629) went ahead and did so anyway, the bakufu angrily countermanded and forfeited the emperor’s directives, in some cases resorting to tearing up the robes in public view, greatly humiliating both the Buddhist institutions and the emperor. The Daitokuji and Myōshinji abbots found this act intolerable and protested with formal letters to the shogun. For their trouble, they were exiled to remote islands.5 This insult finally pushed Emperor Mizu-no-o to abdicate his throne to his daughter (Empress Meishō, r. d. 1629–1643),6 completely ignoring the rules of conduct laid down by the shogun and thus precipitating a serious crisis in the bakufu–court relationship. Another source of conflict was the emperor’s right to travel outside Kyoto. Such travel was strictly banned by the Tokugawa except for occasions when the bakufu demanded the emperor’s audience, as in 1626, when Emperor Go-Mizuno-o travelled to Nijō castle, then presided over by Hidetada and Iemitsu. This travel ban was broken only at the very end of the Tokugawa rule in 1863, when the openly anti-foreign Emperor Kōmei travelled to Kamo shrine to pray for the expulsion of ‘Western barbarians.’ And yet, the problem of Go-Mizu-no-o’s abdication was ultimately resolved with the bakufu backing down from confronting and suppressing the imperial will. Instead, the shogun allowed Go-Mizu-no-o to abdicate unilaterally, even to a female successor, although, with his patriarchal ideology derived from Confucianism, the shogun found this act seriously offensive if not totally incomprehensible. Given the Kyoto court’s traditional relationship with the daimyo, military houses and commoners of the Kinai region, geopolitical considerations must have played a part in this and other cases of ultimate leniency of the bakufu toward the recalcitrant behaviour of the emperors. Yet, even within the bakufu government itself, many were unhappy with the prospect of a

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 57

6/30/2011 12:59:03 PM

58

Kyu Hyun Kim

prolonged or drastic confrontation with the court. They were not predisposed to see the power conflict between the emperor and the shogun as a zero-sum game. To cite but one example, Hosokawa Tadaoki, a stalwart, loyal general of the Tokugawa for forty years, authored a secret report to Shogun Hidetada essentially defending Emperor Go-Mizunoo’s rash abdication. Hosokawa was highly critical of the insults and slights perpetrated by the military houses against the court: he even intimated that the bakufu brought the practice of infanticide and assassination of children into the court in order to control succession.7 Indeed, we can see that the court succeeded in expanding its influence in cultural and religious matters during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, despite the strict constraints imposed by the bakufu. One indication was the revival of the Great Thanksgiving Festival (Daijōsai) in 1687 by Emperor Higashi-yama, a practice discontinued for 221 years, since the Ashikaga bakufu. The Great Thanksgiving, originally a recapitulation of the Festival of the First Fruits (Niinamesai), during which the emperor partakes of the year’s new crops along with the ancestral deities, became closely associated with the crowning of the new emperor. Even Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who apparently was more open than the Tokugawa shoguns to the ideology of Japan as a ‘divine country’ and thus to respecting the religious authority of the imperial house, did not bother to revive the Daijōsai. Of course, the shogun showed who really called the shots by meddling in the procedural aspects of the Festival. But why did the Fifth Shogun Tsunayoshi, not known to be particularly sympathetic to the native belief systems, allow its revival in the first place? Takano Toshihiko argues that this was not a reflection of a long-term trend but a brief eruption of a ‘restorationist’ drive during the reign of Emperor Reigen (r. d. 1663–1687). Following his retirement, the bakufu did put considerable constraint on Reigen’s personal power and strengthened bureaucratic control of the major court nobles (including by the establishment of the ‘Advisory Councilor (Gisō)’ position, answerable, along with the Military House Adviser (Buke densō), only to the bakufu). Still, the Tokugawa regime allowed the court considerable leeway to restore its ancient splendour, albeit incrementally and always under its supervision. It permitted the court to repair the tomb of Emperor Yūryaku (r. d. allegedly 456–479) with funds it provided; the court was also able to revive the Liberation of Living Creatures Ceremony (Hōjōe) at the Iwashimizu Hachiman Shrine in 1679.8 The bakufu certainly would have needed the court to fulfil its part in the rites-based social order, to which the Tokugawa regime around the

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 58

6/30/2011 12:59:03 PM

The Mikado’s August Body

59

time of Tsunayoshi was committed ideologically. Takano believes that the late seventeenth-century Tokugawa regime’s intention was not to allow the court real autonomy but to incorporate it into a bakufu rule based on rites (girei) rather than military authority – ‘rites’ being the Confucian cornerstone of a stable, hierarchical social order in which every member is supposed to know his or her ‘station’ in life.9 This functional separation between the sacerdotal emperor and the administrative–military shogun could have been maintained as a peaceful coexistence so long as the former lacked any real coercive power to challenge the latter’s authority in the secular realm. And yet the situation can be read in another way: that the Tokugawa house was not able to directly maintain its spiritual hegemony over the masses, and had to depend on the court for this purpose. As Japan moved toward the nineteenth century, more and more people made a pilgrimage to the Ise shrine, where the three ‘treasures’ of the imperial house were kept, and the Eastern Shining Capital gradually lost its spiritual authority, despite the bakufu’s attempt to encourage pilgrimage to it. Confucian thinkers who regarded the shogun as, in essence, the monarch of Japan nonetheless subscribed in varying degrees to the model of a sacerdotal emperor who contributed in his own way to the stability of the bakufu–domain order. Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), the founder of the influential Kogaku (Ancient Studies) school of Neo-Confucianism, strongly believed in the kingly authority of the shogun. Yet he also believed in the materiality of ‘spirits’ (including both demons (oni) and gods (kami)) and regarded those who ‘consort’ with the spirits as potential deviants and trouble-makers, existing outside the proper Confucian social order. He then assigned a significant role to the Kyoto court for ‘managing’ these spirits through the conduct of proper rites, including ancestor worship and rituals aimed at appeasing Heaven.10 Thus, interestingly enough, in Sorai’s worldview, the emperor falls outside the purview of Confucian statecraft and yet is allowed to dominate the realm of the unknowable and the mysterious, the very world Confucius in the Analects claimed to have no interest in (and yet the existence of which he did not explicitly deny). In the mid- to late eighteenth century, Kokugaku (Nativist Studies) arose as a new intellectual trend. In their criticism and rejection of Buddhism and Confucianism as ‘foreign teachings,’ Kokugaku scholars privileged the position of the Japanese emperors as sacred descendants of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. The most important Nativist theorist, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), did agree with Sorai and other Confucian thinkers in that he also saw the emperor as primarily the

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 59

6/30/2011 12:59:03 PM

60

Kyu Hyun Kim

leader of the ‘spiritual’ domain, even if, unlike the Confucian scholars, he undoubtedly believed in the literal, transcendental divinity of the emperor. It is clear that he was no more interested in explicitly politicizing the emperor as a potential alternative to the shogunal authority than Sorai was. Yasumaru Yoshio presents one of the most innovative and persuasive interpretations of Norinaga’s philosophy I have ever read, in which he argues that Norinaga’s conception of the kami (gods) presupposed the realm of the unknowable that could not be understood by the rational investigation of Confucian scholarship: for him, the expression ‘it does not match the principle (dōri ni awanai)’ had no connotation of ‘it is wrong’ or ‘it is evil,’ as in Confucian usage. For Norinaga, the world could not be understood in terms of ‘principles’ or the Way: neither could the gods be understood through the human category of morality. In other words, the gods are beyond good and evil. To this Norinaga added that the gods were for the most part tolerant, generous beings, allowing nature to flower into a myriad of empirical phenomena. Yasumaru compares Norinaga’s intellectual orientation to ‘conservatism’ as designated by Karl Mannheim, but also argues that his ideas contain a streak of non-judgmental, anti-rigoristic ‘liberalism,’ in that he readily, unquestioningly accepts ‘nature as it stands’ – as, for instance, when he criticizes the excessive sobriety and lack of tolerance in ritual procedures intended for the gods.11 As a whole, the eighteenth-century versions of Kokugaku and Confucianism were still some distance away from tapping the court’s political energy, much less mobilizing it against the shogun. True, there were occasional controversial figures like Yamagata Daini (1725–1767), author of a treatise that strongly advocated bringing back the imperial institution to its former splendour, and included an alarmingly critical portrait of current Japanese society as ‘ignorant’ and ‘susceptible to evil Christian influences.’ Still, if looked into closely, his Loyalism was rather murky in content: it is hard to believe that he seriously contemplated mounting a political challenge to the bakufu. His exalted position in the lineage of emperor-centrism really is based on the fact that he was executed by the bakufu. Yet, as Bob Wakabayashi and others make clear, his execution was probably a product of political struggles in the Obata domain and had little to do with his ideas per se.12 By the early nineteenth century, we face a new situation, as both domestic and international circumstances shifted toward greater instability. The growth of a commercial economy and metropolitan cities resulted in a significant decline in the economic lives of the samurai as well as an increasing income gap between the wealthy and the poor.

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 60

6/30/2011 12:59:03 PM

The Mikado’s August Body

61

The domains, except for a few which survived through implementation of draconian mercantilist policies, became financially burdened to the point that some nearly went bankrupt. The reform measures instituted by a succession of Head Councillors, including Matsudaira Sadanobu (1759–1829) and Mizuno Tadakuni (1794–1851), mostly retrenchment and frugality campaigns along with a few creative touches, gradually lost even their short-term efficacy. Everywhere, and especially in the northeast, the social order showed signs of breakdown: gamblers, migrant labourers and usurers became the objects of official concern. New religions and chiliastic faith practices sprang up with an alarming frequency. In addition to these domestic problems, the Russian threat from the north and British naval incursions along Japanese shores – beginning with the ship Phaeton disguising itself as a Dutch vessel and infiltrating the port of Nagasaki in 1808, an incident that cost the life of the Nagasaki magistrate – developed an uneasy sense of ‘Barbarians Knocking at the Door’ for the bakufu, which was thoroughly ill-equipped to mount a nationwide coastal defence of any effectiveness. The increasing awareness of the ‘Western threat,’ along with disenchantment with the bakufu’s ability to maintain social order, subtly impacted Confucian and Kokugaku thought. Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), obsessed with the construction of a coherent cosmological order presided over by a Jehova-like Great God Ōkuni-nushi, made fascinating use of the latest Western scientific theories. For instance, the Copernican theory of revolution was employed to explain the primacy of Sun Goddess Amaterasu and of Japan the Divine Land over other nations of the world. Likewise, when he learned about the Biblical description of Noah’s flood, he was overjoyed to discover that in China there were ancient descriptions of flood, but not in Japan: this just went to prove how special Japan was. But Hirata had a strong mystical side, too: he ‘channeled’ the spirits of divine demi-gods and accepted the ‘information’ transmitted by them as empirical facts. He believed that there physically was a place called the Island of Women, and also that he had actually visited the Land of the Dead (Yomi), where he famously met and consulted the spirit of Motoori Norinaga, whom he had never met in ‘real life.’ But, rather than in the obscurantist cosmology he was attempting to perfect, Hirata’s influence was more clearly felt, in the end, in his fairly relentless pursuit of the notion of Japan and the imperial lineage as sui generis and superior to any other corollaries in the world. Hirata was not alone in incorporating the new sensitivity to the ‘West’ and an increasingly apocalyptic vision of Japan’s future into a

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 61

6/30/2011 12:59:03 PM

62 Kyu Hyun Kim

new national consciousness within which the emperor’s position was elevated and expanded beyond that of a sacerdote. Confucian thinkers had also begun to show interest in the potential of the imperial authority to ‘combat’ the ‘Western religious forces.’ Aizawa Seishisai, a scholar in Mito domain and a participant in the domain’s gargantuan project of historical publication, The History of Japan, authored in 1825 a treatise titled New Theses; it was not published until 1857, although privately circulated among elite policymakers. In New Theses Aizawa absorbed the Nativist theory of the inherent uniqueness and superiority of the Japanese polity, calling it kokutai (national body). Aizawa was affected by his experience interviewing shipwrecked British sailors in 1824, and decided that the strength of European nations came from their ideological convictions, based on Christianity. Perhaps taking the Anglican Church as a model, he (erroneously) believed that European nations all promoted one single national religion. Aizawa claimed that the Japanese too must draw upon the idea of kokutai, to be centred on the imperial house, having rejected Buddhism, Shintoism and Confucian philosophy as candidates for an effective countervailing ideology against Christianity. Yet Aizawa, like Hirata, was never radical enough to envision a Japan in which the Tokugawa bakufu itself was seen as an illegitimate regime.13 During the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, the Kyoto court took several initiatives, including providing sustenance to citizens who wished to make the ‘one-thousand-times pilgrimage’ to the imperial palace as a spiritual counter-measure against the Tenmei famine (1782–1788). This enhanced the court’s prestige among Osaka area shrines, whose priests vied for court ranks of the fourth and fifth levels. Interestingly, Matsudaira and other bakufu leaders by the early nineteenth century had come to accept the theory that the shogun’s right to ‘national governance’ was ‘entrusted’ by the emperor (taisei ininron). In Matsudaira’s formulation this notion of the nation entrusted by the emperor to the shogun was tied to the functional differentiation of their roles (shokubun) and was predominantly employed to prevent the court from challenging the latter’s secular authority. In this formulation, the emperor had a certain job, presumably to attend to spiritual matters, and the shogun had the job of actually ruling the nation. During Mizuno Tadakuni’s reign (1812–1817), the circumstances were so dire for the bakufu that those who were worried about the anti-bakufu camp joining forces with the pro-emperor groups, such as the Mito lord Tokugawa Nariaki, counselled the bakufu to be even more respectful and deferential to the court. There was a brief interlude when the bakufu forcibly

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 62

6/30/2011 12:59:03 PM

The Mikado’s August Body

63

shot down Emperor Kōkaku’s (r. d. 1780–1817) effort to bestow the title of ‘emperor’ retrospectively on his father, Prince Sukehito. However, Fujita Satoru argues that this was a one-off affair for the bakufu, and subsequently under the leadership of Mizuno no further strong-armed tactics were used against the court’s initiative to increase its prestige. And the court noble Nakayama Naruchika (1741–1814), punished by the bakufu as the culprit behind this incident, was transformed into a heroic defender of the court’s right as the true ruler of Japan in various popular novels.14 There is still no accepted consensus among historians of Japan regarding the precise relationship between the Meiji Restoration and late Tokugawa Loyalism, which encompassed thinkers and political figures as diverse as the unlucky Yamagata Daini, the Mito domain lord Tokugawa Mitsukuni (1628–1701), the Mito scholars Fujita Yūkoku (1774–1826) and Aizawa Seishisai and the Nativist Hirata Atsutane. However, our brief survey so far highlights two aspects. First, the spiritual authority of the emperor, which had become accepted as a functional component of the bakufu–domain system, was gradually politicized following the systemic crises of the early nineteenth century, specifically in the form that merged the sacerdotal and administrative functions of the monarch into a unified whole. Secondly, despite its impressive resilience (to adopt the term used by Lee Butler, 2002), the imperial institution in early modern Japan was still far removed from the real possibility of asserting its exclusive sovereignty against the shogun. This situation did not change immediately after the bakufu’s existence became forfeit with the return of the ‘fiefdom’ by the last shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu (in line with the notion of ‘entrustment of national governance’). Consequently, in the early years of the Meiji period we witness an attempt to erase this functional differentiation between the sacerdote and the king, based on the principle of ‘unity of rites and governance (saisei itchi)’ that, had it been put into permanent practice, would have indeed resulted in a quasi-theocratic, absolute monarchy.

The Mikado as a living god: the Meiji Emperor between the religious and secular realms For about three or four years following the declaration of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, it appeared that the folkloric beliefs in the emperor’s ‘divinity’ and the fledgling imperial government’s commitment to creating a national Shinto system, countermanding yet paralleling the curiously monolithic conception of ‘Christianity’ found in Aizawa

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 63

6/30/2011 12:59:03 PM

64

Kyu Hyun Kim

Seishisai’s treatise, could combine to result in a genuine revival of state Shinto, a bona fide national religion. In this conception of the Meiji monarch, the teenage Mutsuhito would be both a ‘living god,’ a corporeal incarnation of the imperial spirit inherited through the ‘unbroken lineage’ of the imperial house since Amaterasu, and the supreme patriarch and head of the kokutai (national body), the unique form of the divinely created Japanese nation that distinguished it from other ‘naturally conceived’ nations.15 This conception of ‘national Shinto’ is succinctly summarized in a wartime (1944) text entitled The True Meanings of Shinto Shrines (Jinja hongi): The Great Japanese Empire is a nation Duly Created by the Great Sun Goddess Amaterasu, the Imperial Ancestor, from whom the unbroken lineage for ten thousand generations is descended to the current Emperor. The Emperor thus rules our land for all eternity following the principles laid out in the Divine Edicts from times immemorial. This is what we call the incomparable kokutai of our land ... The Emperor of each succeeding generation is of one body with the Imperial Ancestor, and rules Japan as a living God (akitsumigami) from whom flows the great and boundless sacred virtue. The people of Japan ... [following the leadership of the Emperor] form together a great family-state (ichidai kazoku kokka) based on the principle of conjoining of the monarch and the people, utterly unique in the world.16 As we can see, this conception of the emperor as a living God (‘God’ with a capital ‘G,’ unambiguously superior over other deities) combines the elements of the Hirata School of Kokugaku, the Mito ideology reflected in the thoughts of Aizawa Seishisai, and a rather secular conception of the organic state headed by an absolute monarch. The earlier attempt to create a State Shinto system that consolidated all Shinto shrines into one hierarchical order was strongly pushed by a group of Shinto specialists, especially those surrounding the eleventh Tsuwano domain lord Kamei Koremi (1825–1885). Among them were Kokugaku scholar Yano Harumichi (1823–1887), whose proposal for establishing a state-sponsored ‘Loyalist Academy’ was positively regarded by the new imperial regime; Hirata Kanetane (1799–1880), the scion of the Hirata school; and Fukuba Bisei (1831–1901), the young Meiji emperor’s tutor. Between 1868 and 1872, they were able to push through the agenda of instituting the Meiji emperor as a figure who combined the secular and religious authority of a monarch and a sacerdote in accord

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 64

6/30/2011 12:59:03 PM

The Mikado’s August Body

65

with the ‘unity of rites and governance’ (saisei itchi). They established the Ministry of Divinity (or of ‘Kami Affairs,’ Jingikan)17 that oversaw the ‘separation’ of Buddhism and Shinto and the suppression of the former; established the Shōkonsha in Kyoto Higashiyama, where the spirits of ‘patriots’ were enshrined (its Tokyo branch later became the notorious Yasukuni Shrine of the War Dead); and they planned the incorporation of all shrines throughout Japan into one hierarchical system.18 They were also behind the Five Article Charter Oath, sworn in by the Meiji Emperor on April 5 (lunar calendar 3/13), 1868, and eventually seized upon by the liberal critics of the Meiji government during the parliamentarian movement to justify their demand for the creation of a representative government.19 Despite its eventual role as evidence of the Meiji emperor’s commitment to power-sharing and an open form of government, the Oath itself was strikingly religious, confirming the Meiji emperor’s position as the ‘hub’ through which the supernatural realm of the kami (gods) was interconnected with the secular domain of national politics. 20 The Oath’s message, however, was indeed one of ‘consultation’ and ‘openness’ rather than a declaration of the emperor’s ‘absolutism.’ Neither did it contain any provision for the Meiji emperor to proclaim his status as superior to all other gods. The Meiji state did attempt to consolidate the Shinto shrines, which were more or less independent throughout the early modern period, into a national hierarchy with the Ise Shrine at the top, and to extend the worship of specific kami enshrined in them to the private altars of each household. And yet, by 1871, the Shinto nationalization movement stumbled upon a set of obstacles. There were serious theological disagreements, for instance, between the Hirata school and followers of the Tsuwano domain’s Shinto scholar Ōkuni Takamasa (1793–1871). Perhaps the bigger problem was that the leaders of the Restoration government, former sonnō jōi activists such as Ōkubo Toshimichi, Kido Takayoshi and Itō Hirobumi, and court nobles such as Iwakura Tomomi and Sanjō Saneomi, were men of rather pragmatic disposition. It appears that they grew tired of the Kokugaku scholars’ rigid formalism or ideological commitment to the emperor’s role as a sacerdote.21 For the Restoration leaders, the emperor now had a new ‘job:’ that of a monarch commanding the administrative–executive power of a fledgling new nation. Few of them treated him as a transcendental, trans-human figure, although they were sharply aware of the importance of his spiritual charisma, even possibly his folkloric prestige as a supernatural being among the masses (see below).

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 65

6/30/2011 12:59:04 PM

66

Kyu Hyun Kim

The attitude of the Restoration leadership toward the Meiji emperor is most clearly reflected in Ōkubo’s 1868 proposal for moving the imperial capital to Osaka. In this document, he strongly denounces the way the emperor in the early modern period has been ‘confined inside the holy residence and kept from interacting among the people except for a few court nobles,’ which has led to ‘abandonment of his venerable task (shokushō) bestowed by Heaven, to serve as a parent to the people.’ As a consequence, the people have come to regard the emperor as a well-nigh supernatural being who ‘lives above the clouds’ and whose ‘august body never treads on the earth,’ and the emperor has come to see ‘himself as excessively pompous and precious, resulting in the current regrettable custom of keeping distance from those below.’22 There is not a shred here of the expected religious reverence towards a supernatural ‘god,’ much less towards the ‘God’ supposed to reign supremely over other deities by dint of his direct ancestral connection to the Sun Goddess. Far more telling is the Satsuma statesman’s usage of the term ‘task’ or ‘job’ (shokushō) for the monarch, indicating a strongly functionalist understanding of the latter’s role. Inasmuch as the Japanese were willing to follow his leadership, the Meiji emperor had a duty to expose as much of his corporeal presence as he could to the Japanese people, so that the latter would embrace him as an immanent, as opposed to transcendental, leader of the nation. Even though not so starkly functionalist as Ōkubo’s vision, the court noble Iwakura Tomomi’s notion of the monarch was similarly nonmystical and non-absolutist. In a memorandum regarding the young emperor’s education written in 1874, Iwakura argued for the emperor’s position being akin to a parent of the Japanese people, yet also clearly stated that his power of judgment was ‘leased from Heaven to the king in order to rule the people’ with justice and righteousness, and such power is ‘by no means the king’s private possession.’ Iwakura then, surprisingly, praises the founder of his erstwhile enemy the Tokugawa bakufu, Ieyasu, for understanding the cardinal principle that most of the evils in the world originate from poverty. The Meiji emperor must not follow the example of autocratic emperors from history, such as Xihuangdi, the first emperor of China.23 Iwakura’s view is strongly redolent of the Confucian idea of monarchy, including the notion of the Mandate of Heaven, and a far cry from the radical Shintoist conception of the Japanese emperor as sui generis and particular to Japanese history. With Shintoist absolutism losing favour in government circles, undermined not only by the irritation of secularist leaders but also by the Buddhist counter-criticism ably mounted by men like Shimaji

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 66

6/30/2011 12:59:04 PM

The Mikado’s August Body

67

Mokurai, a Buddhist priest with a strong modernistic bent, the Ministry of Divinity was eliminated in 1872 and replaced by the Ministry of Doctrine. Both Buddhist and Shinto priests were appointed as Doctrinal Officers (kyōdōshoku), still under the ideological rubric of the unity of rites and governance. However, within the Ministry of Doctrine too, the national consolidation of various Shinto factions ultimately proved impossible. The Ministry had to allow various Shinto factions to maintain substantive autonomy over their shrines. Pressure from the Foreign Ministry in favour of free practice of the Christian faith within Japan also pushed the government in the direction of a ‘separation of rites and governance (seikyō bunri).’ It is true that a strong anti-Christian sentiment existed among some conservative government members, especially the emperor’s Confucian tutor Motoda Eifu (1818–1891). Also, the Home Minister Yamagata Aritomo was reluctant to openly ‘acknowledge’ freedom of faith for Christians for a more ‘practical’ reason: the fear of inciting large-scale religious conflict between them and their persecutors. Possibly in order to appease such opponents, the Meiji government managed to avoid mentioning Christianity by name in its directive to abolish the Ministry of Doctrine; but its permission to conduct funerary rites ‘in the manner of any religious faith’ clearly pointed to a substantive freedom of religion for Christians. Motoda Eifu had continued in the anti-Christian lineage of Aizawa Seishisai and other Loyalist discourse in the late Tokugawa period and championed the notion of ‘national teaching (kokukyō),’ which was, interestingly, not exactly an inculcation of Confucianism as an organized religion. He expressed this vision in a memorandum titled ‘The General Principle of Teachings and Learnings (Kyōgaku daishi, August 1879),’ wherein he criticized the ‘Western-style education’ promoted by the Meiji state for prioritizing knowledge and technology above morality and values. Against this Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), now Home Minister and one of the major leaders of the state, presented a counter-argument in which he contended that it is not the task of the government to manage the academic, moral, and religious values of the nation: it should be the task of the ‘wise scholars’ to ‘mediate between the ancient and the new, study the classics and establish the teachings of a nation.’ Motoda’s reply was aptly conservative, arguing that what he meant by a ‘national teaching’ is not about ‘establishing something anew’ but merely to ‘return to the ancient,’ including following the lessons of our ancestors.24 Yet, it is also notable that, despite the government’s rejection of the notion of ‘national teaching,’ following the above exchange, the idea of Zhu Xi-Confucian ‘moral self-cultivation (shūshin)’ became actively

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 67

6/30/2011 12:59:04 PM

68

Kyu Hyun Kim

integrated into school textbooks (the Education Ministry adopted Shōgaku shūshin-kun [Lessons of Moral Self-Cultivation for the Elementary School], authored by another Confucian intellectual, Nishimura Shigeki, in 1880, for instance), and other ‘Western enlightenment’-oriented texts by the likes of Fukuzawa Yukichi, Katō Hiroyuki and other Western Studies scholars were dropped from the basic curricula. Motoda’s constitutional view also gave unambiguous supremacy to the values of ‘benevolence, righteousness, correct rites, loyalty, filial piety and honesty’ and positioned the emperor as possessing the absolute authority over ‘all teachings in the nation.’ In Motoda’s conception, the emperor was to serve not only as the moral centre of the nation but also as its spiritual leader, standing above all religious faiths.25 Likewise, the ‘freedom of religion’ codified in the Imperial Constitution, promulgated in 1889, simply meant for Motoda that the government refused to take sides with a specific religion. In his mind, this new policy confirmed the truth that the emperor was not merely a hierophant of a particular faith, be it called Shinto or whatever else. For Motoda, this decision did not remove the unassailable necessity for a national doctrine, which now is disencumbered of the designation of a ‘religion,’ centred on the figure of the emperor, the doctrine that towered over mere individual faiths.26 In the end, what the Meiji government agreed upon was to strip national Shinto of any ‘religiosity’ and keep it as a system of national rituals. In the long term, this was an astute decision: instead of fighting over theological or metaphysical issues, the Shinto shrines were confined to the overseeing of ‘rites,’ upon which the nation-state could impose its own ideological objectives. Just months before the establishment of the National Diet, both local Shinto priests and Shintoist élites, as well as Motoda, Sasaki, and other ‘conservatives,’ lobbied hard to re-establish the Ministry of Divinity, this time designed to ensure that Shinto rites were ‘distinguished’ from other religious rituals and put under direct control of the government. Freedom of religion was clearly thought to be a potential threat to the ‘national body’ and therefore the authority of the emperor in the minds of Sasaki and Yamada Akiyoshi. Against this, Inoue Kowashi, responsible for steering the constitutionmaking efforts of the government toward the Prussian model, objected, stating that ‘rites of celebrating and paying respect to gods (kami) must be considered a part of religious affairs,’ and that as such they ‘belong to the society in general and not the concerns of the state.’27 In the end, having a national office that privileged the Shinto church structure over other religions was too much of a direct contradiction to the principle of freedom of religion.

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 68

6/30/2011 12:59:04 PM

The Mikado’s August Body

69

At this point, I would like to consider the very notion of the emperor as a ‘living god.’ Drawing upon the achievements of anthropologists and folklore studies (minzokugaku) scholars, I want to state that the idea of the emperor as a ‘living god’ has no intrinsic political meaning. It certainly does not automatically mean that he was an object of fanatical worship or that Japanese soldiers could justify their suicidal missions by invoking his divinity. Military atrocities have been committed on the basis of patriotism, nationalism, imperialism and just plain racism (as in ‘ethnic cleansing’) without much help from fanatical religious beliefs. Neither is the concept of a living god as absurdly superstitious as some ‘Western’ commentators might think. After all, how many Europeans or Americans would directly tell those who apparently believe that a Jewish carpenter who lived nearly 2,000 years ago was a living God that they were absurdly superstitious? Kozawa Hiroshi, who has conducted much research into the phenomenology of the ‘living god’ in Japanese culture, situates the Japanese notion of living god (ikigami) in the context of the interchangeability of kami (gods) and human beings, rather than in any hierarchical relationship between them. In this scheme, transcendental deities bereft of ‘human characteristics’ had their chance to assume a dominant position in medieval Japan – to cite two examples: the belief in Amida Buddha in Shinran’s exultation of ‘pure faith’ for the True Pure Land Buddhist sect, and the mass conversion to Catholicism following the coming of Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century – but these transcendental deities were suppressed largely for political reasons. In fact, it was again in early modern Japan that the ‘gods’ closed the gap between themselves and people, so much so that there was a form of ‘leveling of social differences’ in the supernatural realm. The emperor’s status as ‘living god’ was rooted in this long tradition of collapsing the distance between kami and human beings, and as such was neither a special prerogative of Shintoism nor something that the state could monopolize easily without encountering resistance.28 Kozawa notes the continued friction between ‘new religions’ such as Konkōkyō, Kurozumikyō and Ōmotokyō and the state, specifically the imperial institution, illustrating that all these new religions offered ‘alternative models of a living god’ to the faithful, as can be seen in the Konkōkyō founder Akazawa (a.k.a. Kawate) Bunji’s proclamation that the god he served and embodied, Tenchi-kane-no-kami, was God of the world, whereas Amaterasu, ancestor to the emperor, was merely the God of Japan.29 Akazawa continued to resist state efforts to incorporate his church under the hierarchical Shinto structure, claiming that ‘we do not serve the same god

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 69

6/30/2011 12:59:04 PM

70

Kyu Hyun Kim

as [national Shinto] does.’ But by the 1900s Konkōkyō leadership compromised with the government to survive under its protection, despite internal criticisms. Ironically, Ōmotokyō, which refused to become absorbed into the outwardly diverse Shinto system in the 1900s, turned distinctly reactionary by the 1920s, supporting the ‘restoration’ of divine rule to the Shōwa emperor and criticizing parliamentarian institutions – which in turn provoked brutal suppression from the government in 1935 on the pretext of lèse-majesté.30 It really took the rise of militarism and fascism in the first half of the twentieth century for the government to persecute or incorporate these ‘alternative living gods’ into its model of the family-state with the emperor as the patriarch. Folklorist Miyata Noboru has studied the response of select rural populations to the physical appearance of the Meiji emperor during his national tours: such practices as cordoning off his visitation ‘sites’ with ropes, preserving the artifacts he touched as sacred objects, hiding ‘impure things’ such as a gate to an untouchable (eta) village, and so on. However, this type of behaviour was also typically seen in the early modern period in response to a famous Buddhist priest or other religious figure and was not specifically associated with the emperor. Indeed, the Meiji government, in accord with Ōkubo’s statement above, was unhappy with the people trying to maintain too much distance from the emperor due to their folk belief in the taboo of impurity, and sent directives to the local government relaxing the standards of Shinto-style ‘spiritual cleansing.’ A semi-fictional record of the emperor’s January 1890 tour in Osaka shows the local notables and beneficiaries of modernity, such as female students of a teachers’ college, vying with one another to show ‘their best’ in Western attire (Victorian-style dresses, top hats, frock coats, satin gloves and so on). Miyata observes that other folk-belief practices such as spreading purifying sand on the road, planting strange and rare flora to greet the emperor, and preparing gifts consisting of the region’s special produce were deftly mixed in with a public display of the new symbols of nationhood, such as kites with Hinomaru (rising sun) designs on them.31 A top-level Meiji intellectual such as Fukuzawa Yukichi was merely tolerant of these aspects of the reverence for the emperor, and advanced the view that the imperial house could supplement the wise government of the intelligent and prudent bureaucrats by taking on the function of encouraging morality, good customs and the arts. His suggested mode of imperial rule was relentlessly secular and apolitical, predicated on his (perhaps slightly condescending) view that the Japanese people naturally respect the emperor as if he were their parent, as well as his

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 70

6/30/2011 12:59:04 PM

The Mikado’s August Body

71

preference for British-style constitutional monarchy.32 But we also have case studies such as that of Tanaka Sen’ya (1826–1898), a wealthy farmer in Chichibu County, Saitama Prefecture. He voluntarily celebrated Kigensetsu (the date of the mythical Emperor Jinmu’s coronation) before it was designated a national holiday, and also the Meiji emperor’s birthday, by hoisting the Hinomaru flag and bowing in the direction of the palace. Appointed Doctrinal Officer in 1874, he continued to lecture on Shinto theology and Loyalist teachings. And yet, fascinatingly, he also performed the role of a folkloric ‘medicine man,’ praying against epidemics, exorcising fox spirits from villagers, and so on. For someone like Tanaka, the emperor’s identity as a modern monarch was completely fused, without any sense of contradiction, with his ‘divine’ status as a living God.33 Thus, while it should be acknowledged that the Meiji Restoration revived the possibility of combining the sacerdotal and administrative authorities of the emperor, and that no doubt there were men like Takano Sen’ya who looked exultantly forward to the realization of such an ideal, the historical reality was that the ideal of the Meiji emperor as a divine king was never put into practice. The imperial state eventually adopted the principle of a ‘separation of rites and governance,’ largely subsuming the Meiji emperor’s sacerdotal authority under that of a secular (eventually ‘constitutional’) monarch. By the second decade of the Meiji period, the contestation within the government had come to revolve around the notion of the emperor’s ‘direct rule.’

The Mikado as father–head of the nation: corporeality, visibility and political power of the Meiji Emperor Those who seek a more fully rounded picture of the Meiji emperor will be struck by records that show the young Mutsuhito as a highly individualistic and forthright person with a good understanding of his delicate position as a symbol of ‘modern’ Japan as well as a political actor situated within a complex network of bureaucratic agencies with sometimes conflicting agendas. By the early 1870s he was surrounded by what historians call the ‘attendant’ (jiho) group that included Confucian scholars Motoda Eifu and Nishimura Shigeki and longtime Senate (Genrōin) President and arch-conservative Sasaki Takayuki (1830–1910). Deeply convinced of the Meiji emperor’s potential as an able king, they promoted the ideal of his ‘direct rule’ (shinsei). Nonetheless, they formed a distinctive cluster of ‘advisers’ around him and for most of the time behaved just like the ‘good ministers’ of the classic Confucian model,

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 71

6/30/2011 12:59:04 PM

72

Kyu Hyun Kim

whose advice the emperor must heed. Yet the Meiji emperor was no puppet to this group or any other: most importantly, he clearly saw himself as representing a progressive, modernizing force and was reluctant to play the role of a ‘conservative.’ In 1874, the imperial tutor Motoda Eifu recommended the court nobles Iwakura and Sanjō, and the former Satsuma daimyo Shimazu Hisamitsu, as well as the samurai leaders Saigō Takamori, Kido Takayoshi, and Ōkubo Toshimichi, as trustworthy ministers to the Meiji emperor.34 However, Shimazu and Saigō soon became recalcitrant figures in the government, getting involved in controversies over appointments to the Senate (Genrōin) and a proposed expedition to Korea. And the Meiji emperor reserved the right to reject initiatives developed by his top ministers, despite his strong trust in their good will and expertise. For instance, he rejected Sanjō’s proposal in July 1875 that he should undertake an imperial tour of Hokkaidō at the earliest possible date. Sanjō had argued that the northern defences, especially of the Sakhalin region, were of paramount significance and that the imperial authority must be made to reach the northernmost regions of Japan in an urgent manner. This incident strongly suggests that Sanjō wanted to distract the emperor and the ‘people’ from intra-governmental conflicts over the proposal for an expedition to Korea (which was ultimately rejected, resulting in Saigō’s resignation), but the young emperor was not amenable to such a strategy.35 The emperor also rejected Finance Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu’s plan to take out foreign loans to countermand inflation problems in 1880. Even though it was clear that Motoda, Sasaki and other ‘attendants’ around him, conservative in orientation, were all against Ōkuma’s plan for nationalistic reasons, the Meiji emperor was careful to obtain reassurance that his opposition to the Finance Minister would not result in another break-up among government leaders. He also rejected the conservative alternative to Ōkuma’s plan, that some rural taxation be paid in kind (in other words, in rice bushels), clearly stating in his edict that he ‘found it troublesome that such [a retrograde] financial policy [as collecting rural tax in kind] would be practiced today.’ Again, the Meiji emperor did not buy into the worldview of his attendant advisers, sharply indicating that he did not accept the theoretical basis of the alternative taxation policy, that is, the notion that the current financial crisis was a result of the luxurious and spendthrift lifestyle of the farming population.36 None of this, of course, means that the Meiji emperor was ‘liberal’ or ‘democratic.’ Insofar as his attitude toward the parliamentarian

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 72

6/30/2011 12:59:05 PM

The Mikado’s August Body

73

movement was concerned, he probably felt close to Itō Hirobumi’s belief that the movement was mainly conspiratorial agitations driven by economically resentful ex-samurai activists as well as Finance Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu. It was Ōkuma’s proposal for establishing a parliamentary government that precipitated the second intra-governmental crisis in 1881. The emperor was also allegedly concerned about Saionji Kinmochi, an imperial aristocrat, serving as president of the liberal newspaper Tōyō jiyū shinbun.37 While not an autocrat either in terms of the mechanisms of power accessible to him or by personal predisposition, the Meiji emperor was nonetheless well aware of his rights as a sovereign and had no intention of ‘sharing’ his authority with the parliamentarian critics of the imperial state. After the consolidation of the principles of ‘freedom of religion’ and ‘separation of rites and governance,’ and the elimination of the Office of Doctrine position in 1885, Itō Hirobumi was jointly appointed as both Prime Minister and Imperial Household Minister. He further promoted the ‘Westernization’ of the imperial institution (insisting that the Empress adopt Western dress, for instance); he also drafted and implemented the Imperial Household Laws.38 Even though Sasaki and his colleagues’ movement to make the Meiji Emperor an autocratic ruler in the classic mold failed, by the 1880s many concessions were made to expand the emperor’s position beyond that of a sacerdote. Indeed, as much as his functional–institutional capacity or personal quality, the Meiji Emperor’s corporeal body became an important element of the political order, as Aizawa Seishisai’s vague and undeveloped concept of ‘national body’ was now increasingly tied to the ‘body’ of the emperor himself. For example, it was in 1868 that the imperial institution adopted the practice of ‘one era name for one emperor,’ which extended the corporeal time of the emperor’s body, from his enthronement to his death, to the time of the entire Japanese nation (in such a way that, for instance, the Shōwa era could not ‘end’ unless the Shōwa Emperor, Hirohito, physically died).39 The emperor’s body also inscribed itself into the nation by means of a series of national holidays and celebrations, such as Kigensetsu (the date of the mythical Emperor Jinmu’s coronation), transformed in 1967 into ‘Foundation of Japan Day;’ Tenchōsetsu, the birthday of each emperor; and specifically Meijisetsu, the birthday of the Meiji emperor (November 3), which today survives as ‘Culture Day.’ These and other (presumably) non-coercive means of identifying the emperor with the nation itself, some of which are still very much in operation, are indeed ‘invented traditions’ originating from the early Meiji period.

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 73

6/30/2011 12:59:05 PM

74

Kyu Hyun Kim

Takashi Fujitani’s study shows clearly that the Meiji emperor was also incorporated into a series of state-initiated pageants, ceremonies and rituals that sustained modern Japan’s national imaginary.40 One practice among these state-sponsored ritual activities of the Meiji emperor was the national tours (junkō) that he undertook with startling frequency and urgency between 1872 and 1885, briefly referred to above as providing occasions for the local Japanese populace to directly come face to face with the fabled ‘living god.’ Especially in their early stages, imperial tours were clearly designed, following the above-mentioned dicta from Ōkubo Toshimichi, so that the emperor should no longer reside ‘above the clouds,’ to ‘showcase’ the young king to ordinary Japanese (more precisely, the local notables and élite subjects of the country outside the government). From September 1872, the Meiji Emperor was clothed in modern military uniform; by 1873, the familiar visage of Mutsuhito, a stalwart, bearded, short-haired young man with a dark, penetrating gaze in a gold-threaded black uniform was perfected, and this was how the emperor was made ‘visible’ to the people. Even though Irokawa Daikichi and Obinata Sumio are correct in pointing out that one of the critical political reasons for the imperial tours was to countermand the rising forces of parliamentarian agitations in the localities (especially the fifth junkō of 1881, conducted in conjunction with heavy mobilization of the local police), the tours also presented genuine opportunities for the population to familiarize themselves with the emperor not as a mere abstract symbol of nation or modernity, but as a corporeal, visible presence.41 During these tours, the Meiji emperor inspected Prefectural Offices, public schools, courts and military facilities (voluntarily provided by the local notables) and bestowed ‘entertainment expenses’ on the community elders, later even on public officials and district and census chiefs. Except for the tours of 1881 and 1885, the emperor was lodged in either schools or civilian residences. The local notables sometimes expanded or renovated their houses at some serious cost (reported to be thousands to tens of thousands of yen), and lobbied the Prefecture for the honour of hosting the emperor, as in the case of a Sakata landlord Watanabe Sakusaemon. After the emperor had left Sakusaemon’s newly built ‘imperial quarters,’ more than 100,000 locals visited them within ten days to ‘pay respect’ and, apparently, for sightseeing – the flamboyant and luxuriant house itself commanding much awe and respect.42 These civilian residences and ‘depots’ ‘touched’ by Mutsuhito’s auspicious body were designated as the sites of mediation between the emperor and the people, with the local notables appointed as mediating agents.

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 74

6/30/2011 12:59:05 PM

The Mikado’s August Body

75

The emperor’s 1876 tour in the northeast brought about enthusiastic participation of the rural population (some in clearly festive mood), but it was also clear that the local notables regarded the tour as an opportunity to showcase their leadership, to enhance their standing vis-à-vis the local community, and to gain further support for local development projects. This, for instance, took place during the emperor’s visit to Takasuga village, Saitama Prefecture, where a new reservoir was built mostly at civilian expense. Local notables, along with the Prefectural Governor and his men, while playing host to the emperor, laid out meticulous details of the reservoir construction and its advantages in terms of economy, transportation, and disaster relief (against flooding).43 The government was intensely aware of the objective to strike the right balance between projecting the awe-inspiring authority of the Mikado and at the same time inculcating the image of a benevolent, personable leader. A series of instructions to the police during the 1885 imperial tour shows that, while certain behaviours were strictly prohibited in a manner reminiscent of early modern practices (the police were not to wear adornments on sleeves, gloves, or spectacles; no onlookers were allowed to look down on the emperor’s coach from above), the government was trying reasonably hard not to alienate the populace from the emperor. The police were admonished regarding people who wished to make personal attempts to submit a letter or memorial to the emperor (in the manner of the protesting peasant leaders in the early modern period) that they should be instructed how to properly submit such documents, and that the police should avoid ‘harshly treating those people who might not be accustomed to proper etiquette.’ The proper way of greeting the emperor was not with a traditional kowtow (geza) but with a bowing of the upper body with hats off, while standing.44 With the decline of the parliamentarian movement in the mid-1880s, the Meiji emperor’s authority was gradually codified into ideological texts and visual implements, as Mutsuhito himself consolidated his identity as the military leader, ‘father’ of the Japanese ‘family state’ and the ‘head’ of the national organism. In 1882, Emperor Meiji issued the Rescript for Sailors and Soldiers, partly reflecting the designs of Yamagata Aritomo to keep the soldiers away from the influence of parliamentarian agitation. It is notable, however, that in this document the Meiji Emperor positioned himself as Supreme Commander of the Japanese Army and Navy, citing the ‘tradition’ that the emperor had always led the nation’s military. Such a tradition was, of course, entirely fictional. The Imperial Constitution, promulgated in 1889, put the emperor in the seat of a sovereign monarch, confirmed his

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 75

6/30/2011 12:59:05 PM

76

Kyu Hyun Kim

status as Supreme Commander of the Army and Navy, and gave him the exclusive right to declare war and peace, to impose martial law and, in essence, to suspend the Constitution. For the overwhelming majority of Japanese, the Meiji emperor was conflated with modernity – despite all the rhetoric about an ‘unbroken lineage of thousands of years.’ At the same time, the imperial state instituted a series of programs to ‘educate’ the Japanese people in the notion of Japan as a ‘national body’ (kokutai) with the emperor placed at the top as a brain or as Father of the national family. Motoda and Nishimura insisted that the nation’s public school system should include curricula that inculcated respect for uniformed authority (especially the police) as well as reverence for the Imperial Family. The Imperial Rescript on Education, promulgated in 1890, embodied this ideological program. Even though the plans by Motoda and others to put as much emphasis as possible on traditional Confucian values such as filial piety, loyalty to the monarch and harmony (actually strict hierarchy) between husband and wife were largely frustrated by Itō Hirobumi and others, who were reluctant to create a clearly defined set of ‘orthodoxies’ for the state, these values were absorbed into the public school curriculum. Also important was the manner in which the Imperial Rescript was received in schools: it was distributed with much pomp and ceremony, along with photographed images of the emperor (known as the ‘true visage’ [go-shin’ei]), and school ceremonies centred around memorization of and ritual bowing before the Rescript, regarded as ‘sacred words’ emanating from the emperor. Inoue Tetsujirō authored Chikugo engi, a commentary on the Imperial Rescript on Education, in 1891, and this was promptly approved by the Ministry of Education as an official text for teacher-training schools. Here he mixed with Confucian morality the German theory of the organic state: that the nation-state is an organism and therefore cannot be understood by such conceptual tools as class analysis; its organic totality is represented in the state. In January of the same year, a noted Christian intellectual and pacifist, Uchimura Kanzō, became a target of a persecution campaign when he was accused of not showing ‘total respect’ to the Imperial Rescript on Education and was thus deemed to have committed an act of lèsemajesté. Founder of the No-Church movement, and deeply sympathetic to Quakerism, Uchimura was, however, not a radical by any means – he was, in fact, an ardent patriot. However, he suffered a round of frightening criticisms by the press and students and was forced to resign from the First High School in February. This in turn provoked Christian and

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 76

6/30/2011 12:59:05 PM

The Mikado’s August Body

77

socialist intellectuals to lodge protests against the state’s abandonment of the principle of the separation of religion and state. Uchimura was unable to find a job for the next six years, and the rootless poverty he was subjected to was partially responsible for the sickness and death of his wife. Just how frighteningly irrational this type of ‘patriotism’ could become was illustrated by the fact that even Inoue Tetsujirō, the author of the official commentary on the Rescript, was subjected to criticism. In his text, he had riled against ‘insulting or damaging the Body of the Monarch without apparent reason.’ One reader then criticized him, asking: ‘Are you suggesting that the Monarch can be insulted or damaged if there are good reasons?’ Inoue had to promise to remove this phrase from subsequent editions of his work. Inoue and Hozumi Yatsuka, both Professors at Tokyo Imperial University, further developed the notions of kokutai and family state. They argued that, unlike in European or other Asian nations, the Imperial Couple and their subjects had a special relationship analogous to that between parents and children. Thus they collapsed together the ethics for family (filial piety), society (respect, hierarchical relationships, harmony) and state (loyalty). Hozumi went so far as to state in 1897: Our race consists of blood relatives from the same womb. The family is a small state; the state is a large family. The origin of that which links the two, and the power that unites them in the same blood relationship is belief in ancestor worship.45 The emperor who frequently visited various places and toured the entire nation was replaced by his iconic photographs – a method heartily approved by Motoda Eifu, who in 1880 had rejected the printing of a portrait of Emperor Jinmu on a yen bill for fear it would be abused in the hands of ‘lowly commoners’ and ‘peddlers.’46 Now Motoda felt confident that the Meiji emperor’s portraits could serve the same purpose as the iconographies of great scholars and saints in a school, wonderful tools for ‘imprinting’ young minds with the virtues practiced by these men.47 The government cannily plugged this new system of veneration for the emperor into the existing practice of iconographical worship: many local governments and institutions coveted the emperor’s visage, and the government doled them out to the population as rewards for excellent performance and for display of voluntary enthusiasm.48 However, even at this juncture we do not really have a conclusive answer to the question of just how effective this ideology was in infiltrating the lives of ordinary Japanese. We must heed Yasumaru Yoshio’s

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 77

6/30/2011 12:59:05 PM

78

Kyu Hyun Kim

extremely astute observation that the school presidents who jumped into fire pits trying to ‘save’ the ‘true visage’ of the emperor during the Great Kantō Earthquake and the ordinary soldiers fighting in the Russo-Japanese War, who left behind very little evidence that they ever thought much about the ‘emperor’ or ‘patriotism,’ were both subject to the ‘emperor system ideology.’49 Yasumaru’s tentative conclusion is that the people’s response to this ideology critically depended on their social status, relationship and relative distance to the power centres. Ultimately it is a question of the concentration, distribution, and contours of power, which comes in many forms. Militaristic or state-enforced coercion is only one of them.

Concluding thoughts The post-1988 Heisei emperor, today barred from assuming any real position as a national political actor per provisions in the ‘Peace Constitution’ of 1947, seems to have reverted back, in some sense, to the role of a sacerdote. However, Fujitani’s prognosis that, in contemporary Japan, ‘the people peep in on an increasingly de-auratized imperial family,’ and consequently the dilution and diminution of the emperor system ideology is inevitable, is, in my view, premature.50 The mechanisms for enforcing the identification of Japan with the Mikado’s body, largely developed in the Meiji period, are still very much in operation. And it will continue to be so, unless the Heisei emperor decides to adopt another ‘reign name’ while he is still alive, or otherwise consciously makes efforts to dissociate himself from being the living embodiment of the Japanese culture, nation, and identity. In theory, anybody can be a Japanese citizen today without a shred of association or relationship with the imperial house. In practice, one wonders if this is really conceivable for anyone who is plugged into the Japanese social matrix. This is not an easy question to resolve: even the ‘freedom of religion’ argument in the context of an actually functioning democracy can work both ways, as we have seen above. The Yasukuni Shrine establishment, for instance, continues to rebuff criticisms from Koreans and Chinese by citing the very principle of freedom of religion. In these situations, trivializing the imperial house can always backfire and galvanize support for it; with the proper stimulation of social fear, racism, and other negative sentiments, youthful indifference to the imperial house can be easily transformed into a fanatical, fact-impervious attitude of worship. True, the fanatical belief in the emperor is no different from any form of ultranationalism. What I want to point out is that depriving

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 78

6/30/2011 12:59:05 PM

The Mikado’s August Body

79

the emperor of the abstract, legalistic notions of ‘religious’ or ‘political’ authority is insufficient to deprive him of the ‘symbolic’ power that can be mobilized for this form of ultranationalism. But I do not want to emphasize Japanese ‘particularity’ either. I see no less of a problem with American political leaders deciding to start a war that will destroy thousands or tens of thousands of human lives allegedly based on their ‘Christian faith’ – and publicly admitting it. Obviously we will not come so easily to a full answer regarding what, if anything, is to be done with the emperor system. Nonetheless, I would like to end this chapter by pointing out that the question of whether or not the emperor is a ‘living god’ has never been the real problem in understanding what was ‘wrong’ with the emperor system ideology in the first half of the twentieth century – any more than the question of whether or not Jesus Christ was actually a living god is the real problem when discussing what is ‘wrong’ with the contemporary Catholic church or Protestant fundamentalism. The real problem is whether the Japanese of today are capable of avoiding the usage of the emperor as justification for aggression, destruction, discrimination, obscurantism, and the persecution of those who remain outside the scope of the ‘divine nation.’

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

cf. Hall (1973); Gluck (1986). Imatani (1990). cf. Webb (1968). cf. Wakabayashi (1986, 1991); Miyachi (1981); Imatani (1993); Butler (2002). Imatani (1993). Possibly without intending to do so, Emperor Go-Mizu-no-o thus jumpstarted the long-abandoned practice of allowing female successors to inherit the throne. There was another female emperor during the Tokugawa period, Empress Go-Sakura-machi (r. d. 1762–1771). We shall not delve deeply into the question of the ‘gendered body’ of the modern emperor in this essay, but there still remains much controversy regarding the precise meaning of the discontinuity of female succession since the ancient times, the two female emperors during the Tokugawa period, and reabandonment, as it were, of the possibility of female succession in the post-Meiji imperial lineage considerations. See, for instance, Kobayashi Shigefumi’s (2006) critique of Narikiyo Hirokazu (1999) and Yoshie Akiko (2002); also see Hayakawa Noriyo (2005) and Kobayashi Hiroshi (1992) for detailed analyses of the Meiji bureaucrat-intellectual view of the ‘masculinity’ of the modern emperor as a desirable quality. Imatani (1993). Takano (1992), 152–163.

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 79

6/30/2011 12:59:05 PM

80

Kyu Hyun Kim

9. 10. 11. 12.

Ibid., 162–163. Yasumaru (1992), 51–58. Ibid., 100–108. For an English-language biography of Yamagata Daini, consult Wakabayashi (1995); for studies of Kokugaku and Motoori Norinaga, read Matsumoto Shigeru (1970), Peter Nosco (1990) and Susan L. Burns (2003). Wakabayashi (1986). Fujita (1999), 16–18, 40–43, 71–79, 114–127. cf. Hardacre (1989). Quoted in Kozawa (2004). It is not easy to translate with precision into English various quasi-ancient institutional titles of the early Meiji Japan. Jingikan is rendered as ‘Ministry of Rites’ in some English works (cf. Thal (2005); Ketelaar (1990)). I find this translation perhaps too Confucian and functionally oriented. Hardacre (1989), 27–31; Kozawa (2004). cf. Kim (2007). See Ketelaar (1990), 87–91. cf. Hardacre (1989), 32–34. Tōyama (1988), hereafter TTK, 6–7. TTK, 119–126. Numata (2005), 269–271. Inada (1960), 436–437. Ketelaar (1990), 87–122; Yamaguchi (1999), 66–100. Numata (2005), 287–299. Kozawa (1988), 195–226. Ibid., 3–4. Kozawa (2004), 52–102. Miyata (1978), 104–109; see also Miyata (2006). Fukuzawa (1882). Yasumaru (1992), 242–246. Kunaichō (1969) Meiji Tennō-ki, Vol. 3, 298–300, hereafter MTK. MTK Vol. 3, 473–480. Itō Yukio advances the view, different from the opinions expressed here, that the Meiji emperor was unable to exercise much of his political will between 1878 and 1881 (Itō (2006), 226–232). MTK Vol. 5, 162–166, 178–182. Ibid., 310–324. Sakamoto (1991), 165–176. This system was confirmed into an Imperial Household Law in June 1979, despite the declining health of the Shōwa Emperor. Fujitani (1996). Fujitani draws upon Foucault’s use of Jeremy Bentham’s design of the ‘Panopticon,’ a prison structure in which the prisoners are subject to a totality of surveillance through the act of seeing, to argue that the Meiji emperor in these public rituals and occasions allowed him to lock his subjects in a ‘disciplinary gaze.’ Hara Takashi criticizes this view, arguing that the sense of the Japanese emperor as the head of the ‘national body’ was not accomplished during the Meiji period but much later, in the 1920s to be exact, when the mechanisms, apparatuses and technologies of mass mobilization were perfected during the time of the Taishō emperor – that is, during the regency of Crown Prince Hirohito (Hara [2001, 2002]). Moreover,

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 80

6/30/2011 12:59:05 PM

The Mikado’s August Body

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

81

Fujitani’s perspective could end up playing down the significance of the ‘corporeality’ and ‘visibility’ of the emperor. The ideological codification of the imperial pageantry and public ceremonies might only have worked due to the fact that, as Ōkubo Toshimichi had claimed in a prophetic manner, the emperor had to be ‘moved around’ and ‘seen’ directly by the people. Downplaying this aspect of the Meiji emperor may risk prematurely accepting the prescience of the ideological mechanisms that bound the Japanese people to the emperor. See a useful critique of the Foucauldian perspective regarding politics and the body in Dorinda Outram’s analysis of the body in the French Revolution (Outram [1989], 16–23). Irokawa (1966), 27–30; Obinata (1982). Sasaki (1994), 103–107. Ōtsuka (1876), 330–334. Gyōkō gokeiei (1885?). Duus (1997), 129. MTK Vol. 5, 14–15. Taki (2002), 60–61. Ibid., 188–207. Yasumaru (1992), 262–269. Fujitani (1996), 244.

Bibliography Unless otherwise specified, the city of publication is Tokyo for Japaneselanguage books and New York for English-language books. Asukai Masamichi (1989) Meiji taitei (Chikuma Shobō). Burns, Susan L. (2003) Before the Nation: Kokugaku and Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Butler, Lee (2002) Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan: Resilience and Renewal (Cambridge, MA: East Asia Center, Harvard University). Duus, Peter (1997) Modern Japan (Houghton Mifflin). Fujita Satoru (1999) Kinsei seiji-shi to tennō (Yoshikawa Kōbunkan). Fujita Shōzō (1974) Tennōsei kokka no shihai genri (Miraisha). Fujitani Takashi (1996) Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press). Fukuzawa Yukichi (1959 [1882]) ‘Teishitsu-ron,’ in Tomita Masafumi and Tsuchibashi Shun’ichi (eds) Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshū. Vol. 6 (Iwanami Shoten). Gluck, Carol (1986) Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in Late Meiji Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Gyōkō keiei kokoro-e (circa 1885), in Meiji Bunka Kenkyūkai (ed.) (1928) Meiji bunka zenshū (Nihon Hyōronsha), 585–588. Hall, John W. (1973) ‘A Monarch for Modern Japan,’ in Robert Ward (ed.) Political Development in Modern Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Hara Takeshi (2001) Kashika sareta teikoku (Misuzu Shobō). —— (2002) ‘Kokutai’ no shikakuka,’ in Amino Yoshihiko et al. (eds) Iwanami kōza: Tennō to ōken wo kangaeru. Vol. 10. Ō wo meguru shisen (Iwanami Shoten). Hardacre, Helen (1989) Shintō and the State, 1868–1988 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 81

6/30/2011 12:59:06 PM

82 Kyu Hyun Kim Hardacre, Helen (2002) Religion and Society in Nineteenth Century Japan: A Study of the Southern Kantō Region using Late Edo and Early Meiji Gazetteers (Ann Arbor: Michigan Center for Japanese Studies). Hayakawa Noriyo (1998) Kindai tennōsei kokka to jiendaa (Aoki Shoten). —— (2005) Kindai tenno: sei to kokumin kokka: ryo:sei kankei wo jiku to shite. Aoki Shoten. Imatani Akira (1990) Muromachi no ōken: Ashikaga Yoshimitsu no ōi santatsu keikaku (Chūō Kōronsha). —— (1993) Buke to tennō: ōken wo meguru sōkoku (Iwanami Shoten). Inada Masatsugu (1960) Meiji kenpō seiritsushi. Vol. 1 (Yūhikaku). Inoue Tatsuo (2006) Tennō-kei no danjō: Mikado to jotei no keifu (Yūshikan). Irokawa Daikichi (1966) Nihon no rekishi. Vol. 21. Kindai kokka no shuppatsu (Chūō Kōronsha). Isomae Jun’ichi (2003) Kindai Nihon no shūkyō gensetsu to sono keifu (Iwanami Shoten). Itō Yukio (2006) Meiji tennō (Mineruva Shobō). Kanō Mikiyo (2002) Tennōsei to jiendaa (Inpakuto Shuppan). Kasahara Hidehiko (1995) Tennō shinsei (Chūō Kōronsha). Ketelaar, James Edward (1990) Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Kim, Kyu Hyun (2007) The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: East Asian Center, Harvard University). Kobayashi Hiroshi (1992) ‘Inoue Kowashi no jotei haishi-ron,’ in Shōin Bunko Kenkyūkai (ed.) Meiji kokka keisei to Inoue Kowashi (Bokutakusha). Kobayashi Shigefumi (2006) Tennōsei sōshutsuki no ideorogii: jotei monogatari-ron (Iwata Shoin). Kozawa Hiroshi (1988) Ikigami no shisōshi: Nihon no kindaika to minshū shūkyō (Iwanami Shoten). —— (2004) Minshū shūkyō to kokka shintō (Yamakawa Shuppan). Kunaichō (ed.) (1968–1977) Meiji Tennō-ki. 13 Vols (Yoshikawa Kōbunkan). [MTK] Matsumoto Shigeru (1970) Motoori Norinaga, 1730–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Miyachi Masato (1981) Tennōsei no seijishi-teki kenkyū (Azekura Shobō). Miyata Noboru ‘Tennō shinkō ni miru karisuma-sei: Meiji tennō wo chūshin to shite,’ Gendai shūkyō, Special Topic, Charisma, April 1, 1978. —— (2006) Ōken to hiyorimi. Miyata Noboru Nihon wo kataru. Vol. 10 (Yoshikawa Kōbunkan). Motoda Takehiko and Numata Satoshi (eds) (1985) Motoda Eifu kankei monjo (Yamakawa Shuppansha). Nakai, Kate Wildman (1988) Shogunal Politics: Araki Hakuseki and the Premises of Tokugawa Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies). Narikiyo Hirokazu (1999) Nihon kodai no ōi keishō to shinzoku (Iwata Shoin). Nosco, Peter (1990) Remembering Paradise: Nativism and Nostalgia in EighteenthCentury Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Numata Satoshi (2005) Motoda Nagazane to Meiji kokka (Yoshikawa Kōbunkan). Obinata Sumio (1982) ‘Tennō junkō wo meguru minshū no dōkō,’ Chihōshi kenkyū 175: 1–16.

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 82

6/30/2011 12:59:06 PM

The Mikado’s August Body

83

Ōtsuka Ukichi (1928 [1876]) ‘Ō-u go-junkō meisai nisshi,’ in Meiji Bunka Kenkyūkai (ed.) Meiji bunka zenshū (Nihon Hyōronsha), 330–336. Outram, Dorinda (1989) The Body and the French Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Rekishigaku Kenkyūkai (ed.) (1989) Minshū bunka to tennō (Aoki Shoten). Sakata Yoshio (1984) Tennō shinsei (Kyoto: Shibunkaku Shuppan). Sakamoto Kazuo (1991) Itō Hirobumi to Meiji kokka keisei (Yoshikawa Kōbunkan). Sakamoto Koremaru (1994) Kokka shintō keisei katei no kenkyū (Iwanami Shoten). Sasahara Hidehiko (1999) Tennō shinsei (Chūō Kōronsha). Sasaki Suguru (1994) ‘Meiji tennō no junkō to ‘shinmin’ no keisei,’ Shisō, 845 (November): 95–117. Suzuki Shizuko (2002) Meiji tennō gyōkō to chihō seiji (Nihon Keizai Hyōronsha). Takano Toshihiko (1992) Nihon no rekishi. Vol. 13. Genroku-Kyōho no jidai (Shūeisha). Taki Kōji (2002) Tennō no shōzō (Iwanami Shoten). Thal, Sarah (2005) Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods: The Politics of a Pilgrimage Site in Japan, 1573–1912 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Titus, David (1974) Palace and Politics in Prewar Japan (New York: Columbia University Press). Tōyama Shigeki (ed.) (1988) Kindai Nihon shisō taikei. Vol. 2. Tennō to kazoku (Iwanami Shoten). [TTK] Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi (1986) Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies). —— (1991) ‘In Name Only: Imperial Sovereignty in Early Modern Japan,’ Journal of Japanese Studies, 17(1). —— (1995) Japanese Loyalism Reconstrued: Yamagata Daini’s Ryūshi Shinron of 1759 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press). Webb, Herschel Gordon (1968) The Japanese Imperial Institution in the Tokugawa Period (Columbia University Press). Yamaguchi Yoshiteru (1999) Meiji kokka to shūkyō (Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai). Yasumaru Yoshio (1992) Kindai tennōzō no keisei (Iwanami Shoten). Yoshie Akiko (2002) ‘Kodai jotei ron no kako to genzai,’ in Amino Yoshihiko et al. (eds), Iwanami kōza: Tennō to ōken wo kangaeru. Vol. 7. Jiendaa to sabetsu (Iwanami Shoten).

9780230_240735_04_cha02.indd 83

6/30/2011 12:59:06 PM

3 Does Shinto History ‘Begin at Kuroda’? On the Historical Continuities of Political Shinto Klaus Antoni

The Kuroda School’s View of Shinto History In his essay in Shintō in History,1 Nitta Hitoshi, professor at the Kōgakkan University in Ise, focuses on the importance of the administrational bureaucrats and especially points out the ‘Buddhists’ role in the creation of what we now know as ‘state Shintō,’2 coming to the conclusion that ‘it is clear ... that the arguments defining Shinto as non-religious were the creation of Shinshū Buddhists ... .’3 Nitta’s essay is highly instructive, in particular in its obvious purposes. The author regards the debate over ‘the expansion of the meaning of State Shintō and its application’ to be generally ‘a result of the occupation policies,’ concluding polemically that ‘State Shintō is, indeed, a case of ‘in the beginning was the word; all creation came from the word; nothing came into being that was not of the word;’4 therefore the idea of a real historical foundation of what is called ‘State Shinto’ is rejected by the author in principle. But, in fact, not only the concept but also the term ‘State Shinto’ goes back far beyond the ‘so-called Shintō shirei (‘Shintō directive’) issued by the American army of Occupation,’ as Nitta contends. This is proven, interestingly enough, by another contributor to Shintō in History, Sakamoto Koremaru, Professor at Kokugakuin University. He shows that the term kokka Shinto was used in Japan as early as 1882,5 but then argues that it was only in 1940 that, ‘for the first time, ideology had been implanted in what had been ‘state Shintō’ in purely institutional terms. Only now we can talk about ‘state Shintō’ in the sense in which it is referred to in the 1945 Shintō Directive.’6 So Sakamoto concludes that 84

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 84

6/30/2011 12:59:45 PM

Does Shinto History ‘Begin at Kuroda’?

85

‘the institution of state Shintō could only function as an institution. It had no authority in the spheres of thought or ideology.’7 Such an elegant and clever argument implicitly liberates ‘real’ Shinto from all contamination with the dark spheres of ideological ‘State Shinto,’ which here is constructed as merely a bureaucratic conspiracy without any authentic connection to the world of Shinto. The character of this argument is clearly shown by the author’s own conclusion: ‘The fact that after the war, not a single bureaucrat or priest from the Jingiin was ever purged is a sure proof of just how far removed the institution of state Shinto was from the ideologies of ‘ultra-nationalism’, ‘expansionism’ and ‘militarism.’8 Here we are confronted with an apologetic and historically whitewashing construction of Shinto, which is represented as generally not responsible for any involvement in politics, and especially in the militarist ideology of the 1930s and 1940s. The view of Shinto as a seemingly ‘innocent’ nature cult that was abused by sinister ultranationalist political and ideological forces in modern Japan is characteristic of some other, though not all, contributions to the book, Shintō in History. This is especially true for the article of a particularly important contributor, Sonoda Minoru, Professor at Kyōto University and Chief Priest of Chichibu Shrine in Saitama, who focuses on the relationship between shrine cults and ‘nature,’ which is seen by him ‘as one of the enduring traits of kami cults.’9 This essay has a definite political and ideological connotation as well, as when the author laments over the alleged ‘spiritual confusion’ of present-day Japan: ‘In the 1990s this has undoubtedly been one of the reasons for the frequent occurrence throughout Japanese society of events that border on the pathological.’10 Sonoda recommends a rediscovery and revaluation ‘of Japan’s ancient animistic view of life,’ taking ‘the recent grand rebuilding of the Ise shrines – which are representative of all shrines in the country’ as a model.11 Sonoda thus draws a deliberately culturally pessimistic picture of contemporary Japanese society, reminding one more of essentialist Nihonjinron discourses than of serious historical research. As becomes clear, ‘Shinto in history’ as conceived by this book hardly deals with the history of the political ideas of Shinto, which, of course, reach far back into pre-modern times. This kind of a general denial of ‘genuine’ Shinto thought is also shared by Mark Teeuwen. His argument starts from a completely different point of view, but nevertheless meets Sonoda et al.’s line of argument on the crucial point of the historical liability of Shinto. In Teeuwen’s view a Shinto without Buddhism seems unimaginable, since, according to him, it was the ‘new brand of Buddhist kami thought

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 85

6/30/2011 12:59:45 PM

86

Klaus Antoni

that lay at the basis of the first schools of “Shintō thought”’12 Generally he sees Shinto as a mere product of esoteric Buddhism, an interpretation which basically rests on the well-known teachings of the late historian of thought, Kuroda Toshio.13 This leads Teeuwen to ignore the main ideas of Shinto thought itself, as well as other forms of historical impact through Buddhism, not to mention Confucianism and Daoism. Teeuwen clearly can be recognized as a general supporter of Kuroda’s theses, not only in the present work but also in some of his other writings.14 Not surprisingly, then, the editors of Shintō in History, in their Introduction, present Kuroda’s view ‘that ‘Shintō’ as the distinct, autonomous and independent religion we know today is an invention of the nineteenth century Japanese ideologues. Before the Meiji policy that authorized the ‘separation’ of Shintō and Buddhism, Japanese religious culture had been to all intents and purposes defined by Buddhism. Shrines and shrine-based practice were nothing more than Buddhism’s ‘secular face’; kami, for their part, were understood to be ‘manifestations of the Buddha.’15 In accord with this fundamental claim that ‘Japanese religious culture had been to all intents and purposes defined by Buddhism,’ the first contribution to the book, by Tim Barrett, already formulates an axiomatic conclusion which can be readily applied to key parts of the entire work. Barrett too relies heavily on the investigations of Kuroda Toshio, elaborating Kuroda’s alleged central importance for today’s Shinto studies. He claims, for instance, that Kuroda’s investigations have ‘the greatest direct bearing on our understanding of the nature of Shintō itself.’16 In a more recent publication, Norman Havens (2006) speaks of such a fundamentalist interpretation as the ‘onion’ definition of Shinto. ‘This definitional approach claims that once relieved of its historical ‘accretions’, little remains of an immutable entity worthy of the name ‘Shinto’, at least not until the creation of Shrine Shinto in the modern period. Needless to say, the person most closely associated with this kind of description is Kuroda Toshio.’17 Thus Havens chooses for this part of his recent article on Shinto the ironic title: ‘History begins at Kuroda.’ With Kuroda and his followers pre-modern Shinto is reduced to a religious world of popular beliefs and practices, ultimately embossed by esoteric Buddhism until the dawn of modern times. In their view modern Shinto received its peculiar character only through the infamous constructions of the Meiji bureaucratic ideologues, which finally culminated in a nationalistic and imperialistic ‘State Shinto.’

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 86

6/30/2011 12:59:45 PM

Does Shinto History ‘Begin at Kuroda’?

87

The entanglement of Shinto into the gloomy chapters of modern Japanese history might thus be seen as a kind of historical accident, as clearly shown by the fact that Shinto was declared an ‘independent religion’ during the Meiji period. All its political and ideological elements, in particular the distinct and central emperor cult, are thus exposed as an artificial invention of the modern age. From this point of view, the idea of the historical continuity of political Shinto therefore becomes axiomatically impossible, since, according to the Kuroda school, a Shinto that was in any way politicized simply did not exist in pre-modern times.

The Denial of Shinto’s Intellectual and Ideological History The ‘orthodox’ viewpoint on Shinto – as expressed, for instance, in the Nihonjinron-style writings of Sonoda Minoru (2000) – initially takes a completely opposite position to that of Kuroda Toshio, arguing that Shinto did exist from the very beginning as inconvertibly a Japanese ethnic religion. Nevertheless, this orthodox line of argument ultimately comes to a conclusion very similar to that of the Kuroda school on the question of political Shinto. In its ‘essentialist’ interpretation, Shinto is reduced to a static, ever-existing set of archaic customs of nature-worship and ancestor cults, of animistic spiritualism and of a primeval world of gods and divine emperors, all of which supposedly provided the Japanese nation with a distinct and essentialist spiritual character throughout its history. The orthodox school takes those postulates for granted. Where could the link exist between these two interpretative worlds – in other words, between the ‘Kuroda faction’ and the orthodox views of Sonoda Minoru? I think it can be found in one basic idea which is common to both approaches: both jointly reject the existence of a political, ideological, and intellectual history of Shinto thought and, consequently, understand modern political Shinto as just a perversion of the historical fundamentals. In the eyes of traditionalists like Sonoda Minoru, ‘real’ Shinto has to be understood as just a nature-loving spiritualism, a completely non-political set of religious emotions and rituals, only having suffered radical political abuse in the modern age, through contamination with post-1868 politics and nationalism. The Kuroda school, on the other hand, regards pre-modern ‘Shinto’ (always put in quotation marks by these scholars) as a mere spiritualistic world, incomprehensible without the framework of esoteric Buddhism. Both views are strongly in agreement that Shinto in history did not contain

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 87

6/30/2011 12:59:45 PM

88

Klaus Antoni

any authentic religious, ideological, or even intellectual thought. This denial of Shinto’s own intellectual development, its always utopian and in fact highly political core of thought, ultimately opens the way for an exculpating interpretation that seems to be politically favored by some interpreters – particularly because such an exclusively ‘spiritualistic’ Shinto must be regarded as by definition free of all historical contamination with political ideology. This double strategy to ‘liberate’ the world of Shinto thought from its political and ideological aspects – which are, in fact, an integral part of its fascinating historical complexity – conforms quite well to the general restorative and conservative tendency within present Shinto studies, which openly aims to revalue Shinto and rescue it from its ‘dark’ historical associations.

Political Power After years of research into the topic, and as I have argued at length in my book, Shintō und die Konzeption des japanischen Nationalwesens (kokutai) (1998), I am convinced, contrary to the ‘Kuroda school’s’ interpretations, that it is in fact the political aspect of Shinto thought which forms a constituent frame for the whole system of Shinto throughout history.18 This is not meant, of course, in the above-mentioned orthodox sense that understands Shinto as a static and essentialist ‘native’ and ‘ethnically’ determined national religion of Japan. Historical analysis shows that Shinto, like Buddhism, Confucianism, and other complex systems, is neither a clearly defined nor an invariably set entity, but rather has constantly changed throughout history. Yet it still seems to be possible to determine some fundamental characteristics by documenting a continuity in the main features of Shinto thought. At the very center lies the idea of the legitimization of political power, detectable since the days of the Kojiki and Nihongi. It is not the idea of Shinto as the eternal ‘national religion’ of Japan as allegedly reflected, according to the orthodox view, in the historical facts; rather, the central core of what must be summarized as ‘Shinto’ should be understood as a never-ending ‘invention,’ a continuity of constructs, the main purpose of which was the deification of the emperor in line with the utopian ideal of the ruler as a living god. From this viewpoint, the development of Shintō as a political construct may be traced back to antiquity, even to pre-Nara Japan or, more particularly, to the reign of Emperor Temmu (reg. 673–686), as Nelly Naumann (1996: 6–8) has already pointed out. Interpretations of Shinto’s political–dynastic aspects

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 88

6/30/2011 12:59:45 PM

Does Shinto History ‘Begin at Kuroda’?

89

as mere modern ‘erroneous aberrations’ from an originally spiritualistic or esoteric–Buddhist nature cult must therefore be regarded as historically unfounded.19 Shinto existed and, above all, was politically motivated ever since the days of early Japan, reinventing its political functions again and again under different historical conditions over the centuries. This ‘political purpose’ of Shinto was stressed by, among others, the late Ōbayashi Taryō, a prominent Japanese ethnologist and scholar of comparative cultural studies at Tōkyō University. Ōbayashi always made clear his awareness that the role of ‘Shinto in history’ was definitely political in nature, and that this political Shinto took shape in antiquity, not during the few years of State Shinto in modern Japan.

Historical Basics In Ōbayashi’s view, ‘Shintō in the broader sense [is] the primeval religion of Japan, in the narrow sense a system for political purposes constructed from primeval religion and Chinese elements.’20 This is how he defines the alleged ‘indigenous religion’ of Japan. Thus, the term ‘Shinto’ describes neither a homogeneous nor a static religious tradition, nor an unchangeable ‘independent religion,’ but, rather, a heterogeneous religious system of various origins and contents, which passed through historical changes and developments up to this very day. Ōbayashi’s definition does not point to such commonly mentioned features in conventional definitions of Shinto as ‘nature,’ ‘ancestor worship,’ or even ‘spirituality,’ but tersely refers to ‘primeval religion’ and ‘political purposes.’ This raises two questions: first, what does he mean by the ‘primeval religion’ of Japan? Second, what does he refer to as ‘political purposes?’21 In this context the earliest written records of Japanese history, the court histories Kojiki (712) and Nihongi (720), play a crucial role. These works, drafted as historical documents, reveal the official conception of history in their time. Later in history, they were to a certain degree regarded as ‘holy books’ by the respective traditional circles of Shinto theology, the Nihongi by the houses of Urabe and Yoshida since Heian times, the Kojiki by the leading Nativist scholar Motoori Norinaga and his successors from the later Tokugawa era to the present.22

Legitimization of the Imperial House The opening chapters of both records are of particular importance, as they contain the mythical traditions of the country, and therefore – even

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 89

6/30/2011 12:59:45 PM

90

Klaus Antoni

today – the ideologically binding basis of the ‘great tradition’ of Shinto. Here we find accounts of the creation of the world, of the gods and their deeds, of the origin of the imperial house, and of the consolidation of its power. Thus, the most characteristic feature of Japanese mythology can already be seen here: it serves the purpose of legitimizing the power of the imperial house. It is this function that defines one of the two central aspects in Ōbayashi’s definition of Shinto: namely, its ‘political purposes.’ It is a well-known historical fact that the early Japanese state introduced Chinese statecraft in order to consolidate its central power. Bureaucratic structures were installed according to the Chinese model, and the state was completely sinicized – that is, opened up for Chinese culture and civilization. This meant, most of all, the doctrines of Confucius and his successors – since Buddhism was of only minor importance in this context. At the core of Confucian thought was the concept of the ideal state led by an equally ideal ruler, the ‘son of heaven.’ Only a truly virtuous ruler could secure the prosperity of the state, because ruler and state were deeply, even mystically interlinked. If an emperor ever lost his individual virtue or turned away from the right path of Confucian values, then he could be dethroned. In fact, the people had the moral obligation to dethrone any ruler who turned out to be dangerous to the polity. These political ideas were clearly enunciated by the Confucian philosopher Mencius (Meng tzu), and they came to Japan too as a result of its large-scale importation of Chinese civilization. Significantly enough, it was in the case of a potential dethronement of an emperor that Japan did not follow the Chinese model. The inertias of the old way of clan-thinking were too strong: the ‘sun dynasty,’ which now ruled the whole country, proved to be unwilling to accept the idea of this loss of power, even though it was quite ‘legal.’ The Japanese rulers, by that time called Tennō, ‘divine ruler,’ regarded themselves as absolutely equal to the Chinese emperor, and the imperial court systematically devised its own form of ideological legitimization of imperial power, which deliberately disassociated itself from Confucianism. This legitimization was found in the handed-down myths of the ruling family, which claimed a divine origin for the primogenitor of the imperial house, and thus supported the idea that the living emperor was a direct descendant of the heavenly deities. It was the sun-goddess who ordered the first human emperor and his descendants to rule over the land of Japan, for all time and through one single dynasty (shinchoku).23 A change of dynasty, as was common in Chinese history, was thus inconceivable for the Japanese. This is the central element

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 90

6/30/2011 12:59:46 PM

Does Shinto History ‘Begin at Kuroda’?

91

of the ‘political purpose’ Ōbayashi is referring to in his definition of Shinto. It represents a proprietarily Japanese concept of a ruler, developed at the Yamato court of the seventh century in contrast to the superior Chinese cultural model. The more the state itself was formally sinicized, the clearer the image became of a particular Japanese emperor as a divine descendant of a deity. This form of intentional deification of the emperor – in a way resembling an early ‘invented tradition’ – is the essence of what we have to understand as political Shinto.24 Thus, when we question the fundamental nature of Shinto, we must conclude that a basic political orientation was present in it from the very beginning.

The ‘Primeval Religion’ of Japan The question raised by the second part of Ōbayashi’s definition, which construes Shinto as a ‘primeval religion,’ is much more difficult to answer than that concerning the formation of ‘political Shinto.’ There is, of course, no doubt that pre-Buddhist religions did exist in Japan, but one cannot ignore the fact that the state of resource materials available does not provide a clear picture of these. Moreover, information about them has to be elicited tediously from the handed-down records, and religious science is still far from reaching a coherent interpretation in this respect. A few conclusions can be drawn from the results of archaeological research: for instance, that specific afterlife concepts can be deduced from pre-historic Japanese burial customs. But it is especially the myths of the old sources, the Kojiki and the Nihongi again, as well as local records like the Fudoki, which provide an approach to comprehension. The tales of court mythology were systematically compiled into a set by courtiers of the seventh and eighth century like Ō no Yasumaro, the compiler of the Kojiki, for the purpose, as we have seen, of legitimizing imperial rule, and the mythology was therefore clearly politically motivated from the very beginning. Yet the manifold origins of the single myths, which were integrated into one single continuous narrative only by the compilers, can also be ascertained by an analysis of the written records. It is remarkable that in the Nihongi, one of those court records, the mythological content is presented in a much more differentiated way than in the Kojiki. While the Kojiki presents one single, continuous, and purposive narrative, the Nihongi usually offers more than one variation of each episode. The existence of many variations in the Nihongi shows that various branches of tradition were well known to the court

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 91

6/30/2011 12:59:46 PM

92

Klaus Antoni

authors. The modern Shinto doctrine of ‘one homogenous tradition,’ as postulated by the kokugakusha or ‘Nativist scholars’ since Motoori Norinaga, depends mostly on the Kojiki, and represents, from the beginning, a construction, a mere illusion, something artificially created for the purpose of the abovementioned political legitimization. How important this tends to be for our understanding of ‘Shinto’ in general is shown by modern research on mythology. And the question raised by Ōbayashi’s definition of Shinto as Japan’s ‘primeval religion’ becomes more and more involved the more we try to deal with it. One appropriate way of elucidating this problem is by studying the details and individual motifs of the mythological whole as exactly as possible, and then comparing them.

Modern Mythological Research From the second half of the Meiji period to the end of the Pacific War (1889–1945), Japanese mythology formed the spiritual fundament of the modern Japanese state, of its specific national polity (kokutai), and of State Shinto in general. More particularly, the primary mythological basis was the Divine Order (shinchoku) by the Sun Goddess, Amaterasuōmikami, to her grandson Ninigi no mikoto and his descendants, handed down in the Nihongi. The modern Japanese ideology of the incomparable ‘uniqueness’ of the national polity (kokutai), developed mainly by the Mito school Nativist scholars of the Tokugawa period, was based solely on the legitimizing propositions of the court mythology, handed down in the official records since the eighth century. The objective scientific study of these myths, especially in the sense of critical cultural–historical comparison, inevitably collided with this sacrosanct state ideology, as can be seen in a number of cases. For instance, any proof of connections between the ‘indigenous’ mythology and the traditions of the continental mainland or of the southern archipelago challenged the doctrine of a self-sufficient Japanese ‘divine country.’ Therefore, the importance of the free scientific study of mythology during the post-war period cannot be overestimated. Instead of dogmatic propositions about the origin of the Japanese people and its ruling family, the realization of an extraordinarily complex and historically widely differentiated ethno-genesis and early nation-building now became possible. By virtue of comparative analyses, proof could be given that various parts of the total mythological narrative were produced by formerly autonomous mythmaking groups. Such evidence points to the originally

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 92

6/30/2011 12:59:46 PM

Does Shinto History ‘Begin at Kuroda’?

93

heterogeneous structure of Japanese religions. This branch of analytical and comparative mythological research has only been unrestrictedly possible since the end of World War II. One of its founders, the scholar Tsuda Sōkichi (1873–1961, cf. Naumann (1996), 18), still had to endure retaliatory measures before and during the war because, contrary to the legally binding doctrine of that time, he did not regard the myths as historically true records legitimizing the eternal power of the imperial court, as the kokugakusha and later nationalists had claimed.25 For instance, he disputed the legend of the alleged foundation of the empire by ‘Jimmu Tennō’ in the year 660 B.C., a myth that is widely taken as historical fact even today. Tsuda pointed out the purely legendary character of the ‘historical records’ from which such myths were taken. Thus, since the end of the war, research on Japanese mythology and Shinto in general has received an enormous impetus, and finally the way has been cleared for an ideologically unbiased analysis. The discernment of the original heterogeneity of the total mythical lore, despite the fact that it is well organized in the literary records of the old sources, can be regarded as the most important result of comparative mythological research. It was realized that the Japanese myths were only in the most rare cases unique and without parallels in regions outside of Japan. And it also turned out that single mythical episodes – for instance, accounts of the origin of death – were also to be found, in core form, in the mythologies of neighboring cultures, such as those of China, Korea and the Malay–Polynesian region. Thus, this critical approach to the Japanese myths, by showing their heterogeneous origin, resulted in a complete scientific deconstruction of State Shinto and its ideological basis. In this sense, the enlightening effect of a free scientific research, starting in the post-war period, cannot be overestimated. Without the critical, cultural–historical and comparative analyses of Japanese mythology, the dogmatic doctrines of pre-war political Shinto might remain unexamined even today.26 These studies brought to light the extremely complex and historically graded genesis of Japanese culture and religion, whose origins were liberated from an artificially constructed and ideologically motivated ethnocentric isolation, and placed within the overall context not only of East Asian history but of human history in general. The idea of the ‘homogeneity’ of Japan, which was ideologically rather than religiously founded, and which was rooted in the traditionalistic constructions of pre-modern times, can therefore no longer be sustained. Japan can be seen as an island country (shimaguni) geographically, but certainly not culturally!

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 93

6/30/2011 12:59:46 PM

94

Klaus Antoni

Science has been able to prove that certain mythical themes, interwoven into the systemized court mythology during historical times, originated with different population groups, who, during pre-historical times, migrated to the Japanese islands from different parts of the Asiatic continent, Southeast Asia, and the South Seas – a fact that points to the initial heterogeneity of the Japanese culture(s) and religion(s). It goes without saying that the discovery of ‘foreign’ – that is, Korean, southern Chinese or Indonesian – elements within Japanese mythology is not just of scientific interest but has important political implications, since it touches upon the ideological self-conception of Shinto as, at heart, an explicitly ethnocentric religious system. In this context the mythological narratives themselves give perfect hints to help us understand the original state of ‘religion and power’ as well as the cultural heterogeneity of early Japan. A prominent example is the so-called ‘Izumo myths,’ which throw light on the whole problem of continuity versus discontinuity in Shinto, as well as on the role of cultural, regional, and political heterogeneity throughout Japanese history.27

Izumo Mythology The Kojiki contains a myth cycle in which Amaterasu as the ancestress of the imperial house does not play any role; these are accounts of Susanoo and his descendant Ōkuninushi, the ‘ruler of the great land.’28 This complex narrative, woven into the strand of the mythological chronology, is located in the landscape of Izumo. In its description of the god Susanoo, elsewhere portrayed as wild and headstrong, the bad and violent aspects of his character subside and he appears in a considerably friendlier light. His position as divine ruler of Izumo is finally taken over by Ōkuninushi. These deities of the Izumo line appear in the sources as so-called ‘terrestrial deities,’ whereas those of the Amaterasu line belong to the ‘heavenly deities.’ The assembly of the heavenly gods decides to send a representative down to earth in order to demand heavenly rule on earth, a mythic episode called ‘transfer of the land’ (kuniyuzuri),29 which is interpreted frequently in historical terms as a clash between the independent region of Izumo and the new central state of Yamato. Several divine messengers are sent, but Ōkuninushi is able to defy them all. Finally the subjugation succeeds: Ōkuninushi resigns and retreats into his palace in Kizuki. The Kizuki Shrine – today’s Great Shrine of Izumo – is considered a historical relic of this divine palace. After the subjugation of Ōkuninushi, an episode

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 94

6/30/2011 12:59:46 PM

Does Shinto History ‘Begin at Kuroda’?

95

crucial for imperial legitimization follows. Amaterasu (Takamimusibi) tells her grandchild Ninigi no mikoto to descend to earth and take over its rule. Thereafter no other lineage than that of the sun goddess was to hold sovereignty. The gods of the Izumo line were thus downgraded to a subordinate position for all time.

Hirata Atsutane It was Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), probably the most important and also the most radical ideologist of Restoration Shinto, who played a major ideological role in making the combined topics of ‘Izumo,’ ‘legitimization of power,’ and ‘the Other World’ relevant to the political and religious struggles of modern Japan. This fanatic propagandist of ‘pure Shinto’ also, quite astonishingly, picked up aspects of Christian thinking and modified these for his concept of Shinto.30 For example, he saw a counterpart of Izanagi and Izanami in Adam and Eve, and his reading of Christian texts possibly also influenced his visions of a life after death.31 In Hirata’s theology, the counterpart to the visible world, which according to kokugaku theology was ruled by Amaterasu herself, was to be found in the realm of the invisible, hidden world, in which no one other than the main deity of Izumo, Ōkuninushi, was regarded as ruler by him and other kokugaku theologians.32 In Hirata’s thinking, Shinto ranked higher than all other religions, and the divinity Musubi no kami (i.e., Takamimusubi) was the creator of all things; the main divinities of other religions, therefore, were nothing but local manifestations of this Japanese deity of creation.33 In his work Yūgenben, for example, Atsutane remarks on the relationship of the divinities (Takami) Musubi and Ōkuninushi:34 When one grows old and dies, one’s body will return to dust, but one’s spirit (tamashii) will not disappear. Returning to the Hidden Realm (kakuriyo), it will be subject to the reign of Ōkuninushi no ōkami, accept his commands, and from Heaven it will protect not only its descendants but all those related to it. These are the ‘hidden matters’ (kakurigoto) of man, and this is the Way established by Musubi no Kami and governed by Ōkuninushi no Kami. It is for this reason that the (Nihonshoki) states: ‘The hidden matters constitute Shintō.’ Surprisingly, the problem of Ōkuninushi being accepted as the god of the underworld played a major role in one of the most complicated

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 95

6/30/2011 12:59:46 PM

96

Klaus Antoni

religious and political struggles of the Meiji period, the so-called ‘Pantheon Dispute’ (cf. Hardacre (1989), 48–51), a cornerstone incident in the development of State Shinto in modern Japan.35 Besides these issues of political theology and the development of State Shinto, one major problem in this context demands further research: the question of why Hirata Atsutane, like the kokugaku scholars Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) and Hattori Nakatsune (1757–1824) before him, was convinced that the god Ōkuninushi of Izumo was the god of the underworld. A thorough analysis of this question still remains a desideratum, although one should mention a couple of recent contributions to the subject: Mark McNally’s dissertation on Hirata Atsutane, and the so-called ‘Sandaikō debate.’36 But it must be noted here that Hattori Nakatsune’s main work, Sandaikō, has been a topic of Western research on Shinto for a long time, as already the publications of Ernest Satow37 and, a hundred years later, Harry Harootunian show.38 In a more recent contribution, the Japanese scholar of Shinto history, Endō Jun (2002), gives a comprehensive account of the underlying cosmological strata. In this work, ‘The Cosmology of Shinto and National Identity in Modern Japan,’ Endō states that there was an urgent need for Shinto to present a theology concerning the Other World (takai) in the Meiji era, because Buddhism was up to that time the most popular religion and brought salvation after death.39 As a matter of fact, Endō continues, this kind of Shinto theology had already started to be theorized in the first half of the nineteenth century, before the Meiji Restoration. The purpose of his research, therefore, was to review the development of these theologies and to examine their variations in the Meiji era. That these problems are not limited to modern and Edo-period theological thought is proven by the work of Bernhard Scheid (2006) on Urabe/Yoshida Shinto, which reveals the deep historical roots of the theological and intellectual dichotomy between the divinities Amaterasu and Ōkuninushi in terms of the dichotomy between the visible and the hidden worlds. Thus it is clear that questions of continuity versus discontinuity in Shinto theological and political thought are not confined to modern times or even to the Edo period, but stretch back to antiquity.40

Résumé This brief outline of some aspects of Shinto’s cultural and intellectual history has already shown that an essentialist or static approach does not account at all for its complex historical realities. Just as Buddhism, Christianity, or Confucianism can hardly be said to consist of clearly

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 96

6/30/2011 12:59:46 PM

Does Shinto History ‘Begin at Kuroda’?

97

defined or invariable entities, so it is with Shinto, itself a term which can be understood, I am convinced, only in a very general sense. Yet a continuity in Shinto religion and ideology from pre-modern to modern times is obvious, and makes the often emphasized interruptions in this development in 1868 (the Meiji Restoration) and 1945 (the end of World War II) appear less dramatic than normally portrayed. Thus also the contribution of ‘the West’ to those phases of transition in the modern history of Japan, often emphasized with unveiled cultural–nationalist pride by current modernization theorists, appears from this viewpoint not to have been as important as often claimed. The Japanese ‘modern age’ did not suddenly begin in the year 1868. The country did not doze in the darkness of a late-medieval feudalism before the Meiji Restoration, waiting for enlightenment by the West. The intellectual structures of Japanese modernism had in principle already been created by intellectual circles during the Edo period, although they were put into effect only in the Meiji period – together, of course, with the imported concepts of Western modernity. But, without knowledge of the pre-modern developments, the formation of the modern Japanese empire can only be understood as a ‘miracle.’ A decisive importance in this context has to be attributed to Shinto. I do not wish to deny the importance of foreign influences during the nineteenth century, or the importance of the universal forces of modernism, but it must be realized that decisive impetuses and concepts for the development of the modern Japanese nation-state, with the Tennō as the ‘divine ruler’ at its center, originated in Japan’s pre-modern age.41 In my view historians are wrong to think that religious nationalism in Japan started only after contact with the West in the second part of the nineteenth century. Of course it is true that the European idea of the nation-state and romantic nationalist ideologies have deeply influenced modern Japanese nationalism since the Meiji period. But a Eurocentric view of Japanese intellectual history is unable to account for the astonishing fact that, during Tokugawa times and even earlier, Japanese thinkers themselves had developed their own kind of ethnocentric ‘national idea.’ It centered on the construct of a Japanese sacred community, seen as shinkoku, ‘the country of the gods,’42 and later manifested as the idea of a distinct Japanese kokutai, ‘national polity,’ under the Tennō’s rule. Among Shinto scholars and ideologues it was in particular the construct of a common origin of the Japanese people that was fundamental to this concept. This was based on the myth of the Age of the Gods, which was transmitted through history and eventually elaborated into political radicalism, most notably by Hirata Atsutane

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 97

6/30/2011 12:59:46 PM

98

Klaus Antoni

and his school. Though a religious concept, it always contained within it a clearly political dimension. The subject of ‘Shinto,’ therefore, must form an essential part of any discourse on Japanese culture, but we must also be aware that this subject can easily give rise to clichés regarding Japanese culture. This clearly shows the need for substantial scholarly research on the topic, and it also shows, implicitly, the great hurdle to understanding Shinto created by any approach that tries to preclude the dimension of its historical development and change. I very much doubt that the idea of political Shinto itself is purely an invention of modern times. All sources show the opposite: the enormous historical depth of this world of ideas. Meiji State Shinto was an invention in that it transmuted the political ideas of Shinto thinkers of the Edo and pre-Edo periods into the practical politics of the modern Japanese nation-state, painting the highly ideological picture of a Japanese national polity of divine origin. This was a completely new idea for modern Japan as a nation-state, but a very old one for political Shinto thought itself. It is mostly the exoticism, in many cases the self-exoticism, of Japan that prevents international research from regarding the Japanese case as extremely valuable for comparative analysis in general. Speaking about Shinto in this context means explaining it as an extraordinarily convincing example of a religious ethnocentrism which spawned a political ideology that was able to found a modern nation-state like Japan. To declare that Japan is unsuitable for comparative research means to construct a self-sufficient nihonjinron exoticism. As many cases show, the study of Shinto at present often seems to return to such self-sufficient Japanocentrism, excluding the world and any comparative approach from our understanding of Shinto. Since the days of Yanagita Kunio and earlier, the idea of Japan as not being comparable to the ‘outside’ world formed a main pillar in the traditionalist discourse on Japanese identity. Historical scholarly research should analyze this as a part of the problem, but not use it as a base for its own understanding. It seems to me that, in order to do full justice to the historical development of Shinto, consideration must be given to the above-mentioned fields of political and intellectual Shinto. In particular, the centrally important relationship between Shinto and Confucianism should be taken into account, as well as the highly relevant but complicated topic of Nativism; in other words, kokugaku, mitogaku, and kokutai ideological constructs and political thought in pre-modern Shinto should be treated in a historically appropriate manner. More specifically, scholarly

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 98

6/30/2011 12:59:46 PM

Does Shinto History ‘Begin at Kuroda’?

99

treatments of Shinto political history should aim for an objective representation of the ideology of shinkoku thought, which has not only been a pillar of Shinto orthodoxy since the days of the medieval Jinnōshōtoki and earlier, but has even made its presence felt in recent international debates, thanks to some politically thoughtless comments about ‘Japan as a divine nation’ by a Japanese prime minister.43 The Izumo myths can play a crucial role in our comprehension and analysis of those factors in Japanese intellectual history that point more to ‘continuity’ than to ‘invention.’ There is a saying that the only constancy in history is the constancy of change. This is especially true for Shinto history. Denying the pure existence of Shinto, as does the ‘onion’ model inspired by Kuroda Toshio, does not promote our deeper understanding of its historical development. The contributions of Kuroda Toshio to the field have been extremely valuable, since they opened our eyes to the importance of Shinto–Buddhist amalgamation during the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, it is also surely true that the history of Shinto does not ‘begin at Kuroda.’

Notes 1. Since I have already published a review of this book in the Journal of Japanese Studies, there is no need to present a detailed discussion of the whole work here again. See Antoni (2001). 2. Nitta, in Shintō in History, 10. 3. Ibid., 267. 4. Ibid., 268. 5. Sakamoto (2000), 273. 6. Ibid., 289. 7. Ibid., 290. 8. Ibid., 291. 9. Breen and Teeuwen (2000), 8. 10. Sonoda (2000), 44. 11. Ibid., 45. 12. Teeuwen (2000), 96. 13. cf. Kuroda (1981). 14. cf. Teeuwen and Scheid (2002). 15. Breen and Teeuwen, Shintō in History, 4. 16. Ibid., 13. 17. Havens (2006), 18. 18. In a 1999 review article on this book entitled ‘State Shintō – an “Independent religion?”,’ Mark Teeuwen offers a completely different view from mine on Shintō. The differences between us show some general problems of recent academic trends in understanding Shintō, and also point to some fundamental difficulties with such understanding. Firstly, it is important to note that Teeuwen’s objections are not founded so much on any disagreements

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 99

6/30/2011 12:59:46 PM

100

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Klaus Antoni over fact; rather, he rejects the general message of my kokutai book. He particularly criticizes its presentation of Shintō history as a straight, continuous development from pre-modern ages to modern governmental State Shintō. Thus he states, as a negative critique from his point of view: ‘The consequence is a narrative that depicts the development of State Shintō as an historical necessity, the logical, indeed inevitable, outcome of trends established in the Edo period or even before’ (Teeuwen [1999], 113). Teeuwen is quite correct here: this is indeed one of my principal contentions! Although such an extreme reduction does not do justice to the full content of the work, nonetheless it is true that the display of religious and ideological continuities in Shintō between the pre-modern and modern ages in fact forms the major ‘plot’ of the work. My purpose was to show the deep links between pre-modern and modern Japan in the history of Shintō and intellectual religious thought, especially by investigating the function of Shintō as a religious system to legitimize political power, a trend which culminated in the concept of a specific Japanese national polity (kokutai) during late Tokugawa and early Meiji times. Though the main caesurae in the historical development of modern Japan (e.g., the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the end of World War II in 1945) play a predominant role in this context, my objective was to demonstrate some religious and ideological continuities which are of much greater importance in this respect than those historical fractures postulated especially by western researchers on Shintō. Western modernization theories posit that modern Japan was almost entirely based on Western influence, especially in its idea of the nation-state. In contrast to this axiomatic and, I am convinced, historically incorrect viewpoint, it should be understood that the indigenous intellectual and ideological roots were at least as important for the formation of the modern Japanese nation-state as the intellectual imports from abroad. Within this context it was mainly the ideas and ideological concepts elaborated by Nativist Shintō thinkers during the Edo period which were transformed into political reality in modern Japan. Naumann (1996), 6–8. Ōbayashi (1982), 135. ‘Shintō ... im weiteren Sinne die Urreligion Japans, im engeren Sinne ein aus Urreligion und chinesischen Elementen zu politischen Zwecken ausgebautes System.’ cf. Antoni (2002), 265. cf. Scheid (2001), 88, 89. cf. Nihongi (NKBT) 67, 147; Aston (1956), 76–77; Kojiki (NKBT) 1, 126f.; Philippi (2002 [1968]), 137, and Antoni (1998), 77, n. 48. cf. already Naumann (1970), 13. cf. Naumann (1996), 18. cf. Ōbayashi (1973); Naumann (1996). cf. Antoni (2005). cf. Kojiki (NKBT), 1: 91–125; cf. Philippi (2002 [1968]), 93–136. cf. Kojiki (NKBT) 1: 122–123; Philippi (2002 [1968]), 134–136. cf. Odronic (1967), 34. cf. Bolitho (2000). cf. Hara (1996), 36–66. cf. Odronic (1967), 35.

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 100

6/30/2011 12:59:46 PM

Does Shinto History ‘Begin at Kuroda’?

101

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

cf. Kamata (2000), 305. cf. Hardacre (1989), 48–51. McNally (2005). Satow (2002 [1882]), 186. Harootunian (1988), 148. Endō (2002), 256. In a future publication, I hope to present an overview of the theological, ideological, and political aspects of Ōkuninushi as the god of the underworld. 41. cf. Antoni (1991). 42. cf. Nawrocki (1997), 21–63. 43. cf. Nawrocki (2002).

Bibliography Antoni, Klaus (1991) Der Himmlische Herrscher und sein Staat: Essays zur Stellung des Tennō im modernen Japan (München: Iudicium). —— (1998) ‘Shintō und die Konzeption des japanischen Nationalwesens (kokutai). Der religiöse Traditionalismus in Neuzeit und Moderne Japans’, Handbuch der Orientalistik. Vol. V/ 8 (Leiden: Brill). —— (2001) Review: ‘Shinto in History’, in The Journal of Japanese Studies, 27 (2): 405–409. —— (2002) ‘Shintō and kokutai: Religious Ideology in the Japanese Context’, in Antoni, Kubota, Nawrocki and Wachutka (eds), Religion and National Identity in the Japanese Context, 263–287. —— (2005) ‘Izumo as the ‘Other Japan’: Construction vs. Reality,’ Japanese Religions, 30 (1–2): 1–20. Antoni, Klaus, Kubota, Hiroshi, Nawrocki, Johann and Wachutka, Michael (2002) Religion and National Identity in the Japanese Context (BUNKA, Vol. 5) (Münster, Hamburg, London: LIT). Aston, William (1956) Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697 (Tōkyō, London: Tuttle). Barrett, Tim (2000) ‘Shinto and Taoism in early Japan,’ in Breen and Teeuwen (eds), Shintō in History – Ways of the Kami, 13–31. Bolitho, Harold (2000) ‘Tidings from the Twilight Zone,’ in Formanek, Susanne and Lafleur, William (eds) Practicing the Afterlife: Perspectives from Japan (Wien: Verlag der Österreich. Akademie d. Wissenschaften), 237–258. Breen, John and Teeuwen, Mark (eds) (2000) Shintō in History – Ways of the Kami (Curzon Studies in Asian Religions) (Richmond: Curzon). Endō, Jun (2002) ‘The Cosmology of Shintō and National Identity in Modern Japan,’ in Antoni, Kubota, Nawrocki and Wachutka (eds), Religion and National Identity in the Japanese Context, 249–261. Hara Takeshi (1996) Izumo to iu shisō. Kindai-Nihon no massatsu-sareta, kamigami (Tōkyō: Kōjinsha). Hardacre, Helen (1989) Shintō and the State, 1868–1988 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Harootunian, Harry D. (1988) Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 101

6/30/2011 12:59:46 PM

102

Klaus Antoni

Havens, Norman (2006) ‘Shinto,’ in Swanson, Paul and Chilson, Clark (eds) Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions (Nanzan Library of Asiatic Religion and Culture) (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), 14–37. Hirata Atsutane (1976) ‘Yūgenben,’ in Hirata Atsutane zenshū kankōkai (ed.) Shinshū Hirata Atsutane zenshū, vol. hoi (app.) 2 (Tōkyō: Meicho shuppan), 265–279. Kamata, Tōji (2000) ‘The disfiguring of nativism: Hirata Atsutane and Orikuchi Shinobu,’, in Breen and Teeuwen (eds), Shintō in History – Ways of the Kami, 295–317. Kurano Kenji et al. (eds) (1966) Kojiki (Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vol. 1) (Tōkyo: Iwanami shoten). Kuroda, Toshio (1981) ‘Shintō in the History of Japanese Religion,’ in Journal of Japanese Studies, 7 (1): 1–21. McNally, Mark (2005) Proving the Way. Conflict and practice in the history of Japanese nativism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center). Naumann, Nelly (1970) ‘Einige Bemerkungen zum sogenannten Ur-Shintō,’ in NOAG (Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens/ Hamburg), 107/108: 5–13. —— (1996) Die Mythen des alten Japan. Übersetzt und erläutert von Nelly Naumann (München: Beck). Nawrocki, Johann (1997) Inoue Tetsujirō, 1855–1944 und die Ideologie des Götterlandes. Eine vergleichende Studie zur politischen Theologie des modernen Japan (Ostasien – Pazifik. Trierer Studien zu Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, Kultur, Bd. 10) (Hamburg: LIT). —— (2002) ‘Nihon no kuni wa tennō o chūshin to suru kami no kuni’ – The Divine Country Debate 2000,’ in Antoni, Kubota, Nawrocki and Wachutka (eds), 289–300. Nihongi: Sakamoto Tarō et al. (eds) (1967) Nihon shoki (1) (Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Vol. 67) (Tōkyo: Iwanami shoten). Nitta, Hitoshi (2000) ‘Shinto as ‘non-religion’: the origins and development of an idea,’ in: Breen and Teeuwen (eds), 252–271. Ōbayashi, Taryō (1973) Nihon shinwa no kigen (Tōkyō: Kadokawa shoten). Ōbayashi, Taryō and Watanabe, Yoshio (1982) Ise und Izumo (Die Welt der Religionen, 6) (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder). Odronic, Walter J. (1967) Kodō Taii (An outline of the Ancient Way): An annotated translation with an introduction to the Shinto Revival Movement and a sketch of the life of Hirata Atsutane (PhD. Dissertation) (UMI: University of Pennsylvania). Philippi, Donald L. (2002 [1968]) Kojiki. Translated with an Introduction and Notes (Tōkyō: University of Tokyo Press) 1968, Ninth Paperback Printing 2002. Sakamoto Koremaru (2000) ‘The structure of state Shinto: its creation, development and demise,’ in Breen and Teeuwen (eds), Shintō in History – Ways of the Kami, 272–294. Satow, Ernest Mason and Florenz, Karl (2002 [1882]) Ancient Japanese rituals and the revival of pure Shinto (The Kegan Paul Japan Library) (London: Kegan Paul) (repr. The Revival of Pure Shintau, 1882, 1927). Scheid, Bernhard (2001) Der Eine und Einzige Weg der Götter. Yoshida Kanetomo und die Erfindung des Shintō (Wien: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften).

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 102

6/30/2011 12:59:47 PM

Does Shinto History ‘Begin at Kuroda’?

103

Scheid, Bernhard (2006) ‘Two Modes of Secrecy in the Nihon shoki Transmission,’ in Bernhard Scheid and Mark Teeuwen (eds) The Culture of Secrecy in Japanese religion (London, New York: Routledge), 284–306. Sonoda, Minoru (2000) ‘Shinto and the natural environment,’ in Breen and Teeuwen (eds), Shintō in History – Ways of the Kami, 32–46. Teeuwen, Mark (1999) ‘State Shintō – an ‘Independent religion?,’ Monumenta Nipponica, 54 (1): 111–121. —— (2000) ‘The kami in esoteric Buddhist thought and practice,’ in Breen and Teeuwen, (eds). Shintō in History – Ways of the Kami, 22–46. Teeuwen, Mark and Scheid, Bernhard (2002) ‘Tracing Shinto in the History of Kami Worship. Editor’s Introduction,’ Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 29 (3–4): 195–207.

9780230_240735_05_cha03.indd 103

6/30/2011 12:59:47 PM

4 Sada Kaiseki: An Alternative Discourse on Buddhism, Modernity, and Nationalism in the Early Meiji Period Fabio Rambelli

Accounts of Japanese Buddhist attitudes about modernization, in general, argue that most religious institutions accepted without strong resistance the Meiji government’s policy of separating Buddhism from kami cults and the ensuing persecution of Buddhism and traditional forms of combinatory religiosity.1 By doing so, Buddhist institutions renounced their autonomy and chose a path of almost complete subservience to the state. This implied their acceptance of modern Western culture (including conceptualizations of religion and related practices) and the consequent transformation – if not outright rejection – of traditional Buddhist teachings and practices, beginning with the close ties between Buddhism and the imperial court dating from at least Shōtoku Taishi’s age (the seventh century). Overall, subservience to the modern Japanese state meant, in practice, the acceptance and legitimization of social, economic, and international policies that, because of their authoritarian and imperialistic nature, were essentially at odds with the Buddhist teachings.2 Within this context, most authors also maintain that Buddhism in Japan has, for most of its history, been organically related to state institutions. This sweeping generalization does not do justice to the complexities of the interactions between Buddhist organizations and state institutions throughout Japanese history; in addition, it fails to recognize important aspects of Buddhist autonomy vis-à-vis the state, together with Buddhism’s transgressive potential in Japan – which includes criticism of state policies formulated by Buddhists from explicitly Buddhist standpoints.3 104

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 104

6/30/2011 1:00:15 PM

Sada Kaiseki 105

This essay is an attempt to redress, at least in part, this received picture by exploring the thought and activities of a leading Buddhist figure of the early Meiji period, the monk Sada Kaiseki (1818–1882). Operating during a central time for the formulation of fundamental modernization policies that would determine many future developments of Japan, Sada Kaiseki is a fascinating case of a Buddhist intellectual who did not hesitate to strongly criticize the Meiji government and organize citizens’ movements to counter its policies. After a brief biographical note on Sada Kaiseki, I discuss 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. In all of these areas, Kaiseki tried to formulate original and autonomous intellectual 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 reevaluation of the significance of Kaiseki’s thought in the cultural history of modern Japan, also in the hope that this may open the way for further investigations on the original and progressive possibilities of modern Japanese Buddhism.

Life and works of Sada Kaiseki Sada Kaiseki was born in 1818 (Bunsei 1), the son of a Jōdo shinshū priest in Jōryūji temple in present-day Hachiyo City, Kumamoto Prefecture (Kyūshū); he was later adopted into the Sada family as the son of the head priest of Shōsenji temple in present-day Kumamoto City. From when he was eighteen, for about a decade he studied in Kyoto at the Honganji Higher Education Institute (daigakurin). He died in 1882 (Meiji 15) in Takada, present-day Niigata Prefecture, during one of his frequent lecture tours. Kaiseki was buried at Sensōji in Asakusa, Tokyo, with separate burials at Chion’in (Kyoto), Shitennōji (Osaka), Shōsenji (Kojimachō, Kumamoto Prefecture), and Echigo Gochi Kokubunji (Jōetsu City, Niigata Prefecture). His first biography was published in 1883 by his disciple Nitō Masahiro.4 During his formative years in Kyoto, Kaiseki studied Buddhist astronomy, in particular the theory, very popular at the time, formulated by Fumon Entsū (1755–1834) and developed by the Rinzai Zen priest Kanchū Zenki (1790–1859), known as bonreki (lit. ‘Indic calendrical sciences’); in a few years, Kaiseki became one of the leading figures of

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 105

6/30/2011 1:00:15 PM

106 Fabio Rambelli

Figure 4.1 Portrait of Sada Kaiseki Source: From Nitō (1883), frontispiece

the movement for the diffusion of Indic astronomy (known as bonreki undō), which he developed in an original way. Kaiseki was one of the leading public intellectuals of the time. He founded and edited several newspapers and magazines, wrote articles and books, and gave well-attended lectures on several topics throughout Japan. He also submitted numerous policy statements and proposals (kenpakusho) to the government, in which he criticized the Meiji state policies on several topics, ranging from strictly religious themes to international relations and economic issues. Kenpakusho were a peculiar discursive mode of the early Meiji period, in which citizens (not only members of the samurai class, but also commoners and, as in the case of Kaiseki, priests) addressed personal opinions, policy suggestions, and petitions to the new government. A recently published collection contains 545 such documents on a wide range of topics, including a request to create an elective parliament, the introduction of Western hairstyles, the education system, the adoption

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 106

6/30/2011 1:00:15 PM

Sada Kaiseki 107

of the Western calendar, land taxation, military conscription, the price of rice, and the invasion of Taiwan.5 A resident from the provinces was required to travel to Tokyo to submit his/her document in person and wait in the capital for ten to twenty days to receive an official reply (acceptance or rejection of the kenpaku). It has been argued that this system, however imperfect, allowed the direct participation of citizens in the formulation of government policies at a time when a parliament did not exist.6 According to Nitō Masahiro’s biography, Kaiseki submitted more than thirty such documents to the bakufu and the court before 1868, and another thirty or more to the Meiji government. Kaiseki also published several of them in newspapers. The early Meiji period saw the appearance in Japan of the modern press (newspapers and magazines) in a very dynamic cultural environment. Kaiseki actively participated in this cultural field as well, by creating and editing newspapers. He edited the Seieki shinbun (nine issues, 1875–1876 [Meiji 8–9]), and founded the Shōchin shinbun (two issues, 1876 [Meiji 9]); in both, he addressed issues of astronomy and geography, economics, and the protection of Buddhism (gohōron) from Christianity; in the other journal he founded, the Saibai keizai mondō shinshi (forty issues, 1881–1882 [Meiji 14–15]), he discussed economic issues and criticized the government’s modernization policies. Furthermore, Kaiseki contributed influential articles to other newspapers; for instance, his famous indictment of petrol lamps (‘Ranpu bōkoku no imashime’) was published in Meikyō shinshi, the joint journal of Buddhist organizations during the Meiji period (Issue no. 1011, July 18, 1880 [Meiji 13]); in the same journal, Kaiseki developed for several months a critical discussion with monks open to Western, modern science (from issue no. 694, September 12, 1878 [Meiji 11] to issue no. 762, February 4, 1879 [Meiji 12]). He also won the second prize (first prize not assigned) in an essay competition on the theme of the benefits and dangers of international commerce, in which Kaiseki argued that the latter overwhelmed the former (Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun, August 10, 1877 [Meiji 10]). Kaiseki was also a prolific book writer. Among his books, we find Shijitsutōshōgi ki shohen (1877) and Bukkyō sōseiki (1879) about astronomy and cosmogony; his economic theories are presented in Saibai keizairon in two tomes, four volumes (1878–1879, Meiji 11–12). Unfortunately, a critical edition of his works has never been published, and only a few of his shorter works are currently available in published collections of documents.7 As for his style, Kaiseki was an able and interesting polemist; he produced simple examples to develop complex ideas and thus draw popular

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 107

6/30/2011 1:00:15 PM

108 Fabio Rambelli

attention; his verve and gusto are very much in the tradition of contemporaneous Western pamphleteers. Kaiseki’s active participation in public discussion about general policies is also evident from his numerous lectures, sermons, and seminars. His topics were not religious doctrines in a narrow sense, but political, economic, and social issues. According to a survey by Tanikawa Minoru, Kaiseki gave speeches in more than seventy different places in only the last five years of his life, mostly in the three metropolitan areas (Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto) and neighbouring regions. Kaiseki gave many speeches at temples (including the Sensōji, Tokyo; Zenkōji, Nagano; Shitennōji, Osaka, and the higher education centre of the Ōtani sect in Kyoto), but also at elementary schools, technical schools, hotels (ryōtei), merchant houses, and the Mita enzetsukan (the lecture hall of Keiō Gijuku University) in Tokyo.8

Indic astronomy (bonreki undō) and the attempt at an alternative Buddhist scientific discourse Kaiseki was the last and perhaps most influential and popular exponent of an intellectual movement, known as bonreki undō (movement for the preservation of Indic astronomy and geography), which began in the early nineteenth century and aimed to present a scientifically viable discourse on Buddhist astronomy and geography in order to protect Buddhism from the pernicious influence of Western thought. Since Kaiseki’s contributions to Buddhist astronomy are based on previous developments, it is necessary, in order to understand them, to outline the history and main arguments of the entire bonreki movement. Knowledge of Western geography and astronomy was first spread in Japan by Christian missionaries in the late sixteenth century in order to show the superiority of Western knowledge of the world, but also to relativize traditional geopolitical mappings and replace them with a new geopolitics with the West (especially the North Atlantic countries) at the centre. After the relaxation of the ban on Western books in 1720 under Shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684–1751), knowledge about Western astronomy and geography began to spread all over Japan, and many educated people, not only intellectuals and experts, were exposed to them. In particular, painter and Dutch studies (rangaku) scholar Shiba Kōkan (1747–1818) published Oranda tensetsu (Dutch Theory of Heaven, i.e., European astronomy) in 1796 and introduced the heliocentric theory to a large audience.9 Subsequently, in the early nineteenth century,

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 108

6/30/2011 1:00:16 PM

Sada Kaiseki

109

the Confucian thinker Yamagata Bantō (1748–1821) proposed a rationalistic, materialistic, and heliocentric worldview.10 This branch of Western science was deeply troubling to Buddhist intellectuals, because many of them saw in the explicit negation of the Buddhist traditional cosmology a dangerous threat to the very foundation of the Buddhist worldview. They argued that, once the structure of the Buddhist cosmos was put into question, doubts would arise concerning the existence of hells and heavens, and thus also soteriology (the essence of Buddhism) would eventually collapse. The Buddhist world was, according to its scriptural sources and commentaries, a flat circle, with a huge mountain, the mythical Mount Sumeru (Jp. Shumisen) at its centre and eight circular mountain ranges, each separated by a deep ocean, from the one surrounding Sumeru to the one encircling the border of the world. Between the two most external mountain ranges, in correspondence to the four cardinal points, there were four large island–continents: respectively, Purvavideha (Jp. Tōshōshinshū) to the east, Uttarakuru (Hokuguroshū) to the north, Apara-Godamiya (Saigokashū) to the west, and Jambudvīpa (Enbudai or Nansenbushū) to the south. Human beings were believed to live on the southern continent of Jambudvīpa. Its landmass was occupied mostly by India (usually referred to as Tenjiku); China was a minor country to the north-east of India, and Japan, in particular, was envisioned as a small archipelago further to the north-east. Deep below Jambudvipa were the Buddhist hells. The disk holding Mount Sumeru, the mountain ranges, and the four continents was believed to be supported by three superimposed cylindrical spaces made of, respectively, from top to bottom, metal, water, and air. Above Mount Sumeru were several levels (known as ‘heavens,’ ten), the abodes of deities (Indra, Brahma, Siva, etc.). Some heavens were included in the realm of desire (yokukai, extending from the cylindrical space of air to the sixth heaven above Mount Sumeru), others were part of the realm of form (shikikai, a realm of pure shapes without desire and negative passions), and, further up, in increasingly immaterial dimensions, there was the realm of formlessness (mushikikai), inhabited by Buddhist masters of meditation who had escaped the cycle of reincarnation. All this constituted a world unit called Shumikai (the world of Mount Sumeru). One thousand of these world units form one ‘small thousand-world system’ (shōsensekai); one thousand small world systems form one ‘medium thousand-world world system’ (chūsensekai); finally, one thousand medium world systems form one ‘large thousand-world world system’ (daisensekai) – the totality of the Buddhist cosmos. This vast universe emerges, grows, decays,

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 109

6/30/2011 1:00:16 PM

110 Fabio Rambelli

and collapses, in an eternal cycle, during an extremely long time frame (known in Sanskrit as kalpa and in Japanese as kō, ‘aeon’).11 The Pure Land sect monk Monnō (1700–1763) was perhaps the first in early modern Japan to present a systematic outline of Buddhist cosmography and astronomy, also in order to counter foreign astronomical theories deemed potentially pernicious for Buddhism, but his work was strongly criticized by both adepts of Western astronomy and Nativist authors such as Motoori Norinaga.12 In 1810, the monk Fumon Entsū wrote a ground-breaking and influential work, Bukkoku rekishō hen (Astronomy of the Buddha Land), in which he criticized recent astronomical and geographical theories, including those coming from Europe, while attempting to present a rational and scientific exposition of the Buddhist universe. In so doing, he criticized Buddhist authors such as Monnō for their lack of adequate knowledge of the new sciences. Recent books criticizing Western astronomy from a Buddhist standpoint, Entsū wrote, were written by authors who ‘did not know the astronomical theories outside the Buddhist tradition, nor even examined astronomical theories in the Buddhist scriptures. How can they protect Buddhism from the criticism of others?’13 Entsū based his theory on a critical reading of several Buddhist scriptures filtered through a new awareness of scientific discourse. In order to prove his theory, he adopted some aspects of the modern Western experimental method. In particular, he designed accurate models of the Buddhist world, conducted public observation of astronomical phenomena, and held public lectures in which he addressed questions and objections from the audience. This was the beginning of what came to be known as bonreki undō, one of the most peculiar, influential, and widespread – and, perhaps, one of the least studied and most misunderstood – Buddhist intellectual movements in the later Edo period.14 The Bonreki movement is usually envisioned today as a peculiar development of the efforts to preserve Buddhism (gohōron, dharma preservation discourse), and its place in Japanese society and politics, from the impact of Christianity; such efforts indeed characterize Japanese Buddhism from the late Tokugawa until the early Meiji periods. Thus, Bonreki is normally understood as an essentially reactionary, nationalistic, and Buddhist fundamentalist response to modernization and the impact of Western culture in Japan. Contrary to this received view, Oku Takenori and, especially, Okada Masahiko have shown that this movement, beginning with Entsū, was an attempt to reconceive the Buddhist worldview from within the framework of Western modern science.15 In fact, it is possible to argue further that, as we shall see below, the scope of

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 110

6/30/2011 1:00:16 PM

Sada Kaiseki 111

the Bonreki movement, especially in its later developments led by Sada Kaiseki, was even more radical and intellectually challenging, namely, an attempt to adapt Western science to the Buddhist worldview. Bonreki theories were accepted by many contemporary Buddhists and even professional astronomers;16 from at least the 1830s they became part of standard educational curricula at Buddhist universities (in particular, at Nishi and Higashi Honganji, but also in other temples with different sectarian affiliations). The Tokugawa government recognized this as a legitimate field of study in 1821, after receiving the endorsement of the imperial court – even though Entsū’s work was banned from public circulation in the same year, apparently upon the request of some influential, and conservative, Buddhist institutions. Even after the new Meiji government prohibited its teaching in 1876,17 Bonreki ideas continued to circulate, mainly thanks to the efforts of Sada Kaiseki. Entsū’s Bonreki theory was indeed an attempt to protect Buddhism by showing in detail the Buddhist outlook on the world. Entsū argued that Buddhist astronomy, geography, and calendrical sciences were not strange or peculiar concoctions to be eliminated; on the contrary, he stressed that ‘all astronomical theories in various countries are originally based on Bonreki.’18 However, Bonreki itself ‘has never been introduced to Japan:’19 it was thus Entsū’s task to provide a full and convincing account of how Buddhism envisions the universe and the place and structure of our world in it. It is clear that Entsū was aware that his was a new theory, albeit based on numerous Buddhist scriptures and commentaries; he was critical of Western theories in so far as they did not conform to his own interpretation of the Buddhist classics, but he was equally critical of other Buddhist authors who reacted against Western astronomical theories without direct knowledge of astronomy. In this sense, they were the fundamentalists, and Entsū was a modernizer.20 As Okada writes, ‘The fundamental project of the Bonreki theory was to produce a general theory of Buddhist astronomy by using the geographical and astronomical statements in the Buddhist scriptures as a data base and applying the modern scientific explanatory method to this data.’21 More specifically, ‘Contrary to the previous Buddhist cosmography which was a symbolic representation of reality, Entsū’s model was constructed as an accurate representation of the real world which was sustained by a scientific verification of the correspondence between the representation and the represented.’22 Thus, ‘Entsū’s Bonreki theory ... was constructed as an oppositional theory to modern Western astronomy and geography’ but ‘used the explanatory method of modern sciences;’23 in particular, ‘most of Entsū’s arguments are

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 111

6/30/2011 1:00:16 PM

112 Fabio Rambelli

Figure 4.2 Entsū’s representation of Mount Sumeru Source: From Ono (1927), 123

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 112

6/30/2011 1:00:16 PM

Sada Kaiseki 113

logical criticisms based on numerical calculation.’24 Entsu’s universe with Mount Sumeru at the centre was based on detailed numerical data (those found in Buddhist scriptures) and calculations, and could be modelized; indeed, he did draw realistic pictures of the world of Mount Sumeru. His theory was supported, to an extent, by empirical observations (such as the distance of the stars from earth, and the size and mass of the earth, among others – in so far as these data were known at the time in Japan) and served to explain ambiguous phenomena (the velocity of the earth’s rotation on its axis); but, most significantly, there were neither hells nor heavens in it. Okada also points, rightly, to the fact that Entsū’s ‘was not a traditional and popular religious worldview’ and ‘Entsū himself acknowledges the newness of his theory.’25 The novelty of Entsū’s intervention, which became the basis for the subsequent developments of the Bonreki movement up to Kaiseki’s innovations, lies precisely in his attempt to present a rational and scientific theory of the Buddhist universe. However, the fundamental Buddhist nature of Entsū’s theory is clear from its basic assumption, namely, the fact that Bonreki astronomy was not an abstract and empty speculative theory, nor was it based merely on empirical observations (prone to the mistakes of sense organs and their intellectual interpretations), but had been discovered through the spiritual insight of the Buddha, a direct result of the supernatural powers deriving from religious practice – meditation and, ultimately, enlightenment.26 Buddha’s spiritual eye (tengan, ‘heavenly eye’) is envisioned in opposition to the human eye (nikugan, ‘bodily eye’), a limited sense organ which produces delusory representations of reality and is at the basis of other scientific theories (which are therefore limited and ultimately fallacious). According to Entsū and later Bonreki authors, including Kaiseki, the heavenly eye enables one to see all things beyond differences such as day and night, front and back, past, present, and future, and up and down, from the highest heaven to the deepest hell, from the eternal past to the eternal future – in short, beyond all limitations of ordinary vision. Precisely because it relies upon the wisdom produced by the spiritual eye, for Entsū the Indic astronomical system is based on an absolute standard and is therefore unchangeable and sacred, whereas Western science has many different theories, is changeable, and is man-made, being based on mere human observation and hypotheses lacking any ultimate foundation.27 The role of the heavenly eye and, more generally, the religious foundations of Buddhist astronomy and geography became delicate issues

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 113

6/30/2011 1:00:16 PM

114 Fabio Rambelli

in subsequent developments of the Bonreki movement; Kaiseki in particular attempted to explain (and eliminate) the difference between the appearance of the world through ordinary vision and its true aspect in a rational, theoretical way that excluded references to mysticism as much as possible. After Entsū’s death in 1834, Bonreki became increasingly important, also thanks to the activity of his disciples and their followers. Different orientations began to emerge; two branches, in particular, led by two of Entsū’s most eminent disciples, acquired prominence. The branch led by Shingyō (1774–1858), a scholar monk of the Jōdo Shinshū, stressed strict adherence to the master’s teachings and scorned innovations.28 Another branch, inspired by Mukyūshi Kanchū Zenki (1790–1859), scholar–monk of the Rinzai temple Tenryūji in Kyoto, further developed Entsū’s theory in a scientific and rationalist direction. Kanchū in particular pointed out some problems in Entsū’s theory, such as the explanation of the seasonal change on the four island–continents surrounding Mount Sumeru and the existence of the ‘night country’ (yakoku, i.e., the dark side of the globe not exposed to the sunlight), and tried to solve them; he also recalculated the movements of the sun and the moon and revised Entsū’s calendar.29 Kanchū designed, with his disciple Kōgon, a three-dimensional model showing the actual movement of the celestial bodies around Mount Sumeru and above the Jambudvīpa continent. This model was actually built as a clockwork mechanism by Tanaka Hisashige (1799–1881), inventor and later founder of Tōshiba Company, in 1847–1850.30 Because of his competence in mathematics and astronomy, Kanchū quickly became the most influential leader of the Bonreki movement and gave it a more and more rigorous scientific nature. One of Kanchū’s disciples, Shinshū priest and astronomer Fujii Saishō (1838–1907), developed Entsū’s theory of the distinction between phenomena as perceived by the bodily eye (called ‘reduced phenomena,’ shukushō) and the true aspect of reality perceived by the spiritual eye (‘expanded phenomena’ or tenshō, a development of the Buddhist concept of ultimate reality or jissō). In particular, Saishō tried to explain the visual distortion that results when true reality is perceived by the ordinary human eye. He argued that the area of air supporting the world of Mount Sumeru was divided into five parts characterized by different thickness and different patterns of movement within them. These differences alter the direction of light and affect human vision; because of this, the human eye cannot see the world as it is (jisshō, ‘true phenomena’) but only ‘provisional phenomena’ (kashō).31 Note that, according to this version of the Bonreki theory, heavenly vision is not the result

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 114

6/30/2011 1:00:16 PM

Sada Kaiseki

115

of a mystical experience, in the same way as human vision is not the result of karmic hindrances or moral faults; instead, and significantly, the discrepancy between those two outlooks on reality are described in rational terms through the formulation of a scientific hypothesis. As a consequence, the Buddha’s absolute vision now became, in Okada’s words, a ‘theoretical vision’ – the abstract hypothesis or framework on which scientific theories are grounded. Sada Kaiseki was the last and perhaps best-known scholar of the bonreki movement.32 Kaiseki shared the preoccupations of his predecessors about the negative consequences for Buddhist soteriology of denying the existence of Mount Sumeru and the entire worldview centred on it. However, in accordance with the tendencies of the time, he chose to reject mystical formulations and developed instead bonreki’s scientific approach. He emphasized the fact that all astronomical theories (including modern Western ones) are essentially hypotheses based on interpretations of experience, which is in itself limited and potentially fallacious; he also proposed rational objections to Western hypotheses based on his own observations and experience. The gist of Kaiseki’s theory is an original explanation of the relations between ‘visual phenomena’ (shishō) and ‘true phenomena’ (jisshō) – a further development of ideas already laid out by Fujii Saishō. He begins by criticizing the received idea that visible phenomena (the earth and the universe as they appear to the ordinary human sense faculties) are different from the true appearance of the cosmos; instead, he argues that this difference is based on a perceptive bias and other accidents, which can, however, be explained and formalized according to a series of diagrams; he then concludes that visible phenomena are not essentially different from the universe as it really is. Thus, on the basis of his theory, it is possible to use visual evidence to understand the real outlook of reality; even though, in his view, the true appearance of the universe is the one described in Buddhist scriptures as first envisioned by the Buddha, there is no need to presuppose a mystical vision or a supernatural faculty to attain it – which was the primary scientific limit of previous Bonreki theories. In order to further prove his arguments, Kaiseki asked Tanaka Hisashige and others to build clockwork mechanisms based on his own astronomical models.33 It is interesting to note that he did not even bother to actually represent the shape of the cosmic mountain, which in his theory thus tends to become a sort of abstract symbol. In this way, Kaiseki could also try to promote a coexistence of different and alternative cosmologies. He speaks explicitly, in his work, of

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 115

6/30/2011 1:00:17 PM

116 Fabio Rambelli

Figure 4.3 Sada Kaiseki’s model showing the identity of visual and true phenomena Source: From Sada Kaiseki, Shijitsu tōshōgi ki shohen, 378

his ultimate goal as the attainment of ‘a peaceful coexistence’ (kyōwa) of Buddhist and Western astronomical theories and representations of the earth.34 As we can see, Kaiseki was not against Western theories per se; indeed, he argued that each culture has its own representations of the world and no one is absolutely perfect.35 As rightly noted by Umebayashi Seiji, the main target of Kaiseki’s criticism was not Western

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 116

6/30/2011 1:00:17 PM

Sada Kaiseki 117

science per se but rather the Japanese popularizers of Western science such as Fukuzawa Yukichi – people who, without a deep knowledge of astronomy, limited themselves to presenting to a wide public simple examples and metaphors used in Western textbooks to explain the structure of the earth and the universe.36 Kaiseki was indeed very good at picking up these images and tearing them apart by showing them as superficial and contradictory to everyday experience.

Practicing Buddhism through economic activity: Kaiseki’s economic thought Economics was the other main arena of Kaiseki’s intervention. The early Meiji years were a time of rapid and major transformations, which also affected economic relations and modes of production. The opening of ports to foreign trade in 1859 resulted in price increases, inflation, and widespread poverty. Until the late 1870s, there were many popular revolts and uprisings caused by economic and social factors, as forms of reaction against new thought and social ordering. Kaiseki was one among the many voices trying to offer solutions to those economic problems. His first public statements on the subject are perhaps two kenpakusho, one dated 1873 in which he criticized the government’s policies aimed at “enriching the country” (fukoku), and the other dated 1874, in which he justifies the violent uprisings that had been occurring throughout the country after the Boshin War (1868– 1869); in these widespread revolts, involving thousands of people, prefectural buildings had been burned down and state officers had been killed. Kaiseki argued that the citizens’ rage was justified because of the government’s wrongheaded policies: ‘old practices have been discarded but there is as yet no new way to replace them. If by chance there happens to be one such new way, in those cases the customs of our empire have been replaced by Western methods.’37 In Kaiseki’s eyes, evidently, this attitude of the government justified violent rebellion. Over the years, Kaiseki developed his own economic theory, which became the main focus of his intellectual and political activities. Its most systematic statement is contained in a book, Saibai keizairon (Introduction to Cultivation-mode Economics, 1878–1879), and further developed in newspapers and magazines until his death. His last contribution to economic theory, an article entitled “Tentori kōtsūron,” was published posthumously in 1883. For Kaiseki, agriculture was the basis of the Japanese economy, and the basic model of his economic theory, as is clear from the title of

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 117

6/30/2011 1:00:17 PM

118 Fabio Rambelli

his main work on the subject, is agricultural cultivation (saibai), which is applied to all aspects of production in an attempt to outline a sustainable and community-based economic life. Emphasis on agriculture was a common theme of Edo period intellectual discourse, shared by Confucians and Nativists, but also by new religious movements such as Ōmotokyō, with its early rejection of modernization and the capitalistic economy. However, Kaiseki’s stance was original in several respects, such as his emphasis on businesses’ duties of providing benefits for the totality of the people and not only for the entrepreneurs, his attention to traditional technologies and local products, and the importance he gave to leisure and expenditure (the latter in contrast to the Confucian emphasis on ‘thrift’ (kensetsu). A fundamental theme in Kaiseki’s theory is the idea that business (jigyō) should be judged not according to its principles, however clever, or its success, but only according to the benefits (eki) it brings to the country and the people: ‘if [a kind of business] brings no benefits to the country, if it harms the people, it should be discarded like one throws away a broken shoe.’38 In this way, Kaiseki was distancing himself from Confucian thinkers, preoccupied either with increasing agricultural productivity or with abstract notions of morality and social order, by stressing a close relationship between economic activity and concrete benefits to all the people. Furthermore, Kaiseki’s economic theory is based on four interrelated ideas: (i) the rejection of imported goods and the valorization of Japanese traditional technology and sensibility; (ii) the emphasis on consumption (demand-driven economy), in contrast to the government’s policies privileging production (offer-driven model) based on heavy industries; (iii) the importance of leisure and conspicuous consumption of voluptuary goods and services; and, finally, (iv) the leading economic role of the urban higher classes, who are entrusted with improving the general economic condition of the populace at large. Kaiseki defined economy (keizai) as the ‘unhindered circulation of commodities and money among the people.’39 He envisioned economics as a system of relations and communications pervading society, in which human beings and the natural world and, among human beings, producers and consumers were related, and goods could flow freely throughout the social space. One of the starting points of Kaiseki’s economic ideas (and, more generally, his politics) was the rapid impoverishment and diffuse social unrest that resulted from the Japanese government’s decision to open the ports and allow unrestrained foreign goods to flow into the country. The import of expensive, luxury foreign goods was paid for in silver currency; the outflow of currency caused inflation, which dramatically reduced the purchasing power and conditions of living of many

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 118

6/30/2011 1:00:17 PM

Sada Kaiseki 119

people – in particular, what we would call today the middle and lowermiddle classes. Kaiseki did not shy away from explicitly and strongly criticizing the Meiji government for its policies, which severely affected the majority of Japanese citizens. In short, Kaiseki was against globalization and believed that economic issues should be solved exclusively within Japan. He argued that Japan and the Western countries (which he tended to consider as one large system, rather than different and competing entities – an understanding that, within the context of the economic conjuncture of the early Meiji state, was not totally incorrect) were very different in culture, environment, and national character; since their economic systems were also very different, Japan had everything to lose from its inclusion within a global commercial network dominated by Western powers. In his kenpakusho of 1874 Kaiseki had already stated that ‘the only way to enrich the country is to expand consumption.’40 As he later explained, ‘In the West, goods produced by a single country are consumed all over the world;’ thus, ‘in the West production cannot but be given priority, because there are vast possibilities of consumption.’ In contrast, ‘in Japan, its goods can only be consumed internally and there is no way to expand their consumption elsewhere;’ therefore, in Japan ‘consumption needs to be given priority, because too many different goods are produced and the possibilities of consumption are limited.’ If Japan chose to follow the West and privilege production, this would provoke major damage to the country.41 The reason for such priority given to consumption, rather than production, is fairly straightforward. For example, Kaiseki notes that, if an artisan produces fifteen combs (kushi) or hairpins (kanzashi) a day, in one year he will make about 5,400; however, one customer needs only one a year. That means that, in order to absorb all that production, several thousand people must buy those goods. Therefore, the task of policymakers is to enable more and more people to buy things that only a few producers make.42 In this context, Kaiseki envisioned population control as an obvious way to increase wealth, and proposed expansion of the celibate Buddhist clergy as a form of population control.43 Part of the problem, Kaiseki argued, was the Meiji government’s decision to abolish the fiefs (han) and the samurai class (shizoku); accordingly, former samurai were required to find different jobs as farmers or merchants. Kaiseki wrote: ‘It would seem that after the Boshin War, there is a strong tendency in the government to turn all people in the realm into producers ... this would likely cause great harm.’44 In his view, consumption should be concentrated primarily in the affluent classes (kazoku and shizoku, i.e., the aristocracy and the samurai) living in the Japanese metropolitan cities (Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto);

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 119

6/30/2011 1:00:17 PM

120 Fabio Rambelli

Figure 4.4 Model of economic flows Source: From Saibai keizairon, 362

these were connected with the producers (farmers) in the countryside through mid-size centres of consumption and logistical facilities (harbours, stations, markets) located in regional towns. Kaiseki represented this economic model visually in the following diagram. A concrete example of consumption-led wealth distribution given by Kaiseki is what can be called the ‘dango (rice cakes) effect:’ by selling rice cakes more rice is sold, and rice wholesale dealers, rice shops, and rice flour merchants make profits, as well as merchants of azuki beans and sugar.45 It has been argued that Kaiseki’s vision was essentially conservative, if not outright reactionary, being largely based on pre-modern economic conditions and relations.46 It should be noted, however, that Kaiseki, as we have seen, understood economic activity not as a static situation, but

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 120

6/30/2011 1:00:18 PM

Sada Kaiseki

121

as a dynamic system of relations in which the same person can be, in different times and spatial locations, both a producer and a consumer. In particular, Kaiseki believed that consumption is endowed with a ‘power of expansion’ (bōchōryoku) that enables wealth to spread among all people in the country. Thus, it is quite natural to place the burden of keeping the economic mechanism functioning upon the wealthy classes; Kaiseki thought that their consumption (including what can be called ‘conspicuous consumption,’ as we shall see below) should function as a stimulus in a process in which wealth would ‘trickle down’ from the metropolitan upper classes to the middle and lower classes in regional centres and the countryside, with the result of a general improvement of the conditions of living. Kaiseki wrote that, thanks to the expenditure of the upper classes, ‘the affluence of the farmers in the realm will increase and extend its effects also to artisans and merchants.’47 Put in these terms, Kaiseki was a ‘trickle-down’ economist, with the difference that, in Kaiseki’s case, wealth redistribution was a sort of moral obligation for the upper classes.48 Kaiseki, however, was no economic liberal; he wrote about the need to restrain economic freedom if its exercise harms society.49 This idea also applies to economic development. For Kaiseki, Japanese development consists in ‘making it possible for commodities that are originally of low quality to become more sophisticated, and for useless and discarded things to become useful again.’50 Here we see the idea of a gradual improvement of national technologies and sensibility according to internal logics, not impositions from the outside; but also ideas such as recycling (discarded things becoming useful again) and the valorization of objects and services that a mere logic of production and a narrow economicism consider useless – such as sake, temples and shrines, theatres and pleasure quarters. Kaiseki also favoured ‘natural products’ (tenkōhin) and ‘natural production’ (tenzōbutsu no seisaku) against mechanically produced artifacts (jinkōhin); among the latter, he privileged objects made by artisans following traditional technologies, rather than mass-production by machines.51 Among the reasons for these preferences, Kaiseki argued that natural products and artisanal artifacts follow the natural rhythm of the seasons and are less exploitative of natural resources, and that human beings are more in control of the production process than in the case of mechanically mass-produced goods. In this sense, Kaiseki’s model shows concern with issues such as sustainability, ecological balance, and labour alienation.52 This is particularly evident in his rejection of fossil fuels such as carbon and petrol, because such finite

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 121

6/30/2011 1:00:18 PM

122 Fabio Rambelli

sources of energy, largely dependent on foreign imports, would eventually result in environmental damage. He wrote that carbon ‘is not recreated’ once it’s finished; furthermore, because of its very essence it ‘burns things’ and as a result ‘where carbon is ... neither crops nor plants grow.’53 He even warned against soil overexploitation and excessive emphasis on single crops: ‘Recently, forests in our country are being cut in enormous quantity, and in their place and even in good fields mulberry tree saplings and tea are planted. This is certainly excessive’ and will result in the ruin even of wealthy merchants.54 Of course, Kaiseki’s economic model, in order to function effectively, presupposed the lack of external influence; production and consumption had to take place essentially within Japan, involving Japanese labour and capital, Japanese technologies and natural resources, and Japanese artifacts engineered for the Japanese lifestyle and sensibility. Foreign goods and technologies, together with foreign tastes and habits, would cause enormous disruptions to this economic system and the social structure it was related to.55 Since, in Kaiseki’s words, ‘gold money is the soul (tamashii) of the country,’56 excessive imports cause deficit, which results in inflation, which ends up in loss of wealth and thus poverty; poverty in turn leads to crime and ultimately to the degeneration of society57 – this last development is perhaps an echo of the Scripture of Primary Causes (Pāli Aggañña Suttanta, Jp. Shōengyō), upon which Kaiseki based his own ontology and theory of the origin of society.58 Indeed, until 1881 the value of imports exceeded that of exports; during the late 1870s and early 1880s capitalists and wealthy farmers were able to afford imported luxury items, a development that worried Kaiseki, as did the unexpected accidents related to the use of imported commodities, such as hundreds of cases of building fires provoked by oil lamps.59 This led Kaiseki to begin an aggressive campaign to boycott foreign goods (not only imported from the West, but also from China), an effort in which Kaiseki engaged until the very end of his life (he died during a lecture tour to sponsor the creation of boycott societies in north–central Japan). In particular, the last two years of Kaiseki’s life were devoted to the creation and organization of popular associations dedicated to the boycott of foreign products in various parts of Japan (Tokyo, Kyoto, Shiga, Aichi, Mie, Gunma, Nagano, Niigata); his efforts seem to have met with some success, with several thousand people joining in.60 Kaiseki’s movement targeted a wide selection of goods, including oil lamps, railways, Western hats, ‘bat umbrellas’ (Western umbrellas), milk, the Western calendar, soap, steamboats, wine, public

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 122

6/30/2011 1:00:18 PM

Sada Kaiseki 123

buildings built with bricks (renga), and chairs placed in public offices. In fact, Kaiseki studied in detail the impact of imported goods on the local economy, and found that one single foreign commodity harmed several dozens, if not hundreds, of locally produced goods. Particularly well known is Kaiseki’s campaign against oil lamps, usually referred to as the ‘lamps will bring the country to ruins’ discussion (ranpu bōkokuron). Despite their eccentric appearance, Kaiseki’s arguments were fairly sound and well motivated. He observed that, like other imported goods, foreign oil lamps were expensive, depended on imported oil, and thus were a great burden on Japan’s finances. Moreover, and equally important, imported lamps were replacing Japanese-made traditional lamps, with a huge loss not only of labour and wealth, but also of autochthonous technology and production systems. He detailed sixteen kinds of damage caused to Japan by the adoption of oil lamps, including the outflow of money abroad, the abandonment of national products, obstacles to the free circulation of capital, impediments to the development of agriculture and handicrafts, increases in the cost of wood, diffusion of Western money, building fires (with resulting accidental deaths), widespread economic depression, increase in crime and criminals, harm to eyesight, bad smells at home and on the body.61 However, Kaiseki did not call for a total rejection of all foreign influence; on the contrary, he was aware that imported goods that had not previously existed in Japan might have an important function. In this respect, an argument put forth by Kaiseki that has not previously been discussed in depth is the usefulness of tobacco as a wealth-producing and wealth-diffusion commodity.62 Kaiseki did recognize that commodities imported from abroad and initially diffused in Japan by foreigners, as in the case of tobacco (officially introduced to Japan in 1605), could be beneficial for his country and its citizens, but he was against generalized imports. Instead, he promoted the development and production of alternative products to foreign goods, such as Japanese iron products (which did not use imported iron), surrogates for soap, tangerine juice instead of lemon juice, Japanese textiles and dying techniques, umbrellas, and dango dumplings (which did not contain imported sugar).63 A businessman based in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, named Kōno Ryūkei, worked with Kaiseki to develop a lamp, called Kankōtō (‘lamp for enlightened vision’), which was similar to foreign items but burned Japanese miscellaneous oils instead of imported petrol, and Kaiseki actively promoted its diffusion. Another interesting aspect of Kaiseki’s economic theory, especially in light of subsequent developments in Japanese society, is the importance

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 123

6/30/2011 1:00:18 PM

124 Fabio Rambelli

he attributed to leisure or recreation (asobi) – both pleasurable activities (yūraku) and free time. He identified four kinds of recreation, namely, dissipation (hōtō no asobi), educational activities (yōiku no asobi), recreation to encourage hard work (hagean tame no asobi), and aristocratic leisure (gyōyo no asobi).64 Dissipation is, of course, ‘to be restrained,’ but the other forms of recreation have to be encouraged. Educational activities include children’s games and hobbies for the elderly such as the tea ceremony; their economic impact (toys, tools for tea ceremony, sweets) is significant. Recreation to encourage hard work refers to leisure activities, such as visiting parks and attending theatre performances, in which artisans engage during their holidays; these activities serve to further stimulate workers to work harder during workdays. Aristocratic leisure refers to activities and consumption that take place among ‘noble and wealthy families.’ Kaiseki emphasizes the economic impact of all these activities; contrary to both the Edo period Confucian work ethic and the early Meiji emphasis on hard work and thrift, Kaiseki argued for the importance of free time also by re-evaluating the Edo culture of amusement. Indeed, the ‘power of expansion’ proper of consumption is triggered in particular in public spaces (fukusō) such as shrines, temples, amusement quarters, tourist places, and market places65 – centres of conspicuous consumption of what Confucian economic theories and subsequent common understanding considered ‘non-necessary’ (muyō) services and goods. As an example, Kaiseki argued that sake consumption (and production) was an important way to distribute wealth throughout society – a good instance of an apparently useless good playing a useful role.66 Accordingly, Kaiseki argued that thrift (kensetsu), a Confucian virtue much emphasized by the Meiji government, consists not in refraining from expenditure, but in spending ‘according to one’s possibilities.’67 For Kaiseki, Buddhism constituted an important stimulus for consumption, and thus for the enrichment of the country; he mentioned, in this respect, the economic impact of purchasing Buddhist ritual implements (monk’s robes, banners, etc.) and of temple construction works, as well as pilgrimage to holy sites and related expenditures, ranging from amulets and tourist souvenirs to pleasure quarters, and concluded: ‘[the bodhisattva] Kannon is a great business principle for the country.’68 This was not irony or skepticism, as Kaiseki seriously believed that Buddhist practices were directly related to the attainment of worldly (i.e., also economic) benefits. Kaiseki listed four principles of Buddhist economy: (1) the very useful is not so different from the useless; (2) there are no useless things when it comes to complete

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 124

6/30/2011 1:00:19 PM

Sada Kaiseki 125

consumption; (3) first consumption, then production; (4) the material necessities of monks are useful and produce profits for the country.69 It has been pointed out that Kaiseki’s economic theory was essentially ‘anti-capitalist.’70 Far from being a mere expression of reactionary nostalgia for an idealized past, it contains elements of striking contemporary value, such as the critique of globalization as wholesale adoption of foreign lifestyles resulting in deculturation, the outflow of resources and wealth, and the dependency on foreign powers; emphasis on local technologies and renewable resources against imported goods and services; controlled consumption as a means to redistribute wealth, in contrast to industrialization, which instead generates disparity of income; and the importance of leisure. It may appear strange to a contemporary reader that an engaged Buddhist intellectual of the early Meiji period such as Sada Kaiseki thought that the defence of Buddhism’s leading role in society required both a scientific reformulation of Buddhist astronomical and geographical discourse and the proposal of economic reforms in Buddhist terms; indeed, modern Buddhist priests and intellectuals appear to have been doing neither of these things. What is the connection between Kaiseki’s Bonreki astronomy and his saibai (cultivation-mode) economics? In particular, what is specifically Buddhist about the latter? Kaiseki did indeed believe that his economic theories were a way to promote Buddhism: what he was doing, he wrote, was ‘discussing Buddhism through economics’ (keizai wo motte buppō wo ronzu).71 An important suggestion in this respect comes from a statement about Kaiseki’s economic theory written by liberal intellectual Nakamura Masanao (1832–1891): ‘Rev. Sada Kaiseki does not chant the scriptures or the nenbutsu but discusses economic issues such as clothes, food, and everyday objects.’ Furthermore, he addresses such issues with his ‘eyes of compassion’ (jigan); for this reasons, Nakamura regarded him as a ‘true Buddhist.’72 These praises by a leading liberal intellectual of his time indicate that Kaiseki was closer than is usually thought to at least some positions advocated by the Japanese Enlightenment movement centred on Meiroku zasshi (Meiji Six Magazine). Right-wing intellectual and Shinshū priest Asano Kenshin was also deeply fascinated by Kaiseki’s unique figure as a Buddhist activist, who did not engage himself in ‘empty sermonizing’ (kūseppō), but acted from the perspective of ‘Mahayana social praxis.’73 It is significant here that the term jigan, ‘eyes of compassion,’ is a synonym of tengan, the supernatural faculty that, as we have seen, enables one to see Mount Sumeru and the Buddhist universe, according to Bonreki authors. In Kaiseki’s eyes, a different outlook on

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 125

6/30/2011 1:00:19 PM

126 Fabio Rambelli

the universe based on Buddhist teachings also implied a different look at everyday practices, particularly economic activities.

Buddhism and the modern world: Kaiseki’s thought and politics Practically all of Kaiseki’s activity as an engaged Buddhist intellectual was oriented against state policies and the then-dominant ideas about modernization; in fact, he formulated a sustained and general alternative political discourse and praxis against the state. Let us see the larger framework of Kaiseki’s intellectual world in some detail. Concerning his metaphysical orientation, Kaiseki was a philosophical materialist. As an expert in Buddhist cosmology and cosmogony, he subscribed to the classical Buddhist theories, according to which the universe is in a constant and unceasing cycle of creation, growth, degeneration, and destruction, followed by a new creation, growth, degeneration, and destruction, and so on and so forth, without beginning or end. Moreover, all entities and beings in the universe are the result of the combination of material atoms (mijin), in an eternal movement of aggregation and disaggregation. The first atoms in such movement existed originally and spontaneously in nature, and are thus not the result of creation by intelligent design.74 Because of this outlook on reality, Kaiseki was averse to spiritualistic or idealistic visions of the state and the body politic, mediated from both Shinto Nativism and German idealism, which formed the ‘spiritual’ core of the Meiji state, in striking contrast to its open support of scientific rationality. One wonders what Kaiseki’s reactions would have been had he been exposed to Marx’s materialism. Concerning political praxis in general, we have seen that Kaiseki was profoundly critical of Meiji government policies toward modernization, which he saw as a thoughtless and grotesque adoption of alien ways and fashions from the West – calendar, clothes, hairstyles, material objects, intellectual systems, sensibilities – which would ultimately have disastrous consequences for the Japanese people and their culture. Kaiseki was not, in principle, against progress, the improvement of material and spiritual civilization, perhaps not even against modernization per se – the process known in Japan at the time as bunmei kaika (‘civilization and development’). However, he argued that there is no single path to progress, and in particular that the Western way to development was definitely not appropriate to Japan. He defined the modernization process (bunmei kaika) in the following way: ‘seen for example from

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 126

6/30/2011 1:00:19 PM

Sada Kaiseki 127

the point of view of commodities, the original products of one’s country are coarse and ugly at the beginning, but then the path opens for them to gradually become more sophisticated and beautiful; this brings benefits to the people of that country.’ However, each country has its own way to realize development; thus, ‘In the West there is a western bunmei kaika. In Japan there is a Japanese bunmei kaika.’75 In contemporary terms, we could say that Kaiseki was afraid that the acculturation (the earnest attempt to adopt cultural elements from the West) promoted by the new government was in fact resulting in a serious deculturation (a loss of cultural forms that would ultimately lead to anomie). Kaiseki approvingly quotes Montesquieu concerning the importance of habits and customs and the need to change them only when old customs have become harmful and new customs become available that are more beneficial to the people.76 It should be emphasized that Kaiseki was not against progress in itself, and was deeply critical of the government’s fondness for the mythical times in which the Japanese imperial dynasty supposedly began. Kaiseki wrote: ‘In ancient times, from Emperor Jinmu until Empress Suiko’s reign, their [the Japanese of the time] barbaric customs were like those of wild beasts. The holes in the ground in remote areas where they used to live are scattered here and there. Such wretched customs are beyond comparison.’77 In terms of international awareness, many authors see Kaiseki as sternly nationalistic, if not as an outright Japanese chauvinist, but in fact he was a sort of cultural relativist. It is true that he disliked Christianity and was wary of Western influence as detrimental to Buddhism and Japanese culture in general. However, he did not claim that Japan was superior to other cultures; as a leading exponent of the bonreki astronomical movement, he emphasized the importance of Indic astronomy, geography, and calendrical sciences, and urged the government not to abandon them; he was also aware of the important role played in Japanese culture by Confucianism. As for the West, he recognized the specificity of Western culture and the fact that Western values, systems of thought, and social practices were indeed appropriate to Western societies – but not, he stressed, to Japan, as we have seen apropos his approach to cultural development (bunmei kaika). It is true that Kaiseki’s representations of the West are often superficial, stereotypical, even grotesque, but we should not forget that he was essentially a pamphleteer and political activist, and his writings on the subject were aimed above all at scoring emotional points with his audience, not to provoke subtle disquisitions. Even so, from his descriptions emerges an image of a powerful, gigantic West opposed to a tiny and weak Japan. For example, he

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 127

6/30/2011 1:00:19 PM

128 Fabio Rambelli

Table 4.1 Sada Kaiseki’s comparative summary of Japanese and Western people Term of comparison

Japanese people

Western people

Hair

Black Straight Soft Fine Long

Red, Yellow, White Curly Hard Coarse Short

Face

Gentle

Stern

Eyes

Black

Blue

Body

Small

Large

Nose

Flat, short, small

Protruding, long, big

Excretion of feces and urine Teeth

Simultaneous

Separate

Born without

Born with

Sight

Weak, cannot see in darkness

Sharp, can see in darkness and from afar

Food

Cereals

Meat

Bodily smell

Hate smell of Westerners

Do not hate smell of Westerners, which is like that of people on the beach

Growth

Four or five-year-old children are like twoyear-old Western children

Two-year-old children are like four or five-year-old Japanese children

Children’s intelligence

A fourteen to fifteenyear-old Japanese is like a seven to eight-year-old Westerner

A seven to eight-year-old Westerner is like a fourteen to fifteen-year-old Japanese

Old age

A sixty-year-old Japanese is like a forty-year-old Westerner

A forty-year-old Westerner is like a sixty-year-old Japanese (Westerners age faster and die sooner than the Japanese)

proposed the following comparative summary of Japanese and Western people:78 Aside from stereotypical representations of blue-eyed, meat-eating Anglo-Saxons, estranging details (different excretion of feces and urine), and discriminative slurs (bodily smell), we receive the impression that, seen by Kaiseki, Westerners are more intelligent than the Japanese,

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 128

6/30/2011 1:00:19 PM

Sada Kaiseki 129

are more physically endowed (sight), and generally live faster (and die sooner) – people from a veritable civilization of development and speed alien to the slower-paced, less witty Japanese. It is also for these reasons that Kaiseki was against mixed marriages of Western men and Japanese women. He adduced several reasons for his opposition, including the fact that in such families Japanese cuisine and Western cuisine would also become mixed (a prospect that Kaiseki found abhorrent), but also and especially because Westerners would give women more rights, with the consequence that the Confucian patterns of female subjection that governed traditional Japanese society would be disrupted.79 This is a clearly conservative, if not reactionary, position, but from Kaiseki’s perspective it was necessary for the preservation of social order, especially in his own time of sweeping changes with unpredictable consequences. According to Kaiseki, preservation of social order was one of the main functions of Buddhism; he was critical of the Meiji government’s crucial decision to separate Buddhism from Kami cults (Shintō), persecuting the former (which was known as shinbutsu bunri or haibutsu kishaku) and using a modified version of the latter as an ideological support for the state (kokka shintō or ‘State Shinto’).80 Toward the end of 1870, Kaiseki had been dispatched by Nishi Honganji, the temple to which he belonged at the time, to Toyama, where the feudal administration was going to implement a harsh anti-Buddhist policy (the 313 existing temples were to be reduced to eight, one for each denomination present in the region). Kaiseki’s mission was to ask the Toyama authorities, in the name of Honganji, to suspend the implementation of this policy.81 The fief’s administration did not heed Kaiseki’s request, and the anti-Buddhist policies were enacted. Tanikawa suggests that this experience contributed to Kaiseki’s later social and political activism, through which he attempted to restore Buddhism’s place within Japanese society.82 He stressed that Buddhism in Japan has always collaborated with state institutions and the imperial household, formulating ethical norms and promoting a peaceful and ordered society; in this respect, the ultimate goal of Buddhism is exactly the same as that of Confucianism and Shinto: thus, ‘how can the four Confucian virtues preached by the Buddha be different from those proper to the kami?’ Since buddhas and kami are essentially identical and uphold the same system of values, why privilege the latter and persecute the former?83 Kaiseki’s rejection of Christianity can be understood as being part of the same general perspective. Kaiseki criticized Christian cosmogony and ontology, especially the idea of a creator god, to which he opposes classical Buddhist materialistic atomism.84 But, more than that, he

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 129

6/30/2011 1:00:19 PM

130 Fabio Rambelli

disliked Christianity because it lacked the most fundamental elements of the Japanese social order: Christian worship of the heavenly god excluded veneration due to the country’s ruler and respect due to parents and ancestors. Kaiseki was disgusted at the funerary practices of the Christians; for them, he wrote, the mortal spoils of their parents are just like dead corpses of animals.85 At least in this specific case, we should consider that Kaiseki was probably reacting against common Christian missionary preaching at the time, which targeted widespread and cherished practices related to ancestor worship (despite the fact that, of course, ancestors are important, albeit in different forms, in Christianity as well – but Kaiseki may not have been aware of that). Concerning specific policies, in 1874 Kaiseki submitted a kenpakusho to the government in which he criticized the decision to wage war against China by attacking Taiwan. The Meiji government used as a pretext an incident in which Taiwanese aborigines had attacked and killed Ryukyuan sailors; apparently, Japan wanted to question China’s claims on Taiwan while at the same time having recognized Japan’s sovereignty over the Ryūkyū islands. Kaiseki argued that the official pretext for the war was illegitimate, because the kingdom of the Ryūkyū had been for centuries a tributary state of the Chinese empire, and should be of no concern to Japan. Kaiseki also questioned the wisdom of a small and impoverished country such as Japan waging war against a powerful country such as China, and warned about the likelihood of a long war. In hindsight, we know how right Kaiseki was ... . Kaiseki also criticized Japanese encroachment in Korea with the purpose of opening the country to international trade, saying that Korea was in much the same situation as Japan in the final years of the Tokugawa government – a closed country attacked by foreign powers and facing enormous and disrupting changes.86 The government official who processed this kenpakusho by Kaiseki dismissed it as being too idiosyncratic and out of touch with current trends (it certainly did not help that Kaiseki inserted in this document an invective against Western astronomy and geography, claiming that the earth was flat, not spherical);87 one cannot but think about what would have happened had the government followed, even in part, Kaiseki’s suggestions. As we have seen, he also strongly criticized government economic policies, as a wholesale surrender to foreign powers that would bring disaster upon ordinary citizens. But Kaiseki also did not approve the Meiji government’s new education policy and indoctrination strategy. In particular, he was sceptical of patriotic indoctrination, arguing that patriotism, as an abstract theory, is an elite conceptual formation and

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 130

6/30/2011 1:00:20 PM

Sada Kaiseki 131

is not appropriate for the masses. Instead, he stressed that the masses could develop sentiments of gratitude and indebtedness to the emperor and the state only when the state had implemented policies that would improve their living conditions. He wrote: Patriotism, as something that concerns the country in general, is originally outside the thoughts and understanding of the middleclass and below. The uneducated people from the middle-class and below can barely have feelings for their own persons and their families and cannot share joy and sorrow with their neighbors; how can they love the entire country? [ ... ] Important matters such as having feelings of sorrow and love for one’s country are truly a task for the people from above the middle-class.88 In contrast, the patriotism of which ordinary people are capable consists not in abstract principles or sentiments, but in devoting their lives and their possessions to their country in time of danger, provided they ‘experience the depth and the weight of the generosity from Heaven (ten’on) and from the country itself (kokuon).’89 In other words, Kaiseki was sceptical of mere indoctrination and proposed instead the implementation of concrete policies in favour of the underclasses, who would thus develop feelings of gratefulness and indebtedness to the country and the emperor. Whereas Kaiseki’s formulation does indeed sound paternalistic and condescending toward the lower classes, it shows a significant rejection of facile ideological indoctrination in favour of an emphasis on concrete social policies.

Sada Kaiseki’s world: synchronicity, intersections, parallelisms Virtually all authors who have dealt with Sada Kaiseki and his work describe him as a conservative (hoshuteki) thinker with strong reactionary (handōteki) tendencies, and even as an exponent of Buddhist fundamentalism;90 Kaiseki has been criticized for rejecting Western science and for opposing modern progress in favour of outdated feudal mores; the right-wing Buddhologist and social activist Asano Kenshin even compared him, favourably, with Mussolini and the early Nazi movement.91 Recent scholarship has offered a more nuanced vision of the complexities of Kaiseki’s thought and political activities, as representative of what we would call today the middle classes and their social and economic plights during the early Meiji years;92 for

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 131

6/30/2011 1:00:20 PM

132 Fabio Rambelli

instance, Oku Takenori’s study is rather unique in that he envisions Kaiseki as caught between modernization and traditional culture.93 Even such authors, however, refuse to question the conservative nature of Kaiseki’s thought. Among early scholars, only Kaji Tetsuji argued that Kaiseki cannot be dismissed as a mere reactionary, since his economic ideas in particular contain some original and innovative (kibatsu) aspects.94 Another feature common to virtually all authors who have dealt with Kaiseki is their characterization of him as an eccentric, if not outright oddball (kijin), thinker,95 out of touch with the dominant ideas and trends of his time. As such, there is a widespread impression that Kaiseki was engaged in a futile, useless activity,96 and he can be treated today only as a peculiar witness to the early modernization process. This widespread consensus among Japanese scholars itself needs to be questioned, as it appears to be based on the tacit assumption that authors are deemed relevant only insofar as they follow dominant discourses. Of course, the significance of an author’s thought or political interventions is not only in their immediate content and direct consequences, but also in the process in which they were developed, in their relations to the context in which they arose and to which they responded, and even to the suggestions they may offer to people living in different times and places. Thus, despite the consensus, there is enough room to ask whether Kaiseki was really a nationalist, isolationist, anti-Western, and conservative – or even a reactionary or fundamentalist – Buddhist intellectual. A close analysis of his political positions reveals a much more complicated picture. How could a nationalist and isolationist show Kaiseki’s appreciation for Indic theories and Confucian social values, which he considered as the centres of Japanese culture? How could a conservative author be so critical of the Meiji government’s policies? How could a reactionary be so keen to acquire new knowledge from the West and propose new ideas and courses of action for the new and unprecedented geopolitical, cultural, and economic situation of Japan? How could a Buddhist fundamentalist develop such innovative theories about the structure of the universe? Furthermore, what is the criterion of evaluation employed by scholars to define Kaiseki as conservative or reactionary? Is it based on early Meiji standards, or rather on each scholar’s subjective ideology? On the same lines, was the Meiji government progressive or conservative? Certainly, Kaiseki cannot have overlooked the fact that the very same government that had replaced the Tokugawa bakufu in the name of ‘honoring the

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 132

6/30/2011 1:00:20 PM

Sada Kaiseki 133

emperor and expelling the barbarians’ (sonnō jōi), in a vertiginous somersault, was carrying out a radical form of Westernization. We may say that, within the Meiji cultural revolution, Kaiseki was one of the more radical authors, questioning standard ideas of modernization as Westernization, the role of the government, and essential social values. As an important indication of Kaiseki’s intellectual curiosity and openness, which need to be studied in more depth, Asano suggested, based on Kaiseki’s unpublished writings, that he had visited Nagasaki and studied Western science there.97 We should also emphasize that Kaiseki’s critique of Christianity and his rejection of Western influence were not carried out in an arrogant, dogmatic, and fundamentalistic way, but were always presented in the form of rational and open discussion (albeit spiced with the pamphleteer’s sarcasm). Authors who have studied Sada Kaiseki have generally refrained from attempting to place his thought within an international intellectual context. In this sense, Kaiseki and his later critics were all victims of the same fiction: namely, that Japan until the Meiji period was a closed society with only minimal influence from abroad. However, the entire Bonreki movement was a new scientific discourse resulting from the impact of Western science; and Kaiseki, in all his intellectual and political activity, was aware of and attentive to foreign ideas and trends. There is, therefore, a need to reinterpret Kaiseki from within the broader international context of his age, namely, that of scientific positivism and early modernism; in it, modernization, industrialization, a country’s opening to global cultural trends, economic exploitation and attempts to define ideals of liberation, scientific theories and political discourses – all coexisted in a fluid and confusing arena. From within this context, it is possible to observe interesting synchronicities, parallels, and intersections connecting Kaiseki with other intellectuals and political activists from different countries. A concept that may be useful in this new endeavour is that of ‘synchronicity,’ a word first used by psychologist Carl Gustav Jung to describe what he called ‘acausal connecting principle,’ ‘meaningful coincidence,’ and ‘acausal parallelism.’98 Of course, there is no need to posit mystical or paranormal influences; analogous social contexts, economic conjunctures, intellectual frameworks, similar issues to be solved – they all favour the emergence of ‘meaningful coincidences’ and parallel developments that do not share direct causal relations. Intellectual historian Sugamoto Yasuyuki has successfully explored the synchronous relations between Walter Benjamin and Japanese Marxist author Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke.99 In the remaining part of this section,

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 133

6/30/2011 1:00:20 PM

134 Fabio Rambelli

I will outline some of these possible synchronous elements in Kaiseki’s thought – all of which would require further investigation. The distinction between sensorial appearance and true reality is the starting point of Buddhist thought, and as such was applied by Kaiseki to modern astronomy and geography. This distinction, however, is also typical of modern Western thought in general (at least, after Kant), and is the basis of important epistemological concerns (the relation between reality and its representations, scientific or otherwise).100 In this sense, late Tokugawa and early Meiji supine acceptance of Western theories without questioning their epistemological assumptions was much less intellectually sophisticated (and, one might say, even less ‘scientific’) than Kaiseki’s own critical attitude. The fundamental problem is that he proposed at the basis of his system Mount Sumeru of Buddhist cosmology, an entity that is by definition beyond possibility of observation – even though not a metaphysical entity; he also did not propose sustained experimental ways to prove his hypothesis (although his clockwork model of the universe was a significant step in this direction). However, this approach is in some ways similar to that of contemporary physics, in which entities are posited that cannot initially be observed; new instruments are then developed to try to prove their actual existence. Thus, a couple of decades after his death, Einstein’s relativity theory partially vindicated Kaiseki’s intuitions by relativizing the possibilities of the application of Newtonian physics and by introducing ideas such as the curve in space-time that prevents us from perceiving the universe as it is (thus recalling Kaiseki’s distinction between observed phenomena and real phenomena). Also, in the light of these later developments, Kaiseki was theoretically more sophisticated and advanced than most of his contemporaries (and, perhaps, even some of today’s critics). Another issue that deserves consideration is the fact that the rejection of Buddhist attempts to contribute to the development of modern science – a contribution that was one of the goals of Kaiseki’s Bonreki theories – made it virtually impossible for Japanese scientists to draw upon their own cultural tradition for innovative images and models. Indeed, it is mostly Westerners who have been attracted by the intellectual possibilities of Eastern thought for scientific innovation.101 Kaiseki’s era was the time not only of scientific positivism, but also of spiritualism and the beginning of science fiction, in which alternative realities are explained on the basis of more or less fictional scientific ‘theories.’ It is interesting to note that the French surrealist poet and sanskritist René Daumal (1908–1944) described in an incomplete novel a mystic mountain which cannot be seen through ordinary means because

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 134

6/30/2011 1:00:20 PM

Sada Kaiseki 135

of distorting natural phenomena. The starting point of this novel shows an uncanny similarity with Bonreki astronomy, and Kaiseki’s in particular, and it takes a sort of ‘heavenly vision’ for the protagonist to calculate the exact location of the mountain and the way to reach it.102 Turning our attention to synchronicities in Kaiseki’s economic theories, we note that ideas of self-sufficiency based on valorization of local resources were widespread in the world between the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, and were advocated by, among others, Tolstoy in Russia and Gandhi in India.103 This synchronicity would place Kaiseki away from the reactionaries and among the leading progressive intellectuals of the world – perhaps, even, in line with at least some positions of the present-day anti-globalization movement. Moreover, Kaiseki’s emphasis on leisure, conspicuous expenditure, and free time is close to Thorstein Blemen’s theory of the ‘leisure class,’ and even to Georges Bataille’s ‘general economy’ and its concept of ‘excess’ as the source of culture in general and economic activity in particular.104 To sum up, we could say that Kaiseki was afraid that the acculturation (the earnest attempt to adopt cultural elements from the West) promoted by the Meiji government was in fact resulting in a serious deculturation (a loss of cultural forms that would ultimately lead to anomie). If we adopt the terminology first employed by A.J. Toynbee and modified by the Italian philosopher Franco Cassano, Kaiseki, while critical of the dominant ‘herodian’ positions (those favouring wholesale adoption of the dominant Western culture), was nevertheless able not to fall among the ‘zealots’ (proponents of an integralist and reactionary interpretation of ‘traditional’ culture), but trod a difficult middle ground between conservation of traditional values and practices and the need to innovate.105

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

I would like to express my gratitude to Sugamoto Yasuyuki, Yamazaki Hiroshi, and the students in my Tenjiku seminars at Sapporo University. On traditional religious forms combining Buddhism and kami cults, see Teeuwen and Rambelli (eds) (2003); Grapard (1992). See Victoria (1997, 2003). On these aspects, see, for instance, Rambelli (2004, 2007, 2009); in a modern context, see the discussion of anarchical socialist monk Uchiyama Gudō in Victoria (1997), 38–48. Nitō Masahiro (1883), Tōshōsai Kaiseki shōnin ryakuden. The text can be retrieved at the web site of the Japanese Diet’s Library: http://porta.ndl.go.jp/service/servlet/Result_ Detail?meta_item_no= I000071164&meta_repository_no=R000000008 (last accessed April 15, 2010).

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 135

6/30/2011 1:00:20 PM

136 Fabio Rambelli 5. See Meiji kenpakusho shūsei. Kenpaku are also included in Nihon kindai shisō taikei (1996) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten). On kenpaku, see Makihara (1990). 6. Makihara (1990). 7. Asano Kenshin announced the publication of Kaiseki’s complete works (Asano (1934), 55), but this collection was never realized. 8. Tanikawa (2002), 83–87. This figure is based on information retrieved in contemporary newspapers and magazines; the actual number of speeches could in fact be higher. 9. In fact, Kōkan in this book presents both geocentric and heliocentric theories, which results in confusions and inconsistencies. Kōkan did not fully adopt the heliocentric theory until 1808, with the publication of his Kopperu tenmon zukai (Illustrated explanation of Kepler’s Astronomy). On Shiba Kōkan, see Keene (1969). The first introduction to the heliocentric theory in Japan was the Tenchi nikyū yōhō (Essential principles of the two spheres of heaven and earth), an annotated translation of a Dutch text by Motoki Ryōei, a translation officer in Nagasaki, published in 1774. However, versions of the heliocentric theory seem to have been circulating already among the Jesuits in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries: see Itazawa (1941), 3–8. On the developments of Japanese astronomy in the early modern period, see Watanabe (1986). 10. See, in particular, Bantō (1973) Yume no shiro. 11. For an outline of Buddhist cosmology, see Sadakata (1973, 1997); Kloetzli (1983). 12. On Monnō, see Watanabe (1986), 1: 307–308; Okada (1997), 113–116. 13. Quoted in Okada (1997), 129. 14. The only extensive study of bonreki in any language is Okada (1997). On bonreki Buddhist astronomy and geography, see Itō (1934); Itazawa (1941); Kiba (1983); Muroga and Unno (1979); Watanabe (1986), 1: 305–330; Okada (2003). 15. Oku (1993); Okada (1997, 2003). 16. Among lay astronomers and scientists who joined the Bonreki movement, we find Koide Chōjūrō (1797–1865), an assistant scholar of the Tsuchimikado House that was in charge of the astronomy office of the imperial household; Hiroe Hikozō (b. 1784), a mathematician from the Owari region (presentday Aichi prefecture); and Fujii Saishō (1838–1907), Shinshū priest and astronomer working for the Tokugawa government. 17. See Tanikawa (2002), 67, n. 27. 18. Entsū, Bukkoku rekishō hen, 1:1; quoted in Okada (1997), 5, 42. 19. Ibid. 20. Buddhist traditionalists, in particular from the Tendai sect, criticized Entsū’s work because of his reliance upon Western modern science; antiBuddhist authors, on their part, criticized Entsū’s work for his Buddhist outlook. On disputes concerning the Bonreki theory, see Watanabe (1986), 1: 305–330. 21. Okada (1997), 12. 22. Ibid., 129. 23. Ibid., 10. 24. Ibid., 43. 25. Ibid., 47.

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 136

6/30/2011 1:00:20 PM

Sada Kaiseki 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

137

Entsū, Bukkoku rekishō hen, 1: 29–31; quoted in Okada (1997), 43. See also Okada (1997), 66. On Shingyō, see Okada (1997), 150–152, 156–158. On Kanchū, see Okada (1997), 152–156, 158–160. See picture in http://opac.lib.ryukoku.ac.jp/HTML/K05.html (last accessed May 31, 2011). Tanaka also built, among other things, a perpetual clock based on Western principles (1851) and the first Japanese steam engine (1853). He also collaborated in realizing Kaiseki’s own mechanical model of the universe in 1877. See Okada (1997), 161. On Kaiseki’s astronomy, see Serigawa (1990); Kimura (1924); Umebayashi (2007a). The model, with a clockwork mechanism controlling the movements of the sun, the moon, and the pole star, was displayed at the Japanese Commercial Exposition (Kangyō hakurankai) held in Tokyo in 1877. The model is now on display at the National Museum of Science and Technology (Kokuritsu kagaku gijutsu hakubutsukan) in Ueno Park, Tokyo, in the section of premodern time-measurement devices. For examplars of Kaiseki’s mechanisms in other collections, see Umebayashi (2007b), 4–6. Shijitsu tōshōgi ki shohen, 392. Ibid., 392. Umebayashi (2007b), 8–9. Sada Kaiseki, Kenpaku ‘Nijūsandai no gi,’ 923. Saibai keizairon, 356. Ibid., 314. Kenpaku ‘Nijūsandai no gi,’ 923. Saibai keizairon, 323–324. Kenpaku ‘Nijūsandai no gi,’ 924. Saibai keizairon, 340. Kenpaku ‘Nijūsandai no gi,’ 924. Ibid., 947. For this evaluation, which is largely shared by most authors, see, for instance, Umebayashi (2007b), 17. Kenpaku ‘Nijūsandai no gi,’ 967. Quoted in Umebayashi (2007b), 20. Saibai keizairon, 341. Kenpaku ‘Nijūsandai no gi,’ 931. See Saibai keizairon, 323–324; Kenpaku ‘Nijūsandai no gi,’ 929. See, for example, Saibai keizairon, 314. Kenpaku ‘Nijūsandai no gi,’ 952. Kenpaku ‘Kuwacharon,’ 974. These points were emphasized once more by Kaiseki in an economic tract, Tentori kōtsūron, published posthumously in 1883. Quoted in Asano (1934), 48, 50, and passim. Asano (1934), 48. See Kaiseki, Bukkyō sōseiki. The Shōengyō is included in Taishō shinshū Daizōkyō, 1 (1): 36b–39a; longer versions of this scripture are the section titled ‘Se honnenbon’ (‘Chapter on the primary causes of the world’) of the sutra Sekikyō (Scripture on matters concerning the universe), in Taishō shinshū

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 137

6/30/2011 1:00:20 PM

138 Fabio Rambelli Daizōkyō, 1 (1): 145a–149c, and the section ‘Saishōbon’ (‘Most eminent chapter’) of the sutra Kise inbongyō (Scripture on the primary causes for the origin of the universe), in Taishō shinshū Daizōkyō, 1 (25), 413a–420a. 59. Tanikawa (2002), 79. 60. On this aspect of Kaiseki’s activity, see Asano (1939). 61. From Asano (1934), 32–34. 62. Saibai keizairon, 347–348. This argument will certainly sound astonishing to a contemporary reader, but it probably made sense in Kaiseki’s time. 63. Asano (1934), 34. For an extended list of alternative products, see Honjō (1966), 301–304. 64. Saibai keizairon, 371. 65. Ibid., 319–320. 66. See, for example, Saibai keizairon, 375–378. 67. Kenpaku ‘Nijūsandai no gi,’ 962. 68. Quoted in Kashiwabara (1984), 16–17. 69. Ibid., 18. 70. Asano (1934), 29; Umebayashi (2008), 57. 71. Quoted in Asano (1934), 25. 72. Ibid., 25–26. 73. Asano (1934), 26. 74. This is explained in detail in Bukkyō sōseiki. 75. Kenpaku ‘Nijūsandai no gi,’ 931. 76. Kaiseki refers to the Japanese edition of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748), translated by Ga Noriyuki (or Reishi, 1840–1923) as Manpō seiri in 1875; see Saibai keizairon, 346–348, 364. 77. Saibai keizairon, 326. 78. Kenpaku ‘Nijūsandai no gi,’ 926–927. 79. Ibid., 940–941. 80. On Meiji anti-government policies, see Ketelaar (1990); on State Shinto, see Hardacre (1989). 81. Ryūkoku Daigaku sanbyakugojūnenshi, Shiryō hen (1989), 2: 656–657, quoted in Tanikawa (2002), 68. 82. Tanikawa (2002), 69. 83. Quoted in Kashiwabara (1984), 7. 84. See Bukkyō sōseiki. 85. Kyōyubon, 269. 86. Eventually, Japan employed the navy to force the kingdom of Korea to open up to international trade and Japanese political influence in 1876; this was the first step toward Japanese annexation of Korea. 87. Kenpaku “Shinkoku ustubekarazu no gi,” dated September 10, 1874. 88. Kyōyubon michi annai, 284. 89. Ibid., 285. 90. See, for example, Honjō (1966), 208; Kaji Tetsuji (1937); Kinugasa (1979). More recently, Okada Masahiko still sees him as the leader of an ‘ultra nationalistic movement’ (Okada (1997), 144, 170). 91. Asano (1934), 3. 92. See in particular Tanikawa 2002; Umebayashi 2007a, 2007b, 2008. 93. Oku (1993). 94. Kaji (1937), 537.

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 138

6/30/2011 1:00:21 PM

Sada Kaiseki 139 95. See, for example, Tanikawa (2002). Kashiwabara dismisses Kaiseki’s thought as an ‘aberration’ (or even a ‘perversion (tōsaku)’ and ‘a mere form of paranoia (henshitsutekina mono)’ due to his attempts to introduce in modern Japan a residue of ‘feudal Buddhism’ (Kashiwabara (1984), 2; Kashiwabara even calls Kaiseki ‘uncouth and vulgar’ (yajinteki, 6–7). 96. Even a sympathetic author such as Asano Kenshin compares Kaiseki to Don Quijote (1934, p. 2). 97. Asano (1934), 31, n. 2. 98. Jung introduced the concept as early as the 1920s but developed it in full in 1952; see Jung (1973). 99. Sugamoto (2007). 100. On this subject, see, for instance, Rorty (1979). 101. For a first introduction to this subject, see Capra (1975). 102. Daumal (1981) (English translation in 2004). This novel also served as inspiration for Alejandro Jodorovsky’s controversial film La Montaña Sagrada (The Holy Mountain, 1973). 103. These ideas were indeed at the basis of Gandhi’s swadesh movement about boycotting British goods in favor of Indian-made products. Asano Kenshin pointed to similarities between Kaiseki and Gandhi, but he mentioned explicitly the idea of swarāj (self-rule), probably a mistake for swadesh (Asano (1934), 1–2). The same ideas, of course, were also developed in other directions, such as the Fascist concept of autarchy (another similarity already noted by Asano (1934), 3). 104. Blemen (1994); Bataille (1991). Bataille’s ideas were reformulated by Asada Akira in his best-seller Kōzō to chikara (1983), which constituted one of the intellectual bases during the years of the Japanese economic ‘bubble’ and its wide-ranging economic and cultural transformations of Japan. 105. For the definitions of acculturation and deculturation I am indebted to Latouche (1989). The concepts of ‘herodianism’ and ‘zealotism’ were first introduced by A.J. Toynbee (1948); see their treatment in Cassano (2005), 65–75 (see also Cassano 2011).

References Asada Akira (1983) Kōzō to chikara (Tokyo: Keisō shobō). Asano Kenshin (1934) Sada Kaiseki: Meiji shonen no aikokusō (Tokyo: Tōhō shoin). —— (1939) ‘Sada Kaiseki no hakuraihin haiseki ni tsuite: Sono kessha undō wo chūshin to shite,’ Shakai keizai shigaku 8 (11): 37–56. Bataille, Georges (1991) The Accursed Share, Volume 1: Consumption (New York: Zone Books) (Original edition 1949). Blemen, Thorstein (1994) The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Dover Publications) (Original edition 1899). Capra, Fritjof (1975) The Tao of Physics (Berkeley, CA: Shambhala). Cassano, Franco (2005) Il pensiero meridiano (Roma and Bari: Laterza) (rev. edn). ——. 2011. Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean. New York: Fordham University Press. Daumal, René (1981) Le Mont Analogue (Paris: Gallimard) (Original edition 1952).

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 139

6/30/2011 1:00:21 PM

140 Fabio Rambelli —— (2004) Mount Analogue (Woodstock, NY and New York: Overlook Press). Grapard, Allan G. (1992) The Protocol of the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press). Hardacre, Helen (1989) Shinto and the State, 1868–1988 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Honjō Eijirō (1966) ‘Sada Kaiseki no kenkyū,’ in Honjō Eijirō, Nihon keizai shisōshi kenkyū, 2: 265–314 (Tokyo: Nihon hyōronsha) (original edition 1942). Itazawa Takeo (1941) ‘Edo jidai ni okeru chidōsetsu no tenkai to sono handō,’ Shigaku zasshi, 52 (1): 1–30. Itō Tasaburō (1934) ‘Kinsei ni okeru kagakuteki uchūkan no hattatsu ni taisuru handō nit suite,’ Shūkyō kenkyū (new series), 11 (2): 67–92. Jung, Carl Gustav (1973) Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) (Original edition 1952). Kaji Tetsuji (1937) Meiji shoki shakai keizai shisōshi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten). Kashiwabara Yūsen (1984) ‘Sada Kaiseki no bukkyō keizairon: kindai ni okeru hōken bukkyō no tōsaku,’ Bukkyō shigaku kenkyū, 27 (1): 1–22. Keene, Donald (1969) The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720–1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press) (rev. edn). Ketelaar, James E. (1990) Of Heretics and Martyrs: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Kiba Akeshi (1983) ‘Bakumatsu-Meiji shoki no bonreki kenkyū ni tsuite,’ Shinshū kenkyū 27 (February): 1–11. Kimura Taiken (1924) ‘Sada Kaiseki shi no shijitsu tōshōron,’ Shūkyō kenkyū (new series) 1 (2): 227–236. Kinugasa Anki (1979) ‘Kaikaki no dentōshugishatachi,’ in Hayashiya Tatsusaburō (ed.) Bunmei kaika no kenkyū (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten), 523–539. Kloetzli, Randy (1983) Buddhist Cosmology: From Single World System to Pure Land: Science and Theology in the Images of Motion and Light (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass). Latouche, Serge (1989) L’occidentalisation du monde (Paris: Editions La Découverte). Makihara Norio (1990) Meiji nananen no daironsō: Kenpakusho kara mita kindai kokka to minshū (Tokyo: Nihon keizai hyōronsha). Meiji bukkyō shisō shiryō shūsei henshū iinkai (eds) (1980–1986) Meiji bukkyō shisō shiryō shūsei (7 vols) and supplements (5 vols) (reprint) (Kyōto: Dōhōsha). Meiji bunka kenyūkai (eds) (1967) Meiji bunka zenshū (36 vols) (reprint) (Tokyo: Nihon hyōronsha). Meiji kenpakusho shūsei. (9 vols.), Supervised supervised by Irokawa Daikichi and Gabe Masao. (1986–2000) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō,) 1986–2000. Muroga Nobuo and Unno Kazutaka (1979) ‘Edo jidai kōki ni okeru bukkyōkei sekaizu,’ in Chirigakushi kenkyūkai (eds), Chirigakushi kenkyū. Vol. 2 (Kyoto: Rinsen shoten), 188–229 (original edn 1962). Nihon kindai shisō taikei (24 vols), Katō Shūichi et al. (eds) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten). Nitō Masahiro (1883) Tōshōsai Kaiseki shōnin ryakuden, http://porta.ndl.go.jp/ service/servlet/Result_Detail?meta_item_no=I000071164&meta_repository_ no=R000000008 (last accessed on May 31, 2011). Okada Masahiko (1997) ‘Vision and Reality: Buddhist Cosmographic Discourse in Nineteenth Century Japan,’ PhD dissertation, Stanford University.

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 140

6/30/2011 1:00:21 PM

Sada Kaiseki 141 —— (2003) ‘“Kigen/honshitsu” no tankyū to fuhenshugi no disukūru: Fumon Entsū Bukkoku rekishōhen wo yomu,’ Tenri Daigaku gakuhō, 55 (1): 45–58. Oku Takenori (1993) Bunmei kaika to minshū: Nihon kindai seishinshi danshō (Tokyo: Shin’hyōron). Ono Genmyō (1927) ‘Bukkyō tenmongaku (8),’ Gendai bukkyō, 33: 120–144. Rambelli, Fabio (2004) ‘“Just Behave as You Like”: Radical Amida Cults and Popular Religiosity in Premodern Japan,’ in Richard K. Payne and Kenneth K. Tanaka (eds), Approaching the Land of Bliss: Religious Praxis in the Cult of Amitabha (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), 169–201. —— (2007) ‘Buddhist Kingship, the Kami, and Modernity: Comparative Considerations,’ Shukyo kenkyu, 353: 268–251. —— (2009) ‘Buddhist Republican Thought and Institutions in Japan: Preliminary Considerations,’ in Japanese Studies Around the World 2008, Special Issue ‘Scholars of Buddhism in Japan: Buddhist Studies in the 21st Century’ (Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies), March, 127–153. Rorty, Richard (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Sada Kaiseki (1872) Kyōyubon, Kyōyubon michi annai (Various considerations about education, Instructions on ‘Various considerations about education’). In Meiji bukkyō shisō shiryō shūsei, 2: 266–287. —— (1873) (January) Kenpaku ‘Fukokuron’ (‘On enriching the country’), in Meiji kenpakusho shūsei, 2: 375–377. —— (1874) (September 10) Kenpaku ‘Shinkoku ustubekarazu no gi’ (‘Statement concerning the fact that China should not be attacked’), in Meiji kenpakusho shūsei, 3: 876–881. —— (1874) (September 28). Kenpaku ‘Nijūsandai no gi, Kuwacharon’ (‘Statement in twenty-three clauses, Concerning concerning mulberry trees and tea), in Meiji kenpakusho shūsei, vol. 3, 922–977. —— (1877) Shijitsu tōshōgi ki shohen (Description of the mechanical model showing the identity of visual and real astronomical phenomena, first part), in Meiji bukkyō shisō shiryō shūsei, 5: 373–393. —— (1878–1879) Saibai keizairon (original edition in 2 vols, 4 tomes), in Meiji bunka zenshū, 23: 307–410. —— (1879) Bukkyō sōseiki (A Buddhist Book of Genesis), in Meiji bukkyō shisō shiryō shūsei, 7: 22–37. —— (1883) Tentori kōtsūron (Evaluation of international trade), in Nihon kindai shisō taikei, 23: 71–93. Sadakata Akira (1973) Shumisen to gokuraku: Bukkyō no uchūkan (Tokyo: Kōdansha). —— (1997) Buddhist Cosmology: Philosophy and Origins (translated by Gaynor Sekimori) (Tokyo: Kōsei Publishing). Serigawa Hiromichi (1990) ‘Sada Kaiseki no sekaikan: Bukki no tairon (4),’ Shūkyō kenkyū, 283 (63–64), 9–11. Sugamoto Yasuyuki (2007) Modan Marukusushugi no shinkuronishiti: Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke to Varutā Ben’yamin (Tokyo: Sairyūsha). Taishō shinshū Daizōkyō (1924–1932), 85 vols, Takakusu Junjirō and Watanabe Kaigyoku (eds) (Tokyo: Issaikyō kankōkai). Tanikawa Minoru (2002) ‘Kijin’ Sada Kaiseki no kindai,’ Jinbun gakuhō, 87 (December): 57–102.

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 141

6/30/2011 1:00:22 PM

142 Fabio Rambelli Teeuwen, Mark and Fabio Rambelli (eds) (2003) Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm (London and New York: Routledge/ Curzon). Toynbee, A.J. (1948) Civilisation on Trial (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Umebayashi Seiji (2007a) ‘Sada Kaiseki bukkyō tenmon chirisetsu no kattō,’ Kumamoto Kenritsu Daigaku Bungakubu kiyō, 13 (66): 31–56. —— (2007b) ‘Sada Kaiseki to kindai sekai,’ Kindai Kumamoto, 31 (December): 1–24. —— (2008) ‘Meiji shonen, Sada Kaiseki no genron to shakai keizairon,’ Ritsumeikan bungaku, 603 (February): 50–58. Victoria, Brian (1997) Zen at War (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill). —— (2003) Zen War Stories (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon). Watanabe Toshio (1986) Kinsei Nihon tenmongakushi, 2 vols (Tokyo: Kōseisha kōseikaku). Yamagata Bantō (1973) Yume no shiro, in Tominaga Nakamoto, Yamagata Bantō (Nihon shisō taikei, vol. 43) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten).

9780230_240735_06_cha04.indd 142

6/30/2011 1:00:22 PM

5 Carry the Buddha out into the Street! A Sliver of Buddhist Resistance to Japanese Militarism Brian Daizen Victoria

Introduction Despite Buddhism’s reputation as a religion of peace, by the 1920s institutional Japanese Buddhism was, as a whole, a firm if not fervent supporter of Japan’s increasing repression of the left wing at home and colonial expansionism abroad. Nevertheless, there were a small number of Buddhists who refused to accept the supportive stance of their sectarian leaders and banded together to form the ‘Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism’ (Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei). This group was the single, notable exception to Buddhism’s subservience to the state, especially as the League members were also deeply involved in social and political action. Inagaki Masami (b. 1926) noted that the League was ‘the only sign that there were still conscientious religionists within Buddhist circles.’1 Another distinguishing feature of this organization was that, as its name implies, the members were relatively young, mostly in their twenties and thirties. Additionally, the leadership was composed predominantly of laymen rather than clerics. This latter feature is important in that it meant this organization was not as readily controllable by sectarian hierarchies as in earlier cases of clerical activism, for example Sōtō Zen priest Uchiyama Gudō, True Pure Land (Shin) priest Takagi Kemmyō, or Rinzai Zen priest Mineo Setsudō.2 Needless to say, however, this feature offered no protection from police repression. The League was founded on the afternoon of April 5, 1931 with more than thirty persons in attendance, including four uniformed police observers. The first order of business was the selection of officers, with the forty-two-year-old Nichiren sect lay activist, Senō Girō (1889–1961), being elected as chairman. Next came the reading of the declaration giving the reasons for the League's creation. Since it is so much at variance 143

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 143

6/30/2011 1:00:59 PM

144

Brian Daizen Victoria

with the thinking of institutional Buddhist leaders, it is included here in its entirety: This is an age of suffering. Our compatriots are seeking affection, yet have had no choice but to struggle. The masses of people seek bread, but are fed repression. To escape or to fight, today the entire world is moving about in confusion and financial difficulty. In such an age, what should Buddhists be aware of, what contribution should they be making to society? The majority of Buddhists, intoxicated with an easy peace of mind, don’t even think about these questions. Through Buddhism these Buddhists possess the highest principles available for the guidance of human beings, yet what contact do they have with the lives of the masses? Furthermore, these Buddhists claim ‘religion transcends class differences and values harmony.’ However, in reality their role is that of an opiate, and they are therefore cursed by the masses and incite the moral indignation of young Buddhists. This present situation is something that genuine believers cannot bear. However, when we look to already existing sectarian organizations for reform, we are forced to recognize just how serious their corrupt traditions and degeneration are. Faced with this situation, we have no choice but to resolutely propose a movement to revitalize Buddhism. A revitalized Buddhism must be based on self-reflection. It must deny currently existing Buddhism that has already lost its capacity for confrontation while, at the same time, calling on all Buddhists to return to the Buddha. A revitalized Buddhism must recognize that the suffering in present-day society comes chiefly from the capitalist economic system and must be willing to cooperate in a fundamental reform of this system, working to preserve the wellbeing of the masses. We must revolutionize bourgeois Buddhism and change it to a Buddhism for the masses. A revitalized Buddhism must intensify its speculation and research in an attempt to clarify Buddhist culture for the new age and bring about world peace. If it does this, a revitalized Buddhism will have absolutely no reason to fear the anti-religious movement that is popular at the moment. The reason for this is that we believe religion will never disappear so long as human beings seek affection and stand up for what they believe in, given their finite nature that longs for the infinite. The religion we seek is not one centered on a creator God. Aren’t there too many contradictions between believing in an all-powerful God and the situation we find ourselves in today?

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 144

6/30/2011 1:00:59 PM

Carry the Buddha out into the Street!

145

We believe in a Buddhism that necessarily conforms to the truth, and we revere the Buddha who bore witness to love, equality and freedom through his practice. Our reverence is based on the inherent requirement of life to seek perfection, something that lies at the heart of human existence. We are convinced that it is as a result of this requirement that human beings have been able to constantly create unique cultural forms. We are further convinced that something like the anti-religious movement is itself either an expression of a lack of awareness of the nature of human life or a process for getting rid of numerous superstitions which have hidden themselves in [Buddhism’s] esoteric sanctuaries, thereby providing good material for the revival of true Buddhism. Young Buddhists, now is the time for us to arise. Without hesitation we must discard tradition and, joining together as one, return to the Buddha. And then, while personally experiencing the Buddhist spirit of love and equality, solemnly move forward to reconstruct capitalism. Is this not the way we should endeavor to construct our ideal Buddhist society?3 The preceding declaration was adopted unanimously, despite the obvious discomfort of the policemen in attendance. However, when it came time to accept the League’s ‘Statement of Principles,’ a spirited debate erupted. The three proposed principles were as follows: 1. We revere Buddha Shakyamuni whose character is unexcelled among human beings. We seek to make possible the construction of a Buddha Land according to the teachings of faith in, and love for, our fellow human beings. 2. We recognize that all existing sects are corpses that desecrate the spirit of Buddhism. We look forward to the elimination of this type of Buddhism and the promotion of a Buddhism consistent with the new age. 3. We recognize that the organization of our current capitalist economy is contrary to the spirit of Buddhism and injurious to the wellbeing of the masses. Reforming this, we look forward to the coming of a new society.4 The debate centered on the final words of the third principle. Some members of the audience insisted that the word ‘socialist’ be inserted, that is, ‘… a new socialist society.’ After much debate, literally

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 145

6/30/2011 1:00:59 PM

146

Brian Daizen Victoria

accompanied by ‘saber-rattling’ from the uniformed police present, this proposal was abandoned, and the principles were adopted as proposed. To understand why the League had come into existence at this time, it is important to remember that both Japan and the West were then in the midst of the Great Depression which had begun in 1929. Given Japan’s high dependence on foreign trade, the Great Depression spelled economic disaster. Thus, on the domestic front Japan suffered from both high unemployment and increasingly severe labour disputes. Farmers found themselves caught between the requirement to pay taxes as before and greatly reduced income. The end result was a rapid increase in rural debt, with some poor tenant farmers selling their daughters into prostitution, and others banding together to resist high land rents. Things were no better in Japan’s overseas colonies, where Korean students led demonstrations against the Japanese in 1929 and an antiJapanese aboriginal uprising on Taiwan broke out in 1930. While all acts of resistance, both overseas and at home, were brutally suppressed by the Japanese military and police, they led to a growing role for both right-wing political figures, in and out of government, and their military allies. In addition, there were the family-owned financial combines known as zaibatsu, who were ever more successful in imposing their wishes on the government. Given the social turmoil in which they found themselves, it is hardly surprising that at least a few Buddhists at the grass roots level entered the path of active opposition to the state. That there were, relatively speaking, so few such activists can be explained, at least in part, by the fact that resistance to the Japanese state of the 1930s remained a path fraught with danger. No one understood this better than the League’s new chairman, Senō Girō. On January 13, 1931, more than two months before the formal founding of the League, Senō made the following entry in his diary: This morning as I sat quietly [in meditation], I felt very cold. My finger tips turned to ice, almost to the point of losing all sensation in them. However, when I thought that in the course of fighting for justice this was just preparation for being taken off to jail, I was filled with joy.5 It would be five more years before Senō’s premonition came to pass. During that time, the League became actively engaged in such things as publishing a newspaper and producing pamphlets promoting its views, holding public meetings to increase its membership, and joining

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 146

6/30/2011 1:00:59 PM

Carry the Buddha out into the Street!

147

together with allies in other, mostly political, organizations which advocated the reform, if not the replacement, of capitalism. Between 1931 and 1934 the League published a total of six pamphlets detailing its positions on various issues. Of these six, two were written by Senō himself and the others by leading League members. Not surprisingly, Senō wrote the first pamphlet published, which was entitled simply: ‘A Lecture on the Revitalization of Buddhism’ (Shinkō Bukkyō no Teishō). In this pamphlet he presented a more detailed rationale for the founding of the League, together with the doctrinal basis of its program. Senō’s second pamphlet, published in 1933, was entitled: ‘On the Road to Social Reform and the Revitalization of Buddhism’ (Shakai Henkaku Tojō no Shinkō Bukkyō). As its name implies, Senō’s focus was on the need for social reform based on a Buddhist understanding. For example, he put forth the proposition that international cooperation, rather than narrow nationalism, was the Buddhist approach to world peace. When nations seek only to promote themselves, he wrote, they inevitably resort, sooner or later, to military force to achieve their selfcentered goals. Such efforts, Senō maintained, were clearly at odds with the Buddhist doctrine of ‘selflessness’ (muga). As the martyred, Meiji era Sōtō Zen priest Uchiyama Gudō (1874–1911) had done before him, Senō maintained that the ideal Buddhist society, the Sangha, was a communal organization.6 As such it was in direct contradiction to the personal acquisitiveness fostered by a capitalist economic system. In particular, Senō saw Buddhist temples as the natural agents for the promotion of such a communal society in Japan. In discussing the relationship of Buddhism to socialism, Senō addressed what seemed to be a basic conflict between them, namely Marx’s assertion that religion was ‘the opium of the people.’ In claiming this, Senō asserted that Marx had failed to differentiate Buddhism from Christianity, a religion that instilled belief in an idealistic God. Buddhism, on the other hand, at least in its original formulation, denied the existence of a supernatural realm, God included. Thus, Marx’s critique of religion could not and should not be applied to Buddhism. Building on this insight, Senō went on in this and subsequent writings to describe what he saw as the basic complementary nature of Buddhism to socialism. For example, since Buddhism opposed ‘otherworldliness’ and denied the existence of an immortal soul, it was well placed to participate in the creation of a new society based on the liberation of the masses. In particular, Buddhism advocated the establishment of a rational, realistic life, recognizing the importance of first providing for

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 147

6/30/2011 1:00:59 PM

148

Brian Daizen Victoria

life’s material needs. As such it was opposed to a fatuous and empty idealism based on illusory happiness. What Buddhism had to offer socialism was its insight that the movement for the economic and structural reformation of society must not be based on material needs alone, for it is only when ‘selflessness’ is incorporated into actual social practice that a genuine reformation can occur. As Buddhism teaches, the material and immaterial worlds are one, just as there is no separation between form and spirit. Furthermore, it is exactly because Buddhism recognizes impermanency as a basic principle that it finds significance in even a single day in the life of a human being and relishes love and concern for the wellbeing of others. Based on this realization, Buddhists cannot help but participate in a movement to renew a social structure that serves to obstruct mutual concern and well-being. For Senō it was only when Buddhism’s insights were incorporated into Marxism that a new and higher level of humanitarianism would emerge, one that would be the true servant of the masses. It was, however, not simply the capitalist system that stood in the way of the emergence of a new humanitarianism. Senō also subjected institutional Japanese Buddhism and its leaders to harsh criticism. Among other things, he accused sectarian leaders of having turned the central object of worship in each of their sects – for instance, Buddha Amida in the Shin (True Pure Land) sect – into absolute deities who had the power to ‘save’ their believers. As noted above, Senō asserted that early Buddhism had been clearly atheistic in its orientation, with no place for salvation figures to act as religious opiates. In addition, Senō accused temple priests of being ‘sermon thieves’ (sekkyō dorobō). They deserved this title, in his opinion, because they took the position that social ills and inequities could all be solved if only people would become more spiritually inclined. Behind the scenes, however, these same priests took care to insure that they themselves were well provided for through their solicitation of large donations. In so doing they effectively became pawns of the ruling classes, who used their services to help support the status quo. For Senō there was little, if any, hope that currently existing Buddhism would be able to reform itself from within. He made this clear in the final sentences of his pamphlet: As the saying goes, one should not serve new wine from old wineskins. Members of the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism should advance resolutely. You should carry the Buddha on your

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 148

6/30/2011 1:00:59 PM

Carry the Buddha out into the Street!

149

backs and go out into the streets! Go out into the farm and fishing villages!7 Of all the slogans put forth by the League it was this last one – ‘carry the Buddha on your backs and go out into the streets’ – that was destined to become the best known. It clearly combined the League’s Buddhist doctrinal foundation with a call to social action. Unsurprisingly, the temple priests described as ‘sermon robbers’ by Senō were none too happy with either the League’s activities or its leftist ideology. Initially, institutional Buddhist leaders chose to ignore the League altogether; but, as the number of its supporters grew, this became impossible. Things came to a head in May 1933 at the third national conference of the All Japan Federation of Buddhist Youth Organizations (Zen Nippon Bukkyō Seinen-kai Renmei). Although this Federation had been formed in the same year as the League, it was a much larger organization, composed of more than 450 separate Buddhist groups. One of these groups was the League itself. Thus, in theory at least, it had the same rights as any of the other member organizations to put proposals up for adoption. Exercising this right, League representatives, including Senō, proposed, among other things, that the Federation should go on record as being opposed to ‘anti-foreign, militarist and nationalist ideologies,’ including those movements which promoted the same.8 The response of the conference host, Ōtani University (affiliated with the Higashi Honganji branch of the Shin sect), to this and similar League proposals was to force the conference to find a new meeting site off-campus. This, however, did nothing to deter the League representatives, who put forward yet another motion, this one condemning the Nazi Party and its leader Adolf Hitler: Hitler is a person who is thoroughly suppressing the Jewish people by force and casually burning cultural treasures without a second thought. Furthermore, Hitler crushes without exception all liberals and advocates of peace who are incompatible with the Nazi spirit. Outrages of these kinds are both inhumane and anti-Buddhist, and we must resolutely protest them.9 Given that Hitler had only been appointed Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, it can be said that the League’s representatives were very insightful in their political thinking with regard to events in Europe, let alone Japan. This is especially the case given that many Germans had

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 149

6/30/2011 1:00:59 PM

150 Brian Daizen Victoria

yet to recognize the reactionary nature of the Nazis’ ascent to power. Nevertheless, the protest against Hitler and his party, like other progressive League proposals, went nowhere, for behind the scenes the Federation was being run by the leadership of both branches of the Shin sect, whose uncritical subservience to state policies was absolute. Nor should it be thought that Shin sect representatives were more Nazi-friendly than representatives of other Buddhist schools. For example, as Sueki Fumihiko, a leading scholar of Buddhist intellectual history in Japan, has noted, when D.T. Suzuki, the famous Zen scholar and professor at Otani University, visited Germany in 1936 he provided a Japanese Buddhist newspaper with a sympathetic portrayal of the Nazis. Regarding the Nazis’ persecution of its Jewish citizens, Suzuki wrote: ‘It appears there are considerable grounds for this, too.’10 By this time, of course, the infamous Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 were already in effect, depriving German Jews of their citizenship and even forbidding them to use public parks or beaches, not to mention marry non-Jewish Germans. To return to the Federation, a further example of its subservience to the government was shown by one resolution it did pass: a resolution of gratitude to the kingdom of Siam (present-day Thailand) for its political support of Japan’s newly created puppet government in Manchuria (‘Manshū-koku’ in Japanese). Not content with that, Federation officials then went on to demand the League’s expulsion from the Federation. Once again they were successful, and the League was expelled in the latter part of June 1933. Repressive activities directed towards the League were not limited to institutional Buddhist leaders alone. The police, as representatives of the state, were ever ready to do their part. Thus, the League’s organ, Shinkō Bukkyō, was first censored as early as the November 1931 issue. Over the next five years the police would on more than ten occasions either forbid the sale of the offending League publication altogether or require certain articles to be deleted prior to distribution. The state’s repression, moreover, did not stop with censorship alone. League-sponsored public lectures were frequently terminated by police in the audience, starting as early as May 1933. Senō himself was first arrested in September 1934 when he attempted to speak at a rally in support of Tokyo’s striking streetcar conductors. Although he was only held overnight, a guard beat him the next morning before his release. In February 1936 Senō was arrested once again, this time together with another League member, Matsu’ura Fumio. The police were con-

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 150

6/30/2011 1:00:59 PM

Carry the Buddha out into the Street!

151

vinced the League was either connected to the Communist Party or a Communist organization using Buddhism as a cover. Unable to force admissions of Communist affiliation from either man, the police finally released the two League leaders after having held them without charges for nearly one month. From a police perspective, what was so disturbing about the League was the way in which its members took their organization’s motto to heart. That is to say, members did indeed carry the Buddha out into the street. For example, as early as August 1932 League members began collecting signatures on the street for a petition drawn up by the Japan Farmers Union (Nihon Nōmin Kumiai). The League was collectively able to gather more than 2,000 signatures on this petition, which demanded, among other things, that the government act to increase the incomes of tenant farmers and other workers so as to alleviate the growing disparity between the upper and lower classes. In addition to its efforts on behalf of farmers, the League also took a strong stance against various government and judicial measures that helped perpetuate discrimination against Japan’s traditional outcaste community, members of which were commonly referred to by the pejorative term burakumin. Still further, League members supported the activities of the ‘Anti-Nazi Fascism Annihilation League’ (Han-Nachisu Fassho Funsai Dōmei) and took part in many anti-war labour strikes. Senō himself also became an editor of the left-wing Rōdō Zasshi (Labor Magazine). For Senō, the end result of his activism came on December 7, 1936, when he was arrested yet again. This time, however, he was charged with treason for having allegedly plotted the destruction of both the emperor system and capitalism. Senō was thus faced with precisely the test of his moral character that he had foreseen some five years earlier. At first Senō denied the police accusations, insisting that his goals and those of the League were to reform capitalism, work for world peace, and oppose fascism and militarism. After enduring more than five months of relentless police questioning, however, he finally broke down and confessed that all of the charges against him and the League were true. Not only that, he promised that henceforth he would unconditionally support both the emperor and the nation. In promising this, Senō joined a growing list of left-wing activists who, having been subjected to severe police pressure, underwent a peculiarly Japanese form of ideological conversion known as tenkō (literally, changing direction). It was peculiarly Japanese in that, coupled with police coercion, political prisoners were offered an opportunity

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 151

6/30/2011 1:00:59 PM

152 Brian Daizen Victoria

to rejoin the Japanese racial family, headed by a benevolent emperor as father-figure, if they would simply recant their left-wing ideology. Senō’s confession was used by the police as the pretext for the wholesale arrest of more than 200 League members starting in October 1937. Of those arrested, twenty-nine were eventually prosecuted. In spite of his pledge to support the emperor and nation, Senō himself was sentenced to five years in prison on August 29, 1939. In 1942, however, he was given an early release from prison due to ill health. By that time, of course, all traces of the League had been eradicated. So, too, had all traces of any organized Buddhist resistance, however small, to Japan’s war efforts.11

Conclusion Before attempting to reach a conclusion on the nature and impact of the Youth League it should be noted that, somewhat surprisingly, it was not the sole Buddhist organization in 1930s Japan critical of institutional Buddhism and its support for Japanese militarism. That is to say, it had a counterpart in another part of the Japanese empire, namely Korea, a country that had been annexed by Japan in 1910. Specifically, the ‘Buddhist Reformation Society’ (in Korean, Han’guk Pulgyo Yusinhoe) was first established on December 13, 1921. Its roots, however, reached back to two progressive Buddhists who, together with thirty-one other Korean nationalists, signed the anti-colonial ‘Korean Independence Declaration’ of March 1, 1919, an event that touched off massive antiJapanese demonstrations throughout the country. Only after the deaths of more than 7,500 unarmed civilians at the hands of the Japanese police force and army was the nationwide independence movement finally suppressed. Although the movement failed, it nevertheless provided the impetus for the creation of the reformist ‘Korean Buddhist Youth League (Han’guk Pulgyo Ch’ŏngnyŏnhoe) in 1920. The Korean Youth League’s overall goal was the ‘modernization’ of colonial Buddhism, including the creation of a central Buddhist press, primary schools and kindergartens and establishment of a Buddhist college. The League further called for the rationalization of temple rituals and the centralized management of temple finances throughout the country, something the League saw as critical to fighting institutional Buddhist corruption and the democratization of temple life. Building on the goals of the Youth League, the Buddhist Reformation Society incorporated a strong nationalist and anti-colonial sentiment that was especially critical of Korean institutional Buddhist

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 152

6/30/2011 1:00:59 PM

Carry the Buddha out into the Street!

153

leaders for their slavish subservience to the Japanese colonial authorities. Specifically, the Reformation Society opposed the ‘Temple Law’ (Sach’allyŏng), promulgated by the colonial Government-General on September 1, 1911. While the law guaranteed the right of temples to conduct missionary work and ensured the protection of their lands and other monastic property, the Japanese authorities were granted, in return, a high degree of administrative control over the temples. For example, all commercial transactions involving monastic property were subject to the approval of colonial authorities, and even simply ‘discussing politics’ could lead to permanent expulsion from monastic ranks. This latter stipulation made it very difficult for progressive Korean monks to participate in anti-colonial discourse and struggle. As a result, the focus of the Reformation Society’s activities became the elimination of the colonial authorities’ right of ‘administrative guidance’ over Buddhist affairs, a right they regarded as unacceptable interference in internal Buddhist affairs. The Society charged that such administrative guidance stood in violation of Article 28 of Japan’s own Constitution guaranteeing the separation of religion from politics. Unsurprisingly, the colonial authorities would have none of it. Frustrated by the inability of a legal Buddhist reform movement to advance its agenda, some members of the Youth League broke away to form an underground organization known as the Swastika Party (Mandang) in 1930. The party’s name, of course, was derived from the longstanding Buddhist appropriation of this symbol and had no connection with the Nazi Party. The main goals of the Swastika party were to end Buddhist collaboration with Japanese colonialism while popularizing Buddhism among the Korean people. However, by 1933 party members had become so entangled in regionally based conflicts within institutional Buddhism that they lost the ability to take coordinated action. Finally, in 1937– 1938, many of the party members were arrested by the colonial police. As Vladimir Tikhonov of Oslo University observed: ‘The progressive opposition against the collusive ties between the monastic elite and the colonial rulers proved to be too weak, too divided, and too easily coopted by the Buddhist establishment it so zealously criticised.’12 In comparing these two Korean and Japanese Buddhist reform groups, one is struck by just how much they shared in common. On reflection this is only to be expected, given the conservative and self-serving nature of institutional Buddhist leaders in both countries. Needless to say, from the Japanese government’s point of view both of these organizations were equally dangerous due to the potential threat they posed

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 153

6/30/2011 1:01:00 PM

154

Brian Daizen Victoria

of organizing large numbers of people in opposition to government policies. The anti-colonial nature of the Korean organization was an added dimension that made it especially dangerous, since, as the March 1919 movement had shown, even a relatively small group could spark the mobilization of large numbers of people. To return to our examination of the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism in Japan, if one were to evaluate it purely on the basis of effectiveness, that is, what measurable change in society it brought about, it would, like its Korean counterpart, have to be labelled a failure. That is to say, it cannot claim to have produced so much as a blip on Japan’s inexorable march toward militarism and war. For those who would point out that this is hardly surprising since it was essentially a religious, not a political, organization, it would be well to recall James Ketelaar’s observation that ‘[Buddhism] was indeed one, if not the only, organization capable of offering effective resistance to state policy.’13 The Japanese government was itself well aware of the potential danger Buddhist resistance presented to its policies. In 1937, for example, General Hayashi Senjurō, Japan’s then Prime Minister, said the following in the March issue of the pan-sectarian Buddhist magazine, Daihōrin (Great Dharma Wheel): Buddhism and the state’s policies must be united…. Without this it would be like the situation in England [during World War I] where religion and the state were going their separate ways. This would be troubling. I therefore call on both Buddhists and Shintoists to pay close attention to this issue and strive to become one with the state.14 And, if General Hayashi’s exhortation were not enough, in the same year the headquarters of the Special High Police (Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu), whose job it was to ferret out disloyal elements, issued the following instructions to its personnel: ‘The erroneous words of Buddhist priests and missionaries can have a not inconsiderable impact on the masses. In light of this, you must pay special attention to being on the alert for and controlling such statements.’15 Given that there were then a total of approximately 200,000 Buddhist priests in some 70,000 temples scattered throughout Japan, neither the Prime Minister’s fear, nor that of the police, can be said to have been unreasonable. Just how worried the government was about possible Buddhist resistance is demonstrated in a ‘top-secret’ report written by Ogata Hiroshi in February 1939 for the Criminal Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of Justice.

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 154

6/30/2011 1:01:00 PM

Carry the Buddha out into the Street!

155

Ogata, then a public prosecutor in the Kanazawa district court system, chose the following subtitle to his report: ‘Primarily Concerned with the Incident Involving the “Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism”.’ Ogata devoted more than 200 pages to recounting the League’s ideology and activities, concluding his report by characterizing the League as ‘possessed of a radical and lawless objective that, in the final analysis, puts an extremely distorted emphasis on Buddhist “harmony” and “love”.’16 For a Japanese government at war, harmony and love were clearly unwelcome intrusions. While it was government repression that brought an end to the League’s existence, the question must be asked if some of the League’s ‘non-political’ pronouncements did not at least contribute to the relative ease with which it was crushed – in other words, the League’s unrelenting hostility to institutional Buddhism as a whole. For example, designating temple priests as ‘sermon thieves’ would most certainly alienate the clergy from their cause. Similarly, the claim that ‘all existing sects are corpses that desecrate the spirit of Buddhism’ would ensure a similar outcome among institutional Buddhist leaders. At the very least it must be said that, no matter how accurate the League’s critique may have been, it was a strategic error to try to counter, if not overthrow, both the government and institutional Buddhism at the same time. That said, there is ample evidence to support the argument that no matter what the League said or did, they would have been unable to secure the support of institutional Buddhist leaders, for, as noted above, these leaders had long been locked into fervent and unquestioning support of the government, most especially in the field of foreign aggrandizement. Readers of Zen at War or Zen War Stories, at least, could not escape that conclusion. Nevertheless, the argument can be made that with a softer approach the League might have gained greater support from Buddhist lay members, if not from lower-ranking clerics. A further factor, indeed, perhaps the main factor, in ensuring that the League would be repressed was clearly its very public embrace of left-wing ideology. In fact, it can be justly argued that in reading the League’s ideological agenda it is difficult to tell where Buddhism leaves off and socialism and communism begin. What might have happened if League members had simply said that they took seriously, and would adhere to, the very first of the traditional Buddhist precepts equally binding on both laity and clerics, namely, do not kill? Yet, realistically, when and where in Asian Buddhist history has a large group of Buddhists (or adherents of any faith) ever adopted this path in the face of warfare initiated by their rulers?

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 155

6/30/2011 1:01:00 PM

156 Brian Daizen Victoria

The reality in wartime Japan, just as in Nazi Germany, was that it was only the various left-wing groups who mounted any serious and sustained challenge to the increasingly militaristic policies of their respective governments. While many liberals, and even some conservatives, were unhappy with the direction things were heading, almost none of them were willing to risk imprisonment or worse for daring to resist. Thus, it can be said with some justification that if staunch antiwar Buddhists were to be found it is likely, if not nearly inevitable, that they would be closely linked to the left and suffer the same fate. That said, in recent years it has become common in scholarly circles to question the appropriateness of applying such loaded terms as ‘leftist’ and ‘rightist’ to those radical political groups active in 1930s Japan as well as Germany, given that these groups were all, to varying degrees, opposed to capitalism. In Germany’s case, it is certainly correct to point out that, despite its popular characterization as a ‘right-wing’ movement, the Nazi Party was in fact an abbreviation for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (G. Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). This, however, raises the question of the degree to which ‘national socialism’ (aka ‘state socialism’) can be accurately identified with ‘socialism.’ Needless to say, a detailed discussion of these (and many other) types of socialism lies far beyond the confines of this chapter. Nevertheless, there are two additional, major differences between the left and right that ought to be noted. The first difference holds true for both countries and concerns their attitudes toward warfare initiated by the capitalist-dominated state. The left, as exemplified by the Youth League among many others, regarded such warfare as imperialist and adamantly rejected it. The right, on the other hand, typically supported such warfare as an opportunity to enhance national greatness. That said, elements on both the right and the left were certainly prepared to use domestic violence, when necessary, to achieve their political and economic goals. In Japan’s case, a second major difference between the left and right was their stance toward a foundational element of Japanese nationalism, namely Japan’s ‘national essence’ (kokutai). Ogata Hiroshi, the public prosecutor introduced above, alluded to this difference when he condemned the Youth League’s publications, as well as its activities, for seeking to both ‘revolutionize the national essence and deny the system of private ownership.’17 In 1930s Japan, the charge of seeking to ‘revolutionize the national essence’ referred, first and foremost, to any threat, real or perceived,

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 156

6/30/2011 1:01:00 PM

Carry the Buddha out into the Street!

157

to the Imperial system headed by a divine emperor regarded as a ‘living god’ (arahitogami). As the distinguished historian of modern Japan, Herbert Bix, noted: ‘[Emperor Hirohito] made the system work and was the reason why it worked.’18 It was for this very reason that left-wing activists opposed the emperor system, for they recognized that its existence made meaningful political and economic change in Japan nearly impossible. Their opposition to the emperor system, in turn, made them the primary objects of government repression. Japan’s rightists, on the other hand, were vehement in their expressions of total loyalty to the emperor, with the most radical elements seeking to drastically enhance his authority through the implementation of what they called a ‘Shōwa Restoration’ (Shōwa Ishin), modelled on the earlier Meiji Restoration of 1868. As Robert Bellah noted: ‘[They] conceived of a situation in which all economic and integrative functions would be under the direct control of the emperor, would be merged with the polity. They were violent in their denunciations of both “capitalism” and “politics”.’19 So, while it is true that the advocates of a Shōwa Restoration were, like the right wing in Germany, critical of capitalism, it should be noted that they were never able to agree on a single coherent economic program to replace capitalism, even though many were attracted to features of national socialism. Further, despite their criticism of Japanese capitalism, especially the zaibatsu financial combines, the primary concern of Japan’s rightists, including their military supporters, was the need for relief measures, including land reform, for the impoverished rural population, some of whom were forced to sell their daughters into prostitution, while others lost what little land they had and faced outright starvation. It is, however, critically important to note that these right-wing activists pushing for a Shōwa Restoration never succeeded in their aims, which in reality meant surrounding Emperor Hirohito with civilian and military advisers sympathetic to their program, however vague it may have been. This was not, however, for lack of trying, for through the late 1920s and 1930s they engaged in a series of plots and bloody terrorist incidents, culminating, most famously, in the ‘Young Officers Uprising’ of February 26, 1936. Ultimately, this last major uprising failed because of just one person, the emperor, who demanded that the rebellion be crushed and threatened to personally lead loyal army units against the rebels if necessary. In Japan’s case, then, there is no need, historically speaking, to engage in an extended discussion of the differences between socialism

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 157

6/30/2011 1:01:00 PM

158 Brian Daizen Victoria

and national socialism, since neither of these economic systems was ever implemented. That is to say, while on the one hand the zaibatsu and other major corporations were subordinated to increasingly intrusive government central planners during the war years, their ownership nevertheless remained in private hands, for Japanese central planning was corporatist, not socialist, in nature. In summary, there was a clear difference between left and right, not only when it came to Japanese aggression abroad but also in their respective attitudes toward the emperor system. Given these clear differences, the labels ‘left’ versus ‘right’ are not only convenient but arguably appropriate. However, the left-wing political orientation of the League raises yet another query: is it appropriate to identify Buddhism with leftwing thought of any kind? Needless to say, an answer to this question would require at least a book in itself and therefore cannot be explored here. Nevertheless, as much of the world once again finds itself in the midst of a serious capitalism-induced economic recession, if not depression, the question of what economic system, if any, Buddhism favours is once again of pressing concern, especially in an era when the globalization of corporate-dominated market capitalism seems unstoppable. Addressing this issue, the engaged Buddhist scholar David Loy notes that modern transnational corporations ‘are fueled by, and reinforce, not wisdom or compassion but a very different human trait: namely, greed.’ As for Buddhism’s response to corporate greed, Loy notes that ‘like most religious institutions, [Buddhism] acknowledges the power of greed, yet rather than erect an economic system based on it, Buddhism emphasizes the need to control it.’20 What would an economic system look like that not only controls greed but also promotes wisdom and compassion? At the time of the League its members clearly believed that the former Soviet Union, which identified itself as a socialist state, represented the way forward to collective societal liberation. Yet today, it is safe to say that few Buddhists would point to the economic system of any country as a model to be emulated. Perhaps this is just as well, for it means that Buddhists, like the faithful of all religions, need to examine the highest ideals of their faith in respect to the creation of a socially just and environmentally sustainable economic system. For Buddhists such an economic system would parallel the monastic rules for the creation of a harmonious society as elaborated in the Vinaya Pitaka, most especially the historical Buddha’s admonition to his disciples in the Mahavagga section of that sutra

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 158

6/30/2011 1:01:00 PM

Carry the Buddha out into the Street!

159

directing them to seek ‘the good of the many, the happiness of the many.’ While the Youth League for the Revitalization of Buddhism no longer exists, it can be seen, in retrospect, as a forerunner of what is today known as the ‘engaged Buddhism’ movement. As such, its legacy of the need for social engagement on the part of Buddhists remains as vital today as it ever was.

Notes 1. Inagaki, Henkaku o motometa Bukkyō-sha, 68. 2. These three priests were involved in the so-called High Treason Incident (Taigyaku jiken) of 1910. For details of this incident, including the response of institutional Buddhist leaders, see Victoria, Zen at War, 38–54. 3. Inagaki, Butsuda o seotte Gaitō e, 3–6. 4. Ibid., 6–7. 5. Senō, Nikki, 4: 6. 6. Following his arrest in May 1909, Uchiyama is recorded as having stated the following in his pre-trial testimony: ‘The year was 1904…. When I reflected on the way in which priests of my sect had undergone religious training in China in former times, I realized how beautiful it had been. Here were two or three hundred persons who, living in one place at one time, shared a communal lifestyle in which they wore the same clothing and ate the same food. I held to the ideal that if this could be applied to one village, one county, or one country, what an extremely good system would be created.’ Uchiyama was hanged on January 24, 1911 as a result of his pioneering opposition to the emperor system coupled with his embrace of anarchosocialism. For further details concerning Uchiyama’s life and thought, see Victoria, Zen at War, 38–48. 7. Inagaki, Butsuda o seotte Gaitō e, 139. 8. Ibid., 147. 9. Ibid., 148. 10. Quoted in Sueki, ‘Nihon no Bukkyō to sensō – Suzuki Daisetsu o chūshin toshite’ (Japanese Buddhism and War – centered on Suzuki Daisetsu), 5. 11. Some readers may wonder why I have failed to include a small number of Nichiren-related splinter groups in my discussion of ‘anti-war’ Buddhist movements. The reason for this is that the conflict between these groups and the government was characterized by mutual religious intolerance, not these groups’ opposition to either Japanese colonialism or militarism. The best known (in post-war years) of these groups is Sōka Gakkai, founded in 1930 by Makiguchi Tsunesaburō (1871–1944) and his disciple, Toda Jōsei (1900–1958). Makiguchi’s conflict with the government began in 1939 when he opposed legislation forcing the amalgamation of smaller religious bodies with their parent organizations or with one another. In 1943 both Makiguchi and Toda were imprisoned because they refused to worship and enshrine replicas of the sacred tablets of the Ise Grand Shrine dedicated to the Shinto Sun goddess, Amaterasu Ōmikami. Like Nichiren, the thirteenth-century founder of their faith, Makiguchi, Toda, and their small band of followers

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 159

6/30/2011 1:01:00 PM

160

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

Brian Daizen Victoria vehemently rejected and despised all other faiths, including other sects of Buddhism, Shinto, Christianity, and so on. Although Makiguchi died in prison in 1944 and is held up by present-day Sōka Gakkai adherents as an ‘anti-war martyr,’ the group he founded (also known as Nichiren Shōshū) continues to be characterized by its denunciations of other religious groups, although its stridency has lessened in recent years. For a more detailed discussion of this question, see the author’s article entitled: ‘The Putative Pacifism of Sōka Gakkai Founder Makiguchi Tsunesaburō,’ Japanese Studies, 21 (3), December 2001, 279–296. Tikhonov, ‘Violent Buddhism: Korean Buddhists and the Pacific War, 1937– 1945,’ 172. Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan, 215. Quoted in Victoria, Zen War Stories, 206. Herbert P. Bix, ‘War Responsibility and Historical Memory: Hirohito’s Apparition,’ posted on May 6, 2008, available at: http://www.japanfocus. org/-Herbert_P_-Bix/2741 (accessed December 26, 2010). Bellah, Tokugawa Religion, 105. Quoted in Victoria, Zen War Stories, 206. Herbert P. Bix, ‘War Responsibility and Historical Memory: Hirohito’s Apparition,’ posted on May 6, 2008, available at: http://www.japanfocus. org/-Herbert_P_-Bix/2741 (accessed December 26, 2010). Bellah, Tokugawa Religion, 105. Loy, Great Awakening, 99.

Selected bibliography Bellah, Robert (1985) Tokugawa Religion (New York: Free Press). Inaba Noboru (1966) Bukkyō to Marukishizumu (Tokyo: Sōgen-sha). Inagaki Masami (1974) Butsuda o seotte Gaitō e (Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho) —— (1975) Henkaku o motometa Bukkyō-sha (Tokyo: Daizō Shinsho) Ketelaar, James Edward (1990) Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Kōhashi Kōichi (1968) Shakai kagaku to gendai Bukkyō (Tokyo: Sōgensha). Loy, David (2003) The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory (Boston: Wisdom Publications). Mibu Shōjun. Chian ijihō no gisei ni natte – Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei no danatsu jiken no shōgen in Nihon Shūkyō-sha Heiwa Kyōgi-kai, ed., Gendai ni ikiru shūkyō-sha no shōgen (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppan-sha, 1968), 22–29. Okano Moriya (2000) Jiga to Muga (Kyoto: PHP Shinsho). Senō Girō (1974) Senō Girō Nikki 4 (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai). Shakai Henkaku tojō no Shinkō Bukkyō, 3rd series (1933) (Tokyo: Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei Shuppan). Sueki, Fumihiko Nihon no Bukkyō to sensō – Suzuki Daisetsu o chūshin toshite (Japanese Buddhism and War – centered on Suzuki Daisetsu), unpublished paper delivered to the South Korean-Japan Society for the Study of Intellectual History (Kankoku Nihon Shisō-shi Gakkai) held on November 29, 2008, 1–5. Shinkō Bukkyō, June 1933.

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 160

6/30/2011 1:01:00 PM

Carry the Buddha out into the Street!

161

Shinshu Booklet, No. 8 (2000) Takagi Kemmyō (Kyoto: Higashi Honganji Shuppan-bu). Tikhonov, Vladimir (2009) ’Violent Buddhism: Korean Buddhists and the Pacific War, 1937–1945,’ Sai, 169–204. Victoria, Brian (2006) Zen at War, 2nd edn (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield). —— (2003) Zen War Stories (London: RoutledgeCurzon).

9780230_240735_07_cha05.indd 161

6/30/2011 1:01:01 PM

6 The Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan Alan Tansman

When will I find in the language of this regime a single, truly honest word? all it takes is just a tiny digression into old German, which seems poetic on account of its age and the fact it is no longer in everyday use, or perhaps now and then simply the omission of a syllable, and an entirely different mood is summoned up in the person being addressed ... – Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich1 Ienaga Saburō, the Japanese historian who spent decades fighting the Japanese government for honest school textbook depictions of Japan’s wartime depredations, is unflinching in his description of Japan’s interwar fascism. Ienaga describes a Japan in which the prewar state held the population in an ever-tightening vise – tightened with every challenge to state repression at home or military venture abroad – made of internal security laws restricting freedom of speech and thought, and conformist education blocking the growth of a freedom of consciousness and political action. Coercion and manipulation ended dissent, and indoctrination was backed by the police, the army, and their swords. Though fascism in Japan may not have resulted from a dramatic, revolutionary break from the past, for Ienaga in 1968 the repression and violence within Japan and without added up to fascism. 2 Japanese fascism was no less effective in destroying political freedom. The threats and the use of physical force by the police and kempeitai [army police] were the ultimate weapons. Marxists, Christian pacifists, anyone considered even slightly opposed to the war was 162

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 162

6/30/2011 1:01:31 PM

Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan

163

arrested and incarcerated under regulations ... some prisoners were tortured and physically mistreated; others were held indefinitely, placed in a psychological limbo. Political prisoners were pressured to make false confessions and to recant their political beliefs.3 All government authorities, Ienaga concludes, ‘even the judges, did their best to eradicate freedom.’ Even the most innocent Japanese was not safe to write dissent in a private diary.4 Their private language was now bound – by the combined force of censorship, inculcation, and the threat of punishment – to the words of the state. The general use of the term ‘fascism’ in Japan since the early 1930s in its transliterated version (as fashizumu or fassho) preserves, inadvertently or not, the original Latin sense of Ienaga’s metaphor of binding. Mussolini adopted the Roman symbol of authority, a fasces, an axe bundled together by rods, for his Fascist movement. That original meaning can help us think about the process and effectiveness of binding a various populace to a uniform ideology, and it can require us to ask whether such a binding process is like a religious conversion. The public document by which individuals were to be bound, and the most concise and disseminated artefact of binding (or conversion) as it emanated from the state, was the 1937 Essentials of the National Polity (Kokutai no hongi), a piece of writing that worked religiously on its audience – if by this we mean that it tried to inculcate a set of social norms and ethical attitudes by reference to an overarching, transcendent, divinely authorized framework. Peter Berger’s classic and still useful formulation can help us understand Essentials of the National Polity and the work it did: ‘Religion is the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established ... By sacred is meant here a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than man and yet related to him, which is believed to reside in certain objects of experience.’5 The original draft of the book was written by a scholar of classical literature sometime before 1937, and was twice rewritten by a committee of ‘technical experts,’ including the head of the Bureau of Thought Control of the Ministry of Education, classical literature scholars such as Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, the philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō, whose notion that Japanese national character traits can be linked to climactic conditions suffuses the book, and other academic historians, art historians, and philosophers.6 The book was written at a time when ideologues of the ‘kokutai’ needed to be ‘working harder,’ in Carol Gluck’s words, at their efforts to persuade citizens whose experiences had been growing distant from the rhetoric of ideology.7 It was published on March 30, 1937

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 163

6/30/2011 1:01:31 PM

164 Alan Tansman

in 300,000 copies (and was distributed in the millions by 1945). The product of the government Movement to Clarify the National Essence (Kokutai meichō undō), and written in response to a leftist reading of the Meiji Constitution that argued that the Emperor was a mere organ of the state but did not transcend it,8 the book was distributed to teachers of private and public schools, from the elementary to university levels. Educators were urged by the government to publicize the book, and successive editions were published until 1943, by which time it had apparently sold almost two million copies. Portions appeared in school textbooks and it was discussed in self-study groups. It was the source of quotation in speeches and ceremonies. Dozens of commentaries, quite a bit longer than the original, were written and disseminated. In the two years after publication one commentary on the book went through five editions and ninety-three printings.9 The book can be compared to Hitler’s Mein Kampf as a foundational document of aggression, and in its style of repetitive assertion (what Locoue-Labarthe and Nancy call ‘affirmative accumulation’), but it is an anonymous, bureaucratic document. What Kokutai no hongi had to say and the language in which it spoke would have been no surprise to readers well used to the rhetoric of the Japanese spirit that had been inundating the nation through scholarly tomes, mass media, political exhortation, and, indeed, rarified literature. Neither the writing nor the publishing of Kokutai no hongi was a singular event. That the ‘national essence’ (kokutai, literally ‘national body’) could be clarified by tracing the lineage of the Japanese to the Sun Goddess was familiar in political discussions by the 1850s.10 In his 1825 New Theses (Shinron), Confucian scholar Aizawa Seishisai used the term ‘kokutai,’ which in Chinese and earlier Japanese sources meant the ‘nation’s honor,’ to mean the ‘essence of the nation,’ indicating a state in which government and religion were united under a ruler. The ‘tai’ of ‘kokutai’ (which is also the character for ‘body’) indicated a defining quality or set of characteristics that cannot be transformed.11 Indeed, the government made sure of this in the 1925 Peace Preservation Law, which made altering the ‘kokutai’ a crime against the state. The ‘kokutai’ was an unmovable resistance – a body, a community, a set of standards. The stress and reflections – the rhetorical strategies – of this widely disseminated book give a sense of what its ideological effect might have been. A brief four-point note before the text itself commences lucidly states the goals and methods of the book: to clarify the essence of the kokutai – the national essence – for the sake of the spirit of the people by relying on careful use of written historical sources, quoted in

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 164

6/30/2011 1:01:31 PM

Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan

165

their original classical language. The tone of careful, empiricist accuracy – based on ways of thought the book as a whole strongly cautions against – is balanced by a declaration of what such a scientific methodology cannot capture, the ultimate mystery of the national essence: ‘Our National Essence is vast and unfathomable (kōdai shin’en) and cannot be fully captured.’ The introductory section is reasonable and bright. It offers hopes for the continued prosperity of a nation doing quite well in economic and cultural life. In a few swift pages we read the history of the nation whose narrative will, by the end of the book, have become so familiar as to be second nature. Japan has digested foreign influences – from India, China, and the West – and has learned much from them while assimilating them to its own ends. We notice that history is being written based on the assumption and prestige of an evolutionary model, but that the limitations of such a history are noted, either by explicit argument or by a style of execution that eschews the logical positivism needed to write such a history. We are told that too much absorption of foreign influences has fouled the National Essence and led to a loss of the foundation of the national spirit, creating problems for the present whose causes have been misunderstood. When the text quotes the eighth-century poets of the Manyōshū to describe the present crisis, it calls the deep past into the present and draws the present back into the past, creating for Japanese history a sense of timelessness or eternity – a sense that will be pounded into the reader for the rest of the book in archaic and pompous strings of clichéd phrases. It is these phrases, repeated with the insistence of motifs in a piece of music, not any argument lucidly delineated, that stay with the reader. The book’s own aesthetic foundation, then, is like Mozart’s, expressing through repeated and rhythmic variation and imitation what it claims itself cannot be expressed in words – the inexpressible essence of the spirit of the Japanese nation and its people. It makes perfect sense that the main point the introduction makes about Western influence is that it is the West’s eighteenth century – from which was born logic, positivism, naturalism, individualism, and a notion of abstract identity not connected to the conditions of local circumstance and history – that has caused the present intellectual and spiritual havoc. While the book recognizes that these philosophies have given much to civilization, it sees that they also planted the seeds of an illness. In Japan, this history climaxed in what is known as the Meiji era of Civilization and Enlightenment. The book would have agreed with Marxists Adorno and Horkheimer – though from the right, and with different ends in

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 165

6/30/2011 1:01:31 PM

166 Alan Tansman

mind – who wrote in 1944 that the ‘the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.’12 We feel a visceral rebellion against formal ideologies when we read the complaint that great confusion in Japan has been caused by the influx of too many ‘isms:’ idealism, democratism, socialism, anarchism, communism, and, most recently, fascism. It is both reasonable and cosmopolitan of the introduction to note that the West, too, has reached an impasse with these ideologies, leading it to totalitarianism, Nazism, and fascism. But that is their concern, the book claims: ours is to return to what we truly are by clarifying our ‘eternal and immutable’ (banko fueki) essence, dispensing with all we have taken in to build a new Japan. This will be done by clearly showing how the National Essence has been ‘made manifest’ in history.13 Of course it is impossible to write of these things at all except from the perspective of one already ill with the disease. That is, there is no choice but to work through modern language to undo the very premises of modern language. So, as the essay unfolds, the basic points made in the introduction are elaborated with lucidity and logic. Regularly, passages of lucidity and logic are interrupted by language that communicates more through form than content, replacing or bolstering conclusions to arguments with citations of opaque classical texts, declarations of truths rather than explications, set phrases, recitals of Imperial lineages, or images of sublime light. As each section repeats the same points by repeating the same citations, lineages, and phrases, the reader finds himself not working through an argument at all, but moving to the rhythm of words and phrases that come to feel already familiar, unspoken, and an unquestionable part of the sense of things. The feeling of naturalness created by this style is only increased by the nameless authorship of the book. Though written by particular people, the book was presented as anonymous, like an unnamed folk song (also an artificial construct), or minyō. In this way, it represents what it argues: it sounds like the voice of history working through the people, written with no concern for self-expression or individual originality. And, by arguing in the language of ‘we,’ it sounds like the voice of the tribe. It is very interested in language in its declarative form, not only in its own style but also in its citation of poems, histories, and, most importantly, spoken and written declarations by Emperors. 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. Through repeated words and declarations, it calls into existence not only its own lineage and essence,

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 166

6/30/2011 1:01:31 PM

Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan

167

but also its own substance as a sanctioned cultural artefact, its own closed canon written in the small vocabulary of classical rhetoric whose meanings can only be understood and felt by an elite community with access to an arcane vocabulary. The proliferation of commentaries written to elucidate the book to a general audience made it possible for any reader to imagine being a member of that small group. The book assumes a reader literate in a canon of limited but tradition-soaked references and terms. Recognition of references to classical poetry and history would signal a tradition still intact, and, though the writers knew this was more a fantasy than a reality, they wrote as if such a readership existed, thereby enacting the canon and the community of being it hoped to bring into being. 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. The ‘magical power of words’ is to be more felt and absorbed than analyzed and understood – like the shot of an arrow, to use Yasuda Yojūrō’s metaphor for the goal of criticism. To build a world that was to be uncritically absorbed it depended upon a vocabulary that signalled distances too far and depths too deep to comprehend; it signalled the sublime. It did so by incessantly repeating words that were amplifications and variations of the same idea, thus giving the sense (and this is one of the central points of the book) that what it was trying to name was not nameable. These words include: ‘eikyū’ (eternal), ‘eien fuhen’ (eternal and unchanging), ‘eien fudō’ (eternal and unmoving) ‘yōjō shin-en’ (boundless and profound) ‘kodai shin-en’ (vast and deep), ‘kodai muhen’ (vast and limitless), ‘bandai fuyō’ (everlasting and eternal), ‘kagirinaku’ (without limits), ‘okuchō kagirinaku’ (the millions, without limits), ‘tenjō mukyū’ (heaven and earth infinite), ‘mukyū’ (endless), ‘mugen no hatten’ (limitless development), ‘yūdai’ (sublime) At the other end of the spectrum are words expressing the tiny, singular units to be absorbed by the sublime, like ‘ichi’ (one), ‘ittai’ (one body), or its honorific form, ‘goittai.’ This singular is made into the mass in phrases such as ‘hitotsu ni shite’ (making into one), ‘okuchōgokoro o hitotsu ni shite’ (the spirit of millions made into one), ‘botsuga kiitsu’ (effacing the self into one). The one is extended to the polity in phrases like ‘kokka ittai’ (the nation one body) and ‘bansei ikkei’ (unbroken line),

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 167

6/30/2011 1:01:32 PM

168 Alan Tansman

and all things are synthesized through ‘manbutsu sōgō’ (all things synthesized). The process of assimilating the one into the whole is ‘dōka’ (assimilate), or ‘musubi,’ (knot, tie, fasten), and what allows the self to be assimilated is a ‘mushi no seishin’ (spirit of selflessness). What replaces the self are the repeated proper names of the gods (Amaterasu), and the proper name and abstract first-person designation are replaced by a first-person plural possessive, ‘our’ (waga). What the book names is ‘Our National Essence’ (Waga Kokutai no hongi). These words are used to concretize and amplify nouns. The nation is a ‘national body,’ but not simply that; it is an ‘ancient and unchanging’ (bankō fuyō) national body. And the lineage of Emperors is more than that; they are the Emperors of ‘tens of thousands of generations’ (banyō ikkei). The fundamental principle of the nation (hongi) is that it is ‘eternal and unchanging’ (eien fuhen). The throne is no mere throne; it is ‘the throne coeval with heaven and earth and of tens of thousands of generation’ (tenjō mukyū bandai ikkei). The land never stands alone as an abstract unit, but is always ‘our land’ (wagaguni). Though the audience was hailed into this community of ‘we’ and ‘our,’ it was not necessarily up to the language by which it was addressed. The audience for the book was not elite: it was the general population, including every school child. As indicated by the publication and diffusion of dozens of interpretive books on Kokutai no hongi, often longer than the original itself, this audience did not necessarily have access to the book’s language. This would suggest that it claimed a place in a community by the prestige of its very abstruseness and by providing readers with the sense that they could ‘get’ the essence of words and phrases sanctioned by history without fully discerning their meanings. The circulation of glosses on the text only increased that sense of being in a community of readers. It thus conjured what Yasuda hoped to create: a community of readers of a closed canon connected through feeling rather than thought. The ‘meaning’ of Kokutai no hongi does not exceed its six-page introduction. But as the first chapter, ‘The Founding of the Nation,’ begins, and the prose thunders forth through classical phraseology, declaring that an unbroken line of Emperors has reigned eternally over Japan from time immemorial, we begin to sense that we will be getting more feeling than meaning; more sublimity than lucidity. Immediately upon reading the first lines of the text proper, one is shaken from the cool mood of explication just promised in the preface; from now on we will read prose that shifts among declarations about the present state of affairs and the truth of the National Essence, the reel-

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 168

6/30/2011 1:01:32 PM

Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan

169

ing off of Imperial lineages, and citations from Imperial histories and rescripts and from classical poetry in classical language largely opaque to contemporaneous readers. Each of its ten sections, ranging though topics such as the founding of the nation, the sacred virtues of the people, harmony and truth, the spirit of history, the life and character of the people, ceremonial rites, and political, economic, and military affairs, proceeds through a series of declarative statements built upon the dense texture of classical aphorisms and phrases. Each chapter provides a discussion of the historical lineage of its topic, citing the same sources as the other chapters and repeating the same central points. The Emperor Meiji’s Imperial Rescript on Education is repeated like a talisman. Issued in 1890, by 1937 it had acquired an aura of sacred scripture. It placed the authority of the Emperor in his divine origins and established a code of ethics centered on devotion, giving birth to the concept of ‘national essence’ (kokutai) as historically transcendent.14 At moments, we even find passages in which an argument is made through logic and analysis, but the work of convincing is done when these moments yield to declarations or citations that have already been repeatedly stated. The book has an aversion to abstraction. The aversion is clearly stated as a disgruntlement with Western thought since the eighteenth century, but more pertinent to the aesthetic effect of the book is the vocabulary of concreteness and the style of concreteness it impresses upon the reader. The word ‘kokutai’ itself means, literally, ‘national body,’ and the family unit at its core is described as ‘one body’ (ichidan).15 Abstraction is its enemy, but a diaphanous sublimity is its goal. The sheer proliferation of words evoking distances in time and space that cannot be contained by the imagination – like the language of superlatives and of the eternal Victor Klemperer notices in Nazi language16 – bathes the declarations of Imperial descent and national mission in an atmosphere of sublimity. 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 feel 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. But, as a modern document, the essay relies on the authority of an empirical methodology of proof through evidence – an authority it explicitly recognizes for its benefits to Japan but which it seeks to go beyond. It thus makes the stylistic choice of reinforcing its rote repetitions with variation and amplification. The use of a variety of synonyms implying the boundlessness of eternity

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 169

6/30/2011 1:01:32 PM

170 Alan Tansman

serves the propagandistic function of reinforcing through such variations. Displaying shades of difference in the naming of boundlessness lends an air of careful philological parsing. At the same time, and at odds with this gesture toward scientific methodology, the multiple variations imply that what lies beneath words cannot, or need not, be fixed by language, because it is beyond language’s capacity to render into meaning – it is the sublime. The boundlessness of the sublime is potentially disruptive to the need to rein in citizens for the work of nation-building. It offers the potential for personal distraction from the call of this-worldly things. The movement of the sublime is potentially disruptive because it pushes toward the limitless bounds of time, space, and the imagination. In a tract whose goal is to bind people together, the sublime needs to be reined in. The process of taming its power can be understood through Edmund Burke, who argued that the sublime evokes feelings of ‘delight’ by offering presentiments of death without the real threat; and through Kant, who, in responding to Burke, argued that the sublime was a more ‘noble’ emotion, experienced without threat to the cohesion of the self in a moment of social connection. The binding of individuals is not a cool process. The pleasure of the sublime is a ‘sacred thrill’ premised upon a feeling of sacrifice or deprivation. It is an exchange: the imagination gives up the power it feels for a simultaneous elevation and reduction of the self.17 The language of Kokutai no hongi is clear about this process. It invokes a loss of selfhood and intimates the pleasure of its disappearance, making domination pleasurable and violence beautiful. The sublime in this book is not an abstract realm in the imagination. Abstraction itself is one of the book’s main targets. The sublime here is an adjective for describing concrete things: the founding of the state, the ancient emperors, the Meiji Emperor, the spirit of the Japanese, Japanese history, the movement of time itself in Japanese history, Japan’s world mission, and the mission of each Japanese to sacrifice himself to the larger body and spirit. On the level of rhetoric the sublime must be bound to these concrete things; on the level of exhortation the people, turned into abstract individuals by Western modernity, must regain their concreteness by being bound to the sublime state, its history, and its mission. This binding happens not through abstract explication of its necessity, but by concrete declarations of its reality. The concrete connection is made through declarations of lineage and blood and the recalling of other concrete, conditioning circumstances of material life. Though the book’s language does not have any consciousness, it does reveal general rhetorical patterns: it knows what it is

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 170

6/30/2011 1:01:32 PM

Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan

171

doing. Its movement between declarative utterance and logical explanation is reflected in the relative density or sparseness of talismanic words and phrases. If one batters the reader through repeated motifs whose sound and sight come to bear more propagandistic weight than their semantic content, the other coolly clarifies by allowing the intellect to think it is getting something like a rational explanation. There is no greater challenge for this dual rhetoric than to have readers understand the meaning, or, more to the point, to ‘get’ the feeling of, ‘eternity,’ a sublime place and time beyond the imagination. The following passage builds in rhetorical steps to create, by declaring, a myth. It begins in the cool language of a Confucian exegesis (or a Bergsonian explication): The meaning of ‘endless as heaven and earth’ (tenjō mukyū) means being endless with heaven and earth. It seems that one who thinks of endless simply in terms of the succession of time has not yet fully exhausted the meaning (imi o tsukusu). Usually, the words eternity (eien) or limitless (mugen) mean simply the quality of the eternal (eikyū) in the sense of the succession of time, but the expression ‘endless as heaven and earth’ has a far deeper significance. That is, it expresses eternity (eien) and at the same time means the present. The passage then begins to build by declaring, in ornate honorific language thick with arcane clichés: In the great August Will and great undertakings of his Lord the Emperor, deity incarnate, the August Will of the Imperial Ancestors is received in adoration, and in this will our nation’s endless future lives. The meaning that our Imperial Throne is ‘endless as heaven and earth’ is truly that the past and the future have become one in the now, that our nation possesses eternal life, and develops endlessly. Our history is a development (tenkai) of the eternal now, and at the root of our history there is always an eternal now flowing. In the Japanese, the passage moves through a lucid rhythmic repetition of repeated terms, nouns modified by ‘our,’ and short parallel phrases. The august declarations now give way to proof through a higher form of declaration, in the words repeated throughout the book, from the Emperor Meiji’s 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education. Often the quote is long, though here it is short: Guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne endless as heaven and earth.

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 171

6/30/2011 1:01:32 PM

172 Alan Tansman

In the Japanese, the reader moves with this quote to the words of eternity, the words of an Emperor in a lineage through thousands of generations reaching back to the gods. The language itself, of an arcane older Japanese almost as inaccessible to readers then as was eternity itself, places the meaning in a misty time before time. These are words, then, of eternity incarnate. They are both the concrete words of a specific Emperor who stands at the beginning of Japan’s modernity, and the words of nobody in particular; they are the words of nature working spontaneously through tradition. It is no leap at all for the ‘argument’ to now declare that all this has been brought to fruition by an acceptance of the Imperial Will: ‘Thus, sovereign and subject, united in one, take shape and develop eternally, and the Imperial Throne continues to prosper.’18 In the course of the book, we learn that ‘our nation’s politics,’ ‘our nation’s history,’ our nation’s wars and building of colonies, our nation’s everything, is brought into being and sanctioned by the sublime will of history working through the eternal line of Emperors and the Japanese citizens who are members of their family. How does the language of the book tame the vast sublimity of history into the concrete actions of living people in a real situation? First, it tells us that the notion of the individual as an abstract entity belongs to a tradition that has influenced us but is not our own, no longer has any use, and must be wiped away, for it has done much damage. Then, it places that individual within the blood lineage of the Japanese people stretching though the imperial line, eternally. Before the individual gets that far, he (or she) is placed within the family unit; not the nuclear family in which the romantic bond is central, but the family in which the harmony of husband and wife ‘materializes (jitsugen) in communal life.’19 Of course these are not so much exhortations as declarations. We (the Japanese) are not told that we should do this or that, but that we are this or that. To speak about the individual, the book joins the rich debate among scholars and writers of literature about the meaning of the modern self. But, whereas the literature of the self written outside the envelope of state-imposed language showed a complexity of meanings and a variety of usages, Kokutai no hongi is quite sure of what it means. If the meaning of the self and the term for it were in a condition of dizzying flux during this time – like the ideologies swirling about Japanese life that the book so fears – then Kokutai no hongi would fix that term, and fix it hard.

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 172

6/30/2011 1:01:32 PM

Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan

173

In our national character there is a strong spirit of ‘no-self ‘ (mushi) and ‘assimilation’ (dōka). In importing culture from the Asiatic continent, we used the ideographs from the Chinese classics for ‘emptying the self’ and assimilated their thought, and by our own spirits we by ourselves (mizukara) are consolidating (tōitsu) and assimilating that thought.20 The passage recognizes the debt Japanese national character – not an abstract national character but ‘our’ national character – owed to Chinese culture (indeed, throughout it reveals an anxiety of influence not only about China and the West, but about India as well) but takes credit for assimilating it (literally ‘making the same’) to its own character, in the way the self is assimilated to the nation, and, I would add, the way the various variations on a few singular points in the book are assimilated into one simple meaning. Finally, it recognizes that this assimilation is mediated through language. There is no ‘self ‘ in the passage apart from a self that belongs to an entity; and this is true for the entire book. There is only a ‘we’ (ga) connected to a nation, a history, a spirit, a people. There is a concrete ‘I’ submerged in a ‘we’ that has assimilated the ‘I.’ The trick the book must perform is to suggest a transformation of a concrete ‘I’ into an ‘I’ that is nothing, but an ‘I’ that is also not abstract. The book does this carefully, appealing to a cool and rational sensibility, using a term for the modern self to reject it: ‘The spirit of ‘selflessness’ (literally, submerging the self, botsuga) is not a simple denial of the self (jiko), but means living the great, true self by denying the small self.’21 Individuals are not something isolated from the state, but are that which ‘possess, as segments (bun) of the state, their particular places forming the state. Because they are segments, their essence is to unite (tōitsu) with the state, and here give birth to the spirit of selflessness.’22 Selflessness here is literally ‘submerging the self,’ but the book wants to make clear that this does not imply submergence or devotion to the nation in the Western sense, because there the two are seen to be separate entities. In Japan, they are one and the same, so there is nothing to submerge and nothing in which to submerge. But as the book begins to draw toward its conclusion the submersion of the self is not as gentle. In the section on morality, discussing the ethics of the warrior, we learn that ‘through warrior society there has been transmitted (denchō) the totalitarian (zentaishugi) spirit and structure of the ancient tribes, peculiar to our nation.’23 This

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 173

6/30/2011 1:01:32 PM

174 Alan Tansman

totalitarianism was learned from Buddhism and Confucianism, but transcended them: This was a spirit of selflessness between master and servant bounded (musubarenagara) by the principle of obligation transcending obligation; in which looking at death came to be like being reduced to death. In this way death was not made light of, but deeply revered as death in its truest sense. In other words, through death life was perfected. Rather than losing the self by clinging to the self and maintaining it, he tried to kill the self in order to make the whole live by perfecting it. Life and death are fundamentally one and the same; the truth of oneness is in the transcendence of life and death. 24 What ties the self to its own demise is a concrete binding through the bodily action of self-immolation, spilling one’s blood for the blood of one’s lineage. Simply, the act solves the split between self and other and between individual and totality. It cures abstract thought with concrete action. It cures the modern crisis of the split between spirit and body by uniting them. This combination of self-effacement and unity has religious roots (as the book itself notes) in the Buddhist Priest Shinran’s belief in absolute salvation through faith, and in the way the priest Hōnen taught through constant chanting, regardless of time and place, that one fulfills one’s destiny when one is in ‘one’s natural form’ (ari no mama no sugata). This way of teaching ‘manifests a view of life that is kinetic and practical.’25 That is, the Japanese are concrete beings tied to nature. Here, concrete means to be ‘as one is’ while chanting the teachings of the Buddha regarding self-submersion and oneness. Kokutai no hongi is anything but a self-reflective literary text, but I can think of no better image of how it hopes it will work on its readers. If the Japanese are concrete beings because they chant, this is because the book understands the Japanese language (not language in general) to have the ‘spirit of words,’ the ‘magical power of words,’ the kotodama of the ancient poets. This is the power to create through enunciation, and to name things concretely, seeing them not through the veil of abstraction but through the lucid eye of honest vision. The lineage of the belief in the power of words is traced in the book through eighteenth-century scholars of National Learning such as Kamo no Mabuchi and Fujitane Mitsue, who believed that ‘true words are true deeds,’26 and climaxes in the emphasis in the Meiji Imperial Rescript on Education on the

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 174

6/30/2011 1:01:32 PM

Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan

175

practical efficacy of sincere words and sincere actions. Its roots are to be found in the nation’s first anthology of poetry, the Manyōshū, in the ‘magical power of words of our nation,’ the belief that ‘words that can become actions are true words.’27 Such words have ‘limitless power and communicate with endless breadth.’ Kokutai no hongi loves language, but we should not hear in it a paean to the flourishing of diverse speech in an open society. The ancient collection tells us that Japan is ‘a land where words flourish,’ but also ‘a land of the gods where words are not celebrated.’ The seeming contradiction is noted and quickly clarified, through repetitions that amplify without expanding meaning, drumming into the reader a truth through the power of language that it also explicates: once a word is spoken it must be put into action; and accordingly words that cannot be put into practice should not be spoken rashly. In this way, once a word is stated, it must be put into practice. Nay, if genuine words are ‘the spirit of words’ they must be put into practice. At the roots of words that can be put into practice there exists truth. Within truth there must be no self (ga). Precisely in speaking and acting having completely cast oneself aside lies the truth, and the truth shines.28 The truth the passage reaches through its declarations is that language that is sincere and true, and that can be put into practice, has dispensed with the speaker, who has become one with words that shine. Throughout the book, such shining marks the sublime place at the heart of the ‘national essence,’ the principle of filial piety upon which it is based ‘is shining beautifully’;29 and the records that give evidence to the great spirit of the nation’s history are the ‘shining records of our history.’30 The sublime moment of shining is the final point cinching the book’s ‘arguments,’ which regularly work by beginning with a declaration (our national history rolls along unfolding the single line of the great spirit of the nation, to the present day), moving through examples of the stated principle to build an Imperial lineage through Japanese history (from ancient times through Meiji and the present), and climaxing in the edicts of the Meiji Emperor, which are the ‘spirit of words.’ These are words, remember, not to be analyzed but to be acted upon. The cinch is made, then, with a final declaration of what is shining, and what cannot be analyzed.31 What is shining through the spirit of words that cannot be analyzed is what the book refers to as a ‘binding’ or ‘fastening,’ a musubi. Before

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 175

6/30/2011 1:01:32 PM

176 Alan Tansman

calling upon that term rather late, the book tells us that the ‘harmony’ that holds the nation together (we are reminded of Bergson’s rainbow) is made not of the mechanical conjoining of independent, equal individuals that has its basis in logic and reason, but a ‘great harmony that keeps the body together (ittai) by the existence of the parts within the whole and by acting through those parts.’ This harmony is no abstraction, but a ‘concrete harmony.’32 What flows inexorably from this is 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.’ Our spirit of war does not have as its objective the killing of men but looks to give life to men. This war is a method for giving life to all things and not for destroying all things. War, therefore, is not meant to destroy, overpower, or subject, but to bring about great harmony and peace.33 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. This is no mere literary essay. But its thorough blending of the realms of language and reality and its language of ‘creation’ that is also ‘action’ puts us in mind of its more literary cousins. We are told that war ‘does the work of creation (sōzō) by following the Way.’ This is creation not as a product of the imagination, but as concrete making; it is a style of imitative and improvisatory creation that writers in the period, going back to Akutagawa Ryūnosuke in the 1920s, had tried to enshrine in place of the ‘modern’ style of original creating out of whole cloth. It is a style premised upon the absence of a self. The link between art and action becomes even clearer as the book finally names this style of creation, and, like a good literary critic, explores its etymology, as if implying that in its quality as language lies its power. Japanese roots – like Aryan roots for the Nazis34 – are constructed philologically. The word for creation is ‘musubi,’ whose first manifestation was the binding of the gods to the land to which they gave birth. ‘Musu’ derives from growth, the way moss grows (as in Kimi ga yo), and means the generation of things; and when things grow together there is ‘musubi.’ Binding, fastening together, is thus a natural process; ‘musubi’ is creation, and creation is ‘the manifestation of the power of harmony.’35 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.’ This then allows ‘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.’36 Such willingness,

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 176

6/30/2011 1:01:33 PM

Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan

177

we are told, is natural and spontaneous, in the same way as the Japanese arts are natural and spontaneous, ‘adopting forms based on the spirit of effacing the self into one (botsuga kiitsu) and an attitude of more deeply conforming to nature.’ This requires casting off one’s self and following the norms set down before one. Literature, like life, is not the creation of the individual but grows out of group harmony.37 In art and life the self has been asked to disappear. But the Japanese who has vacated the self has not become an abstraction. The Japanese self comes into being as that which acts by abnegating the self, but the Japanese worldview, we are told, is an active, ‘kinetic realism’ (dōteki na jissaiteki).38 The implication is that the Japanese self and the Japanese arts are alike in that they both bring together reality and spirit, in a ‘unitary’ (ittai) relationship.39 This spirit of harmony is built upon the ‘synthesizing of all things’ (manbutsu sōgō).40 The Japanese self, then, is concrete in its belonging to a living tradition. It is never defined abstractly in the book, but is concretely evoked in the incessant repetitions of the proper names that make up Japanese history – of gods, Emperors, and personages; and, by extension, of Japanese words and Japanese places. Even the designation ‘Japan’ itself is too abstract to render service. In fact, though the first words of the book proper are ‘The Great Japanese Empire’ (Dainihonteikoku), the proper name is rarely used. It is as if, having spoken at the start in the abstract defining language of modern thought, the book is free to speak only in the concrete of ‘our’ Land, ‘our’ Japanese Culture,’ and ‘our National Polity.’ The final call to the reader is made in an afterword, a lucid and logical recapping of the main points of the book. Framing the text (along with the preface, which it recapitulates), this way lends it an air of naturalness, of being the ‘unwritten’ place into which we sink from the clarity of logic and from which we emerge back into that clarity. The point it makes is quite simple: Western thought, its abstract logic, has brought us many great things, but it has failed us, and we must return to our own way. By the time we read this conclusion we have become ready to accept it, not as a novel idea or a tendentious argument, but as an echo of what we have heard many times before. The ‘spirit of words’ enacted by the book has planted its words into our memory and made them seem to be already within us, there to be merely recalled. We have been led to a conclusion through the sublimity of Japanese things, a sublimity summed up in the last lines of the text proper, which asks us to discharge our duties to the Emperor’s Throne, which is ‘infinite between heaven and earth’ (tenjōmukyū).41 In the end, we are told that

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 177

6/30/2011 1:01:33 PM

178 Alan Tansman

our duty is concrete and artistic: to do ‘the work of creating a new Japanese culture.’42 And, in doing that work, we would be the conduits of a lineage running through us. We would, in other words, not be ourselves. In his remarkable book, The Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer describes the way people come to be controlled by language. An assimilated German Jew who survived openly as a Jew in Germany through the war and kept a daily diary of life under the Nazi Regime, Klemperer was a professor of French literature and by training a philologist. He was attuned to shifts in language usage he noticed across the range of written and visual media and from the mouths of fellow Germans, and tracked that language to reveal patterns similar to those we have noted in Kokutai no hongi. Such language, he said, does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it. And what happens if the cultivated language is made up of poisonous elements or has been made the bearer of poisons? Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.43 If the language of Kokutai no hongi was toxic, it was also considered obscure enough to require the writing and disseminating of dozens of books explicating its meanings; or, more to the point, it was toxic because obscure. If it is true, as I have suggested, that the book’s message was simple and that it relied on the obscurity of its references and the opacity of its language for its ideological effect, then the effort may have been wasted. Books like The Essence of the National Polity – A Supplement (Kokutai no hongi seikō), published in 1939, dissect the original book paragraph by paragraph, providing summaries of chapters in contemporary Japanese, glosses on the original text, definitions and etymologies of key terms, research topics and sources, interpretations, and questions and answers regarding central points. The tone is scholarly, the prose lucid; indeed, in the preface it discusses the looseness of the original style and the difficulty its leaps in logic present to the reader hoping to follow its argument. But the purpose of the supplement is anything but cool: the author addresses the reader with passion for the critical place Kokutai no hongi has in the present circumstances. By writing the book the author prays, he says, for the day when the youth he addresses become perfect students and perfect Japanese (mattaki Nihonjin) – when

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 178

6/30/2011 1:01:33 PM

Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan

179

‘every word and every line of Kokutai no hongi becomes your blood and becomes your body.’44 The question of conversion – of how words transformed flesh and blood, or whether they did at all – seems vexed when conversion involves no sudden shift of beliefs or behavior and no ritual marking a change. Change was effected at a steady but imperceptible pace, in slow drops whose accumulation could only be seen once the process had been fairly completed. Can a notion of conversion account for such a gradual transformation? If we can find a young Japanese citizen who, in 1923, hopes to build a career out of personal vanity and financial desires, but, by 1937, has given up his selfish desires for the greater glory of sacrificing his heart and mind to his lineage – if we can find such a person, can we say we have found a convert? And what about the efforts at conversion? Were they effective? This question, too, is vexed. We need only be reminded of the mass popularity of religious groups like Oomoto to know the limits of the state’s power to control individual, and subversive, agency.45 The war for the minds and hearts and imaginations through what Jay Rubin calls fanatical suppression and propaganda could not be as successful as its creators might have hoped.46 In Grass Roots Fascism (Kusa no ne no fuashizumu), Yoshimi Yoshiaki shows how propagandistic cliches such as the ‘holy war’ (seisen) or ‘self-annihilation for one’s country’ (messhi hōkō) became part of the everyday language and thoughts of Japanese men and women struggling through their everyday lives during the war years. The language of ideology shifted according to the practical exigencies of daily life; and its reception depended on a multitude of factors, including economic class, education, age, gender, and locale. Those with a measure of material comfort might have the luxury to be thrilled at the prospect of a ‘holy war,’ while those in a more fragile economic condition might tend to view the war through its effects on their daily lives. Yoshimi’s reading of hundreds of letters, diaries, and surveys reveals that some supporters of the war saw it as a means to a better living and that the army might be liberators from the hardships of farm life, providing an escape from poverty. Dramatic events, like the 1931 Manchurian Incident, resulted in a welling of popular support for the war, only to collapse as people focused on more mundane matters like inflation, unemployment, or poverty. Dramatic events like the failed government coup by right-wing Imperial Loyalists in 1936 elicited reactions against militarism: letters to newspapers reveal a reaction against the military and support of the forces who quelled the coup,

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 179

6/30/2011 1:01:33 PM

180 Alan Tansman

and hatred of what Yoshimi calls military fascization (gunbu fasshōka).47 These were feelings belonging to the political and social ideals of Taishō democracy, lingering in the age of imperialism in what Yoshimi calls ‘Grass-roots Imperial Democracy’ (kusa no ne no tennosei demokurashii). As early as 1940, Ministry of Education surveys revealed that many people were simply sick of war and its consequences at home, and exhausted by the restrictions of daily and cultural life; resentment was particularly felt among the lower middle class and the country people, who suffered most economically.48 The spell of abstractions may have fallen on the deaf ears of people trying to just get by. Intellectuals, readers of texts, and interpreters of language, inclined to allow the force of imagination to mold thoughts and feelings, may have been better listeners to the languages of ideological conversion. From them, we have some evidence of ideological conversion from the other side – from after belief had waned. At the very least, some of the youthful readers of Yasuda Yojūrō noted this after the war had ended, when their passion for violence and transformation, and their desire to believe in something, had disappeared. After the war, Takeuchi Yoshimi described Yasuda as a sorcerer (miko) of war: ‘a born demagogue, and at the same time a “spiritual gem.” If he hadn’t been a demagogue, he couldn’t have been a “spiritual gem.”’49 That Yasuda beautified the battlefield and elevated action to the status of art seemed beyond dispute to Takeuchi. Yasuda ‘likened us youth to contemporary Japanese warriors of old, and drove us to tragic deaths as young heroes of the people.’50 I raise the case of Yasuda here because he reminds us of the power of mere words, given the right conditions, to form readers looking for answers to a crisis. That readers could be transformed by mere rhetoric requires us to consider the emotional power of Jamesian tropes of turning, not only to understand the experience of the soon-to-beconverted, but also to discern how a text leads to a conversion through its own moments of rhetorical turning. This would mean, for example, understanding how what Philip Fisher calls the moment of wonder – an aesthetic experience in which one sees something as if for the first time, in a way that demands one’s attention and leaves no room for reflection or abstraction from the moment (the way one glances at or suddenly sees a rainbow, or the George Washington Bridge) – can be ‘kidnapped’ for ‘alien use’ by history, science, religion, or politics, for ends hostile to the very energies of wonder.51 Writers like Yasuda traded in wonder. During the years he wrote, other writers more explicitly called for violent self-sacrifice. In 1940,

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 180

6/30/2011 1:01:33 PM

Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan

181

the philosopher Tanabe Hajime argued that through the state an individual transcends death by freely choosing it and building for eternity. The individual, through the mediation of the race, by dying within it, on the contrary, lives ... When the time comes when one should die within the state ... and one’s cooperation is called for, within that a free life is born again. That is, the state equals the self.52 Yasuda did not make this argument. He evoked a ‘mystical union’ – to use the religious Nazi phrase – that transcended reason and made sacrifice of one’s individuality to a higher cause seem attractive. Yet he never fully endorsed action and he rejected actual transformations. The point is that he cast spells through the tools of his art – the fresh play with words, the elegant turn of phrase, the suggestive evocation of moods and feelings, the non-tendentious exposition of states of mind and conditions of living – and by doing so he helped create an atmosphere that might have done the work of conversion (if the term is apt) more effectively than explicit state rhetoric had. Atmosphere was not the sole province of the cultured elite, of course; the government understood its workings only too well. Inculcation worked through what one government censor called a ‘tacit pressure’ (mugon no atsuryoku) whose goal was to have ideology accepted ‘naturally’ by ‘creating atmosphere’ (kūkizukuri).53 The question is: can atmosphere convert?

Notes 1. Victor Klemperer (2000) The Language of the Third Reich, translated by Martin Brady (London: Continuum), 35, 237. 2. See Ienaga Saburō (1978) The Pacific War, 1931–1945 (New York: Pantheon), 31–32, 52, 112. 3. Ibid., 113. 4. Ibid., 114–115. 5. Peter Berger (1969) The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books), 25. Berger’s is seen by many to be a classic example of a naively ‘protestant’ approach in that it emphasizes belief (doctrine, ideology, faith in an overarching ‘sacred canopy’) over praxis, whose definition may not work in Japan. If religions are about faith in some overarching unifying or transcendent truth or body of norms, why are people in Japan regularly involved in multiple and incommensurable ‘religions’ at one and the same time? His approach does, however, apply well to the text at hand and its purported function, suggesting its strangeness – ironically, its European ‘Protestant-ness’ – in the Japanese context. I thank Robert Sharf for this formulation.

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 181

6/30/2011 1:01:33 PM

182 Alan Tansman 6. See John S. Brownlee (1997) Japanese Historians and the National Myths, 1600–1945: The Age of the Gods and Emperor Jimmu (Vancouver: UBC Press), 152–153. 7. See Carol Gluck (1985) Japan’s Modern Myths Ideology in the Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 282. 8. The scandalous interpretation was by Minobe Tatsukichi (1873–1948), emeritus professor of law at Tokyo Imperial University and member of the House of Peers. 9. Kokutai no Hongi (Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan), translated by John Owen Gauntlett and edited with an introduction by Robert King Hall (1949) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 3–11. 10. See Brownlee, 64. 11. See Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (1986) Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies), 13, 299–300. 12. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (2000) Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (New York: Continuum), 3. 13. Ibid., 6–7. 14. See Hirakawa Sukehiro (1998) ‘Japan’s Return to the West,’ translated by Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, pp. 30–97, in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (ed.) Modern Japanese Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 95. 15. Ibid., 43. 16. Klemperer, 110. 17. Thomas Huhn (1995) ‘The Kantian Sublime and the Nostalgia for Violence,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53 (3): 269–275. 18. Throughout the chapter I have rendered the Japanese of Kokutai no hongi in my own words while relying on the translation sponsored by the United States government in 1945, particularly for its rendering of highly ornate passages. The translation is very accurate, but at times chooses elegance over precision. The passage quoted here is from Kokutai no hongi (1941) edited by the Ministry of Education (Tokyo: The Ministry of Internal Affairs), 16, and 65 in the translation. 19. Ibid., 56. 20. Ibid., 97. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 98. 23. Ibid., 110. 24. Ibid., 110–111. 25. Ibid., 113. 26. Ibid., 59. 27. Ibid., 62. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 47. 30. Ibid., 84. 31. Ibid., 64–84. 32. Ibid., 51. 33. Ibid., 52. 34. Klemperer, 138. 35. Ibid., 53.

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 182

6/30/2011 1:01:33 PM

Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan

183

36. 37. 38. 39 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Ibid., 110. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 113. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 143. Klemperer, 16. Hiroshi, 3. Nancy K. Stalker (2008) Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburo, Oomoto, and the Rise of New Religions in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), 3–4. 46. Jay Rubin (1984) Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 236–256. 47. [Editor’s note: This failed coup is the same event referred to elsewhere in this book as the ‘Young Officers Uprising of February 26, 1936’ – often called in Japanese the ‘ni-ni-roku jiken’ or ‘February 26 Incident.’] 48. Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Kusa no ne no fasshizumu, 1–17. What does seem clear, however, is that where ideology hit the ground it often did not do so smoothly. Some young men who expressed passionate support for the holy war before being drafted expressed only visceral fear after; some who felt regret, or sadness even, for not being drafted at all quickly became relieved of their sentiments by the fear that set in with the reality of going to war (92, 95). As the war progressed, exhaustion set in and it seemed best to lose as a means to an end (247). Some were transformed from peace-loving to violently antiChinese (39); others felt empathy with the Chinese on the battle front as fellow farmers or as the bearers of a great civilization (41, 52), though this fellow-feeling could strengthen one’s belief in Japan’s role as the protector of Asia (63). At home many may have felt joy in the work being done in Manchuria, rendered unaware by censorship and propaganda of the project there as one of theft and violence (110). Indeed, the good will of believers in the war as holy and in Japan as protector and liberator of Asia may have prevented them from seeing the more complicated truth of events. But there was serious cynicism too, not only about the war but also about the state of language. One woman, the leader of a local chapter of the ‘Woman’s Love of the Nation Club’ (aikoku fujinkai), which functioned under the support of the Ministry of Education and the military as an intermediary between the government and local communities and a conduit of propaganda, recalls: ‘I wanted to open up my chest – this chest of mine overflowing with the blood of sincerity of ‘selfless devotion to the country’ (messhi-hōkō) and ‘loyalty and patriotism’ (chūkun aikoku)’ (85).’ The diary of a soldier written in 1941 on his way to Pearl Harbor reveals thoughts of parents at home and a darkness that came from thinking of a wife and a child at home, and of his own death. The soldier insistently adds to this, however, a disclaimer: ‘no, no, that’s not how it will be. My body is a body already given over to the glory of the Emperor and the Imperial Nation. What is there to be nostalgic about anymore?’ (104). A letter written by a new recruit in 1937 to his mother in the countryside while traveling from Hiroshima on his way to Shanghai registers deep assent to the wishes of the state, but also a deeper resistance: ‘Mother,

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 183

6/30/2011 1:01:34 PM

184 Alan Tansman

49.

50. 51. 52.

53.

you have perhaps read in the papers that yesterday, the 27th of May, soldiers gave themselves in sacrifice. We too will now be going to a place of battle so I am prepared to not return alive. Please feel at ease, as I have given my all for the glorious nation. It is not an honor to die. Please await for my return’ (11–12). Takeuchi Yoshimi (1979) ‘Kindai no chōkoku,’ in Kawakami Tetsutarō and Takeuchi Yoshimi (eds) Kindai no chōkoku (Seidōsha). The post-war rethinking of Yasuda began in 1951 with Takeuchi Yoshimi and continued with Ōoka Makoto’s study in 1955 and Hashikawa Bunzō’s essays in 1957. See Ōoka Makoto (1977) ‘Yasuda Yojūrō nōto,’ in Ōoka Makoto chosakushū 5 (Seidōsha); Hashikawa Bunzō (1978) Nihon romanha hihyō josetsu (Miraisha). Hashikawa removed the taboo against Yasuda, and it was in his essays that many young post-war readers first experienced Yasuda. One Japanese critic, now in his sixties, described to me his first reading of Yasuda’s prose as like discovering outlawed pornography. For a review of the resurgence of critical interest in Yasuda, see Kurihara Katsumaru (1985) Nihon rōmanha – sono shūhen (Kobunken), 4. Kurihara Katsumaru (1985) Nihon rōmanha, sono shūhen (Tokyo: Kobunken), 2, 5. Philip Fisher (1998) Wonder, The Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 18–41. In Tanabe Hajime zenshū (1964). Vol. 8 (Chikuma shobō), 119–169. For a general discussion of this, see Arakawa Ikuo (1989) Shōwa shishōshi: kuraku kagayakeru 1930 nendai (Asahi shinbunsha). Romano Vulpitta intelligently argues that Yasuda employed a language of aesthetics akin to that of European fascists, but stopped short of them. See Romano Vulpitta (1994) ‘Fashizumu to kotenshugi,’ Ironia, 2 (3): 93. Minami Hiroshi, ‘Senden – Senji no taishū sōsa,’ 364, in Shōwa Bunka 1925– 1945, 358–389.

9780230_240735_08_cha06.indd 184

6/30/2011 1:01:34 PM

7 A Naked Public Square? Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan Kevin M. Doak

Denying the right to profess one’s religion in public and the right to bring the truths of faith to bear upon public life has negative consequences for true development. The exclusion of religion from the public square – and, at the other extreme, religious fundamentalism – hinders an encounter between persons and their collaboration for the progress of humanity. Public life is sapped of its motivation and politics takes on a domineering and aggressive character. Human rights risk being ignored either because they are robbed of their transcendent foundation or because personal freedom is not acknowledged. Secularism and fundamentalism exclude the possibility of fruitful dialogue and effective cooperation between reason and religious faith. Reason always stands in need of being purified by faith: this also holds true for political reason, which must not consider itself omnipotent. For its part, religion always needs to be purified by reason in order to show its authentically human face. Any breach in this dialogue comes only at an enormous price to human development. Pope Benedict XVI (2009) Caritas in Veritate, #56 In 1984, Richard John Neuhaus published a book that transformed much of the public debate over religion and politics in America.1 Neuhaus’s thesis was that the ‘naked public square’ ideal of contemporary secularism – the idea that all vestiges of religious faith and culture must be removed before engaging in political debate – was untenable from the start and dangerous to democratic societies. Since politics involves culture in its broadest sense, Neuhaus knew that politics cannot effectively be discussed without allowing an open expression of those moral 185

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 185

6/30/2011 1:02:02 PM

186

Kevin M. Doak

visions that most deeply shape our cultural values. And, indeed, he points out that even ‘when religion in any traditional or recognizable form is excluded from the public square, it does not mean that the public square is in fact naked. ... When recognizable religion is excluded, the vacuum will be filled by ersatz religion, by religion bootlegged into public space under other names.’2 What Neuhaus means by this ‘ersatz religion’ is the concept of ‘civil religion’ that was much celebrated at that time as an easy resolution of the tensions between religious Truth and modern democratic practice in ever-increasingly secularized states. While much of Neuhaus’s vision was limited to Western polities and its uneasy relationship with Christianity as modernization apparently enhanced secularization, his fundamental question about the ability of modernization to encompass secularization and whether secularization would enhance democracy can, indeed must, be applied to other societies outside the West. The question of how religion and politics relate is an important matter for all societies throughout history, but it is a particularly acute one in modern societies, given certain broad and persistent assumptions about the normatively secular nature of the modernization process. In recent years, there has been a growing challenge to the secularization thesis as definitive of the modern context of religion and politics, particularly as evidence has mounted that for many societies (especially in Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, and to some extent Latin America) religious issues have grown more, not less, prominent as modernization has progressed.

Secularism and the foundations of the modern Japanese state Japan presents an ideal test case for Neuhaus’s thesis on the naked public square. Yet, unfortunately, there has been less attention to the failures of the secularization thesis in Japan than in the West, and in fact many political and even religious leaders continue to promote secularization as the best guarantee of continued democratic freedom in post-war Japan. The horrific sarin gas attacks in Tokyo in 1995 by the new religious cult Aum Shinrikyō had the effect of enhancing the allure of the secularization thesis among broad segments of Japanese society who inferred from that tragedy that religion only leads to intolerance and indiscriminate killing. But the sensationalism of that terrorist attack may have distracted attention from a broader and more fundamental challenge that continues to inform debates over religion and politics in Japan: how the modern state dealt with Shintoism at its very outset

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 186

6/30/2011 1:02:02 PM

Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan

187

in the late nineteenth century. Shinto activists figured prominently among the revolutionaries who gave birth to the Meiji State. Does the historical fact of religious activists influential at the birth of the modern Japanese state mean that religion (at least Shintoism) will always be inextricably linked to politics in modern Japan? Did the ‘restoration’ of the Meiji monarch as a Shinto ruler constitute a fundamental compromise of religious freedom in modern Japan? And, in any event, did the post-war revision of the Religious Organization Law and the new Constitution of 1946 render that earlier history irrelevant? Perhaps lying underneath such questions is an implicit, culturally essentialist one: is there something unique in Japanese attitudes about religion and politics that weaves together the warp of Shinto revolutionaries and the woof of Aum terrorists of more recent memory? In this chapter, I try to address these issues by offering an historical overview of the relation of religion and politics in modern Japan, one that takes into consideration the frequently neglected role of Catholic Japanese as a distinct religious minority with disproportionate influence in Japanese politics. By giving serious attention to the often overlooked modern Japanese Catholic minority, we may gain a new understanding of the dimensions of religious freedom and the relationship of church and state in modern Japan that is not available from perspectives that focus mainly on Shintoism, Buddhism, or even Protestant Christianity or ‘new religions.’ Some historians of modern Japanese religion see Shinto and the Meiji state as two products of the same matrix that, hardly distinguishable from each other, evolved together at least to the end of the Second World War. Yet even Sueki Fumihiko, who concludes that State Shinto was the ultimate result of Japan’s pre-war political history, noted the failure of restorationist Shintoists to implement their preferred theocracy in the early years of the Meiji state. Sueki narrates in detail how the effort by Shinto activists in the Meiji government (e.g., Hirata Kanetane, Ōkuni Takamasa, Yano Harumichi, Fukuba Yoshishizu) to construct a national religion of Shinto was frustrated by government officials who upheld a secular idea of the relationship of government and religion in the new modern society. They knew that many of the Restorationist Shintoists were, like Ōkuni, not so much devoutly religious as they were politically anti-Christian. Consequently, as Sueki concludes, ‘the clarification of the position of Christianity conversely brings forth the characteristic structure of Japan’s religious history.’3 While Sueki made this comment in reference to the Edo period, it applies a fortiori to the modern period, and especially in clarifying the relationship of radical

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 187

6/30/2011 1:02:02 PM

188

Kevin M. Doak

Shintoists, Buddhists, Confucianists, and secularists in the context of religious freedom during and after the Meiji period. In the early years of the Meiji period, radical Shintoist government officials found themselves facing a dilemma: in order to fulfil their Shintoist political aspirations, they had to reject traditional religious syncretism, repeatedly issuing ordinances to separate Shinto and Buddhist deities. Their purpose may have been merely to construct a pure Shinto religion that could serve as the functional equivalent of what they regarded as the official religion of Christianity in many Western states. Yet, in the process of pursuing this anti-Christian Shinto agenda, they also had offended many Buddhists, whose religion was embraced by the majority of the population. Wiser heads intervened. In 1872, the government office that served as the base of Shintoist influence, the Jingikan, was abolished and its place taken by the Kyōbushō, where Buddhists – especially the Jōdō Shinshū sect – now gained considerable influence. This moment was ‘substantially the breakdown of the transformation of Shintoism into a state religion ... and the beginnings of Buddhist influence [in the politics of the modern state].’4 To make matters worse for Shintoist activists, the taka-fuda signs proclaiming Christianity (i.e., Catholicism) an ‘evil cult’ and offering rewards for turning in hidden Catholics were removed in 1873, thus marking a de facto legalization of Christianity in all its forms. Tolerance of Christianity exploded during the Westernization period of the 1870s, and even some Meiji elites like Nakamura Masanao (and a young Hara Takashi, the future prime minister) were baptized as Christians during this decade. Resentment among the Shintoist activists at the power and prestige of Christianity in a government they had expected to be a Shinto theocracy grew strong, even as the Shintoists were increasingly marginalized and even dismissed from government positions.5 Anti-Christian politics were not limited to Shintoists. Shimaji Mokurai was one Buddhist who fought passionately against the Christian religion in the early Meiji years. In 1870 he proposed the establishment of the Daikyō-in, a nationwide system of institutes for the propagation of official ‘Japanese’ (i.e., Buddhist and Shintoist) moral values as a buffer against Christianity. The Daikyō-in was established in 1873 but abolished only two years later. Its failure had much to do with the inability to reconcile Buddhists like Shimaji with the still dominant Shintoist flavour of its ‘syncretism.’ Because of Shimaji’s strong criticism of the marginalization of Buddhism in the Daikyō-in, he is often characterized today as an advocate of ‘religious freedom.’ But his support for ‘religious freedom’ was first and foremost a political posture to promote

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 188

6/30/2011 1:02:02 PM

Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan

189

Buddhism against what he perceived to be Shintoist privileges in the government. He had little interest in the religious freedom of Christians. Finally, this rivalry between Buddhists and Shintoists led to the withdrawal of support by Jōdō Shinshū Buddhists for the Daikyō-in and its inevitable collapse in 1875. As a result of all this religious infighting among Buddhists and Shintoists, the office for administration of religious affairs was then reduced in size and placed under the authority of the Home Ministry, and ‘religious freedom was officially recognized and written into the Meiji Constitution that was promulgated in 1889.’6 Sueki and countless other commentators have emphasized that this was a conditional religious freedom: Article 28 of the Meiji Constitution guaranteed religious freedom provided that religious activities did not violate the peace of the order and that all recognized the emperor as ‘sacred and inviolate’ (shinsei ni shite, okasubekarazu). From this perspective, Sueki concludes, the end result of the effort to resist Shinto theocracy by ensconcing the emperor in the constitution was ‘the defeat of religion.’7 This limitation on religious expression (that it must not be used to upset the legal order or to attack the monarchy) is not far from the norm for most constitutional democracies of the late nineteenth century. 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.’8 Herein lies the informing dilemma in the relationship of religion and politics in modern Japan. One of these historical revisionists is Saitō Tomō, who has presented a case study in support of the argument that the Meiji state was not a Shintoist state but a secular state. Focusing on the ideas of the influential imperial adviser Inoue Kowashi (who participated in the drafting of 1889 Meiji Constitution and the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education), Saitō argues that Inoue was able to reconcile Shintoism and secularism under a ‘secular state’ that did not compromise religious freedom.9 Indeed, this secular state protected not only Buddhists from Shinto radicals, but Buddhists and Shintoists from those who advocated converting the Japanese nation into a Christian state (kirisutokyō koku ka) – an idea that was taken seriously in 1884 by some government leaders working to revise the unequal treaties with the West.10 Saitō’s thesis that Meiji Japan was a secular state has been severely criticized by Itō Yahiko. Itō makes two main criticisms: first, that the concept of the secular state ‘in the West’ refers to a neutral state (here, Itō perhaps is thinking of the night watchman state theory?) that does not interfere

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 189

6/30/2011 1:02:02 PM

190

Kevin M. Doak

in spiritual values, whereas the Meiji state was not neutral with regard to Shintoism; and, second, that the time frame of Saitō’s study does not permit him to consider the 1939 ‘unity of rites and governance’ (saisei itchi) cabinet of Hiranuma Kiichirō that Itō and other historians consider an instance of sacral politics in Japan. The second point has some merit, since, as we shall see, the relationship of religion and politics was significantly changed in wartime Japan. But the first point seems a bit too restrictive, not allowing for the fact that there are various kinds of secular states, even in the West.11 At least when we restrict our historical analysis to the early Meiji period, Saitō’s thesis that the Meiji state was a secular state finds some supporting evidence, particularly when considered in light of the practices of other constitutional states in the same time period. Consider Mori Arinori’s 1872 essay on ‘Religious Freedom in Japan: A Memorial and Draft of Charter,’ that was submitted to Sanjō Sanetomi, the head of the Japanese government, while Mori was in Washington DC.12 Mori drew from his observations and reflections on Western states and the ways they dealt with the issue of freedom of religion. From that vantage point, he felt that, already from the outset, the Kyōbushō was a fatally flawed experiment in religious syncretism: the department specially established for the administration of our religious affairs, has indicated ... no mark of its success. ... Far from it. Its policy of combining the two antagonistic faiths of Buddhism and Sintooism [sic], which some time since was inaugurated under its sway, has utterly failed to command our respect.13 Mori did not propose a Christian Japanese state, although he found much to praise about Christianity. But he did argue strenuously that the new state should be a secular one (in Itō’s terms). This was not to be a secular state in the sense of one that promotes secular (atheistic) values; rather, Mori made it clear that religious values, especially Christian ones, were essential to a healthy public order, and he argued that the free embrace of religious faith by citizens of the state was certainly not incompatible with reason, as some secularists insisted then (and now). Mori insisted that ‘religion can neither be sold to, nor forced upon, any one. It is ... a duty of man as a rational being, and according to the internal conception of its light, we, independently of each other, are enabled to know and to enjoy the happy life of faith, and insight into spiritual truths.’14 Mori’s was a proposal for a secular state in the sense of a state neutral with regard to all religions, but not hostile to religion

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 190

6/30/2011 1:02:03 PM

Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan

191

as such. And Mori presented his draft of ‘The Religious Charter of the Empire of Dai Niphon’ [sic] with no sense of contradiction to the principle that the new state would be headed by the monarch Meiji. How did we get from Mori and Inoue’s ‘secular state’ to the notion that the Meiji Imperial State was a Shintoist one? In his recent authoritative study Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism, Walter Skya fills in the missing historical picture, and his conclusions largely support Saitō’s secular state thesis by challenging essentialist interpretations of the modern Japanese state as a theocracy from its birth. Skya notes that ‘the Meiji state was not a politically and ideologically static entity. It had a dynamic political system and was in a constant state of flux. It rapidly evolved in response to complex ideological pressures from within and to foreign pressures from without. ... it was in response to continued political instability in the last decade of the nineteenth century that alternative [Shintoist] articulations of the Japanese nation-state and [Shinto] nationalism emerged.’15 These Shintoist strategies to co-opt the state for their own religious agendas were already present from the outset. Indeed, Mori’s proposed ‘Religious Charter’ was an attempt to rebuff efforts by such radical Shintoists against permitting Christianity to spread among the Japanese people. His ‘secular state’ was nothing less than a means of preserving individual freedom of religious conscience from those who would insist that all Japanese must adopt a single (Shinto) religion: The established laws should secure a complete liberty of conscience; first, by a sufficient protection for the free exercise of that liberty in matters of religion, so far as its outward action does not conflict with the law of the state; second, by a perfect impartiality in the attitude of the state in relation to all religious denominations; third, by the protection from disturbances which may arise from disagreement in their religious faith and formulas. In consideration of these points the paper accompanying this address, and bearing the title of ‘Religious Charter of the Empire of Dai Niphon,’ [sic] has been prepared as a draft, and is now humbly submitted to your distinguished attention.16 It is remarkable how closely Article 28 of the 1889 Constitution of the Empire of Japan followed Mori’s first point in his 1872 ‘Religious Charter.’ The coincidence is remarkable, but not surprising, since Inoue, who had considerable influence in the drafting of the Meiji Constitution, had a close relationship with Mori and the two saw the

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 191

6/30/2011 1:02:03 PM

192

Kevin M. Doak

issue of politics and religion in a similar light. Mori’s third point was addressed by later laws enacted to supervise public actions taken in the name of religion or other belief systems (e.g., the Public Peace Preservation Law and the Religious Organizations Law). But, on balance, it can be said that the Meiji State failed most in respecting Mori’s second point (a perfect impartiality in the attitude of the state in relation to all religious denominations). Yet, this failure cannot automatically disqualify Meiji Japan as a democratic state without calling into question England, Italy, Ireland, and other Western states that are often considered democratic and ‘secular’ even though they have an institutionally preferred religion. A night watchman state is not the only kind of modern secular state. And an official state preference for a certain religion should not be confused with the ersatz religion (‘civil religion’) that Neuhaus warned against or with a state that violates the freedom of religion of its citizens. So the dilemma persisted. The modern Japanese state would be neutral with regard to all religions, the Japanese people would enjoy freedom of conscience and religious affiliation, and sovereignty would rest with the tennō, who had a long and intimate relationship with the privileged Shinto faith. The touchstone would remain Article 3 of the Meiji Constitution that declared the emperor to be sacred and inviolable. Many later historians, particularly Christians and Marxists, have read this Article 3 with little sense of the tensions or dilemmas it reflected. Skya is, therefore, quite helpful in noting that the meaning of this constitutional language was not self-evident and did not simply resolve the dilemma in favour of theocracy or secularism: For the ruling oligarchs and the opposition leaders at the top of the power structure, as well as for secular political realists, such articles in the Constitution of the Empire of Japan meant little beyond acknowledgment that the emperor was to be the nominal head of state. But for State Shintō fundamentalists such as Hozumi Yatsuka, Articles 1 and 3 carried with them the entire weight of the Shintō religious tradition.17 In short, the Meiji Constitution was, like so many other constitutions, a multi-vocal compromise. As a legal document, it reflected the limits of contemporary efforts to resolve the inherent tension between religious freedom and Shinto monarchy in the new Japanese state. Since it was unable to resolve those tensions, it merely kicked the matter forward for legal scholars, historians, activists, and others to interpret, debate,

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 192

6/30/2011 1:02:03 PM

Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan

193

and fight over in subsequent years. But its language was clear enough to permit the free exercise of Buddhism and Christianity under the Meiji State, and it is especially striking that Christians, with their relatively few numbers, were free from religious persecutions under this constitutional order. In fact, with these constitutional protections in place, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a veritable renaissance period for the minority Christian faith in Japan.

Taishō liberalism, new religious movements, and rising populism of early Shōwa During the early twentieth century, idealism and moralism swept across philosophy and culture in Japan, and the resulting idealistic culture encouraged various new religious and ideological expressions.18 It was also a period of rising socialism and anarchism, and a burgeoning Marxist movement that culminated in the establishment of Japan’s first Communist Party (JCP) in 1922. Years before the JCP was founded, anarcho-socialists had struck at the very heart of social order in Japan. In the High Treason Incident of 1910, police uncovered a plot by members of the socialist movement to assassinate the emperor, and the following year the remaining ‘moderate’ socialist faction (those heavily influenced by Christianity) led the Tokyo streetcar strike that essentially shut down Tokyo for several days in late 1911 and early 1912. The Christian socialist Katayama Sen and some of his comrades were arrested, but the strike drew the attention of the government to the political threat posed by political activists inspired by certain interpretations of Christianity. In response to these developments, vice-minister of Home Affairs Tokonami Takejirō became the ‘chief architect of the rapprochement with the religions,’ sponsoring regular assemblies of leaders of Buddhism, Shintoism, and Christianity.19 As Garon has pointed out, successive cabinets likewise turned to leaders of the three major religions to raise the moral standards of the people and to discourage violence in the streets.20 The underlying reason for the government reaching out to religious organizations was to find allies against the rising tide of socialist and anarchist violence that had even threatened the life of the emperor. Christian leaders in particular could offer valuable aid in correcting what Home Minister Hara Takashi called ‘the mistaken belief that Christianity advocates socialism.’21 Hara should know. He himself was a baptized Catholic, and from recently uncovered evidence appears to have kept up a quiet faithful practice of Catholicism throughout his life.22 Hara’s example as a successful Christian politician under the Meiji

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 193

6/30/2011 1:02:03 PM

194

Kevin M. Doak

Constitutional state was unusual, but not unique. Chinda Sutemi, who led the group of attendants that accompanied Crown Prince Hirohito on his tour of Europe, was a Methodist who served as Grand Chamberlain of the Imperial House from 1927 to 1929. Other public figures from this time whose Christianity was well known include Uchimura Kanzō, Nitobe Inazō, Admiral Suzuki Kantarō, Admiral Yamamoto Shinjirō, and Privy Councilor Kaneko Kentarō.23 While some Christians adopted a critical view of the government at times, many did not (as attested by the large number of Christians in the Foreign Service, the Imperial Navy, and even the Privy Council). But it is clear that these Christians saw no contradiction in practicing their religion while serving a state headed by a monarch who was declared ‘sacred and inviolable.’ One reason why members of traditional religions could work with the government was that the Christian Home Minister Hara and his Vice-Minister Tokonami did not approach these religious organizations either from a narrow sectarian position or from a secularist standpoint that discounted the importance of religious conviction. Rather, it was from a concern over the growing politicization of religious and ideological organizations that threatened the founding compromise the Meiji state had made with political Shintoism that conditioned its ability to offer legal protection of the rights of religious minorities. Hara and Tokonami knew that all the founders of Japan’s first socialist movement were Christians (except Kōtoku Shūsui) and that these socialist ‘Christians’ were increasingly influenced by Unitarian and Liberal theologies that rejected traditional Christian teachings like original sin and the trinitarian nature of God. Along with the increasingly popular ‘new religions’ like Ōmotokyō, whose heterodox Shinto dogmas left them open to the charge of lèse majesté (fukei no tsumi), the lines that demarcated some of these new ‘religions’ from illegal political organizations were becoming increasingly difficult to discern. As Garon points out, the thrust of new efforts to restrain religious activities was directed mainly at the new religions like Ōmotokyō and Hitonomichi Kyōdan. These groups developed large, nationwide organizations that rejected traditional values and appealed instead to anarchic and libertine values, while offering an alternative theology to the Shinto that enjoyed a privileged position within the constitutional, religiously pluralistic state (much like Anglicanism in England). Hara and Tokonami were not attempting to restrict the constitutional right to freedom of religion; they sought to cooperate with a range of religious organizations in enhancing public support for the values and morals that Japanese had long shared as normative, regardless of

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 194

6/30/2011 1:02:03 PM

Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan

195

their particular religious beliefs. Hara’s inability to contain these newly politicized extreme cults may have cost him his life. Sonoda Yoshiaki points out that Hara had been at the centre of a roiling political controversy for his defence of fellow Catholic Rear Admiral Yamamoto Shinjirō’s participation in Crown Prince Hirohito’s grand European tour of March–August 1921. Shortly after the Crown Prince returned to Japan, Hara was assassinated by a railway worker named Nakaoka Kon’ichi. (Hirohito himself narrowly escaped assassination by the anarcho-socialist Nanba Daisuke on December 27, 1923 in the Toranomon Incident.) Sonoda believes that Hara’s assassination stemmed from his defence of Yamamoto’s relationship with the Crown Prince, and not from his efforts to curb military influence in the government, as other historians have long maintained.24 During the Taisho period, 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. After the Toranomon Incident, and the realization that Nanba had nursed grudges from earlier police action against anarchists and socialists (e.g., the High Treason Incident, the Amakasu Incident), communist and labour organizations were seen as posing the most serious threat to public security. Within a few decades, even as the political threat from the communist movement had been largely contained, anti-government and anti-monarchical ideas unleashed by those movements had spread and taken new form in new religious groups that often were at least as politically motivated as they were religiously inspired. They also often embraced sexually libertine attitudes and practices that violated the moral sensibilities of most Buddhist, Shinto, and Christian Japanese. Reports of such immorality only facilitated cooperation between the government and traditional religious institutions in resisting these ‘new religions.’ In 1936, a police bulletin commented on the moral decadence prevalent among these new religions, noting that ‘they stimulate the lust of their ignorant mass following. By evoking a total looseness in matters of carnal love [sic], they unabashedly propagate a gospel of extreme lewdness concerning sexual pleasure.’25 Indeed, Miki Tokuharu, the founder of Hitonomichi Kyōdan, was arrested that very year and charged with the rape of eleven girls between the ages of thirteen and fifteen.26 Were these trumped-up charges by a government overly zealous to protect ideological orthodoxy? Or were sex crimes and other outrages against

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 195

6/30/2011 1:02:03 PM

196

Kevin M. Doak

moral decency being committed by cult leaders under the cover of religious freedom?27 It is hard to conclude that the charges against Hitonomichi Kyōdan were trumped up by police with a religious bias. It is true that the Osaka police had opened a file on Hitonomichi Kyōdan back in 1931, but the cause for concern was not the organization’s religious beliefs. Rather, the police had become concerned over the methods of recruitment the rapidly growing organization used, and their investigation found Miki Tokuchika (Tokuharu’s son and second-in-charge) guilty of bribing an official. He paid a fine. From then on, the Special Higher Police were looking for grounds to disband the organization, but they had none until September 21, 1936, when Ōtsuka Kōichi, head of the Morioka branch of Hitonomichi Kyōdan, filed a formal complaint that Miki Tokuharu had raped his fifteen-year-old daughter, a clerk in the Founder’s offices. During the course of the investigation, various statements and teachings of the Founder came to light that police believed violated the laws against lèse majesté (which applied to disrespect not only for the monarch, but also for official Shinto shrines, thus reminding us of the peculiar nature of the compromise between ‘church and state’ in modern Japan). It does appear that the prosecutor’s office at times was overzealous in its methods, and it certainly was looking for legal grounds to disband the organization.28 But we should not simply assume that an occasion of prosecutorial abuse of suspects of violating laws against lèse majesté meant that the Japanese state itself denied religious freedom during wartime. A careful reading of the record of the legal cases against Hitonomichi and Ōmotokyō reveals that legal procedures were followed assiduously, and, when violations of the rights of the defendants occurred, the courts provided redress for the defendants. The case against Ōmotokyō is revealing in this regard. Although hundreds of members of Ōmotokyō were arrested on December 8, 1935 for violating the Peace Preservation Law and the law against lèse majesté, only 61 were prosecuted. After two lower courts found them guilty, the Supreme Court took up the case on appeal and set aside the first charge because it found evidence that harsh methods of interrogation used by the police had tainted the reliability of the testimony. It did, however, uphold the conviction on the charge of lèse majesté.29 However one regards the merits of laws against lèse majesté or the Peace Preservation Law, there does not seem to be evidence that the Japanese state was acting outside the law or trying to suppress constitutional guarantees of religious freedom. Rather, the crux of the matter involves the legacy

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 196

6/30/2011 1:02:03 PM

Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan

197

of revolutionary Shintoism in modern Japan and the rise of politicized Shintoist groups during the 1930s, which Skya has identified as a serious challenge to the Meiji compromise that had been struck between religious and political freedom. Indeed, Deguchi Onisaburō, the leader of Ōmotokyō, who was found guilty of lèse majesté, was a close associate of Rōyama Mitsuru and Uchida Ryōhei (both leaders of the terrorist organizations the Gen’yōsha and Amur River Society) and on their advice established, as a wing of Ōmotokyō, the Shōwa Holy Society (Shōwa Shinsei Kai) with the likes of Lieutenant General Andō Kisaburō. The first guiding principle of the Shōwa Holy Society was the establishment of saisei itchi, the unity of rites and governance, or a theocratic Shinto State.30 Clearly, Deguchi and his cohort did not believe the Japanese state was a theocratic state, and they were intent on using all methods at their disposal to make it into one. It was not the Japanese officials who were trying to establish a Shinto theocratic state. Rather, they were using legal methods to protect the Meiji compromise between constitutional Shinto monarchy and religious freedom from extremists who were using new religions as fronts for terrorist agendas against the state and other religious minorities. Statistics on those arrested for violating the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 (which made it illegal to advocate changing the kokutai or the system of private property) are illuminating on this question of religious freedom during wartime Japan (see Table 7.1). The first thing that one notices is that there was no arrest recorded for offenses under the category of religion until 1935 and an all-time high of 860 arrests under that category the following year (these appear to be entirely from the Ōmotokyō case of December 1935). Second, the increase in arrests for religious reasons seems to follow a relative decline in arrests of leftists to the point that in 1939 there is near parity in the numbers for leftist (383) and religious (325) offenses. At the same time, the number of arrests in the third category (‘independents’) shows a marked increase from 7 in 1937 to several hundred in the early years of the Pacific War. Yet, overall, the vast majority (7,376 cases or 75 per cent) of all those arrested for violating the Peace Preservation Law, even counting only from 1935, were of left-wing (mainly communist) political activists, not religious groups or individuals (who represented only 1,780 cases or 18 per cent of the total). And of those arrested (whether under left-wing or religious categories), most were never indicted. The rates of non-indictment were more favourable for those arrested for religious acts than for leftists, although both enjoyed a high chance of non-prosecution. Those arrested as leftists show a ratio of slightly

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 197

6/30/2011 1:02:03 PM

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 198

6/30/2011 1:02:04 PM

1,207

1,292

789

1936

1937

1938

193

13

237

210

97

113

496

1285

3

1,718

1935

N: 930

3,994

1934

646

307

461

61

14,622

1933

860

13,938

1932

7

10,422

1931

67

6,124

1930

381

298

154

269

831

1474

774

454

292

27

4,942

1929

336

16

525

R

3,426

I

Indicted

L

1928

R L

I

Arrests

Year

L

1

I

Stayed

4

174

R

53

186

626

1016

717

67

3

L

I

3

R

Deferred

43

15

11

9

17

22

24

4

38

2

168

L

1

I

7

R

No suspicion

Non-Indicted

Cases Disposed

Table 7.1 Violations of the Peace Preservation Law by category and result

8

2

2

4

16

53

37

6

18

4

L

I

Other R

669

525

317

581

1986

3850

2198

838

809

368

713

L

I

5

Total

4

245

R

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 199

6/30/2011 1:02:04 PM

53

19

1943* (Jan-April only)

87

33

203 163

N:1,376

332

71

8 325

256 107

N: 1,049

849

N: 682

713

N:853

389

N:215

18

N:346

217

N: 221

205

N: 220

128

N:339

163

15

62

29

12

225

19

60

2

89 60

8

3

39

34

317 179

291

231

381

15

52

4

76

56

16

9

8 13

9

5

3 12

95 41

53

6

24

2

14

4

1

5 2

3

1

3

2

L=Left-wing; I= Independent; R= Religion. Figures preceded by ‘N’ refer to numbers from the 1970 Naimushō shi, Vol. 2. Source: Itō Takashi (1983) Shōwa-ki no seiji (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha), 348

1944–1945: no information on this period, as documentation was destroyed during the war

1943

1942

1941

1940

1939

67

643

549

365

572

63

287

98

23

3

36

124

12

180

299

200

Kevin M. Doak

over 5:1 in chance of not being indicted, while those arrested for religious reasons enjoyed an even higher ratio of nearly 8:1 in chance of not being prosecuted. Overall, these statistics have been interpreted by leading historians as evidence of the prosecution’s preference for changing offenders’ minds (tenkō) rather than trying, convicting, and jailing them for such offenses.31 What is clear is that arresting and prosecuting people for religious reasons was not a major feature of wartime prosecutors’ activities, even in wartime Japan. What is not clear is whether there was significant movement across categories; that is, whether offenders arrested as leftists announced a ‘conversion’ from left-wing politics while in custody and later were arrested again for political acts committed under the cover of new religions or cults. We may take 1935 as an important year in this respect. Skya has argued that 1935 was a watershed year between the secular state, as defended by the traditional legal theories of Minobe Tatsukichi, and the rise of Shinto nationalism of Hozumi Yatsuka, Uesugi Shinkichi, Minoda Muneki and others.32 Skya’s argument provides one possible explanation for the arrests of ‘religious’ offenders after 1938 (the surge in 1936 seems entirely accounted for by delayed statistics from the Ōmotokyō case, and seven of the thirteen arrests in 1937 would be delayed reporting from the Hitonomichi case; by 1936 Ōmotokyō had been neutralized as a organized force and by 1937 Hitonomichi Kyōdan had been disbanded, so most ‘religious cases’ after that were unrelated to these two organizations, although some may have been former members still active in their agendas). Politicized Shintoist movements that sought a theocratic state indeed remained a serious terrorist threat during these years, and this may be the primary reason for the rise in arrests under the category of ‘religion’ after 1938, when Japan was officially on a wartime footing. But Shintoism was not the only politicized religion of concern. There were also Buddhist-inspired activists, some of whom were also involved in terrorism. Close attention to the case of Senō Girō elucidates some of the ways in which leftist and religious motivations were often merged in religious activists who attacked the public order and the state. Senō was the founder of the New Buddhist Youth League, who was arrested in 1936 as a preventive measure in relation to the February 26 coup attempt. Although he was released on March 29 (his League had already been disbanded by the government in 1930), he was again arrested on December 7 on suspicion of being a member of the illegal Japan Communist Party. One might think this was merely a paranoid overreaction by police who should have understood that religious faith

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 200

6/30/2011 1:02:04 PM

Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan

201

and Communist ideology are not compatible. But, in fact, there were overlapping relationships between communism and certain religious groups in Japan at that time. Two days before Senō was arrested, several members of the publishing board of the left-wing Workers Journal (Rōdō Zasshi) were arrested for attempting to restart the communist movement in Japan. Senō was a member of that board, and in fact had read deeply into materialist philosophy and socialist thought, which he then mixed into his own version of Nichiren Buddhism, while building a nationwide network of followers. Put into the context of the times, it is hard to conclude that Senō was arrested because of his religious beliefs and not for his illegal political acts: politics and religion were inextricably intertwined in his thought and behaviour. Senō’s affiliation with Nichiren Buddhism is significant, since many of those involved in the terrorist incidents of the 1930s were members of the Nichiren sect, including the ex-monk Tanaka Chigaku and his Kokuchūkai and the monk Inoue Nisshō, who was behind the Blood League Incident of February–March 1932 (the assassination of Inoue Junnosuke and Dan Takuma) and the May 15, 1932 coup attempt that killed Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi. Also influenced by Nichiren Buddhism was Kita Ikki, who was executed for inspiring the February 26 coup attempt that took the lives of the Christian finance minister Takahashi Korekiyo, the pro-Christian Saitō Makoto,33 and the Inspector General of Military Education Watanabe Jōtarō34 and wounded many others. Another target of the February 26 assassins was Count Makino Nobuaki, who was a promoter of the Christian Nitobe Inazō and a close associate of the Christian Chinda Sutemi and of Gotō Shimpei, who also was supportive of Christians.35 Makino, however, escaped with his life.

Theocracy and the wartime Japanese government The terrorism of anti-Christian political extremism was effective. By 1939, with Japan already in a state of war with China for over a year and a half, pressures for greater social cohesion were strong. It was in such a context that the Hiranuma Kiichirō Cabinet (January–August 1939) was formed, a government that has been labeled a ‘saisei itchi’ (unity of rites and governance – in other words, of religion and politics, or a ‘theocratic’) government. Evidence marshalled in support of this moniker includes the fact that Hiranuma was the founding president of the Kokuhonsha, a right-wing group established in 1924 to promote Japan’s unique religious character, and that the Religious Organizations Law

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 201

6/30/2011 1:02:05 PM

202

Kevin M. Doak

was passed by the Diet in April of that year. Garon suggests that a ‘new definition of orthodoxy’ was codified by Prime Minister Hiranuma in the debate over passing the Religious Organizations Bill when he said ‘let me emphasize that all religions must be one with the ideal of our national polity; they cannot be at odds with the spirit of our Imperial Way.’36 Yet, on the face of it, this language was not a significant departure from the words of Article 28 of the Constitution that guaranteed freedom of religion as long as those engaged in religious practice ‘did not violate the peace of the realm or contravene their duties as imperial subjects.’ But the meaning of this religious freedom was shaped by the conditions of the time, and those conditions in 1939 were significantly different from those that had prevailed in the years immediately after the promulgation of the Constitution. One measure of how much things had changed – and how much things had remained the same – is how the Christian minority responded to these pressures for religious cooperation with the government. On June 12, 1940, Ministry of Education officials directed the twenty separate Japanese Christian groups to merge into one unified Japanese Christian patriotic organization under the provisions of the Religious Organizations Law. Protestant reaction to the measure was ambivalent, largely because the new law was seen as strengthening unity among the different Protestant communities. As one Protestant historian has written: ... it became apparent at once to all Protestants that church union was the one indispensable means to save Japanese Protestantism from eventual disintegration, and ... the great desire of most Japanese Protestants over long years, which they were not able to fulfill of themselves, was now to be realized under the pressures of a totalitarian government seeking primarily the reorganization of religious bodies into units of a size it could more conveniently control.37 The Hiranuma Cabinet – and its successor the Abe Cabinet – had been replaced by the Yonai Cabinet, which was in its final days when the directive was issued to the Christians. Matsuura Shinjirō was Minister of Education at the outset, but discussions lasted until June 24, 1941, when the Nihon Kirisuto Kyōdan (United Church of Christ, or UCC) was established as the single Christian organization for Protestants in Japan. The matter was concluded under Education Minister Hashida Kunihiko of the second and third Konoe Cabinets (July 22, 1940 – October 18, 1941), a government that historian Itō Takashi has described as the

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 202

6/30/2011 1:02:05 PM

Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan

203

nesting ground of the ‘reform bureaucrats’ and their radical outline for a new Japan.38 To grasp the significance of government policies on religion at this time, it is essential to understand who these ‘reform bureaucrats’ were and who their political opponents were. Key intellectual leaders among the ‘reform bureaucrats’ were the communist spy and Pan-Asianist Ozaki Hotsumi, Social Masses Party leader Kamei Kan’ichirō, and diplomat Matsuoka Yōsuke. Their opponents were led by the pro-Christian Count Makino, his son-in-law and diplomat Yoshida Shigeru (Christian), diet members Hatoyama Ichirō (Christian), Ashida Hitoshi, Ozaki Yukio, Saitō Takao, and Katayama Tetsu (Christian). One notes the surprisingly large number of Christians among the group opposing Konoe and the ‘reform bureaucrats’ (Matsuoka was the exceptional Christian among the ‘reform bureaucrats’ and, as I discuss below, did not really fit well with them). Count Makino and his group considered the ‘reform bureaucrats’ as ‘reds,’ or atheist communists,39 a charge that takes on added significance in light of the strong Christian values within his own group. Many of these highly placed Japanese politicians saw a rising political threat to their own religious faith, but they defined that threat not in terms of ‘Shintoism’ but of the anti-Christian atheism of revolutionary ‘reds’ in the Japanese government. Of course, the charge was not that these reformers were card-carrying members of the (now illegal) Japan Communist Party, but that secular socialism informed their (national) socialist policies. Given Ozaki’s conviction for espionage with Richard Sorge, a known Soviet spy, the deep national socialist influences in Kamei’s Social Masses Party, and the arrests of several others close to Konoe on similar grounds, their sense that, for Christians like themselves, secular ideologies like national socialism constituted a greater threat to religious freedom than constitutional State Shintoism is not entirely unreasonable. We can also learn a great deal about the limits and possibilities of religious freedom during wartime Japan from the contrasting example of how the Catholic Church successfully resisted the directive to merge with Protestants into a unified Japanese Christian patriotic organization: When, however, the officials of the Ministry [of Education] tried to force the Catholics to sever their ties with the pope of Rome, the ordinaries and laity, represented respectively by Bishop Taguchi Yoshigorō and Admiral Yamamoto Shinjirō, insisted that such separation was contrary to the essence of their faith and that they

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 203

6/30/2011 1:02:05 PM

204

Kevin M. Doak

preferred martyrdom to obeying an order of this kind. The Ministry then backed down from insistence on this point.40 Unique among the Japanese Christian minority, Catholic Japanese successfully resisted demands that they sever ties to Rome and unite with other Christian groups in Japan. The reasons for their successful resistance are instructive. A key member of Konoe’s cabinet at this time was Matsuoka Yōsuke, who is best known for having led the Japanese delegation out of the League of Nations in protest against the Lytton Report. Matsuoka was a baptized Christian, and had been moving towards the Catholic Church since the late 1920s.41 In a fascinating letter written in 1940, Fr L.H. Tibersar, M.M., wrote that ‘I met Mr. Matsuoka several times while I was in Manchuria. He was then Vice-President of the South Manchurian Railway. His children were then attending Catholic schools in Tokyo and he told me of their desire to become Catholics and of his own willingness that they should enter the Church when they come of age.’42 It is not known whether Matsuoka played an active role in defending the Catholic Church from this attempted intrusion on its religious freedom, but we do know he was a friend of the Church and held a high position in the Konoe government. During that very time, late 1940 to early 1941, he was in sustained communication with Fr James M. Drought, M.M. and other ‘John Doe Associates’ who were involved in a private diplomatic venture that can only be described as a Catholic Japanese and Catholic American concerted effort to avert war between the United States and Japan. We also know, however, that Matsuoka was not on the best of terms with Konoe.43 To understand the nature of the relationship between Catholic Japanese and the wartime government is to grasp something essential about the actual range of religious freedom Japanese enjoyed even at the height of the wartime period. Key roles were played by the two devout Catholic Japanese who led the resistance to the Ministry of Education’s directive to break from Rome: Bishop Taguchi Yoshigorō and Rear Admiral Yamamoto Shinjirō. Bishop Taguchi had published a book five years earlier, based on his official visit to Manchukuo, that offered his support for the legitimacy of Manchukuo and his gratitude for Japanese military protection of the Catholics there, particularly protecting Catholic nuns from rape by local lawless bandits.44 As the book was published by the Japanese Catholic publishing house and carried the imprimatur of Archbishop Chambon, it easily conveyed the impression that the Catholic Church itself held the same political view as Bishop Taguchi. It did not. For example, the idea that the Holy See recognized the state of Manchukuo

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 204

6/30/2011 1:02:05 PM

Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan

205

was a notion largely spawned by Bishop Taguchi’s own activities and writings, quickly propagated by Japanese military and diplomatic officials, and certainly had earned considerable good will for the Catholic Church among Japanese government officials at the time.45 With patriotic Catholic bishops like Bishop Taguchi, neither the Japanese government nor the military had reason to question the patriotism or loyalty of Japanese Catholics.46 Bishop Taguchi’s work had prepared the Japanese authorities to be favourably pre-disposed toward Catholics and certainly not to regard them as politically subversive like those Protestants who had close ties with socialists and leftists. But by all accounts the key role in resisting this directive to the Catholic Church was played by Rear Admiral Yamamoto, a Catholic with intimate connections at the highest levels of government. Yamamoto was not only actively involved in Catholic lay organizations, but he had been a personal acquaintance of Emperor Hirohito for nearly twenty years. At a time when military officers regularly intimidated civilian politicians with impunity, an admiral in the Imperial Navy and a friend of the Emperor was not someone to be taken lightly, whether Catholic or not. Rear Admiral Yamamoto is a little known, but key figure in the intricate relationship of religion and politics during wartime Japan, so a bit more information on his life is essential in grasping the actual range of religious freedom in pre-war and wartime Japan. Yamamoto became a Catholic when he was a fifteen-year-old student at the Catholic Morning Star (Gyōsei) Middle School in Tokyo. Although his father had sent him to Morning Star because he admired its moral education, he was adamantly opposed to the idea of his son becoming a Christian. After months of a tense standoff, culminating in Shinjirō’s argument that he would not disobey his father but also could never be a truly moral man without becoming Catholic, his father relented. Shinjirō was baptized by Fr Henrich on Christmas Eve 1893 in the chapel of Morning Star School. After graduating from Morning Star in 1896, Shinjiro entered the Naval Officers School and became an officer in the Imperial Navy. He was involved in negotiations with the combined fleet during the Boxer Rebellion, was a divisional officer on the flagship Mikasa during the Russo-Japanese war, and was decorated for his service in the Battle of the Sea of Japan. After graduation from the Naval College he was appointed adjutant to Fleet Admiral Tōgō, military attaché to the Italian Embassy, and after the First World War he was a member of Japan’s plenipotentiary committee to the Paris Peace Talks. Just as he was open with his faith in Japan, he did not keep his faith a secret while in Europe. In 1916, he gave a lecture to the French Catholic Writers Association on

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 205

6/30/2011 1:02:05 PM

206

Kevin M. Doak

the topic of ‘Japan’s various religions,’ which was reported in a local French newspaper. Yamamoto attended Mass daily, whenever possible, and he was fond of saying, ‘If I were not Catholic, I would never have become this good a subject, this loyal a soldier.’47 From 1919 to 1937 he was appointed a clerk in the Crown Prince Institute for Knowledge, and through that office ‘influenced the Shōwa Emperor [Hirohito]’s character.’48 In 1921, when accompanying Prince Hirohito on his tour of five European countries, Yamamoto brought about the historic meeting in Rome between Hirohito and Pope Benedict XV. Yamamoto also was instrumental in persuading Rear Admiral Dr Totsuka Kankai to allow his son Bunkyō to become a Catholic priest. Yamamoto was very public with his faith, playing a leading role in Catholic youth organizations, funding and providing land for churches, convents, and monasteries. Right-wing organizations called him ‘the perverted minister near the Emperor’ in various mass media and sent him threatening letters.49 As noted above, the (Catholic) Prime Minister Hara Takashi may have lost his life for defending Yamamoto’s close relationship with the Crown Prince. When the Imperial Diet was debating whether to post an emissary to the Vatican, Yamamoto addressed the House of Peers, with a Catholic prayer book in his hands, telling them that ‘being Catholic does not contradict the idea of allegiance to the State.’50 Yamamoto fell ill in 1937, after an exhausting year-long trip to Brazil, the USA, and Europe in an effort to reduce international tensions that led to the outbreak of war with China. He died in 1942, and the following year Sophia University held a public memorial, ‘A Night in Commemoration of Rear Admiral Yamamoto,’ at which Imperial University of Tokyo law professor (and fellow Catholic) Tanaka Kōtarō gave a talk emphasizing that Yamamoto’s death, along with that of Fr Iwashita Sōichi a few years earlier, was a major loss ‘from the perspective of the State.’51 Clearly, Catholic Japanese were able to exercise their faith openly throughout the wartime period, and some Christians, like Yamamoto and Tanaka, were patriots who saw no contradiction between their Christian faith and loyalty to their monarch and their nation. It became even easier for Catholics to embrace patriotism in the early 1930s, again thanks in part to help from Rear Admiral Yamamoto. One recurrent issue in the history of politics and religion in modern Japan is the question of the status of Shinto: is it a specific religion, or is it some kind of extra-religious civic system? The issue reached a crisis in the early 1930s with regard to the status of Shinto shrines and whether Christians (and, less often, Buddhists) could ‘worship’ or ‘visit’ such

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 206

6/30/2011 1:02:05 PM

Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan

207

shrines. This matter came to a head when sixty Sophia University students were being taken to Yasukuni Shrine on May 5, 1932 by their military instructor Colonel Kitahara Hitomi.52 At the shrine, two of the students refused to present arms to show respect for the war dead due to religious scruples. Colonel Kitahara inquired of Fr Hoffman, president of Sophia University, whether Church teachings prohibited such visits to Shinto shrines, and a prolonged debate over the question began among Catholic authorities in Tokyo. Bishop Ross, who had been studying the issue of shrine visits for some time, made a strong argument that Canon 1258 did not preclude Catholic visits to Shinto shrines, and he convinced Archbishop Chambon. After contradictory communications from different Japanese ministries as to whether such visits to shrines were religious or patriotic in nature, Rear Admiral Yamamoto was able to get a clear statement from the Ministry of Education that, in fact, ‘the visit to the national shrines is required of the students ... for reasons which conform to the program of education [and] ... the bow that is required ... has no other purpose than that of manifesting the sentiments of patriotism and loyalty.’53 With this official Japanese government written reply in hand, the magisterium of the Church was able to provide authoritative guidance on the question to Japanese Catholics, and did so on May 26, 1936 in the document called Pluries Instanterque issued by the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. The Church’s teaching (then and now: Pluries was reaffirmed by the Vatican in 1951 and has never been rescinded) is that ‘[bishops in Japan should instruct the faithful that] since these ceremonies have only a purely civil value, it is lawful for Catholics to take part in them.’54 As Minamiki noted, the bishops ‘are told that they not only can, but should (debere) follow out the norms given in the instruction.’55 There is no evidence of any undue pressure by the Japanese government on the Church to make this determination, and, in fact, the local church had decided in favour of shrine visits by 1932, long before wartime governments began to take assertive positions with regard to religious organizations. In short, there was no conflict between being a Catholic Christian and showing respect at a Shinto shrine (even Yasukuni Shrine) for those who had given their lives in service to their country. How, then, are we to assess the significance of the 1937 National Spirit Mobilization (kokumin seishin sōdōin) campaign, often heralded as another instance of ‘sacral politics’ or theocracy in wartime Japan? In the first place, ‘national spirit mobilization’ was not simply a propaganda effort by an all-powerful wartime regime. The 1937 National Spirit Mobilization was actually the second such movement, the first being

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 207

6/30/2011 1:02:05 PM

208 Kevin M. Doak

the 1923 National Spirit Summons inaugurated by the Imperial Rescript ‘Kokumin Seishin Sakkō ni kansuru Shōsho’ that sought to resist the rising socialism after the Kanto earthquake and to encourage through moral suasion the virtues of human warmth and simplicity in place of the frivolity and self-centeredness that had started to shape popular culture during the 1920s. The second National Spirit Mobilization of 1937 harkened back to this earlier effort, but it was also the result of the failure to establish a new, single renovationist party to rule Japan. The 1937 National Spirit Mobilization movement is generally associated with Konoe, but the people most responsible for promoting it were Social Masses Party leaders like Asō Hisashi and Kamei Kan’ichirō.56 The outline for the movement, ‘The Issue of Re-Organizing National Spirit Mobilization,’ presented on July 20, 1938, makes clear that it intended the ‘spirit mobilization’ not to be a religious movement but to be as secular as possible: III. To ensure the vigorous functioning of the Central League of the National Spirit Mobilization As a result of various and sundry groups being added to the Central League, we have lost the power of centralized direction and have fallen into a condition where it is difficult to achieve unity of opinions on the execution of concrete initiatives. Therefore, we consider it necessary to consider the following points: 1. we must cut back on religious overtones.57 This statement was followed up by a document put out by the business office of the Shōwa Research Association in October that described the guiding principles of the National Spirit Mobilization movement as an effort to ‘overcome liberalism, communism and fascism,’ and that these principles would be ‘not something only Japan understands’ but something the Chinese masses would accept and must be ‘a new principle for uniting the Orient’– but also principles that would ‘simultaneously shape the world’ and also ‘be principles for domestic reform.’58 Two key points emerge from a close reading of the documents related to the ‘spiritual mobilization’ movement. First, there was very little cohesiveness of purpose behind the movement. And, second, whatever ‘spirit’ (seishin) meant here, the movement seemed quite interested in keeping religious creeds and clerics at arm’s length. It was not an instance of theocratic politics, let alone an organized expression of ‘State Shinto.’ It invoked seishin more in the generic sense of ‘patriotic spirit’ than religious ‘spirituality.’

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 208

6/30/2011 1:02:05 PM

Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan

209

The movement to mobilize the national spirit, and the broader issue of the relationship of state and religion during wartime Japan, is elucidated by the early post-war reflections of Yabe Teiji, who was a close adviser to Prime Minister Konoe during the war. According to Yabe, the political pressures on Konoe were coming from two separate camps: the ‘reform right wing’ (kakushin uyoku) and the ‘idealist right wing’ (kannen uyoku). The reform right wing, supported by elites in the Imperial Army, was loudest in calling for a single, national unity party; the political parties themselves, however, were arguing for the formation of a new party that would work alongside the existing parties. Konoe and Yabe sought an ‘independent position’ that meant not falling into the model of Germany’s Nazi Party, either as a national unity party or as a new party in the Diet. When the plan for a new single party to spearhead the spiritual mobilization was rejected as a violation of the Peace Police Law (which forbade the participation of religious clerics in political parties), Konoe decided that the ‘spirit mobilization’ would have to be a cultural ‘movement’ rather than a political party. The solution Konoe arrived at was the establishment of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (I.R.A.A.) in October 1940. As Yabe recalled, the I.R.A.A. initially was composed of both right wing camps, the established political parties, and even some leftists, industrialists, and cultural leaders, but during the Second Konoe cabinet the reform right wing had taken control of the I.R.A.A. and the National Spirit Mobilization Movement. In the midst of bickering among these factions, Konoe found it necessary to bring idealist rightists like Hiranuma Kiichirō and Yanagawa Heisuke into his cabinet, which killed any further hopes by the reform faction for the new structure movement to provide a single national unity party. Finally, by January 1941, Konoe conceded to the divisions within the movement and, abandoning his hopes for a political resolution through a new structure for ruling Japan, accepted Hiranuma’s arguments that it should be merely a ‘spirit movement.’59 In this sense, then, the National Spirit Mobilization Movement was at best a vague, cultural effort to enhance public morality as part of a mission to strengthen support for the war and at worst a chaotic, rudderless idea that never gained much traction in its short-lived existence. It certainly did not compromise the religious freedom of Japanese subjects, not even the Christian minority, and hardly supports the notion that wartime Japan was a ‘theocracy.’ A different argument against the notion that the wartime Japanese state was a Shinto theocracy can be discerned in the work of those historians who point to moral suasion (kyōgaku) 60 rather than Shintoism as the reigning ideology of the late 1930s and early 1940s. The concept

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 209

6/30/2011 1:02:05 PM

210

Kevin M. Doak

of moral suasion in modern Japan may be traced back to the 1879 Imperial Memorandum on Moral Suasion (Seishi Kyōgaku Taishi) drafted by Motoda Eifu to assert Confucian morals against the liberal ideas of the period of ‘civilization and enlightenment’ and in particular against those of the Freedom and People’s Rights movement. The institutional history of this moral suasion took a new turn in 1937, when the Ministry of Education established a Bureau for Moral Suasion (kyōgaku-kyoku) that published such works as ‘The Way of the Subject.’ The syncretic, non-denominational character of this mission of moral suasion was still apparent when the Japan Moral Suasion Institute (Nihon Kyōgaku Kenkyūjo) was established in 1942, although a Buddhist tone was certainly implanted later in the war when the ‘Wartime Moral Suasion Headquarters’ (Senji Kyōgaku Shidō Honbu) was opened on the grounds of the Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist sect’s Nishi-Honganji in 1944.61 Inoue Takuji severely criticizes the moral suasion movement as an important component in wartime mobilization, but even he recognizes that ‘in the end, it is difficult to call it a religious form of moral suasion.’62 Christians joined in the moral suasion movement also, but in their pronouncements were concerned with secular goals like ‘patriotism and loyalty to the monarch’ and ‘eradicating selfishness, increasing public service’ that certainly were not incompatible with such traditional Christian virtues as temperance, fortitude, and justice. Although such moral suasion statements at times emanated from religious organizations, they were secular statements insofar as ‘in them, was no evidence of God, Christ, or a confession of faith. ... [There was nothing in them] but a drumming up of the spirit of loyalty to the monarch and patriotism, and eradicating selfishness in the interests of public service so as to successfully prosecute the war.’63 Inoue’s assessment of the issue of theocracy at the height of the war is a nuanced one, and one that we might conclude with. On the one hand, he notes the non-denominational, secular orientation in the substantive goals of the moral suasion campaign; on the other hand, he sees the moral suasion campaign as part and parcel of something he calls ‘the Imperial Way religion’ (kōdō shūkyō), which was merely an ersatz religion in the service of the state.64 Inoue’s effort to strike a balanced assessment of the reality of religious freedom in Japan under wartime mobilization takes us back to Neuhaus’s point cited at the opening of this chapter: ‘when religion in any traditional ... form is excluded from the public square ... the vacuum will be filled by ersatz religion, by religion bootlegged into public space under other names.’ The question raised by the issue of Shintoism, religious freedom, and the various government efforts at promoting a

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 210

6/30/2011 1:02:05 PM

Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan

211

secular ethics during the war ultimately asks us whether either State Shintoism or secular moral suasion campaigns played the role of this ersatz religion. In the first place, we must recognize that, even at the height of wartime Japan, traditional religious organizations, including the Catholic Church, were certainly not excluded from the public square. Yet, it is equally undeniable that the Japanese government did prosecute ‘new religious groups’ (mainly heterodox Shinto cults) for anti-government beliefs and for rape, even as it promoted various secular ethics initiatives. These were secular ethical systems in the sense that they sought to avoid close identification with existing religious organizations, including Shinto, and drew more on vague, Confucian-inspired injunctions to be good, loyal citizens committed to the monarchy and the public good. 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. But, even if pre-war and wartime Japan does not provide clear evidence of sacral politics or theocracy, nor does it present a perfect example of secular politics. To the degree that the Japanese monarchy remains paramount, with its deep, historical connection to Shintoism, a perfect separation of church and state is not likely to be found in Japan, any more than in England, where the Queen is both head of state and head of the official Church of England. In fact, comparing wartime Japan with post-war Japan raises the question of whether it is in the post-war period that the public square has been subject to the greater pressures of secularization – and thus whether it is in the post-war period that we are more likely to discover the persistence of ersatz religion.

Notes 1. The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the research assistance received from Nagai Juníchi of Hōsei University and Umeda Sayuri of the Library of Congress. 2. Richard John Neuhaus (1984) The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans), 80. 3. Sueki Fumihiko (2006) Nihon shūkyōshi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten), 134. Here, Sueki is referring to the Edo period, but his point applies, in ways he himself might not endorse, to the modern period as well. 4. Sueki, Nihon shūkyōshi, 180–182. 5. Shimazaki Toson’s Before the Dawn (1932–1936; translation by William E. Naff published by University of Hawaii Press, 1987) is historical fiction based on the bitter experiences of his own father, a Shinto activist who was released from government service. 6. Sueki, Nihon shūkyōshi, 183.

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 211

6/30/2011 1:02:06 PM

212

Kevin M. Doak

7. Ibid., 184. 8. In a recent roundtable discussion on state and religion in modern Japan, Ogawara Masamichi concludes that historical conditions during the early Meiji period were such that, despite efforts to create a policy of State Shinto indoctrination, such a policy was not possible due to significant resistance from Buddhists, especially the Shinshū sect. See ‘Dai 43 kai shimpojium: kokka to shūkyō – ishin-ki no shūkyō seisaku o megutte,’ Ryūkoku kyōgaku 43 (March 2008): 124–183, on p. 129. 9. Saitō Tomō (2006) Inoue Kowashi to shūkyō: meiji kokka keisei to sezokushugi (Tokyo: Kōbundō). 10. Saitō, Inoue Kowashi to shūkyō, 171. On the 1884 controversy within the government over the proposal to convert the Japanese nation into a Christian one, Saitō references Sakamoto Kazuto (1991) Itō Hirobumi to meiji kokka keisei: ‘kyūchū no seidoka to rikkensei no dōnyū’ (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan) and Yamaguchi Teruomi (1999) Meiji kokka to shūkyō (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai). 11. I am indebted to Professor Sheldon Garon for this insight regarding the plural forms of secularized polities. 12. Mori Arinori ‘Religious Freedom in Japan: A Memorial and Draft of Charter,’ privately published in 1872, reprinted in Yoshino Sakuzo (ed.) (1928) Meiji bunka zenshū Vol. 11 (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha), 532–546. The document itself, apparently composed in English, is paginated in reverse order from p. 16 to p. 1. Below, document page numbers are given in brackets [ ]. 13. Mori, ‘Religious Freedom in Japan,’ 543 [4]. 14. Ibid., 543 [4]. 15. Walter A. Skya (2009) Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 22. 16. Mori, ‘Religious Freedom in Japan,’ 538 [9]. 17. Skya, Japan’s Holy War, 45. 18. Sheldon Garon (1986) has recounted: ‘Kano Masanao portrayed the new religions as the forgotten other side of the mass awakening following World War I,’ ‘State and Religion in Imperial Japan, 1912–1945,’ Journal of Japanese Studies, 12 (2): 286. 19. Garon, ‘State and Religion,’ 280. 20. Ibid., 281. 21. Hara Takashi, quoted in Garon, ‘State and Religion,’ 17. 22. Sonoda Yoshiaki (2008) Kakusareta kōshitsu jimmyaku (Tokyo: Kōdansha), 112–113. 23. Ibid., 231–237. 24. Ibid., 113. 25. Nagano Wakamatsu (1936) ‘Shūkyō keisatsu ni tsuite,’ Keisatsu kyōkai zasshi, 434 (July): 25; cited in Garon, 298. 26. Garon, ‘State and Religion,’ 298. Garon himself argues that ‘the veracity of the charges is open to question, considering their sensationalism and timing’ (298–299), although he does not introduce any exculpatory evidence. 27. Sexual abuse of minors by leaders of new religious cults in Japan (and elsewhere) is by no means uncommon. As recently as April 6, 2005, Japanese police in Kyoto and Osaka arrested Tamotsu Kin (aka Tamotsu Nagata), founder of a 3,000-member religious cult in Kyoto known as ‘The Central

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 212

6/30/2011 1:02:06 PM

Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

213

Church of Holy God,’ on suspicion of sexually molesting a twelve-year-old girl over the course of three years. Would we regard the charges against Kin more skeptically if they had been lodged in 1937 when Japan was at war? Or perhaps, as some maintain in Japan today, should we regard the arrest of Kin as an instance of religious persecution, in light of the widespread bias against non-traditional religious organizations in the aftermath of the Aum Shinrikyō prosecutions? cf. Miyachi Masato (1976) ‘Hitonomichi kyōdan fukei jiken,’ in Wagatsuma Sakae et al. (eds), Nihon seiji saiban shiroku 5: shōwa gō (Tokyo: Daiichi Hōki Shuppan): 245–272. Complicating the effort to determine whether the charges against Miki Tokuharu were legitimate is the fact that the case was closed when he died of natural causes on July 6 1938, before the investigation was complete. Miyachi Masato (1968), ‘Dai-niji Ōmotokyō jiken,’ in Wagatsuma et al. (eds), Nihon seiji saiban shiroku 5: shōwa gō, 95–140. Miyachi Masato, ‘Dai-niji Ōmotokyō jiken,’ 99. The Amur River Society (Kokuryūkai) was founded in 1901 by Uchida and was closely connected with the Gen’yōsha that was established in 1881 by former samurai in Fukuoka who were disgruntled over the government’s refusal to ‘chastize Korea.’ It was a Gen’yōsha member, angry over treaty revision, who attacked foreign minister Ōkuma Shigenobu with a bomb in 1889, causing the loss of his leg. By the 1930s, Uchida worked closely with Tōyama, then the leader of the Gen’yōsha. Both groups were disbanded after the war by the Occupation. See the analysis of the statistics on arrests under the Peace Preservation Law in Itō Takashi (1983) Shōwa-ki no seiji (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha), 347–350. Skya, Japan’s Holy War, 105–111. Saitō Makoto was a friend of Gotō Shimpei, and he served as an admiral in 1912, deputy navy minister in 1898–1905 and navy minister in 1906–1914, the period when the Catholic Yamamoto Shinjirō was rising through the Imperial Navy ranks. The Watanabe family were Jōdō Shinshū Buddhists, but apparently did not indulge in anti-Christian bias. General Watanabe himself was responsible for the education of his children, and his second daughter Kazuko (who witnessed her father’s assassination when she was nine years old) later converted to Catholicism at the age of eighteen and eventually became a nun. See: http://www.seijo-church.com/event/archive/081012.html (Date accessed: May 26, 2011). Sonoda lists Makino as a member of the ‘Christian network’ close to the emperor, but I have not been able to corroborate the claim that Makino himself was Christian; cf. Sonoda, 16, 64, 132, 232. Hiranuma, cited in Watanabe, ‘Fuashizumu-ki,’ cited again in Garon, 301. Richard H. Drummond (1971) A History of Christianity in Japan (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.), 257. Itō Takashi (2001), Nihon no uchi to soto, nihon no kindai 16 (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Sha), 312. Itō, Nihon no uchi to soto, 315. Drummond, A History of Christianity in Japan, 322. On Matsuoka as a practicing Christian with affinities for the Catholic Church (into which he was later baptized), see Sonoda, 118–119, who draws

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 213

6/30/2011 1:02:06 PM

214

42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Kevin M. Doak from Miwa Kimitada’s Matsuoka Yōsuke; see also R.J.C. Butow (1974) The John Doe Associates (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 89. L.A. Tibesar, M.M. to Mt. Rev J.E. Walsh, M.Ap., M.M., November 7, 1940. DH Seattle, Box 33, Folder 3, Maryknoll Mission Archives, Development Houses Collection, Seattle, WA. My thanks to Professor Yuki Yamazaki for this source. Butow writes, ‘Matsuoka and Konoye were as different in their own way as Hideyoshi and Nobunaga had been. A close subordinate of the Foreign Minister later wrote: ‘If Konoye was a shy squirrel sheltered in the deep forests, Matsuoka was the stormy petrel that delights to spread its wings over the foaming sea. It is doubtful if the two ever understood one another.’ Butow, The John Doe Associates, 87. cf. Taguchi Yoshigorō (1935) Manshū teikoku to katorikku kyō (Tokyo: Katorikku Chūō Shuppanbu). The idea that the Holy See had recognized the state of Manchukuo, long accepted by most historians, has recently been challenged on the basis of careful reading of official documents of the Holy See. It now appears that the Church at best recognized the reality of what had happened in the interest of protecting the rights of Catholics in Manchuria (‘religious recognition’), but the Holy See never went so far as giving official diplomatic recognition to the state of Manchukuo. See Giovanni Coco (2006) Santa Sede e Manciukuo (1932–1945): con Appendice di Documenti (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana). I learned through an oral interview with an eighty-three-year-old former Christian Japanese Imperial Army private that, even at the height of World War II, he was never discriminated against by his officers or fellow soldiers because of his religion, which he did not hide from them. Interview with Hideo X, Washington, DC, November 14, 2009. His personal account that Christians were fully accepted in the Imperial Army is supported by other interviews and historical evidence. For example, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (2002) writes in Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) that some soldiers ‘were devout Christians who carried the Bible on their final flights or who sang hymns on the last night ... Even non-Christian pilots eagerly read about Christianity’ (5). What is not so easily substantiated is Ohnuki-Tierney’s conclusion that these were ‘dangerous acts given the strict censorship on the bases’ (5). We should recall that many influential government and military leaders, like Rear Admiral Yamamoto Shinjirō and Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke, were Christian. Yamamoto Shinjirō, cited in Ikeda Toshio (1998) Jimbutsu chūshin no nihon katorikku shi (Tokyo, San Paulo), 363. Ikeda, Jimbutsu chūshin no nihon katorikku shi, 362. Ibid., 367. Yamamoto Shinjirō, quoted in Ikeda, Jimbutsu chūshin no nihon katorikku shi, 362. Sonoda, Kakusareta jimmyaku, 115. The Sophia Yasukuni Shrine Incident is recounted in detail in George Minamiki, S.J. (1985) The Chinese Rites Controversy: from Its Beginning to Modern Times (Chicago: Loyola University Press), 139–158; a shorter

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 214

6/30/2011 1:02:06 PM

Religion and Politics in Imperial Japan

53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

215

summary is available in Kevin M Doak (2007) ‘A Religious Perspective on the Yasukuni Shrine Controversy,’ in John Breen (ed.), Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (London: C. Hurst), 48–51. Awaya Ken, Minister of Education, to Alexis Chambon, Archbishop of Tokyo, September 30, 1932, Monbushō, zasshū 140 gō, reproduced in Pluries instanterque, cited in George Minamiki, S.J., The Chinese Rites Controversy, 145. See also Doak, ‘A Religious Perspective,’ 49. Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, Pluries Instanterque (The Holy See, May 26, 1936); cited in Minamiki, S.J., The Chinese Rites Controversy, 156. Minamiki, S.J., The Chinese Rites Controversy, 157. Itō Takashi (1974) ‘Shiryō kaisetsu,’ in Imai Seiichi and Itō Takashi (eds), Gendaishi shiryō 44: kokka sōdōin 2 (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō), xix. [Nakamizo et al.] ‘Kokumin seishin sōdōin sai-soshiki no ken’ (July 20, 1938); reprinted in Imai and Itō (eds), Gendaishi shiryō 44: kokka sōdōin 2, 4–7, on p. 5. Shōwa Kenkyūkai Jimukyoku ‘Seido o ika ni denaosashimu beki ka’ (October 1938); reprinted in Imai and Itō (eds), Gendaishi shiryō 44: kokka sōdōin 2, 47–49, on p. 48. Yabe Teiji (1946) ‘Konoe shin-taisei ni tsuite no shuki,’ reprinted in Imai and Itō (eds), Gendaishi shiryō 44: kokka sōdōin 2, 582. My translation of kyōgaku as ‘moral suasion’ should not be confused with Sheldon Garon’s translation of kyōka as ‘moral suasion.’ See Garon (1997) Molding Japanese Minds: the State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 7. The two Japanese terms refer to distinct, if related, social phenomena; I simply cannot find a better term to translate kyōgaku. Inoue Takuji (2000) Kindai nihon no shūkyō to kokka (Tokyo: Tokyo Tosho Shuppankai), 202. Inoue Takuji, ‘tōtei shūkyōjō no kyōgaku to wa yobinikui mono de aru,’ Inoue Takuji, Kindai nihon no shūkyō to kokka, 201. Inoue Takuji, Kindai nihon no shūkyō to kokka, 205. Ibid., p. 201.

9780230_240735_09_cha07.indd 215

6/30/2011 1:02:06 PM

8 ‘The Gakkai is Faith; the Kōmeitō is Action’: Sōka Gakkai and ‘Buddhist Politics’ Erica Baffelli

Introduction After World War II, several so-called ‘New Religions’,1 such as Risshō Kōseikai (literally, the Society for the Establishment of Righteousness and Friendliness) and Seichō no Ie (literally, the House of Growth) became involved in Japanese politics, supporting their own political candidates or joining political committees. However, as this chapter will discuss, Sōka Gakkai (literally, Value Creation Study Association) was the only religion in postwar Japan to found an independent political party that has established itself as an enduring presence in the Japanese electoral system. More recently, two other religious groups attempted to imitate the success of Kōmeitō and founded political parties. In 1990, members of Aum Shinrikyō (Aum Supreme Truth), the group responsible for the sarin gas attack in Tokyo’s subway system in 1995, attempted to run for the Lower House election with a political party called Shinritō (Party of Supreme Truth). Aum’s election campaign, based on lively public performances with song and dances and warning of the coming apocalypse, was highly ridiculed in the media, and the leader, Asahara Shōkō, and twenty-four of his followers – who presented themselves as candidates – failed miserably (Asahara, for example, received only 1,783 votes).2 Early in 2009, before the Japanese General Elections, a group called Kōfuku no Kagaku (also known as Happy Science) founded the Kōfuku Jitsugentō (Happiness Realization Party). The party presented 345 candidates in 99 per cent of Japan’s 300 constituencies, including the 216

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 216

6/30/2011 4:48:08 PM

Sōka Gakkai and ‘Buddhist Politics’

217

group’s leader, Ōkawa Ryūhō.3 The mainstream press largely ignored the new party, which promoted itself also through the Internet. The party claimed to offer a ‘third choice’ to the Japanese electorate, opposing both the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Their political platform included a plan to double the population of Japan and to improve the economic situation. Furthermore, the party strongly supported the revision of Article 9 of the Constitution, according to which Japan renounces war, in order that the country could prepare to defend itself from attacks from China and North Korea, which the party claimed were imminent. More generally, Kōfuku Jitsugentō emphasized the idea of a unity between politics and religion, based on the leader’s teaching concerning the building of ‘Utopia’ on earth. The party received around half a million votes nationwide for the 2009 General Elections and around 230,000 for 2010 House of Councillors elections, but not enough to obtain a seat in the new government. Sōka Gakkai is considered the largest of the Japanese shinshūkyō (New Religions) and one of the most visible overseas. Today Sōka Gakkai claims more than 8 million households in Japan,4 while 12 million members in 192 countries are claimed by Soka Gakkai International (SGI), an international network created in 1975.5 The group was founded during the 1930s by the educator Makiguchi Tsunesaburō as the lay organization of the Buddhist denomination Nichiren Shōshū. Under the leadership of its second president, Toda Jōsei, the group became involved with Japanese politics in the 1950s and has maintained a (at times highly criticized) relationship with the political sphere ever since. As we have seen already, Sōka Gakkai is not unique among new religions in being actively involved in political activities. But Sōka Gakkai’s own political party, the Kōmeitō (Clean Government Party), founded in 1964 and renamed New Kōmeitō (Shin Kōmeitō) in 1998, represents what is to date the only case of a truly successful religious political party in the Japanese context. Indeed, the Kōmeitō is the only example in modern Japanese history, either before or after World War II, of a political party run by a religious group that has been able to become a major political party. Until the 2009 election the party was the third largest in Japan, and the New Kōmeitō served as part of the ruling coalition government from 1999 until 2009. Sōka Gakkai traces its roots to the teachings of Nichiren, an important figure in the history of Japanese Buddhism, who lived and taught in the thirteenth century. Sōka Gakkai combines Nichiren’s ‘faith in the Lotus Sutra with its commitment to social engagement.’ 6 The group is

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 217

6/30/2011 4:48:08 PM

218 Erica Baffelli

not only without doubt one of the most successful of the ‘new’ Buddhist religions, but it can also be defined as one of the biggest private organizations active in Japan.7 At the same time, it can also be defined as the most criticized religious group in Japan (together with Aum Shinrikyō), as its political involvement, its school system, its publishing empire, and its history of aggressive proselytization techniques often attracted harsh criticism. Ikeda Daisaku is the former president of the organization, who now holds the title of Honorary President of Sōka Gakkai International. His early political views were based on an elaboration of a program for what he called a ‘Buddhist democracy’ (buppō minshushugi), which he imagined as a ‘humanitarian socialism’ (ningen shakaishugi) that seeks an ‘equality of value’ and aims for the unification of societal and individual welfare. In the 1960s, Ikeda advocated a ‘politicized sacrality,’ thus affirming that religion would serve as the basis of politics, and that the attainment of ‘true democracy’ was only possible through a universal conversion to what he called ‘True Buddhism.’ This chapter will offer an overview of the history of the relationship between Sōka Gakkai and Kōmeitō and discuss Ikeda’s early vision of politics, based on Buddhist teaching, during the 1960s.

Japanese new religions and politics after World War II The interest of new religious movements in politics has its roots in prewar shinshūkyō political and social activities, such as the Shintō-based new religion Oomoto’s sociopolitical ideals and its relationship with the Showa Holy Salvation Association (Shōwa shinseikai), founded in 1934.8 However, under the Religious Organizations Law (Shūkyō dantai hō), passed by the Japanese imperial government in 1939, only religious organizations recognized by the government were allowed to exist, at least from a legal standpoint. At the time, there were forty-three officially recognized groups, including thirteen Shintō sects, twentyeight Buddhist organizations, and two Christian groups, one Catholic and one Protestant.9 Despite their obvious doctrinal differences, the government maintained a strict control over all these organizations. Indeed, despite the fact that, as Nancy Stalker claims,10 ‘Oomoto’s prewar blend of religion and politics anticipates the political orientation of many new religions in the postwar period,’ the adverse reactions the group received in 1920s and 1930s served as a precedent for public and governmental suspicion regarding political engagement by new religions.

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 218

6/30/2011 4:48:08 PM

Sōka Gakkai and ‘Buddhist Politics’

219

From a legal point of view, the situation changed in the postwar period. From the Japanese government’s acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration in 1945 until 1952, the country was under the administration of the Allied Powers. At the end of 1945, the ‘Shinto Directive,’ submitted as part of the Occupation policy, imposed a strict separation between religion and state and outlawed the government’s control over religious organizations. The Religious Organizations Law was replaced by the Religious Corporations Ordinance (shūkyō hōjin rei) in 1947 and then by the Religious Corporations Law (shūkyō hōjin hō) in 1950. The Religious Corporations Ordinance allowed any group that met prescribed criteria to become a religious corporation. The Religious Corporations Law followed the principle of the Religious Corporations Ordinance, but required that any group seeking recognition must publicly identify its members and acknowledge the people in its organization. The Ordinance additionally required that groups obtain an official certificate from a government office. Furthermore, Article 20 of the 1946 Japanese Constitution guaranteed freedom of religion, but also stated that religious organizations would not receive privileges from the state and, more importantly, that religious groups could not exercise political authority.11 Articles 20 and 89 were created to discontinue all support of State Shintō, but they have also been used, as we shall see later, as the basis for criticizing the involvement of various new religious movements in politics. Before the new laws were introduced, it was officially prohibited for religious groups to participate in politics, but after the Occupation reforms it became possible for them to be involved in political activities. New religious movements as well as more established religious groups were immediately attracted to this new sense of opportunity. As early as April 1946, during the first postwar election for the House of Representatives, eight candidates from Buddhist organizations and two candidates related to the new religious group Tenrikyō were elected.12 According to Nakano Tsuyoshi, however, political involvement at this stage was still in its infancy: From the beginning the new religions, with the exception of Konkōkyō, took an active part in postwar politics. It must be admitted, however, that at this stage neither the established religious organizations, the new religions, nor the candidates who made their living by religion displayed a mature awareness of what political involvement meant. It cannot be denied that for some, political involvement was merely a way of currying favor with proponents of postwar democratisation policy.13

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 219

6/30/2011 4:48:08 PM

220 Erica Baffelli

The Federation of New Religious Organizations, formed in 1951 and including, at the beginning, twenty-four different religious groups, played an important role in the involvement of new religious movements in politics, especially with the formation in 1965 of the New Political Alliance of Japan (Shin nihon seiji rengō).14 In the immediate postwar period, however, new religious movements usually supported their candidates individually. To take a single example, one of the groups more deeply involved in political activities was Seichō no Ie (lit. House of Growth),15 which in 1953 established the Seichō no Ie election committee and in 1954 formed a political society called the Seikyō Club. This group actively involved itself in the right-wing political movement and in 1957 withdrew from the Federation of New Religious Organizations. In 1964, the group founded the Seichō no Ie Political Union (Seichō no Ie Seiji Rengō).16 The group was actively involved in politics in the postwar period, supporting several activities, including the ‘campaign to preserve the Emperor system’ and the ‘campaign for the ideological salvation of the nation.’ Seichō no Ie is representative of a conservative approach to political activities by religious organizations, based on a critical rejection of postwar Occupation reforms and aimed at the restoration of the Emperor’s political and religious powers. The group’s political involvement decreased in the 1980s, especially after the leader’s death in 1985. The enthusiasm expressed by New Religions to be involved in political activities in the postwar period can be attributed in part to the new freedoms allowed by the new legislation. There was, however, more to it than simple expediency, as Ben Dorman 17 and Nakano Tsuyoshi 18 have pointed out. Nakano 19 argues that the New Religions’ political involvement can also be seen as an attempt to protect themselves from potential attack after the withdrawal of the Occupation Powers. According to Nakano, the approaches of new religious movements to political activities in the period between 1955 and 1975 fit roughly into four different categories: The first type entered into no alliance with other religious organizations, but sought entry into the political world by forming its own political party. This is exemplified by Sōka gakkai. Second is the type that approved the postwar reforms of the religious system, but made its entry into the political world indirectly by joining a comparatively liberal wing of the Liberal-Democratic Party, thus supporting conservative political power. This was true of the member bodies of the Federation of New Religious Organizations of Japan. The third

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 220

6/30/2011 4:48:09 PM

Sōka Gakkai and ‘Buddhist Politics’

221

type found it difficult to approve the postwar religious reforms, but upheld such ideas as an independent constitution, legalization of state support for Yasukuni Shrine, and restoration of the rights of the emperor. At the top of the list of the right-wing groups that exemplify this type is Seichō no Ie. Fourth is the type that utterly refused to get involved with politics, for example Konkōkyō and Tenrikyō.20 In this context it is clear that Sōka Gakkai was not alone in its desire to be politically active in the postwar period. However, as we will consider later, its motivations were in an important sense unique. Sōka Gakkai’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Nichiren Buddhism played a key role in the group’s political life, both as a motivational force for political candidates and as the foundation for their political party’s platform.

Sōka Gakkai and Kōmeitō Sōka Gakkai was not initially founded as a religious group. Makiguchi Tsunesaburō (1871–1944) started it as Sōka Kyōiku Gakkai (Value Creating Education Society), a group focused on his educational philosophy. Makiguchi and his disciple Toda Jōsei (1900–1958) converted to the Buddhist sect Nichiren Shōshū (Nichiren True Sect) in 1928 and turned to lay Buddhist activism. In the 1930s the organization adopted a more explicitly religious character. At the beginning the group was a lay association under the Nichiren Shōshū, which follows the teaching of Nichiren (1222–1282), a Buddhist reformer of the Kamakura period (1185–1333). Nichiren preached that faith in Lotus Sutra and the practice of chanting the title of the Sutra in the seven-syllable formula namu-myōhōrenge-kyō (known as the daimoku) are the sole effective means to achieve salvation in the period of mappō, the Latter Days of the Buddha’s Dharma.21 Makiguchi was eventually officially elected president and Toda vicepresident and general director of the movement, which grew quickly. Makiguchi’s teachings were mainly based on educational reforms. For Makiguchi, religious activities were primarily a means to effect social reform, and his valuation of creative pedagogy (sōka kyōiku)22 was deeply rooted in Nichiren Buddhist principles. Makiguchi, Toda and several of their followers were arrested and imprisoned in 1943 on a charge of lèse-majesté for refusing to enshrine a deity tablet (kamifuda) from the Grand Shrine of Ise (as required by the 1940 Religion Corporation Law). For Sōka Kyōiku Gakkai, enshrining kamifuda

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 221

6/30/2011 4:48:09 PM

222 Erica Baffelli

constituted hōbō – slander to the Dharma – because it was against the preservation of exclusive faith in Nichiren’s teachings. Toda and the other followers were released in 1945, but Makiguchi died in prison in 1944 of old age and malnutrition. With the death of the movement’s co-founder, Toda faced the challenge of reconstructing the movement to fit the changing realities of the postwar period. He changed the name of the organization to Sōka Gakkai and he also founded the newspaper Seikyō shimbun (Holy Teaching Newspaper), which would quickly become (as it remains today) the official news organ of the organization. Furthermore, he greatly amplified the importance of a conversion technique called shakubuku (previously introduced by Makiguchi) – literally to ‘subdue the will’ or ‘to break and subdue’ 23 – a practice stressed by Nichiren and which advocates an assertive, missionary approach to proselytising in which ‘each believer must go out and convince others,’ 24 all the while clearly expressing disapproval of views that the movement deemed inferior or simply false.25 Under Toda’s leadership, the group’s focus shifted from social reform and educational ideas to a more religious focus on Nichiren Buddhism. According to Toda, the suffering and destruction wrought by the Second World War had an underlying religious causality in the Japanese government’s rejection of Buddhism in favour of State Shintō 26 during the Meiji Restoration in the late nineteenth century. During the same period, Sōka Gakkai moved into political involvement, considered part of its religious mission of spreading Nichiren’s teaching and, as I will discuss later, to construct an ordination platform. As pointed out by Nakano,27 the rationale behind Sōka Gakkai’s initial decision to participate in politics was fundamentally tied to the aim of realizing ōbutsu myōgō (fusion of politics and religion).28 In the first phases of Sōka Gakkai’s political activities, Buddhist terminology was extensively used both within and outside the group to explain its political concepts and justify the group’s involvement in the public arena. The decision to enter politics was a means of expanding the group and gaining new followers, but it became also a means of increasing its influence within Japanese society beyond the boundaries of its own religious structure. In 1955, the group took part in local elections, sponsoring more than fifty of its own candidates, forty-seven of whom were elected, going on to serve on two prefectural assemblies and more than twenty city councils.29 During the national elections of 1956, the group sponsored six candidates and three of them were successful, going on to serve on

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 222

6/30/2011 4:48:09 PM

Sōka Gakkai and ‘Buddhist Politics’

223

the national political stage. In 1959, a further six candidates associated with the movement were elected to the Upper House,30 while, on the local scene, the same year four candidates were elected to the Tokyo Prefectural Assembly and 293 candidates in prefectural, city, and ward elections won seats throughout Japan. In 1961 the Kōmei Seiji Remmei or Kōseiren (League of Fair Statesmen) was established and in 1962 Sōka Gakkai’s councillors represented the third largest group in the Upper House of the Japanese legislature.31 In 1964 the Kōmeitō (the Clean Government Party) was formally established, and a mere five years later the Kōmeitō obtained forty-seven seats in the Lower House and received more than five million votes, fully 10.9 per cent of the total vote in the December 1969 election.32 As discussed by several researchers, the Sōka Gakkai’s youth division played a central role in the larger group’s entry into the political arena. The Komei Political Federation was at the beginning the political section of the youth division 33 and electoral activities were categorized by the group as ‘cultural activities’ (bunka katsudō). These activities were part of the mission of converting all people to Nichiren Shōshū Buddhism, or kōsen rufu (literally, ‘declaring (the Lotus Sutra) far and wide’ 34), to use Sōka Gakkai’s own terminology. Nowadays the members, and in particular the Married Women’s Division, still play an important role in canvassing for candidates,35 and campaigning for elections is still considered part of devoted members’ activities. The political activities started by Toda achieved their peak under the leadership of his successor, Ikeda Daisaku, who nowadays holds the title of Honorary President of SGI. Ikeda initially declared that the group did not intend to become an independent political party, and in his earlier speeches he promised that the aim was not to enter the House of Representatives, but to use political activities to support the religious mission of the group.36 However, as Nakano has noted, in 1964, the foundation of a new political party was announced: Initially Sōka Gakkai’s entry into the political world was a matter of sending delegates familiar with the Buddhist spirit of compassion to the House of Councillors and to local assemblies. The aim was to help purify the political world and support political actions that would benefit the people. Eventually, however, a change took place. In May 1964, at the twenty-seventh Sōka Gakkai General Conference, it was announced that the Political Federation for Clean Government would henceforth be a political party based on Buddhist social ideas. November 1964 saw the inauguration of this religiously

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 223

6/30/2011 4:48:09 PM

224 Erica Baffelli

oriented political party: the Kōmeitō, or Clean Government Party. Its immediate goal was to elect members of the House of Representatives. It aimed to become a moderate, humanist party with its roots in the masses. The motivation for this movement sprang, in the last analysis, from the religious idea of ōbutsu myōgō (‘a polity fundamentally united with Buddhism’). The new political party definitely possessed, then, a strongly religious character.37 The party started at the local level, running candidates for local assemblies, city councils, and the Upper House, a smaller canvas where the candidates had a greater chance of winning. They only entered the Lower House, the most important body in the Japanese parliamentary system, after installing some successful candidates in smaller bodies and after establishing a strong electoral base. It is very difficult to access reliable data regarding new religious movement affiliations, but it has been estimated that before the 1970 elections approximately 90 per cent of Kōmeitō’s electorate was formed by Sōka Gakkai members. 38 The percentage was lower in the 1970s and 1980s, but, despite some successful attempts in reaching non-Sōka Gakkai voters, the Kōmeitō remains heavily dependent on its traditional Sōka Gakkai electorate. Despite their evident political acumen, things have not always gone smoothly with Sōka Gakkai’s political aims. In 1956 the group was accused of illicit campaigning and in 1957 forty-five members were accused by the Osaka Public Prosecutor of public elections law violations. During the campaign in support of the candidate Nakao Tatsuyoshi, a group of Young Men’s Division members were accused of attempting to buy votes, because they distributed cigarettes, caramels, and boxes containing money to supporters the night before the elections (McLaughlin (2009), 90). The head of the boards of directors, Koizumi Takashi, and Ikeda Daisaku, head of the Youth Division Chief of Staff, were arrested. In 1970, the group was also accused of attempting to stop the publication of a book critical of the religious group and its political activities.39 As a reaction to similar criticisms, Sōka Gakkai officially dissociated itself from its political party and, in 1994, the Kōmeitō was disbanded in favour of a newly created party, the Shinshintō (New Frontier Party, NFP), which included some former Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Social Democratic Party (SDP) members of parliament. The new party itself disbanded in 1997, and in 1998 ex-Kōmeitō members established the New Kōmeitō.

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 224

6/30/2011 4:48:09 PM

Sōka Gakkai and ‘Buddhist Politics’

225

Until 1998, Kōmeitō was an oppositional force, strongly emphasizing its role as a ‘watchdog’ and its aim to speak for those people ‘left behind by Japanese industrialization.’ 40 The party also took an active role in criticizing Japanese foreign policy when it conflicted with its ideals or interests (for example, the party criticized the United States – Japan Security Treaty and played an important role in Japan’s normalization of relations with China in 1972). In 1999, however, the New Kōmeitō became part of the political mainstream when it joined the three-party ruling coalition led by Prime Minister Keizō Obuchi and including the Jiyū-Minshutō (Liberal Democratic Party, LDP) and the Jiyūtō (Liberal Party), which merged with the Minshutō (Democratic Party of Japan, DPJ) in 2003. Since that time, the New Kōmeitō has been key to the success of the LDP, not only as a coalition partner that allows the ruling party to secure a majority, but also as an important supporter during elections. On the other hand, however, the LDP’s relationship with Sōka Gakkai’s aggressive campaigning style has led to a number of criticisms and to some concrete political fallout. Recently, the Democratic Party of Japan has successfully partnered with another Buddhist organization, Risshō Kōseikai, which had traditionally been a supporter of the LDP, but was also a rival of Sōka Gakkai in both the religious and political spheres. From 1970 onwards, Sōka Gakkai authorities did not appear in person during Kōmeitō’s meetings. Kōmeitō and Sōka Gakkai continue to maintain separate leadership and finances, and the group itself is extremely careful about the way it presents this key relationship, as we can see from this excerpt from New Kōmeitō’s official website: With its current membership in Japan of some eight million households, the Soka Gakkai constitutes the largest single support group of New Komeito. As do other political parties and their major constituencies in Japan, the Soka Gakkai and New Komeito periodically hold briefings to debate and discuss policy issues. Unlike its political peers, however, New Komeito has never lobbied for or introduced legislation that provides the Soka Gakkai special privileges or sanction.41 In earlier decades, the Kōmeitō used clearly religious language and declared that its intentions were to develop four new religio-political systems: neo-socialism (shin shakaishugi), a third civilization (dai san bunmei), Buddhist democracy (buppō minshushugi), and global nationalism

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 225

6/30/2011 4:48:09 PM

226 Erica Baffelli

(gurobaru nashonarizumu). In the announcement of the formation of their political party, the Kōmeitō leaders quoted from Nichiren’s Risshō ankokuron (Treatise on Establishing the True [Dharma] and Bringing Peace to the Land) and stated that the party’s ideals and policies were based on the unity of government and Buddhism.42 The announcement stated that the party’s objectives were fourfold and related directly to the new systems that it envisioned: (1) permanent peace in the world through the unity of government, (2) realization of welfare for the masses through humanistic socialism, (3) establishment of a political party for the masses through a Buddhist democracy, and (4) the establishment of a parliamentary system of democratic government.43 Third Sōka Gakkai President Ikeda Daisaku was presented as the party’s founder and the party’s leader. Since January 1967, the Kōmeitō has adopted the more secular language of ‘middle-of-the-road politics’ (chūdō seiji) to describe its methods and goals 44 and makes a concerted effort to avoid explicitly religious language in its public rhetoric. However, Kōmeitō’s emphasis on social equality, revealed through semi-religious or quasi-religious language – ‘sanctity of life,’ ‘coexistence of humans and nature,’ ‘reshaping a New Japan,’ ‘Japan’s contribution to the World,’ and so on – recalls Sōka Gakkai’s language.45 More specifically, religious stances influenced Kōmeitō’s opposition to the revision of the Article 9 of the Constitution (according to which ‘Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation’)46 and changes to the Religious Corporations Law instituted after the Aum affair in 1995, aiming to reinforce control over new religions. Furthermore, the two groups used similar language in recent advertising campaigns. The slogans for both groups are remarkably similar – compare ‘Anata no, ashita wo, atarashiku, Sōka Gakkai’ (your new future, Sōka Gakkai) and Kōmeitō’s ‘mirai ni sekinin’ (responsibility for your future/ in charge of your future). Both focus heavily on the idea of a ‘new future,’ which evokes change at both a religious and a political level. The formation of a coalition between the LDP and Kōmeitō in 1994, and, consequently, the entrance of Kōmeitō into government, reopened the discussion about the relationship between the political party and Sōka Gakkai. Concerns about the proper meaning of the separation between state and religion in modern Japan were raised again and several critical articles appeared, both in the popular press and in more explicitly Buddhist-centered publications.47 The major point of controversy is related to suspicions that the group treats religious conversion as a political goal.48

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 226

6/30/2011 4:48:10 PM

Sōka Gakkai and ‘Buddhist Politics’

227

Nichiren Buddhism and politics Some history of Nichiren Buddhism’s links to the political sphere will help us to locate Sōka Gakkai in a larger context. The link between the Lotus Sutra and the prosperity of the nation had been expressed as far back as the eighth century in the writings of the founder of the Tendai school, Saichō (767–822), and in the practices of the Heian period (794–1185), which included the recitation, interpretation, and copying of the Lotus Sutra as ‘a ‘nation-protecting sūtra’ believed able to ensure the country’s safety and well-being.’ 49 Moving forward past the thirteenth century, Nichiren’s religio-political ideas about the role of the Lotus Sūtra in transforming the world into a ‘Buddha land,’ 50 the idea of an ordination platform to be erected when ‘the ruler and his minister’ have embraced the Lotus Sūtra,51 and the relationship between Buddha-dharma (Buppoō) and the ruler’s Dharma (ōbō), have all influenced a number of modern interpretations of Nichiren Buddhism. This was particularly true in the Nichirenism Movement (Nichirenshugi) led by Tanaka Chigaku (1861–1931) and Honda Nisshō (1867–1931). Tanaka argued that modern Japan needed a spiritual basis in the form of ‘a popularised, lay-oriented Nichiren doctrine applicable to contemporary social realities.’ 52 In Tanaka’s political ideology, defined by George Tanabe as ‘Lotus Nationalism,’ 53 the truth is embodied in the Lotus Sūtra, the superiority of which needs to be propagated (through shakubuku) and which represents the very essence of Japan: ‘unless kokutai [the ‘national polity’] is a manifestation of the Lotus Sutra, it will not embody the Eternal Truth.’ 54 This idea in turn influenced the political ideas of some other new religious movements based on Nichiren Buddhism, such as Risshō kōseikai and Reiyūkai, and at least indirectly played some role in shaping Sōka Gakkai’s ideas about the relationship between religion and politics. Tanaka, like Sōka Gakkai after him, was active in the political arena, and he established the Rengekai, which became the Risshō Ankokukai (the Association for Establishing True Dharma and Securing Peace in the Nation) in 1885. Later, he founded the Kokuchūkai (Nation’s Pillar Society, 1914), which from 1923 had a political wing called Rikken Yōseikai.55 Tanaka’s ideology, in line with the larger historical context, was profoundly nationalist and aimed at establishing a doctrine based on the fusion between state ideology and the religious principles of the Lotus Sūtra. Again like Sōka Gakkai, Tanaka advocated the founding of a national ordination platform (kokuritsu kaidan) in order to convert the whole nation to Nichiren Buddhism. If this project came to fruition,

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 227

6/30/2011 4:48:10 PM

228 Erica Baffelli

Tanaka taught, the emperor would become ‘the righteous Buddhist king (Sanskrit; cakravartin) who would eventually rule the world.’ 56 The concept of ōbutsu myōgō has often been interpreted not as state religion but in a broader sense, ‘indicating that the principles used in leading society are to be the ideals of the Buddhist Dharma, which emphasize the moral influence of religion rather than the direct involvement of a particular religious organization in governing the people.’ 57 In the rhetoric of Toda, the second president of Sōka Gakkai, the fusion of Buddhism and government was based on the idea that implementing Buddhist concepts into politics would prevent ‘bad government’ because, in his opinion, the Japanese government during the war had been the ‘worst government in the world.’ 58 This vision, which differed from Tanaka’s, was clearly in contrast to the postwar period, when religion was relegated to the private sphere and the separation between religion and the state was emphasized in both the social and political arenas.59 Furthermore, for Toda, the unity of government and Dharma was strictly connected to the propagation of Nichiren Buddhism, as Robert Kisala has noted: Prior to 1955, when Sōka Gakkai’s direct involvement in election campaigning began, Toda’s use of the word ōbutsumyōgō was restricted to connection with kōsen rufu [propagation of Buddhism]. This term was understood to mean the propagation of Nichiren Buddhism, which would culminate in the establishment of a ‘National Hall of Worship’ (kokuritsu kaidan) at the foot of Mount Fuji, after such time as the nation had adopted the Nichiren faith as its own.60

Nichiren and the ordination platform Toda’s decision to change Makiguchi’s emphasis on a value-creating pedagogical movement (Sōka kyōiku) into a more politically and socially active religious group can be seen in relation to the emphasis on social engagement within larger religious trends that fall under the rubric of ‘Buddhist modernism,’ both in Japan and in many other parts of the world. Nowadays, Sōka Gakkai has aligned itself with other engaged Buddhists, advocating interfaith dialogue and cooperation. The group is widely considered an example of Buddhist modernism, with a characteristic ‘mixture of tradition and innovation, contemplation and social engagement, commercial entrepreneurship and cultural critique.’ 61 However, Toda’s attempts are also rooted in and inspired by the teachings of Nichiren (1222–1282), which Sōka Gakkai have reappropriated and reinterpreted in a modern context.

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 228

6/30/2011 4:48:10 PM

Sōka Gakkai and ‘Buddhist Politics’

229

The aspect of Nichiren’s teachings that is most important to Sōka Gakkai is his conviction that the Lotus Sūtra (Sanskrit: Saddharma pundarīka sūtra; Chinese: Miaofa lianhua jing; Japanese: Myōhō renge kyō) is the most important text in the Buddhist canon for the age of mappō (the age of the Final Dharma), a period when the teachings of the Buddha are believed to have fallen into general decay. According to Nichiren, during the time of mappō, what is required of the Buddhist is an exclusive devotion to the Lotus Sūtra. The Three Great Secret Laws (sai dai hihō) are the means to achieving salvation. The three great secret laws include the gohonzon, a mandala inscribed by Nichiren himself; the daimoku, the mantra ‘namu myōhō renge kyō’; and the kaidan, or high sanctuary, which transforms salvation from an individual to a national matter, as James White has noted: ‘Once all Japan has been converted to Nichiren’s religion, a sanctuary symbolizing this achievement – and the country’s salvation – will be established, where the rulers of the nation will come to worship.’ 62 Sōka Gakkai’s political views grow out of this aspect of Nichiren’s teaching; in short, the salvation of the nation depends on its conversion to a pure form of Buddhism. Nichiren’s own political viewpoint was expressed in the interrelated ideas of ōbutsu myōgō (the fusion of Buddhism and politics), kaidan (the worship hall), and Utoku-o (the virtuous ruler). Nichiren, however, did not propose any concrete ideas about the formation of the state after the achievement of the ‘propagation on Buddhism’ (White (1970), 133). In the Risshō Ankokuron (Treatise on Establishing the True [Dharma] and Bringing Peace to the Land), Nichiren strongly attacked other schools of Buddhist thought, in particular Hōnen’s form of Pure Land Buddhism, blaming them for the calamities and difficulties, including earthquakes, famine, and epidemics, that Japan faced in the thirteenth century. According to Nichiren, a stable, peaceful society could exist only if the people accept the ‘true’ teaching of the Buddha. For Nichiren, the Lotus Sūtra was the only ‘True Dharma‘ and the only means to salvation. Besides the Lotus Sūtra, Nichiren’s reinterpretation of the meaning of the kaidan is, according to Jacqueline Stone, one of the most crucial factors in understanding Sōka Gakkai’s involvement in politics; a move, moreover, that is seen as a fundamentally religious act – based on the vision that politics, economics, and other activities would be informed by the Lotus Sutra 63 – not only a means to increase internal cohesion and the organization’s presence in the wider society or a defensive measure against (possible) repressive measures.64 Nichiren did not clearly explain the meaning of the ‘ordination platform,’ another critical aspect of his political vision; however, the idea

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 229

6/30/2011 4:48:10 PM

230 Erica Baffelli

of establishing a state-sponsored national platform for ordination at the movement’s headquarters was clearly expressed by the writings of Sōka Gakkai’s leader, Toda, during the early stages of the group’s political involvement: We must work to have this message [a Diet order for the construction of a national ordination hall] issued. Because a majority of the members of the House of Representatives will have to agree to its issue, our activities to propagate the true faith must acquire a new dimension.65 However, after the formation of Kōmeitō and the 1970s scandal (related, as discussed above, to the accusation that the group had attempted to stop the publication of a critical book), the group renounced its plan to construct the national ordination platform, and Buddhist language was eliminated from the political party.66

Religion and politics I must first say that I’m not a politician. Nor am I a so-called religionist. I’m one of those citizens deeply concerned with contemporary Japanese politics. Ikeda Daisaku 67 The emphasis on proselytism and propagation of true Buddhism is expressed also in Ikeda Daisaku’s Seiji to Shūkyō (Religion and Politics), published in 1964. Seiji to shūkyō is based on Ikeda Daisaku’s speeches and writings, which provided a programmatic guide for and practical explanation of political activities, as well as their philosophical and religious justification.68 In his writings, Ikeda proposed the adoption of what he defined as the ‘True Buddhism’ as the guiding principle for Japan’s politics. For Ikeda, this represented the ideal combination of religion and politics and was the ideal solution for Japan’s social welfare problems. The prerequisite for a fusion of politics and religion is the conversion of sufficient numbers of individuals to the ‘True Buddhism.’ The strong emphasis on proselytism was explicit in Ikeda’s early writing, but became less pronounced when Kōmeitō expanded its political activities. In Ikeda’s view, with the right fusion of politics and Buddhism, the happiness of each individual and the prosperity of the entire society could thus be realized simultaneously. Ikeda repeatedly stressed that Buddhist politics would be the ideal solution for improving the lives

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 230

6/30/2011 4:48:10 PM

Sōka Gakkai and ‘Buddhist Politics’

231

of the ‘masses’ and harmonizing the relationship between individuals and society.69 True Buddhism was to be the guiding principle of Japan’s democracy, but Ikeda explained that he was not aiming to create a theocracy. Instead, Ikeda wrote that religion would serve as the ethical basis for political philosophy while remaining separate from any direct administration: [ ... ] our objective – obutsu myogo – is by no means a theocracy. This new idea is absolutely inconsistent with anything similar to a unity of Church and State. Politics must base itself on a philosophy. Politics without a philosophical basis is likened to a ship without a compass; it does not deserve to be called solid politics in the strictest sense of the word.70 The relationship between the Dharma and the ruler was complex in Nichiren’s original thought as well, and in his writings he stressed that the ruler should support the ‘right’ teachings. Stone summarizes: Nichiren himself often directed his efforts in shakubuku toward those in positions of power because of their influence over the people at large. But at the same time, he strictly subordinated the authority of worldly rule to that of the true Dharma of the Lotus. A ruler’s obligation, in his view, was to protect the Lotus Sutra and the monks who upheld it while denying support to those who ‘disparage the Dharma’; this would ensure general peace and prosperity. If, on the contrary, the ruler gave support to misleading teachings, disaster would plague his realm. This claim was articulated in Nichiren’s famous admonitory treatise Risshō ankoku ron (Treatise on Establishing the True [Dharma] and Bringing Peace to the Land), submitted to the Bakufu in 1260.71 For Ikeda, the world in the mid-twentieth century could be divided into two philosophically based systems, capitalism and socialism, and into two philosophical trends that he called ‘materialism and Spiritualism.’ 72 This, he argued, was not true for Japan; these two categories ‘are only parts of truth seen from the Buddhist outlook on life.’ 73 The lack of ‘solid philosophy’ in Japanese politics needed to be filled with a ‘great religion,’ which already existed in Japan. Ikeda criticized Pure Land Buddhism as ‘heretical,’ belonging to a ‘lower Mahayana Buddhism,’ 74 and defined Confucianism as an ‘inferior philosophy.’ 75 Thus, the great religion he is referring to is, and could only be, what he called the ‘True Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin.’

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 231

6/30/2011 4:48:10 PM

232 Erica Baffelli

According to Ikeda, politics should give priority to mankind’s rights, and the ideal public welfare program should aim at achieving a ‘social prosperity in accordance with individual happiness.’ 76 The basic idea is that the happiness of the individual coincides with social prosperity: Political ideas will become obvious only when they are based on a great philosophy which can harmonize material and spiritual civilizations. Therefore, to remove the contradictions of our present-day society, all people should seek the philosophy which can make individual happiness correspond to social prosperity on the common basis of all mankind. We have discovered in the life-philosophy, the essence of Buddhism, the philosophy which can meet these conditions.77 The role of religion in politics is thus to establish and maintain this link between individual happiness and social prosperity: [ ... ] the social role of religion lies in removing the cause of unhappiness from every individual, offering more basic salvation by purifying each person’s life, thereby bringing prosperity to the entire society. [ ... ] I am convinced that the true religion lays the foundation of true democracy.78 Working from the view that Japanese politics has ‘totally alienated itself from the general public,’ 79 the aim of Kōmeitō became that of ‘cleansing the Japanese political world’ 80 from corruption and degradation. Kōmeitō was envisioned as the party of the masses, because Ikeda believed that handling these masses was ‘essential for politicians.’ 81 Ikeda attributes to Nichiren the statement that: ‘Because the Law is supreme, Man is worthy of respect. Because man is worthy of respect, the land is sacred,’ 82 and adds to this the following: The ‘Law’ means a basic principle, idea and philosophy. If the Law, the base of all things, is supreme politicians who practice it become worthy of respect, and if the politicians are so, the land in which they live will become sacred.83 Ikeda explicitly stated that Kōmeitō members were ordinary politicians who believed in the ‘supreme religion’ and that their work would fulfil Nichiren’s will: I am convinced that today the Sokagakkai’s campaign for obutsu Myogo and the Komeito’s activities are the most glorious ventures

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 232

6/30/2011 4:48:11 PM

Sōka Gakkai and ‘Buddhist Politics’

233

which, basing politics on this great Buddhism, makes politics into what it should be to materialize the happiness of mankind and world peace in accordance with the Daishonin’s will.84 According to Ikeda, ōbutsu myōgō could also be defined as ‘Buddhist democracy’ 85 (in Japanese, bukkyō minshushugi 86), a democracy that could be achieved only through a ‘religious revolution’ 87 (in Japanese, shūkyō kakumei 88). This revolution would be the natural outgrowth of kōsen rufu, the missionary movement initiated by Nichiren. The diffusion of Nichiren’s basic teachings, which often involves the strong criticism of other forms of Buddhism, is thus the primary aim of Sōka Gakkai: The objective of the Sokagakkai [ ... ] is what we call Kosen-rufu or the propagation of the Daishonin’s Buddhism of the Three Great Secret Laws not only in Japan and in the Orient, but also to the entire world.89 Kōsen rufu will be obtained through shakubuku, which in Sōka Gakkai means conversion specifically to the Buddhism of Nichiren Shoshū and was defined by Ikeda as both an ‘act of mercy’ and an ‘act for introducing or awakening other people to the True Buddhism with mercy and reasonable persuasion.’ 90

Conclusions Since 1970 shakubuku has become more and more synonymous with ‘proselytism,’ and the group tends to avoid the nuance of ‘rebuking of wrong teaching’ as originally implicit in the term. As a consequence, criticism towards other organizations is made less explicit and the group has consequently embraced a more moderate position. However, Sōka Gakkai is still considered different from other lay Buddhist organizations in Japan, and the members’ activities and ‘social engagement’ are still explicitly focused on expanding the organization, while other groups are more engaged in, for example, volunteer activities. The relationship between Sōka Gakkai and Kōmeitō represents an interesting example of the emergence of a new form of Buddhism in Japan, a Buddhism that considers political and social engagement to be a duty. Members of such groups recall what Noah Feldman defines as ‘values evangelists’ 91 and are politically active, believing that their religious values should be integrated into the political process. This is largely

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 233

6/30/2011 4:48:11 PM

234 Erica Baffelli

an internal Japanese matter, as Sōka Gakkai’s political activities are limited to Japan; however, the religious organization has a far broader reach, aided by Sōka Gakkai International, established in 1975 and now active in 192 countries. ‘Politicized sacrality’ can be defined as a worldview that subordinates seemingly secular matters of governance, like taxes and education, to religious teachings and values.92 In defining his political viewpoint, I have been arguing, if rather implicitly, that Ikeda proposed just such a politicized sacrality, affirming that religion, Sōka Gakkai’s interpretation of Nichiren Buddhism in this case, would serve as the basis of politics and that for Japan’s attainment of ‘true democracy’ a conversion to the ‘True Buddhism’ is necessary. The formation of Kōmeitō as a political party was the first step in that direction, as the party and the religious organization Sōka Gakkai claim that they ‘share the same spirit’ (itaidōshin). In 1965 the Federation of New Religious Organizations founded a political group, the New Political Alliance of Japan (shin nihon seiji rengō 93), and between 1965 and 1975 the involvement of Japanese new religious movements in national politics intensified. One of the reasons for the Federation’s decision to strengthen its political involvement was the rapid expansion of Kōmeitō. In the same period, critics who felt that the idea of ōbutsu myōgō was contrary to the principle of separation of religion and state also became more vocal and more visible in the social and political realms. In the face of this growing tide of criticism, Ikeda strategically compromised his earliest political ideals, moving, for example, towards a more neutral, more secular redefinition of the ‘state-sponsored ordination platform’ (kokuritsu kaidan). In 1970, as Stone has noted, Ikeda declared that the aim of the group was not to create the kaidan: Ikeda further announced that, while Sōka Gakkai and Kōmeitō were united in a common desire for the people’s peace and happiness, use of the expression ‘one and inseparable’ to describe their relationship had invited misunderstanding. Henceforth, the activities of the two organizations would be separated, and Kōmeitō officials would no longer hold leadership positions within the Sōka Gakkai. The next month, at the eighth general meeting of the Kōmeitō, the expression ōbutsu myōgō was dropped from the party platform, and Kōmeitō assumed a more secular self-definition.94 The same year, an official statement was released by the head office declaring that Sōka Gakkai was not aiming to make Buddhism the state

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 234

6/30/2011 4:48:11 PM

Sōka Gakkai and ‘Buddhist Politics’

235

religion of Japan and that there was a clear distinction between the political party and Sōka Gakkai’s religious activities. Furthermore, from 1970 Kōmeitō members no longer occupied administrative positions in the religious group. However, despite these official changes in the relationship between Sōka Gakkai and Kōmeitō and the declarations from both that they are fully independent of each other, Nichiren exclusivism – that is, the claim to possess the sole True Dharma – remains an issue that has never been fully addressed and clarified by either the political party or the religious organization. Furthermore, the question of the proper relation between religion and the state in Japan and the related issue of the very legitimacy of the Kōmeitō is still provoking debate in Japan today.

Notes Ikeda Daisaku, quoted in Takase Hiroi (1964) Kōmeitō (Tokyo: Gakushū kenkyūsha), 155. An earlier, abridged form of this chapter has been published (2010) as ‘Sōka Gakkai and Politics in Japan,’ in Religion Compass, 4 (12): 746–756. 1. For a definition and discussion of shinshūkyō (New Religions), see Trevor Astley (2006) ‘New Religions’, 91–114, in Paul Swanson and Clark Chilson (eds) Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i press); Shimazono Susumu (1992) Shinshūkyō to shūkyō boom (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten); Shimazono Susumu (1994) ‘Shinshūkyō wo sasu yōgo’, 2–5, in Inoue Nobutaka et al. (ed.) Shinshūkyō jiten (Tokyo: Kōbundō); Inoue Nobutaka (1996) Shinshūkyō no kaidoku (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō). 2. See Ian Reader (2000) Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan. The Case of Aum Shinrikyō (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), 153–156. 3. Japanese names in this essay are given in the Japanese order, with the surname first. 4. http://www.sokanet.jp/info/gaiyo.html (Accessed May 26, 2011). 5. See Okuyama Michiaki (2010) ‘Soka Gakkai as a Challenge to Japanese Society and Politics,’ in Politics and Religion, 4 (1): 83–96 and Shūkan Daiyamondo, Shinshūkyō (special issue), September 12, 2009. 6. George Ehrhardt (2008) ‘Book reviews’, in Politics and Religion, 1, 137. 7. See Levi McLaughlin (2009) Soka Gakkai in Japan, PhD Thesis (Princeton: Princeton University). 8. Nancy Stalker (2008) Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburo, Oomoto, and the Rise of New Religions in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i press), 177–182. 9. Nakano, Tsuyoshi (1996) ‘Religion and State,’ 115–136, in Tamaru Noriyoshi and David Reid (eds) Religion in Japanese Culture: Where Living Traditions Meet a Changing World (Tokyo: Kodansha International), 119. 10. Stalker, 73.

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 235

6/30/2011 4:48:11 PM

236 Erica Baffelli 11. Article 20: ‘Freedom of religion is guaranteed to all. No religious organization shall receive any privileges from the State, nor exercise any political authority. No person shall be compelled to take part in any religious act, celebration, rite or practice. The State and its organs shall refrain from religious education or any other religious activity.’ Article 89. ‘No public money or other property shall be expended or appropriated for the use, benefit or maintenance of any religious institution or association, or for any charitable, educational or benevolent enterprises not under the control of public authority.’ See: http://www.sangiin.go.jp/eng/law/index.htm 12. Nakano (1996), 122–123. 13. Ibid., 123. 14. Nakano Tsuyoshi (2003) Sengo nihon no shūkyō to seiji (Tokyo: Taimeidō), 150. 15. Seichō no Ie was founded in 1930 by Taniguchi Masaharu (1893–1985) and it is considered one of the largest Japanese New Religions. Its doctrine contains elements of Shintō, Buddhism, and Christianity, and it is based on the leader’s forty-volume Seimei no jissō (translated into English as Truth of Life). Member practice includes participating in member division activities, spiritual training and seminars, studying the group publications, and practicing a form of mediation called shinsōkan. See Birgit Staemmler (forthcoming) ‘Seichō no Ie’, in Ulrich Dehn and Birgit Staemmler (eds) Establishing the Revolutionary: An Introduction to Japanese New Religions (Hamburg: Lit Verlag). 16. Nakano (1996), 124. 17. See Benjamin Dorman (2006) ‘Religious Politics, Japanese Style,’ in Religion in the News, 9 (1). http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/csrpl/RINVol9No1/ Religious%20Politics,%20Japanese%20Style.htm (accessed 5 November 5, 2009). 18. See Nakano (1996 and 2003). 19. See Nakano (2003). 20. Nakano (1996), 128–129. 21. According to a popular form of East Asian eschatology, the decline of Buddhism can be divided into three periods: the True Dharma age (shōbō), the Semblance Dharma age (zōhō), and the Final Dharma Age (mappō). In the chronology most widely accepted in Japan, the Mappō, which began roughly 500 years ago, is, however, believed to last for 10,000 years or more. See Jan Nattier (1991) Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline (Berkeley: Asian Humanities press) for more details. 22. See Jacqueline Stone (2003a) ‘“By imperial Edict and Shogunal Decree”: Politics and the Issue of the Ordination Platform in Modern Lay Nichiren Buddhism,’ in Steven Heine and Charles S. Prebish (eds), Buddhism in the Modern World: Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 193–220. 23. Jacqueline Stone (1994) ‘Rebuking the enemies of the Lotus: Nichirenist Exclusivism in Historical Perspective,’ Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 21: 233.

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 236

6/30/2011 4:48:11 PM

Sōka Gakkai and ‘Buddhist Politics’

237

24. Arvin Palmer (1971) Buddhist Politics: Japan’s Clean Government Party (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff), 8. 25. For more on Shakubuku, see Stone (1994) and Jacqueline Stone (1999) Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press). 26. Daniel A. Metraux (1994) The Soka Gakkai Revolution (Lanham: University Press of America), 272. 27. See Nakano (2003). 28. Hiroshi Aruga (2000) ‘Soka Gakkai and Japanese Politics,’ 97–127, in David W. Machacek and Bryan R. Wilson (eds) Global Citizens: The Soka Gakkai Buddhist Movement in the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 114. 29. Robert Kisala (1999) Prophets of Peace: Pacifism and Cultural Identity in Japan’s New Religions (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), 81. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 82; Kisala (1999), 82; James White (1970) The Sokagakkai and Mass Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 134. 32. White, 22. 33. Aruga, 114. 34. See McLaughlin, 5. 35. See George Ehrhardt (2009) ‘Rethinking the Komeito Voter,’ in Japanese Journal of Political Science, 10 (1); McLaughlin (2009); James Marshall (1981) The Komeito in Japanese Politics, PhD thesis (Charlottesville: University of Virginia). On Sōka Gakkai structure and ‘block system’ (burokku soshiki), see McLaughlin, 101–104. 36. See McLaughlin, 92. 37. Nakano (1996), 125. 38. Aruga, 118. 39. The book in question was Sōkagakkai wo kiru (I denounce Sōkagakkai), written by Fujiwara Hirotatsu, a university professor and later a political commentator. 40. Ehrhardt, 139. 41. See ‘View on Politics and Religion,’ http://www.komei.or.jp/en/about/view. html (accessed November 2009). 42. Murakami Shigeyoshi (1980) Japanese Religion in the Modern Century, translated by Byron Earhart (Tokyo: University of Tokyo press), 154. 43. Ibid. 44. See White. 45. See ‘New Komeito’s platform:’ http://www.komei.or.jp/en/about/platform. html (accessed November 5, 2009). 46. See Helen Hardacre (2005) ‘Constitutional Revision and Japanese Religions,’ in Japanese Studies, 25, 235–247. 47. Robert Kisala (1994) ‘Sōka Gakkai, Kōmeitō, and the Separation of Religion and State in Japan,’ Nanzan Bulletin, 18, 7. 48. Ibid., 8. 49. Jacqueline Stone (2003b) ‘Nichiren’s activist heirs: Sōka gakkai, Risshō Kōseikai, Nipponzan Myōhōji,’ 63–94, in Damien Keown, Charles Prebish, and Christopher Queen Action Dharma: New Studies in Engaged Buddhism (London and New York: Routledge), 64. 50. Stone (2003a), 193.

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 237

6/30/2011 4:48:11 PM

238 Erica Baffelli 51. Ibid., 196. 52. Ibid., 197. 53. George J. Tanabe Jr (1989) ‘Tanaka Chigaku: The Lotus Sutra and the Body Politic,’ 191–208, in George Tanabe Jr and Willa J. Tanabe (eds) The Lotus Sutra in Japanese Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), 192. 54. Ibid., 200. 55. Ibid., 109. 56 Kawanami, Hiroko (1999) ‘Japanese Nationalism and the Universal Dharma,’ 105–126, in Ian Harris (ed.) Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth-century Asia (London: Pinter), 110. 57. Kisala (1994), 8–9. 58. Stone (2003a), 206. 59. Ibid., 207. 60. Kisala (1994), 8. 61. David McMahan (2008) The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 264. 62. White, 33. See also Nishiyama Shigeru (1975) ‘Nichiren shōshū sōka gakkai ni okeru ‘honmon kaidan’ ron no hensen: seijiteki shūkyō undō,’ 241–274, in Nakao Takashi (ed.) Nichirenshū no shomondai to shakai tōsei (Tokyo: Yūzankaku) and Stone (2003a). 63. Stone (2003a), 206–207. 64. Ibid. 65. Seikyō Shimbun, January 1, 1954. Quoted in Ronald Hrebenar (1986) ‘The Komeito: Party of ‘Buddhist’ Democracy,’ 147–180, in Ronald Hrebenar (ed.) The Japanese Party System (Boulder: Westview Press), 153. 66. McLaughlin, 98. 67. Ikeda Daisaku (1968) Complete Works of Daisaku Ikeda vol 1 (Tokyo: Seikyo press), 3. 68. See Marshall. Ikeda’s political speeches have been translated into English and were published as Complete Works of Daisaku Ikeda vol 1 in 1968. 69. See Marshall. 70. Ikeda (1968), 16. 71. Stone (2003a), 195. 72. Ikeda (1968), 8. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 19. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 84. 77. Ibid., 93. 78. Ibid., 150. 79. Ibid., 101. 80. Ibid., 104. 81. Ibid., 106–107. 82. Ibid., 123–124. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 133. 85. Ibid., 153. 86. Ikeda Daisaku (1964) Shūkyō to seiji (Tokyo: Ushio), 206. 87. Ikeda (1968), 158.

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 238

6/30/2011 4:48:11 PM

Sōka Gakkai and ‘Buddhist Politics’

239

88. 89. 90. 91.

Ikeda (1964), 214. Ikeda (1968), 164. Ibid., 166. See Noah Feldman (2005) Divided By God: America’s Church-State Problem – and What We Should Do About It (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux). 92. This definition was proposed by Nancy Stalker in a non-published abstract. 93. See Nakano (2003). 94. Stone (2003a), 209–210.

9780230_240735_10_cha08.indd 239

6/30/2011 4:48:12 PM

9 From Mishima to Aum: Religio-political Violence in Late Twentieth-Century Japan Roy Starrs

Why do Japanese undertake political action which they know to be futile? Yet if an act has really passed the test of nihilism, then even though totally ineffective, it should surprise no one. I can even predict that from now on, to the extent that the action principles of Yang-ming [neo-Confucian] Thought are imbedded in the Japanese spirit, perplexing political phenomena which are incomprehensible to foreigners will continue to crop up in Japan. Mishima Yukio1

A tale of two terrorists On November 25, 1970, the internationally famous writer Mishima Yukio, a frequent nominee for the Nobel Prize, shocked the world by committing an act of suicidal terrorism. With half a dozen members of his private army, the ‘Shield Society,’ he entered the office of the commanding officer of a Tokyo military base and forcibly took him hostage – delivering sword blows to some other officers in the process. Then he coerced the commander to call an assembly of his troops on the parade ground outside. While helicopters hovered noisily overhead, almost drowning out his words (the media-savvy Mishima had summoned the Press that morning to record what he called his ‘little show’), he stood precariously perched on the balustrade of a balcony high above the assembled troops and harangued them at the top of his voice. If he had fallen off at that point, as seemed quite likely, his ‘attempted coup’ would have come to the abrupt and farcical ending 240

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 240

6/30/2011 1:03:16 PM

From Mishima to Aum 241

that perhaps it deserved. But, luckily for Mishima, he kept his balance, and for ten minutes or so tried to incite the troops to rebel against a ‘corrupt’ government that had consigned them to the ‘shameful’ status of a mere ‘self-defense force’ – in such sad contrast to their proud erstwhile role as the ‘Imperial Army,’ the shield of the divine emperor and the scourge of all his enemies. It was as if he were addressing a pathetic paper tiger that had been de-fanged and de-clawed, imploring it to recover its fighting spirit. No doubt Mishima knew beforehand that it would be a hopeless attempt; in fact, he had already made meticulous plans for what he would do next. When the troops responded with shouts of baka-yarō (‘You idiot!’) and oriyō (‘Get down from there!’), as if chastising a mischievous boy, Mishima returned to the commander’s office and, before that elderly officer’s horrified gaze, performed ritual suicide (seppuku) in the precise manner stipulated by the traditional code of the samurai: stripping to a white loincloth, he knelt on the floor, plunged a shortsword into his abdomen, cut his own guts out with a crosswise and then an upward pull of the razor-sharp blade, then signalled to his ‘second’ (kaishaku), who proceeded to lop off the great writer’s head (not too skilfully, one regrets to say – it took three blows). About a quarter century later, on March 20, 1995, a ‘new religion’ that called itself ‘Aum Shinrikyō’ (Om Religion of Truth) staged one of the most horrific terrorist attacks of recent times, releasing lethal quantities of sarin gas simultaneously on five trains of the Tokyo subway system, killing twelve commuters and injuring many hundreds more.2 This shocking incident was a product of the most deadly mix of religion and politics in recent Japanese history and, in a way that seems significantly representative of the age, it had been perpetrated not by adherents of any of the traditional Shinto or Buddhist sects but by followers of one of the multitude of ‘new new religions’ that had sprung up in the latter half of the twentieth century – in other words, since the defeat of ‘traditional Japan’ in the Pacific War. Under the leadership of their strangely charismatic leader, the half-blind ‘guru’ Asahara Shōkō, the Aum sect had at first tried to acquire political power by ‘legitimate’ democratic means, running twenty-five candidates of their so-called ‘Shinri-tō’ (Truth Party), including Asahara himself, in the House of Representatives elections of 1990. Soundly rejected by the Japanese electorate, the group withdrew from mainstream society and began to act in the ‘cult-like’ manner familiar from other such groups around the world, growing increasingly hermetic, paranoid, and violent. Finally, on that fatal March morning in 1995, it tried to mount an attack that

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 241

6/30/2011 1:03:17 PM

242

Roy Starrs

would cause so much indiscriminate carnage, especially among the many government bureaucrats who used those subway lines that all converged on Kasumigaseki, the heart of the national capital, that it would actually bring down the government. Furthermore, because Asahara and his closest disciples were now living in a fantasy world of their own creation, absolutely immune to any ulterior checks on their sense of reality, they were also convinced that the government’s downfall would compel the Japanese nation to accept the Aum guru himself not only as their spiritual saviour but as their new emperor, thus actualizing his long-held ambition for limitless political power in the ‘real world.’ In other words, Asahara, like Mishima, aimed to effect an abrupt and radical transformation of the national polity, but his political ambition dwarfed even Mishima’s, since his goal was not to ‘restore’ the emperor but to replace him. And even that would not be the end of it: his motto seemed to be ‘today Japan, tomorrow the world’ – absurd and incredible as this seems, in the megalomaniac delusional state he had now entered Asahara aimed at nothing less than becoming the absolute dictator of the whole planet. At first sight, there may seem to be little in common between these two terrorist incidents and the men who perpetrated them. Indeed, it may even strike some devotees of ‘high culture’ as somewhat sacrilegious to compare the major post-war writer Mishima, a world-class literary genius, with the barely literate, half-mad ‘doomsday cult’ leader Asahara. But I would like to argue here that there are fundamental affinities as well as obvious differences between these two men and their respective resorts to violence, and that, whereas the differences between them speak significantly to the changes Japanese society underwent between 1970 and 1995 – and perhaps, more specifically, to the changes that occurred in the relation between politics and religion in Japan over the same period – their affinities are at least equally instructive for what they reveal about some common traits of twentieth-century religio-political violence, not only in Japan but throughout the world. On the more intimate level of individual psychology, to compare Mishima’s ‘sacralized politics’ with Asahara’s ‘politicized religion’ is ultimately, it seems to me, to tell a similar story of lives ruined by a runaway political ambition. Much of the world was left scratching its head at these two disturbing and perplexing events: the two perpetrators were both ‘mature’ men in their forties at the time they staged their respective ‘incidents,’ and, on the face of it, both were at the height of remarkably successful careers, the one as a highly regarded novelist and playwright, the

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 242

6/30/2011 1:03:17 PM

From Mishima to Aum 243

other as the founder and leader of a growing new religion. Nonetheless, both were driven, at least partly by religious and political conviction, to launch a self-destructive attack on the society to which they ostensibly belonged, the society that had produced and sustained them. So the question inevitably arises: why did they do it?

The sacralized politics of Mishima Yukio The militant nationalism Mishima developed in the last decade of his life led him to take sides in an age-old religious conflict that had periodically erupted since the beginnings of Japanese history: that between Shinto as the ‘native’ religion devoted to the worship of the Japanese gods and Buddhism as a ‘foreign’ pan-Asian religion of universal human values. To understand Mishima’s religio-political position, we must first understand something about the long history of ideological and political conflict (as well as of simultaneous coexistence) between these two Japanese religious traditions. There was always a potential for serious conflict between the two, since Shinto was often perceived by its most devoted adherents as the only genuinely ‘national’ or ‘Japanese’ religion, and Buddhism was often castigated by these same Nativists as a foreign newcomer and interloper that never really belonged in the ‘land of the gods.’ Thus, although Japanese history has been comparatively free of sectarian violence in recent centuries (the last major incident was the massacre of Christians following the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–1638), if one were to look for a fundamental religious split that always had the potential to cause ideological, political, and even military conflict in Japan, the Shinto/Buddhist divide would be the closest thing to it. Of course, we must also remember that this particular fissure has behaved like some geological fault line or semi-active volcano that ‘lies dormant’ for centuries at a time. Nonetheless, it was present from the very starting point of Japanese history proper: in the late sixth century Japan’s earliest recorded civil war was fought between two rival clans, at least partly on religious grounds – that is, to determine whether or not Buddhism was a politically acceptable religion, and would be allowed to establish itself alongside Shinto on Japanese soil. The victory of the Soga clan (who were of foreign, Korean descent and therefore devotees of continental Buddhism) over the Mononobe clan (who were ‘native’ traditional guardians of Shinto and thus implacably and violently opposed to the establishment of Buddhism) ensured that the continental religion would be allowed to flourish under the new Soga-dominated

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 243

6/30/2011 1:03:17 PM

244

Roy Starrs

imperial state and with the generous patronage of Prince Shōtoku, putative builder of many temples, and a Soga on his mother’s side.3 But this was far from the end of the story. Although the fundamental conflict between Shinto and Buddhism was submerged for many centuries and the two traditions even seemed to join forces under state patronage, the conflict would re-emerge ‘with a vengeance’ over a thousand years later, in early modern times, at first in the Nativist ideology of highly influential eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century thinkers such as Kamo no Mabuchi, Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane.4 The anti-Buddhist sentiment of these Tokugawa thinkers was partly no doubt because of Confucian influences on them, but it was also a result of their Shinto-centred Nativism – a nascent form of modern cultural nationalism but existing, of course, prior to the formation of any modern nation-state. Thus, more than a millennium after the antiBuddhist Mononobe clan chieftains, traditional guardians of Shinto, had been defeated in the late-sixth-century ‘religious wars’ by the Soga forces, their spirit of resistance to the ‘foreign gods’ was reborn in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan. To Nativist scholars (kokugakusha) Buddhism was a foreign religion whose very presence in Japan was an insult to the native gods; besides, its ‘decadent’ doctrines and worldview threatened to corrupt the natural ‘purity’ and ‘sincerity’ of the Japanese mind and national character, especially as embodied in the bushido ideals of the samurai class. In other words, Buddhism was suspect not only for its foreign origins but also for its putative pacifism – or what Mishima called its ‘passive nihilism.’ (Of course, the often militaristic and nationalistic historical reality of Japanese Buddhism – right up to the Pacific War – actually belied this view.) Just as Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, accused Christianity of having undermined the traditional Roman martial virtues with its pacifist ‘preaching of patience and pusillanimity,’ thus hastening the fall of Rome, so the Japanese Nativist scholars, Gibbon’s faraway contemporaries, said of Buddhism that it had undermined traditional Japanese values, such as loyalty to the Emperor and the martial spirit that made their Empire great.5 Thus, the ‘father of Japanese Buddhism,’ the Sinophile Prince Shōtoku, was attacked by the Tokugawa Nativists for having betrayed his native gods by his patronage of this ‘evil’ foreign creed. As Satō Masahide has written, leading Tokugawa Confucians such as Hayashi Razan (1583–1657) and Nativist scholars such as Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) severely criticized the Prince as an ‘immoral person who was unjust and disloyal’ (fugi fuchū no haitokusha).6 And many other Nativist schol-

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 244

6/30/2011 1:03:17 PM

From Mishima to Aum 245

ars took the same line, including the Mito School authors of the Dai Nihon shi (History of Great Japan, 1715), who also accused the Prince of having ‘destroyed our national religion [Shinto].’7 Indeed, the Nativists’ feelings against the Prince had become so vehement by the end of the Tokugawa period that he was transformed into a symbol of everything they despised. As Itō Kimio has written: ... nationalist scholars severely condemned Prince Shōtoku for disrupting the basic structure of the nation by introducing Buddhism. In the period leading up to the Meiji Restoration (1868), when imperial sentiment reached a feverish pitch, Shitennōji [the Buddhist temple in Osaka reputedly built by the Prince in thanks for the victory of the Buddhist Soga over the Shintō Mononobe] became the site of violent protests, including suicides and an incendiary attack that burned twelve buildings on its grounds.8 More than twelve hundred years after the Prince had ‘Sinicized’ Japanese culture, there were still people who would not forgive him for this ‘traitorous’ act. As part of the haibutsu (eliminate Buddhism) movement of the early Meiji period, imperial Shintoists were thus prepared even to resort to terrorist attacks in their attempts to rid Japanese culture of this ‘foreign’ legacy – the first incidents of religio-political violence in modern Japan. Somewhat later, this national Shinto political religion again provided the ideological driving force behind Japan’s imperialist expansion into continental Asia and the Pacific, as well as behind the increasing incidence of domestic terrorism during the period of ‘Taisho democracy’ – what has been called the ‘politics by assassination’ that terrorized and ultimately defeated more liberal politicians in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, this new ultranationalist form of Shinto made it possible for the fascist and militarist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s to represent Japan’s imperialist war against China and the West as a ‘holy war.’9 Although not specifically linked to the anti-Buddhist movements of the past, it had many of the same ingredients, being Nativist and anti-foreign, and, because of its contempt for China and continental Asia in general, suspicious of any continental influence in Japan. In this respect, these modern imperial Shinto nationalists were heirs to the sixth-century Mononobe Shinto guardians as well as to the eighteenth-century Tokugawa Nativists. As Walter Skya has shown in his major study of the subject, radical Shinto ultranationalism was the main ideological driving force behind both Japan’s domestic fascism and its international imperialism in the

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 245

6/30/2011 1:03:17 PM

246

Roy Starrs

1930s. Although Skya recognizes, of course, that 1930s Japanese fascism was not a purely indigenous phenomenon and can be fully understood only within the context of the international rise of fascism at the same time, he also throws light on the vexed question of how the ‘traditional’ Shinto religion was made to serve the purposes of a ‘modern’ Japanese fascism. Through studies of a number of nationalist ideologues, he shows how radical ultranationalist Shinto was used to ‘mobilize the masses’ for conquest and war – most especially, the ‘holy war’ against the West (he also points out the significant parallels with present-day Islamic jihadist ideology). At the heart of Skya’s analysis is his contention that ‘a fundamental transformation in the ideology of Shinto ultranationalism took place in the Taishō period,’ and that this transformation was necessary because earlier nationalist ideologies (most notably as propounded by Hozumi Yatsuka) portrayed the masses as ‘passive political objects to be acted on’ and thus had little appeal to the masses themselves.10 As with European fascism, a key historical factor in the rise of a new, more populist form of Japanese nationalism was the increasing politicization of the masses in the early twentieth century, beginning with the riots following the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and culminating in the rice riots of 1918. These demonstrations of popular political power convinced right-wing thinkers that a new form of emperor-centred nationalism was called for, one that would have more popular appeal than Meiji patriarchal authoritarianism. Most crucially, the new ideology would have to inspire an intense religious fervour in the masses, a willingness to sacrifice themselves ‘for the emperor’ – or, in other words, for the state. The Japanese did not have to look for a god-like national leader in a Hitler or a Mussolini – they already had one in the emperor, who could be turned to the uses of a fascist ideology just as easily as he had been to other ideologies and political systems in the past. Right-wing political theorists such as Uesugi Shinkichi and Kakehi Katsuhiko cleverly conjured up the idea of an unmediated union between the emperor and the people, and suggested that all Japanese could bring ultimate meaning to their lives by achieving a kind of mystical union with the emperor – especially, of course, through death in battle. As Skya writes: ‘Loyalty to the emperor was religious devotion. ... Personal union with the emperor was the individual’s ultimate objective; it was this objective that was at the heart of radical Shintō ultranationalist ideology. The individual was driven beyond the self to his essential being, to the emperor.’11 As we shall see, this populist idea of a mystical union of the Japanese people with their emperor was central also to Mishima’s thought. And conversely, like many of his Nativist predecessors, he came to regard the

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 246

6/30/2011 1:03:17 PM

From Mishima to Aum 247

all-pervasive, millennium-long influence of Buddhism as inimical to Japan’s native traditions, above all to its traditions of emperor-worship, national Shinto and bushidō. The most compelling expression of these two dialectical poles of his latter-day worldview – emperor-centred Shinto mysticism consciously opposed to philosophical and religious Buddhism – is found in the culminating work of his literary career, the work he intended as his magnum opus and final testament, his tetralogy of novels published under the general title The Sea of Fertility (Hōjō no umi, 1965–1970).

Mishima and Buddhism The Sea of Fertility was not the first Mishima work to make significant use of Buddhism. The work generally regarded as his most successful single novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji, 1956), is implicated with Zen Buddhism on several different levels. On the level of narrative, it tells the story, based on an actual historical incident, of a deranged Zen monk who destroys a cultural treasure belonging to his own temple – the famous ‘golden pavilion’ located in the garden of the Zen temple named after it, ‘Kinkakuji.’ On the level of moral and philosophical argument, the novel uses – or misuses – Zen iconoclastic teachings in an attempt to justify the protagonist’s final nihilistic act of destruction. Interpreted literally, it could thus be regarded as a perversion of Zen. Interpreted on a more allegorical level, it could also be regarded as itself a kind of Zen parable of spiritual self-reliance, similar in spirit to those famous Sung dynasty ink paintings which depict Zen monks ripping up sutras or tossing Buddha statues into the flames. On the whole, Mishima seems to have found Zen more sympathetic than any other form of Buddhism, and the image he presents of it in Kinkakuji is at least partially positive. We can see this above all in the figure of the Zen master, Zenkai: he represents the more vigorous, ‘masculine,’ activist side of (Rinzai) Zen, and serves as a positive foil to the negative counter-example of the Abbot of the temple, who represents the passive, ‘feminine’ side of Buddhism that Mishima despised. In a Japanese political/historical context, Mishima’s partial sympathy for Rinzai Zen is quite understandable, since that sect, with its tough, nononsense attitude and its rigorous training, was favoured by Japanese militarists from the days of the medieval samurai up to the time of the Pacific War. Indeed – paradoxically for a Buddhist sect, one would think – Zen was associated with Japanese militarism and nationalism almost as much as was modern national Shinto.12

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 247

6/30/2011 1:03:17 PM

248

Roy Starrs

In some respects, Buddhism seems even more deeply implicated in the final tetralogy than in the Temple of the Golden Pavilion – especially because the traditional Buddhist idea of reincarnation is used as the main device linking the four novels together. Primarily Mishima refers here to an older, more complexly philosophical form of Buddhism than Zen: the ‘Mind Only’ or Yuishiki school that was popular among eighthcentury Nara court aristocrats. There is even an excursion into Thai Buddhism in the third volume of the tetralogy. But what seems to be a profoundly Buddhist tenor in much of the work is actually deceptive. The tetralogy is ultimately anti-Buddhist, in marked contrast to the Zencentred Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Although, as I have pointed out, there are understandable political/historical reasons for Mishima’s sympathy with Zen, there is surely another factor at work here too: in the few years intervening between 1956, when he wrote the Temple, and the early 1960s, when he began to write the tetralogy, Mishima’s right-wing political stance had hardened and he had turned himself into a political activist, publicly agitating for a ‘restoration’ of the pre-war kokutai centred on the national-Shinto cult of emperor-worship. It hardly seems surprising, then, that the world-view underlying the tetralogy is not Buddhist but precisely this brand of militant national-Shinto. Ultimately the work makes clear that these two worldviews, the Shinto and the Buddhist – or, in other words, the native Japanese and the continental Asian – are mortally opposed to each other. Mishima is by now too extreme a nationalist to tolerate the easy-going syncretism that had been common in Japanese culture since ancient times, with Buddhism and Shinto often inseparably intermixed, and Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines often sharing the same precincts. In this respect his attitude is close to that of Tokugawa Nativist scholars such as Kada no Azumamaro (1669–1736), Andō Shōeki (circa 1710–1760), Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), and Aizawa Seishisai (1782–1863), and also to that of the late-nineteenth-century Meiji government: Shinto needed to be disentangled from Buddhism (shinbutsu bunri, as the slogan went) so that it might serve as a purely ‘native’ national religion that fostered the true virtues of the Japanese national character, traditional virtues such as loyalty, perseverance, and courage. As Marius Jansen puts it, ‘the national gods would reassert their sovereignty just as Japan was resolved to restore its own integrity.’13 Or, as Mikiso Hane writes, somewhat more prosaically: ‘The [Meiji] government leaders’ support of Shinto was linked to the resurgence of cultural nationalism in the 1880s and after. It was a reaction against the move to ‘civilize and enlighten’ [i.e., Westernize] the country.’14

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 248

6/30/2011 1:03:17 PM

From Mishima to Aum 249

The anxiety of (Indian) influence As Alan Tansman discloses herein from his analysis of the Kokutai no hongi, Japanese Nativists suffer an ‘anxiety of influence’ not only from the usually noted sources of China and the West but also from India, the ultimate source of the most influential religion in Japanese history, Buddhism. Mishima was an interesting case in point. It was his habit to undertake extensive ‘field trips,’ both in Japan and overseas, to gather background information and inspiration for any novel he was planning to write. While writing his final tetralogy in the 1960s, he travelled to Thailand and India on this kind of ‘fact-gathering’ mission. On his trip to India in 1967 he visited Calcutta, Benares, and the Buddhist cavepaintings of Ajanta. Although modern India is no longer a Buddhist country, Buddhism, of course, was originally a product of Indian or ‘Hindu’ culture, although in some respects it could also be regarded as a reaction against that culture.15 In the Sea of Fertility Mishima, as already mentioned, uses – or misuses – a Buddhist (Yuishiki sect) interpretation of the idea of reincarnation as a kind of plot device to tie the four novels together. That is, each novel tells a separate ‘story’ in that each recounts the life of a new protagonist – three heroes and one heroine. At the same time, these protagonists are not entirely ‘new,’ since each is supposedly a reincarnation of his or her predecessor. The reader’s credibility is somewhat strained by the fortuitous manner in which the viewpoint character, Honda (who survives through all four novels), re-encounters the three later incarnations of his childhood friend, Kiyoaki, the hero of the first novel: by discovering the same tell-tale birthmark of three moles under their left armpits! Our credibility is further strained by the way each hero or heroine dies promptly at the age of twenty, as if following a predetermined schedule; and also by the way the Thai princess, heroine of the third novel, remembers her previous incarnations as a Japanese. My point is that all of these ‘untoward coincidences’ seem to be based more on a literal-minded Hindu interpretation of reincarnation than on the more philosophical-minded (idealist) Yuishiki Buddhist interpretation. And this despite the fact, paradoxically, that Mishima demonstrates in the third novel, The Temple of Dawn (Akatsuki no tera, 1970), that he understands the Yuishiki doctrine perfectly well. The middle-aged Honda is shown to be puzzled by the apparent contradiction between the Buddhist doctrine of ‘no-soul’ (anatman) and the doctrine of reincarnation. If mortal beings have no soul, then what exactly is reincarnated? Who suffers on the endless wheel of life and death?

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 249

6/30/2011 1:03:17 PM

250 Roy Starrs

And who is finally liberated from that suffering, attaining the endless bliss of nirvana? Through an in-depth study of Buddhist philosophy, Honda eventually discovers the Yuishiki answer: what is reincarnated is not a personal soul but an impersonal karmic force, the alayavijnana or ‘storehouse consciousness.’ This alaya consciousness is a ‘stream of noself’ (muga no nagare) which the Yuishiki scriptures compare to a torrent of water, never the same from moment to moment. These ingenious and tortured reasonings of the Buddhist philosophers, and Mishima’s own vacillation between a literal-minded and an idealist–philosophical interpretation of reincarnation, both seem to point to one basic fact: that the very doctrine of reincarnation does not sit comfortably in the Buddhist worldview. Indeed, there is an obvious logical contradiction between the idea of reincarnation and the core Buddhist doctrine of ‘no-self.’ What this suggests, further, is that the idea of reincarnation was a survival from an earlier tradition (namely, what we now call ‘Hinduism’) that, for some reason, Buddhist leaders felt obliged to retain, even though it contradicted one of their core beliefs (or disbeliefs). Perhaps it was simply too popular, too deeply rooted in folk belief, for any religion of Indian origin to risk trying to dispense with it. It is perhaps quite understandable, then, that Mishima, in trying to give concrete fictional expression to, or in trying to find an appropriate ‘objective correlative’ of, the idea of reincarnation, should end up with a fictional rendition that is more Hindu than Yuishiki Buddhist, even though, on an intellectual level, he knew well enough what the Yuishiki Buddhist interpretation was. The idea of reincarnation itself was originally a Hindu idea and remains more naturally ‘at home’ in that religious context. Furthermore, Indian religious culture has elaborated that idea more thoroughly than any other. In visiting India, Mishima no doubt hoped to deepen his understanding of the phenomenon by observing at first hand a culture in which belief in reincarnation was still very much a part of the fabric of everyday life. He seems to have gotten more than he bargained for – especially in Benares. His experience of the raw physicality, ephemerality, and squalor of human existence in that ‘holy city’ evoked in him a Sartrean sense of ontological nausea. As he confessed later: ‘I felt that I had never experienced anything more terrible than Benares.’16 More importantly, he made good use of this experience in the tetralogy. Indeed, Mishima himself claimed that the experience of Benares which he gave to the tetralogy’s viewpoint character Honda was meant to be the ‘most climactic scene’ of the entire work.17 In this scene Honda is confronted

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 250

6/30/2011 1:03:17 PM

From Mishima to Aum 251

by an appalling, phantasmagoric vision of the cheapness of life and the omnipresence of disease and death; in short, by a vision of human physical existence in its most repugnant and nauseating form: Everything was floating there. Which is to say, everything most ugly, most mournful, the realities of human flesh, the excrements, the stenches, the germs, the poisons of the corpses – all together were exposed to the sun and, like a steam arising from ordinary reality, floated through the sky. Benares. It was a carpet so ugly it was splendid. One thousand five hundred temples, temples of love with scarlet pillars on which all the positions of sexual intercourse were carved in black ebony reliefs, houses in which widows waited for death while continually and fervently chanting sutras in loud voices – inhabitants, visitors, the dying, the dead, children covered with syphilitic sores, dying children clinging to their mother’s breast ... 18 After this overpowering ‘vision of Benares,’ we witness its effect on Honda throughout the remainder of the tetralogy, an effect consisting mainly of his steady moral and psychological decline. It is as if the mere sight of those horrors has permanently contaminated his mind. Honda confesses to himself that ‘since his eyes had seen such an extremity, he felt they would never be healed. It was as if the whole of Benares suffered from a holy leprosy, and as if Honda’s vision itself had also been contaminated by this incurable disease.’19 Throughout the tetralogy up to this point Honda has played the role of passive observer of the lives of the more active and heroic characters. Now it is as if reality has finally taken revenge on him for his passivity; he is no longer secure in his pose of intellectual detachment. Mere voyeurism is no longer a harmless avocation; he has been forever ‘contaminated’ by what he has seen. The practical effects of this ‘contamination’ become increasingly evident in the remainder of the tetralogy. Soon after his return home from India, the Pacific War breaks out, but Honda is completely uninterested: ‘when the vision of Benares arose before him, all kinds of brilliant heroism lost their luster. Perhaps the mystery of reincarnation had paralyzed his spirit, robbed him of his courage, and convinced him of the nullity of all action. ... Perhaps, finally, it had made him use all his philosophy only to serve his self-love?’20 In other words, Honda’s contact with India and Hinduism has turned him into a passive nihilist in the Nietzschean sense, incapable not only of heroic actions but even of heroic thoughts.21 His descent into nothingness begins at Benares and ends, in the final scene of the tetralogy,

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 251

6/30/2011 1:03:17 PM

252 Roy Starrs

at the Yuishiki temple outside Nara, with Honda’s complete disillusionment and despair. The sun so strongly present in this final scene is neither the life-giving Greek sun (so admired by Mishima on his trip to that country) nor the national Shinto sun symbolic of the Imperial Way (kōdō); it is the merciless Indian sun which beats down on the disillusioned Honda, only increasing his sense of the ruthless indifference of the universe to all human suffering. We might conclude, then, that India and Indian religious culture (including Buddhism as its major agent of transmission to Japan) are used in the tetralogy to reinforce a worldview that is fundamentally nihilistic.

Mishima’s ‘return to Japan’ A ‘conventional’ view of Mishima’s life and career, and no doubt a widely accepted one, is that, in his last few years, he was finally able to eschew his foreign tastes and lifestyle and ‘return to Japan,’ following a familiar pattern (Nippon kaiki) established by older Japanese writers such as Tanizaki and Kawabata.22 Mishima himself, we could say, wrote the last act of the narrative of his life in conformity with this pattern. If his ‘return to Japan’ took a particularly extreme and even violent form, perhaps this was only to compensate for the extremity and depth of his ‘Westernization.’ In Mishima’s case, however, this simple pattern is complicated by one other important element: India. On the face of it, one could argue that India’s ‘displacement’ of the West in Mishima’s worldview was a natural part of his ‘return to Japan,’ since India is the ultimate source of Buddhism, a major part of Japanese tradition. But that is not how Mishima himself saw it. In fact, for him India represented an even greater threat to Japanese cultural identity than did the West – all the more dangerous because it had insinuated itself into Japanese minds and hearts for more than a millennium. Indeed, if we are to judge by the outcome of The Sea of Fertility, Mishima’s ‘last testament’ as a creative writer and his final judgment on twentieth-century Japanese history, then the grip of India on Japan was a fatal one; it was like a ‘black hole’ which ultimately devoured any culture which tried to raise up a beautiful, heroic, idealistic, or simply positive view of life, whether Western or Japanese. In short, India was the cultural homeland of passive nihilism in the Nietzschean sense, a worldview so bleak that it sapped away all will to action – a decadent worldview characterized by, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘the weary nihilism that no longer attacks ... a sign of weakness.’23 By no coincidence, Nietzsche, who exerted a major

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 252

6/30/2011 1:03:18 PM

From Mishima to Aum 253

influence on Mishima’s thought, also regarded Buddhism as the ‘most famous form’ of passive nihilism.24 Although Mishima’s ‘return to Japan’ did indeed take a more extreme form than that of most other modern Japanese writers, what really set it apart from the usual pattern is that it was based not so much on a rejection of the West as on a rejection of continental Asia. In this sense it was much closer in spirit to the ‘return to Japan’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Nativist scholars and revolutionaries than to the Nippon kaiki of his fellow Japanese writers of the twentieth century. A scholar in this earlier Nativist tradition, one Kaidō Masugi, is the Shinto teacher of the young terrorist Isao, hero of the second novel of the tetralogy, Runaway Horses. Kaidō views Buddhism as an insidious anti-life philosophy which ‘robbed the Japanese of their Yamato spirit, and their manly courage.’25 Furthermore: Kaido Masugi’s aversion to Buddhism was celebrated. Since he was an admirer of [Hirata] Atsutane, this was only to be expected, and it was his practice to make Atsutane’s diatribes against Buddha and Buddhism his own and to deliver them unchanged to his students. He condemned Buddhism for denying life and, as a consequence, denying that one could die for the Emperor, for knowing nothing of the ‘abundant life of the spirit’ and, as a consequence, shutting itself off from the essential, life-giving source that was the object of true devotion. And as for Karma, that was a philosophy of evil that reduced everything to nihilism.26 Western culture, on the other hand, is not seen as necessarily inimical to the Japanese warrior spirit. Indeed, the wartime alliance of Japan with Germany and Italy is celebrated in the same novel as ‘an alliance of German mythology, Roman mythology and the Kojiki, a friendship between the manly, beautiful, pagan gods of East and West.’27 Of course, all this is very much in harmony with the kind of overblown pseudomythologizing of the German Nazi and Italian fascist ideologues of the 1920s and 1930s. If Mishima can be said to have hoped for any concrete, positive result from his rightist activism – beyond the realization of a private fantasy – it was to ‘enhance the spiritual strength’ of Japanese men – to use the phrase in which Nietzsche defined the primary aim of active nihilism – by making their lives more ‘manly,’ more dangerous, more violent.28 When he argues that the Emperor is the indispensible cornerstone of Japanese culture – the ‘Emperor as cultural concept’ (bunkagainen toshite

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 253

6/30/2011 1:03:18 PM

254 Roy Starrs

no tennō), as he says in his late essay, ‘On the Defence of Culture’ (Bunka bōei ron, 1969) – what he means by ‘Japanese culture’ is not just such things as the tea ceremony and flower arrangement.29 What he means, above all, is the samurai warrior code of bushidō, the code according to which one resolves all moral conflicts ‘by choosing immediate death.’30 It is the divine Emperor who sanctifies this code – and, indeed, who enables the warrior to die happily. During the Pacific War, after all, all good Japanese soldiers were expected to die shouting: ‘Tennō Heika banzai!’ (‘Long live His Majesty the Emperor!’). Without the divine Emperor, the modern Japanese warrior would have nothing to die for. Mishima wholeheartedly accepted the American anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s characterization of Japanese culture as having ‘two sides,’ one peaceful and the other warlike, symbolized by the ‘chrysanthemum’ and the ‘sword.’31 And he felt that the ‘sword’ side had been increasingly neglected in modern times. It follows from this, of course, that, in order to reverse the process, in order to ‘remasculinize’ the Japanese male, the nation would have to become more warlike. Over the past century the process of ‘feminization’ had only worsened. In Runaway Horses the narrator speaks of the ‘spiritual massacre’ (seishin-teki gyakusatsu) that had been committed by the Meiji government in 1876 when it banned the wearing of swords.32 This symbolic ‘castration’ of the most manly of Japanese men – the samurai – was repeated on an even larger scale by the ‘emasculation’ of the Imperial Army after its humiliating defeat in the Pacific War: its reduction to the farcical status of a ‘self-defense force’ – as Mishima lamented in his ‘final address’ to members of this force on the day of his death. Being ‘condemned’ forever to play the contradictory role of a ‘pacifist army,’ the flower of Japanese manhood (as Mishima conceived the military to be) were no longer allowed to be ‘real men’ – aggressive, dangerous, quick to defend their honour with their lives; they were nothing more than paper tigers. But, if Japan could become once again a nation of swordsmen instead of salary men, the Emperor and the Imperial Army would naturally be restored to their rightful position. During his trial, Isao, the young 1930s right-wing terrorist, who serves as the ideal hero of the tetralogy, delivers a paean to the sun as the ‘true image of His Sacred Majesty.’33 When, after his release from jail, he finally succeeds in exercising his ‘assassin’s will’ and stabs to death the ‘un-Japanese’ capitalist Kurahara, the murder is justified on national-Shinto grounds: for Kurahara’s supposed ‘profanation’ of the major imperial shrine at Ise (by carelessly sitting on a sacred sakaki branch there). Thus Isao’s violent action, like other such actions by

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 254

6/30/2011 1:03:18 PM

From Mishima to Aum 255

1930s right-wing terrorists, is putatively undertaken in service to the emperor (even if actually against the imperial will), and in the hope of achieving a kind of mystical union with him in the death that will inevitably follow. Indeed, what really interests Mishima is the subsequent scene of Isao’s seppuku. He lingers over this in loving detail, and the final ‘explosion’ which occurs after Isao plunges the knife into his abdomen resembles nothing so much as a sexual orgasm – albeit one with the ‘sun-god emperor’ as his partner. As we have already seen, this idea of mystical union with the emperor was a keystone of 1930s Japanese fascist ideology. But it is interesting – and no doubt significant – to note that when the sun again appears in the very last scene of the tetralogy, to ‘punctuate’ Honda’s experience of nothingness, it is no longer the ‘divinized’ or anthropomorphized imperial sun but merely the ordinary, impersonal sun of a hot summer’s day – which, with its ruthless and unrelenting heat, seems only to reinforce the temple garden’s ‘message’ of the indifference, if not hostility, to man of the whole universe. The all-powerful, benevolent Emperor, fountainhead of the national culture, seems to have vanished into thin air along with all the other ‘illusory’ identities of the tetralogy. He is as conspicuously absent from this final scene as is Nietzsche’s famous ‘dead God’ from the novels of modern Western nihilists. Thus, in Mishima’s final tetralogy, the Nietzschean active/passive nihilist dialectic, used in earlier novels such as The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and Confessions of a Mask to define the basis of the psychological struggles of an individual protagonist, is brought onto a wider historical, religious, and philosophic stage: the Hindu–Buddhist worldview as passive nihilism is opposed by nationalist Shinto emperor-worship and rightist terrorism as active nihilism. Ironically, despite Mishima’s own obvious sympathy with the latter, the work’s despairing conclusion, its shattering of all illusions of value and faith, suggests that it is ‘Indian’ passive nihilism which triumphs in the end. But the ‘ending’ Mishima planned for his own life, although as consciously designed as the tetralogy’s ending, had quite the opposite import. In his final political manifestoes, including the one he delivered to Japanese troops just before his suicide, he argued that Japan could indeed be rescued from the morass of passive nihilism and recover its true warrior spirit – if only the military would disavow the Americanimposed ‘Peace Constitution,’ an emasculating insult to the nation, take back its proud pre-war status as the Imperial Army, and restore the Emperor to his proper position at the power centre of the national

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 255

6/30/2011 1:03:18 PM

256 Roy Starrs

polity. Always eager to show that, unlike most intellectuals, he was not afraid to put his ideas into action, on the final day of his life Mishima signed the last page of the tetralogy, then set off with some members of his private army to attempt his ‘takeover’ of the Japanese Self-Defense Force headquarters in Tokyo. Although he would end his own life in a gruesomely violent way – hardly a positive outcome from most points of view – Mishima was fond of pointing to what he saw as a crucial difference between the Japanese and the Judeo-Christian tradition: that in the Japanese tradition suicide is often regarded as a kind of moral victory. By committing ritual suicide in the traditional samurai manner, he no doubt hoped that it would be accepted by his fellow countrymen in this spirit. And one must admit that, although most Japanese initially regarded his seppuku as the act of a madman or a vulgar exhibitionist, under the patina of time it has assumed more of a legendary status and, at least in rightwing circles, Mishima is now firmly established in the national pantheon of martyrs and heroes.

The politicized religion of Asahara Shōkō As might be expected, the shocking sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by Aum Shinrikyō provoked intense debate as to its ultimate ‘meaning’ for contemporary Japan. Was it a terrible ‘one-off’ or an augury of things to come? Was it a symptom of a widespread malaise among a well-educated younger generation disenchanted with modernday Japan’s materialistic ‘economic animal’ lifestyle? (Some of the Aum members were products of the country’s most elite universities.) What would be its long-term impact on the Japanese people’s (already rather lukewarm) attitude to religion? The most thoughtful treatment of the subject in English is by Ian Reader, who rejects attempts to sensationalize or to dismiss the group as an ‘evil cult’ unrelated to ‘genuine religion.’ On the contrary, Reader shows that this ‘new religion’ drew much of its ideology and practices from traditional, established religions, but carried certain aspects of these – especially the sense of its own righteousness and consequent alienation from an irreligious, materialistic society – to such an extreme that it finally resorted to a ‘holy war’ against that society. Thus, ‘Aum Shinrikyō provides us with a salient example of the violence-producing dimensions of religion and reminds us of how religious movements can, through a confluence of circumstances, engender, legitimate and commit acts of violence in the name of their faith.’34 Needless to say,

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 256

6/30/2011 1:03:18 PM

From Mishima to Aum 257

all that we have learned in recent years about the ‘violence-producing dimensions’ of even ‘orthodox’ religions – in the Japanese as in other contexts – makes Reader’s argument quite easy to accept. Indeed, some social analysts even claim that Japan is now living in a ‘post-Aum age’ in which all religion has become seriously suspect in the eyes of the Japanese people. The novelist Murakami Haruki, for instance, in his collection of profoundly moving interviews with victims of the Tokyo subway gas attack (and a few Aum members), relates the attack to another tragic event that occurred just two months earlier – the Kobe earthquake – and claims that these two events created a mid-1990s double trauma for the Japanese national psyche, a trauma from which it will not soon recover: The Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo gas attack of January and March 1995 are two of the greatest tragedies in Japan’s postwar history. It is no exaggeration to say that there was a marked change in the Japanese consciousness ‘before’ and ‘after’ these events.35 But Murakami, in a way that is entirely apropos to the central concerns of the present volume, believes that the long-term repercussions of these two events will be as much political as religious, since he also claims that, coming in the wake of the bursting of Japan’s ‘bubble economy,’ they have ‘ushered in a period of critical inquiry into the very roots of the Japanese state’ – in other words, into what has traditionally been called the kokutai.36

Aum’s radical challenge to the Kokutai The religio-political goals of Aum were nothing if not ambitious. Not only did they aim to replace State Shinto with State Aum, they also intended to replace the democratic government headed by the Heisei Emperor as its symbolic sovereign with a religio-fascist dictatorship headed by Emperor Asahara as absolute sovereign. Aum organized itself as a mirror image of the Japanese government, complete with ‘twentyfour separate ministries and agencies, all of them comparable to the government with similar functions and responsibilities.’37 Thus, the sect’s elaborate political structure was ready to precisely replace and replicate that of the established government after the imminent Armageddon that Asahara had prophesied (and ultimately would try to engineer). In order to precipitate the state’s collapse, the gas attack was organized with military precision as a coordinated strike on all the major subway lines

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 257

6/30/2011 1:03:18 PM

258 Roy Starrs

leading to the heart of the Japanese government in Kasumigaseki – and designed time-wise, too, to kill thousands of government bureaucrats on their way to work in the morning. Because, in post-Armageddon Tokyo, Asahara himself planned to assume the position of emperor, he had also already established his own imperial-style ‘Household Agency,’ exactly like the real Japanese emperor’s. Absurdly overambitious as these goals might seem, the Aum phenomenon could not just be laughed away. From a practical viewpoint, of course, Asahara’s attempted coup d’état, like Mishima’s, was a feeble and inept affair, ridiculous apart from its tragic consequences; but, like Mishima’s again, it also seemed to many observers symptomatic of serious, deeper, and wider discontents, anxieties, and uncertainties in the Japanese society of its day, a general sense that something was wrong with the body politic and perhaps even with the nation’s ‘spiritual condition.’ Certainly both Mishima and Asahara encouraged exactly this interpretation of the terrorist incidents they launched. Both exploited Japan’s religion-influenced ‘seishin culture,’ the complex of traditional popular–cultural beliefs about the health or sickness of the human ‘spirit,’ to justify their acts of ‘spiritually purifying’ violence. As Mishima asked the assembled troops in his ‘last speech:’ ‘Is there no one who will die by hurling his body against the [‘Peace’] Constitution which has mutilated her? If there is, let us rise together even now, and let us die together. It is in the fervent hope that you who are pure in spirit will once again be men and true bushi that we have resorted to this act.’38 And Asahara, who by 1995 had taken to seeing himself as a manifestation of the destructive side of the Hindu god Shiva, justified his murderous attack by claiming that it would ‘purify’ a ‘decadent’ Japanese society.39 Although, of course, there were important religio-political and cultural differences between the ‘cures’ the two men prescribed for an ailing society, it must also be said that their ‘prescriptions’ were both fundamentally in tune with a major twentieth-century religio-political tradition: namely, that of fascism. Politically, Aum may be regarded as a proto-fascist movement – in the sense defined by Umberto Eco. Speaking of the essential characteristics of what he calls ‘Ur-Fascism’ – that is, fascism in its most basic and universal form – Eco explains the origins of fascism’s ‘Armageddon complex,’ in words that seem perfectly applicable to Aum (indeed, Asahara adopted the Christian idea of ‘Armageddon’ in precisely the way Eco specifies): For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 258

6/30/2011 1:03:18 PM

From Mishima to Aum 259

life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world.40 Indeed, had Asahara actually achieved his political ambitions, he would have created a new form of Japanese fascism, more revolutionary than the 1930s variety in its total rejection of the Meiji kokutai, and closer to the ‘revolutionary’ European fascism that broke completely with the established authorities of the past. As it turned out, sarin gas was not the only thing he borrowed from the Nazis; his worldview had much in common with theirs – even to the reductio ad absurdum of a Japanese religious leader espousing anti-Semitism. In January 1995 ‘the sect formally declared war on the Jewish people, which it described ... as “the hidden enemy” and “the world shadow government,”’ echoing traditional Nazi and other anti-Semitic propaganda, and even accusing some of their wealthy and cosmopolitan compatriots of being ‘Jewish Japanese.’41 Apart from this increasing demonization of all manner of outsiders as the ‘enemy,’ in its ‘internal affairs’ too Aum began to show all the classic signs of a group or society undergoing fascistic transmogrification: the demand for absolute submission to the leader, who is increasingly presented as a perfect and omniscient, godlike figure (‘Mussolini is always right,’ as a popular fascist slogan of the 1920s proclaimed); the sacralization of politics and the politicization of religion; absolute totalitarian control of members’ lives, including thought control (one of the original and most notorious contributions of Aum in this area was the electric headset, which Asahara’s followers wore supposedly to attune their brainwaves to the Master’s); this was matched by zero tolerance for, and violent suppression of, any hint of dissent; increasing militarization of members’ daily lives and of the group’s power structure; and the ultimate glorification of violence as a good or end in itself – as, indeed, the royal road to salvation. In his chapter in the present volume, Kevin Doak asks an intriguing question vis-à-vis the possibility of seeing Aum as symptomatic of some larger truths about Japanese religio-political culture: the sensationalism of that terrorist attack may have distracted attention from a broader and more fundamental challenge that continues to inform debates over religion and politics in Japan: how the modern state dealt with Shintoism at its very outset in the late nineteenth century. Shinto activists figured prominently among the revolutionaries

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 259

6/30/2011 1:03:19 PM

260

Roy Starrs

who gave birth to the Meiji State. Does the historical fact of religious activists influential at the birth of the modern Japanese state mean that religion (at least Shintoism) will always be inextricably linked to politics in modern Japan? Did the ‘restoration’ of the Meiji monarch as a Shinto ruler constitute a fundamental compromise of religious freedom in modern Japan? And, in any event, did the postwar revision of the Religious Organization Law and the new Constitution of 1946 render that earlier history irrelevant? Perhaps lying underneath such questions is an implicit, cultural essentialist one: is there something unique in Japanese attitudes about religion and politics that weaves together the warp of Shinto revolutionaries and the woof of Aum terrorists of more recent memory? In a sense, then, one could argue that the modern kokutai, constructed, in its initial form, during the Meiji period, prepared the way for a postmodern political religion such as Aum, which was also founded on the premise that politics and religion should join together for the national good. In fact, Aum was not the first fascistic new religion to challenge the established kokutai: most notably, the pre-war Ōmoto-kyō, although deriving its beliefs largely from Shinto, deviated from the official State Shinto line by questioning the supremacy among the gods of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. Since Amaterasu was officially considered to be the imperial ancestress, this amounted to lèse-majesté, and the sect was ruthlessly suppressed in 1935. Also, as Sheldon Garon has pointed out: Its charismatic patriarch organized paramilitary groups, and he mimicked the sacrosanct emperor by reviewing them mounted on a white horse. Perhaps Omotokyo’s eeriest resemblance to Aum lies in their common prophesy of an impending apocalyptic war with the United States, which would destroy all of Japan except their own compounds. In contrast to Aum, however, neither Omotokyo nor any other prewar new religion was ever charged with committing violent acts to bring about that apocalypse.42 Indeed, as Garon suggests, none of these earlier ‘new religions’ seemed to pose anywhere near as serious a threat to the state as was posed by Aum. Ōmoto-kyō’s ‘charismatic patriarch’ may have mimicked the emperor by riding on a white horse, but he never dared suggest that he should replace the emperor at the heart of the kokutai. Such mad effrontery – or political recklessness – was inconceivable in the 1930s, but obviously it had become quite conceivable by the 1990s.

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 260

6/30/2011 1:03:19 PM

From Mishima to Aum 261

What made it conceivable, of course, was not just Asahara’s personal arrogance or megalomania but the momentous social, political, and ideological changes that Japan had undergone in the intervening six decades. To understand the nature of these profound changes more clearly, we will consider, again, the difference in religio-political motivation between the ‘two incidents’ of 1970 and 1995.

Mishima’s attempt to restore the ‘sacred canopy’ In Nihilism (Nihirizumu), a volume of stories and essays he edited in 1968, the nationalist philosopher and cultural critic Umehara Takeshi credits Mishima with being the first to recognize the nihilist philosophical and moral implications of the post-war Japanese version of the ‘death of God’ – the Emperor’s renunciation of his divinity: This collapse of the godhead of the Emperor was really a metaphysical kind of event (keijijogaku-teki jiken] in Japan. Mishima Yukio was the one who noticed this – though rather a long time after the event itself. Unlike Sakaguchi [Ango] or the scholars demobilized after the war, he had not staked his life on the Emperor and then experienced nihilism when the imperial system collapsed. Rather he was a thinker about the reality of the confusion of values after the defeat. Something was missing in peace and democracy. Intense enthusiasm was lacking, and thus Mishima longed for his past in which this enthusiasm and faith existed. Did not faith in the Emperor exist exactly as this kind of enthusiasm and faith some twenty years before? He depended on the reality of the existence of this kind of god, and criticized the corruption of those people who had lost this god. And Mishima criticized the human emperor, asking whether it was not a breach of faith for a god to confess that he was not a god.43 The Mishima of whom Umehara is speaking here is the Mishima of the 1960s. It was not until then that he began explicitly to discuss the ‘metaphysical’ or ‘nihilist’ import of the Emperor’s renunciation of his godhead. There is an echo here, of course, of the crisis in modern Western culture that Nietzsche prophesied would result from the ‘death of God’ in the Judeo-Christian context. More recently, the sociologist of religion Peter Berger argued that modern secularism has eroded the ‘sacred canopy’ that human beings need as a shield against anomie – that is, against a sense of nothingness, meaninglessness, and despair. Expanding on

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 261

6/30/2011 1:03:19 PM

262

Roy Starrs

this key insight, Roger Griffin has applied it to the ‘psychodynamics’ of fascism, which he sees as an attempt to restore the ‘sheltering sky’ in the face of the ‘primordial terror induced by modernity:’ ‘A modern political movement born of nomic as well as socio-economic crisis is thus the manifestation of the collective search for a new nomos, a new community living under a new sky.’44 Although no doubt ‘new’ in a sense, the fascist and Nazi projects also involved the putative ‘revival’ of ancient Roman and Teutonic religious mythologies. As we have already seen, this ‘mythological’ aspect of the fascist and Nazi ideologies was highly attractive to Mishima, who celebrated the wartime alliance of Japan with Germany and Italy as ‘an alliance of German mythology, Roman mythology and the Kojiki, a friendship between the manly, beautiful, pagan gods of East and West.’45 As Emilio Gentile has pointed out, myth and ritual were used by fascist regimes to ‘sacralize’ politics: ‘The sacralisation of politics takes place when politics is conceived, lived and represented through myths, rituals and symbols that demand faith in the sacralised secular entity, dedication among the community of believers, enthusiasm for action, a warlike spirit and sacrifice in order to secure its defence and its triumph. In such cases, it is possible to speak of religions of politics in that politics itself assumes religious characteristics.’46 And Roger Griffin has also shown that at the heart of this mythological revival was the fascist and Nazi belief in the myth of a timeless, essentialized ‘nation’ – for instance, in Hitler’s case, what he called the ‘eternal German nation’ and the ‘eternal values of blood and soil’ – which needed to be restored by a violent process of ‘purging’ and ‘purification.’ As Griffin explains (in words that could apply equally to Asahara and his followers and, though perhaps less obviously, to Mishima and his): ‘It was the projection onto Hitler of this temporalized utopia of a purified society created within historical time that lay at the heart of the Hitler cult, and allowed him to assume the role of the propheta leading his new community through its collective rite of passage into the new world beyond decadence and decay.’47 Following upon this, of course, was perhaps the central fascist myth, a myth found in both the political and religious varieties of fascism (if the two can be distinguished): the myth of the redeeming power of violence. In short, the ‘purified society’ that is ‘beyond decadence and decay’ could be achieved only by violent force, whether in the form of ‘small-scale’ terrorist attacks or by ‘ethnic cleansing’ on a massive genocidal scale. Hermann Rauschning, a German scholar of the 1930s, described the recent Nazi assumption of power as the ‘revolution of nihilism,’

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 262

6/30/2011 1:03:19 PM

From Mishima to Aum 263

and explained clearly how its typically terrorist emphasis on ‘direct action’ – in other words, violence – was related to its nihilist philosophy/ psychology: Direct action is defined as ‘direct integration by means of corporativism, militarism, and myth;’ this is to replace democracy and parliamentarism. But the true significance of direct action lies in its assignment of the central place in its policy to violence, which it then surrounds with a special philosophical interpretation of reality. Briefly this philosophical system amounts to the belief that the use of violence in a supreme effort liberates creative moral forces in human society which lead to social and national renewal. ... The barbaric element of violence ... is the one element that can change a social order. ... [Such is] the logical and inevitable outcome of the National Socialist philosophy, of the doctrine of violence.48 Mishima’s own readiness to use violence in support of his right-wing agenda, then, places him squarely within the ‘mainstream’ of twentieth-century fascism. This also means that his politics were entirely consistent with the rest of his ‘nihilist program’ – a fact which might easily be missed if they were viewed exclusively within a national context. Indeed, if Mishima’s ultranationalism were regarded only as a narrowly Japanese phenomenon, it might well seem an unaccountable anomaly – in fact, it has often been depicted as merely an eccentric or quixotic blend of politics with aesthetics or, worse yet, with personal psychosis. The great majority of post-war Japanese writers and intellectuals identified themselves as liberal democrats, socialists, or communists, and thus welcomed the spread of democracy, the ‘Peace Constitution,’ the de-deification of the Emperor, and the relegation of the military to the status of a ‘self-defense force.’ In his perception of all these ‘reforms’ as inimical to the ‘Japanese spirit,’ Mishima found himself almost alone among the leading intellectuals of his generation. In his ‘New Theory of Fascism,’ Mishima tried to dissociate himself – and the wartime Japanese nationalists – from the European fascists by pointing to what he saw as some crucial differences: Japanese nationalism was not based on a systematic, man-made philosophy such as that of fascism but on Emperor-worship; it did not appeal to the intelligentsia as fascism appealed to many European nihilists; and, finally: The genesis of fascism is inseparably linked to the spiritual conditions of Europe from the latter part of the nineteenth century to the

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 263

6/30/2011 1:03:19 PM

264

Roy Starrs

beginning of this century. And the fascist leaders themselves were definite nihilists. Nothing could be further than fascism from the optimism of the Japanese right wing.49 Though he grants that the Japanese ultranationalists were as racist as the fascists, he contends that racism is only a ‘secondary phenomenon’ of fascism: ‘What the Japanese right wing had in common with fascism was mainly this secondary aspect ...’50 and this is simply because ‘racism is the easiest weapon to use ...’ – presumably, to arouse the masses.51 But Mishima’s attempts here to befuddle those leftist critics who would associate him with the fascists are somewhat disingenuous. While there may be a cultural or stylistic difference between pledging blind obedience to a tennō on the one hand and a Führer or a duce on the other, for the fascist both these ‘acts of submission’ may be made to serve the same purpose: forging a whole populace into one mass expression of the national will to power. As Walter Skya has pointed out, the Japanese militarists’ ideological mobilization of their citizens for a ‘holy war’ against the West was based on a more personalized form of emperor-worship than that constructed in the Meiji period: ‘Personal union with the emperor was the individual’s ultimate objective; it was this objective that was at the heart of radical Shintō ultranationalist ideology.’52 Mishima’s own exaltation of blind devotion to the Emperor as deity certainly fits this fascist pattern; and, on the other hand, the European fascist’s exaltation of blind submission to a Hitler or a Mussolini as personifications of the national will to power was every bit as ‘suprarational’ or ‘mystical’ as emperor-worship. During the last decade of his life, Mishima, as we have seen, devoted all his energies, both as a writer and as a political activist, precisely to an attempt to restore the ‘sacred canopy’ of State Shinto with the ‘divine emperor’ at its core – knowing full well that, without these, the modern kokutai had become meaningless and was no longer viable as a religio-political system. And, on the very last day of his life, his final act was a desperate attempt either to realize this goal or to inspire others to do so in the future. As he said in his exhortation to the assembled troops just before committing seppuku: What kind of an army is it that has no higher value than life? Right now we will show you that there is a value higher than reverence for life.

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 264

6/30/2011 1:03:19 PM

From Mishima to Aum 265

It is neither freedom nor democracy. It is Japan. Japan, the country whose history and traditions we love. Is there no one who will die by hurling his body against the [‘Peace’] Constitution which has mutilated her? If there is, let us rise together even now, and let us die together. It is in the fervent hope that you who are pure in spirit will once again be men and true bushi that we have resorted to this act [his terrorist attack on the SDF headquarters].53

Asahara’s attempt to replace the ‘sacred canopy’ Mishima, then, tried to restore the ‘sheltering sky’ of the pre-war kokutai. Coming a few decades later, Asahara knew that it was far too late for that; indeed, he may be said to have ‘exploited’ the spiritual vacuum that remained for his own nefarious purposes. He knew instinctively that the ‘sheltering sky’ was severely eroded and he saw in this an opportunity for himself: to offer his own newly minted political religion as a substitute ‘shelter’ for a ‘lost generation.’ In this sense he was the right man at the right time, which is no doubt why he was able to attract many thousands of followers in such a remarkably short time. For a new generation of young Japanese ‘disinherited minds,’ he seemed to hold out far more promise of meaning and purpose than any ‘archaic’ Mishimaesque scheme for a ‘Heisei Restoration’ of the imperial, national-Shinto kokutai. In other words, the ‘Aum generation,’ unlike Mishima, was historically too far removed from the post-war collapse of the imperial godhead and the kokutai to believe in the possibility – or even in the desirability – of its restoration (something so many young Japanese revolutionaries had demanded in the past). For Asahara and his followers, the modern kokutai could not be restored but only replaced, albeit with a new form of fascistic political religion. Both Mishima and Asahara struggled to achieve some kind of ‘reconfiguration’ or ‘readjustment’ of the interplay between politics and religion in Japan; like the Shinto activists, they both sought to transform their religious vision into a ‘state religion,’ a kind of totalitarian theocracy. And, like the Shinto revolutionaries, both were willing to resort to terrorist violence to achieve their religio-political goals. But there is a crucial distinction between Asahara’s religio-politics and those of both Mishima and the nineteenth-century Shinto activists: Asahara’s complete break with the modern imperial state to create a wholly new ‘counter-kokutai.’ This is precisely what makes Aum a ‘postmodern’ phenomenon.

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 265

6/30/2011 1:03:19 PM

266 Roy Starrs

Aum and post-modernity Certain more immediate historical factors – namely, the ‘collapse’ of the booming Japanese economy of the 1980s and the continuing rise of a global post-modern culture – no doubt also played a part in making it unlikely that young Japanese of the 1990s would be receptive to a ‘Heisei Restoration’ or, in other words, any attempt to ‘restore’ the modern nationalist kokutai. The 1980s were a golden age for Japanese nationalists, with the economy booming and Japan predicted to soon overtake the US economically and become, as the title of Harvard professor Ezra Vogel’s bestseller proclaimed, ‘Number One.’ Politically, the right wing was newly ascendant, with ultranationalist Prime Minister Nakasone in power for much of the period, a close ally of the archconservatives Reagan and Thatcher in the US and Britain. By cruel contrast, the following two decades were a far less happy time – a time, quite literally, ‘to try men’s souls.’ With the economic collapse that occurred shortly after the death of the Shōwa emperor (Hirohito) in 1989 – a historical moment charged with immense symbolic significance for the Japanese – the post-war ‘golden age’ seemed to have come to an abrupt end, and many Japanese again felt troubled or confused in their relationship with modernity. Thus, it was inevitable that the Aum incident would be interpreted as symptomatic of a wider malaise in the postboom Japan of the 1990s. Indeed, certain diehard nationalists took the Aum incident as a kind of call to arms, convincing them of the imperative need to revive the kokutai for the sake of the nation’s ‘spiritual health.’ The ultranationalist cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori, for instance, whose cartoons glorifying Japan’s ‘liberation’ of Asia in the Pacific War have sold tens of millions of copies, suggests that the Aum attack traumatized him and others into embracing ultranationalism. In short, he became convinced that the doomsday cult’s attack was an extreme expression of the alienation of the Japanese from their own past, an alienation which has cut them off from the source of a stable belief and value system. In other words, like many other social analysts, he sees the attack as a product of postmodern anomie. As he told John Nathan: ‘We have a responsibility. ... If we reject our inheritance we create the emptiness we live in now.’54 As an antidote to what he sees as Japan’s masochistic obsequiousness and lack of a strong and confident sense of national identity, Kobayashi urges his fellow countrymen to become more ‘arrogant’ in order to free themselves from foreign – especially American and Chinese – influences and pressures (or intimidations)! And he also advocates a revival

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 266

6/30/2011 1:03:19 PM

From Mishima to Aum 267

of the pre-war kokutai. He ends Sensōron (On War, 1998), his comic book glorifying Japan’s role in the Pacific War, with the following rhetorical flourish: ‘May I be an arrogantist? Japan is a country of the gods. ... We must never forget that legacy, where we came from and who we are.’55 A more mainstream attempt to revive the kokutai has come from the conservative political establishment, which has toyed in various ways with resurrecting a somewhat ‘toned-down’ or more politically respectable version of pre-war nationalism. The establishment attitude is perhaps best – or most notoriously – symbolized by Prime Minister Mori’s public pronouncement in 2000 that ‘Japan is a divine land centered on the emperor,’ but there have been a long series of ‘kokutai-friendly’ official and unofficial policies and projects: from restoring the national flag and anthem to schools to authorizing revisionist (more nationalistic) history textbooks, other hints of emperor-worship and national-Shintō mysticism in public pronouncements by politicians, the more frequent use of pre-war national symbols, including, as John Breen explains herein, the Yasukuni Shrine as a memorial to the heroic war dead – and even the evocation of a possible revival of pan-Asianism. Nonetheless, it seems unlikely that any of these government-sponsored efforts to revive the pre-war kokutai will have a very deep or lasting effect on the younger generation. The rise of global post-modern culture (aided by travel, education, mass media, and the Internet) has produced a new generation who seem so different from ‘traditional’ Japanese that their elders call them shinjinrui (‘a new species of human’). These sophisticated, well-travelled, cosmopolitan youth are hardly promising subjects for a conversion to a revived national Shinto or emperor cult. On the other hand, some of the ‘best and brightest’ of them obviously did prove susceptible to a new-age transnational ‘hybrid’ religion like Aum, a syncretic religious hodgepodge. One might well ask why. As has often been pointed out, post-modern culture is pre-eminently a culture of choice and, as a consequence of this historically unprecedented ‘freedom of choice,’ a culture that is increasingly transnational and hybridized. The archetypal cultural products and primary symbols of life in a globalized, late capitalist society are the supermarkets, megastores, and shopping malls, with their ever-growing abundance and variety of consumer goods that leave the customer ‘spoiled for choice.’ In such a society, shopping becomes a major pastime. Indeed, as one sociologist has remarked: ‘shopping is no longer just a chore but a way of life.’56 And the more important point is that this unprecedented level of individual ‘free choice’ seems to extend also to matters of personal identity. Not only can we choose from among a myriad of material and

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 267

6/30/2011 1:03:20 PM

268 Roy Starrs

cultural products but also, cut off from the past and from all kinds of traditions, we can also choose our personal life-style, identity, beliefs, and values. We ‘life-stylize’ continually to construct ourselves, freely selecting the components of our identity from potentially an almost infinite range of different ‘cosmopolitan’ sources. At least, so says the great post-modern myth. In this respect, Aum was a typically post-modern ‘new new religion:’ its teachings represented a veritable smorgasbord of world religious traditions, with fragments drawn from Hinduism, Yoga, Vedanta, Tantric Buddhism, Zen, Christianity, and rival new religions – all of it given a unique ‘twist,’ of course, as it passed through the rather overheated brain of the self-styled ‘Ultimate Liberated Master,’ Asahara himself, whose worldview seemed to have been shaped, again in a very postmodern way, as much by science-fiction cartoons and comic books as by his readings in the ‘sacred texts’ of global religions.57 We can see this clearly, for instance, in the contrast between his attitude towards India as a post-modern cosmopolite and Mishima’s as a modern nationalist. As it happens, India played an interesting, if unexpected, role in both men’s lives and thought: the India that was the ultimate source of Japan’s ‘universal’ religion, Buddhism. We have already seen its meaning for Mishima. But, if Mishima sought to banish the feared Indian influence from Japan forever, Asahara may be said to have brought it back with a vengeance. Like Mishima, Asahara travelled to India in search of some kind of ‘enlightenment.’ But his experiences there, at least as he himself reported them, were far more positive and uplifting than Mishima’s. In this sense, of course, both men found what they were looking for: India provided a negative contrasting continental-Asian ‘other’ to Japan for the anti-Buddhist Mishima, and an equally positive ‘other’ to Japan for Asahara, who drew from both Buddhism and Hinduism to create his ‘new religion.’ For Mishima and his followers Japan was the land of the gods, the fountainhead of all goodness and spiritual purity; India, on the other hand, represented every kind of evil and decadence. For Asahara and his followers it was exactly the opposite. As Ian Reader points out: ‘India was a potent image and a popular religious destination in Aum. It was a holy land (seishi) which Asahara visited on many occasions and where he had some of his formative religious experiences.’58 On his ‘pilgrimage’ to India in 1986, Asahara, by his own account, practiced meditation alone in the Himalayas for two months, by the end of which time he became ‘the first Japanese in history to have attained ultimate liberation.’59 Whatever actually happened

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 268

6/30/2011 1:03:20 PM

From Mishima to Aum 269

to him in India, he certainly came away with an inflated sense of his own importance, and even megalomaniac delusions of grandeur, claiming that he was now the spiritual equal of the Buddha and would ‘restore ‘original Buddhism’ (genshi Bukkyō) to the world.’60 He also claimed that he had met a number of gurus in India who predicted that Japan faced imminent destruction and only he could save it.61 This enabled him to quite effectively practice the oldest kind of ‘religious blackmail’ in the world, which might be paraphrased as: ‘Accept my religion (and me) as supreme or face an unprecedented apocalypse!’ Thus Asahara’s ‘sense of mission’ was clarified and greatly strengthened by his sojourn in India. It tells us something about the Zeitgeist of the 1980s that a founder of a Japanese new religion at that time felt it necessary to turn to India’s religious culture, rather than Japan’s own, to provide the indispensible foundation in a ‘genuine’ religious tradition – in other words, the imprimatur or ‘proof of authenticity’ both of his new religion and of his own inflated self-presentation as a great guru to Japan and the world. He even went so far as to adopt the outer trappings of a stereotypical Indian guru, by then so familiar from mass media images, growing his hair and beard long and wearing flowing white robes. And, of course, the very name he chose for his new religion, ‘Aum,’ pointed to its putative Indian origins. Even in his references to Buddhist scripture, he showed a preference for the Pali sutras of Theravadin (South Asian) Buddhism rather than the Sanskrit sutras of traditional Japanese Mahayana Buddhism. Asahara was canny enough to realize that, in late-twentieth-century post-modern, globalized Japan, the younger generations who had absorbed pop-cultural ‘new age’ religious influences since the 1960s were more likely to follow an ‘Indian-style guru’ than anyone who looked or sounded like a traditional Japanese-style religious figure. As D.W. Brackett writes: ‘To many young people [in Japan] the image of traditional Buddhism is one of elaborate funeral services held in ornate temples, and most show very little interest in the established sects of Japanese Buddhism.’62 Significantly, too, Asahara drew inspiration from Hinduism as well as Buddhism – although it may be said that his Hinduism seems closer to the pop-cultural, cartoonish, Indiana Jones (Kali Ma! Kali Ma!) version than to the real thing. As we have seen, he was especially attracted to the Hindu deity Shiva, the ‘destroyer god’ in one of his aspects, whom Asahara interpreted in his own increasingly nihilistic way as his worldview darkened and he decided that he must resort to violence. Thus Shiva ultimately was transmogrified in the Aum leader’s exhortations to his followers into a kind of patron god of terrorism. As Reader

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 269

6/30/2011 1:03:20 PM

270

Roy Starrs

points out, Shiva became ‘Aum’s main image of worship,’ Asahara often claimed to be guided by messages received from the god, and finally he began to claim that he himself was a manifestation of Shiva.63 Thus the final acts of mayhem and murder perpetrated by Asahara and his followers against a ‘decadent’ Japanese society could be justified as paradoxical Shiva-like acts of ‘creative destruction,’ purifying or even saving the ‘unenlightened’ by ‘compassionately’ murdering them. Of course, this was not the first time in religious history that ‘true believers’ have been guided by such a perverse logic. Just the year before he launched the subway attack, Asahara announced to his followers that ‘he had received a message from Shiva, informing him that the time for war had come, and that only he (Asahara) could purify this polluted world.’64 As Reader points out, in the ‘final stage in Aum’s violence’ its ‘sacred war against evil became a real one’ and the talented young scientists among its members began to prepare chemical weapons to be used indiscriminately against their fellow Japanese.65 Thus Asahara’s total rejection of the kokutai, and especially the religio-political manner and cultural style in which he expressed that rejection, with what might be called his ‘counter-kokutai ideology,’ seems so thoroughly characteristic of the ‘post-modern’ Japan of the 1990s that it is hard to imagine it as having occurred in any previous age.

Conclusion In the 1930s idealistic young people who were concerned about Japan’s ‘spiritual decline’ because of ‘decadent Western influence’ were sometimes persuaded to join right-wing terrorist groups. These groups were motivated by a radical Shinto ideology that convinced them that the ultimate good was to die – or to kill – for the emperor and his empire, and thus to help return their divine nation to its true pristine spirit. It was these ‘pure-hearted’ youth whom Mishima celebrated in his fiction and whom he emulated on that final day of his life in 1970. Even in 1970, of course, Mishima’s action seemed somewhat anachronistic, a throwback to the famous young radical right-wing coup attempt of February 1936 (a historical echo no doubt intended by Mishima, who hero-worshipped those young rebel officers in particular66). In other words, Mishima’s national-Shinto, emperor-worshipping, militarist, fascist, and ultranationalist political religion represented the response to modernity of an earlier generation of nationalists, an attempt to ‘overcome modernity’ by reviving certain privileged and often imaginary or mythical aspects of the national tradition. As a member of the last generation who had

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 270

6/30/2011 1:03:20 PM

From Mishima to Aum 271

fought for that vision of the imperial kokutai, Mishima in 1970 could still bring himself to believe in its religio-political viability. But if he hoped by the example of his own ‘death for the great cause’ to inspire such ‘pure-hearted’ national-Shinto, emperor-worshipping fervour in future generations of young Japanese, his efforts seem to have been in vain. By the 1990s similar groups of young idealists, equally convinced that a post-modern Japan was spiritually bankrupt because of the evil influence of Western materialism, were too far removed from their native religio-political traditions to follow any such program as Mishima had espoused. Rather, somewhat bizarrely but in a way typical of the global post-modern age, they preferred to follow a pseudo-guru who sought to transform himself into a pseudo-emperor and who inspired them with his syncretic mélange of transnational religious traditions and stereotypical pop-cultural notions of ‘spiritual power.’ Asahara and his followers had little interest in the national tradition; for them India, not Japan, was the sacred land. Thus, in many respects, they were highly representative of a younger, more globalized generation of post-modern Japanese. Although just as uneasy as Mishima with the ‘materialism,’ ‘corruption,’ and ‘decadence’ of late capitalist society, they sought salvation or spiritual purification not through any revival of national-Shinto or imperial tradition, but rather, in a typically post-modern way, in an apocalyptic cult or ‘new religion’ that was a veritable smorgasbord of undigested tidbits of world religions mixed with a worldview concocted largely from science-fiction comic books, video games, and cartoons. Their cultural style was popular or ‘low-cultural’ rather than elite or high-cultural; transnational and hybrid rather than ‘purely’ national. Both politically and religiously, Aum and its actions did not fit into any traditional category. Could there be any clearer evidence that, by 1995, the Meiji kokutai, and the national-Shinto ideology that supported it, was well beyond hope of ‘restoration?’ I have argued here that the different character of two incidents of latetwentieth-century religio-political violence in Japan, in 1970 and 1995 – and the different character of their principal perpetrators, Mishima and Asahara – tells us something important about the changes the island nation underwent in the intervening quarter century, culturally as well as socio-politically. In general, as one would expect, the influence of traditional, national, and high-cultural values and beliefs markedly declined, and global, transnational, post-modern, and pop-cultural influences became increasingly predominant. More specifically, these social and cultural changes inevitably also produced a fundamental change in the relation between politics and religion. The late-nineteenth-century

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 271

6/30/2011 1:03:20 PM

272

Roy Starrs

State Shinto kokutai was a spent force by the 1990s, no longer viable either politically or religiously, and the Aum incident was interpreted by some as an ominous sign that dangerous new political religions – far more dangerous even than the Sōka Gakkai – might try to replace it, should significant portions of the Japanese population become dissatisfied with their secular or non-sectarian democracy. In other words, the State Shinto kokutai first constructed in the Meiji period no longer sufficed as a ‘sheltering sky’ for vast numbers of Japanese, especially of the younger generation, the ‘Murakami generation,’ and younger, despite the continuing and increasingly desperate efforts of the (mostly older) conservative political establishment to revive that moribund religiopolitical system and worldview. The leading perpetrators of the two incidents, Mishima and Asahara, were probably the two most troubling and controversial figures of the latter half of the twentieth century in Japan, and two of the most threatening to the political establishment. Both staged terrorist incidents designed to bring down the Japanese government of their day and to replace it with a kind of fascist theocracy or sacral political system ruled by a divine emperor (in the case of Asahara, himself). Both considered – or at least claimed to consider – the Japan of their own day to be decadent, materialistic, overly Americanized, and inimical to the ‘spiritual’ life, which for Mishima was the life of the self-sacrificing warrior ready to die for the emperor, and for Asahara the life of the bodhisattva ‘holy warrior’ willing to sacrifice himself for the ‘enlightenment’ of others (at least, that was the traditional Mahayana Buddhist doctrine with which he exhorted his disciples). Although Mishima attempted to restore the modern kokutai and Asahara to replace it, in another sense they were both true to its spirit – in the limited sense that they both aimed for a revival of sacral politics, a reunion of church and state. Thus, in both cases, their terrorist actions seemed to be motivated first and foremost by a religio-political goal. And yet, and yet ... in both cases, there also seemed something more to the story than that. In both men there was a complex personal psychology at work that complicated their politics and their religion and created a puzzling air of ambiguity about their ideas, actions, and beliefs. Did Mishima actually believe his attempted coup had any real chance of success? And did he really believe in the divinity of the emperor and that he would achieve a mystical union with him in death? Did Asahara actually believe his gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system, near the government headquarters in Kasumigaseki, had any real chance of bringing down the government and forcing the nation to turn to him

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 272

6/30/2011 1:03:20 PM

From Mishima to Aum 273

as its saviour? And did he really believe he was a reincarnation of Shiva sent to purify a decadent society through violence? Were these megalomaniac delusions on the part of both men, or canny manipulations of the media for other and more hidden purposes? If the latter, what were these ‘hidden purposes?’ A raw grab for attention and power? Or, given what we know of both men’s ‘extreme psychology,’ were their terrorist actions disguised suicide attempts – a will for self-immolation in the best fascist tradition of a final grand Götterdämmerung? After all, psychologists such as Freud and Lacan have taught us that both narcissism and megalomania, or the excessive will to power that often goes with these, can lead, paradoxically, to a self-destructive death-wish.67 And Umberto Eco, as noted above, has meticulously explained the steps by which the ‘ur-fascist’ develops an ‘Armageddon complex.’ On the other hand, Mishima and Asahara may have longed for ‘Armageddon,’ but both also both ensured that their particular ‘Armageddons’ would be major ‘media events.’ Both were masterful self-publicists who skilfully manipulated the new mass media of the late twentieth century to make themselves loom large in the public eye. Mishima called upon the media to record his own last act (phoning a number of reporters that very morning to make sure they showed up). Asahara’s terrorist attack, staged at prime time in the very heart of Tokyo, was obviously also designed to achieve maximum media impact. Earlier he had skilfully shaped his media image as a new-age healer and as a ‘guru’ with occult powers, a clever way of attracting new followers. As already noted, both men obviously had strong narcissistic and megalomaniac tendencies and, consequently, an insatiable will to power. This naturally led many observers to question the sincerity of their religious beliefs – were these assumed merely for the ‘ulterior motive’ of realizing their fantasies of power? Such questions are probably unanswerable (as with anyone’s motives for their personal beliefs), but certainly both were able to use their professed ‘beliefs’ as a rationale for their violent attempts to impose their will upon the world and to achieve some measure of ‘real’ political power – and in the meantime draw attention to themselves on a worldwide scale otherwise unimaginable. Nonetheless, it is strangely ironic that both men chose to cut short highly successful careers ostensibly out of an excess of political ambition, with disastrous consequences both for themselves and for others. Given that Mishima was forty-six when he committed suicide and Asahara forty when he launched his attack, the former might well have added a good many more significant works to his oeuvre and perhaps won the Nobel Prize he coveted so much, while the latter might

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 273

6/30/2011 1:03:20 PM

274

Roy Starrs

well have become an even more powerful religious figure, ruling over a worldwide community of devoted followers.68 From this perspective, the life stories of both men take on something of the character of Greek tragedy: heroes to their many admirers, but brought down by the tragic flaw of hubris, manifesting itself as an excessive and inappropriate political ambition. In this respect both were ordinary human beings writ large: filled with demonic energy, no doubt, but not demons.

Notes 1. Mishima (1971), 85. 2. For an efficient and dramatic journalistic account of the incident, see Brackett (1996), which also provides some analysis of the group’s background and ideology. 3. The primary source for this account, the historicity of which is still debated, is Japan’s oldest extant official history, the Nihon shoki (Chronicle of Japan, 720). On the Korean origins of the Soga, see Como (2008). 4. See Harry D. Harootunian (1988) and Robert Bellah (1985). 5. Quoted in Boardman et al. (1988), 826. 6. Satō (2004), 3. 7. Itō (1998), 41. 8. Ibid. 9. See Skya (2009). 10. Ibid. (152). 11. Ibid. (201). 12. On this still rather sensitive issue, see, for instance, Brian Victoria’s two ground-breaking studies, Zen at War (1997) (London; New York: RoutledgeCurzon) and Zen War Stories (2003) (London; New York: RoutledgeCurzon), and Heisig and Maraldo (1995). 13. Jansen (2000), 351. 14. Hane (2000), 89. 15. The term ‘Hindu’ is of modern coinage but is used retrospectively to encompass a myriad of Indian religious traditions that are now identified as generically related in doctrine and practice. Buddhism distinguishes itself from this Hindu tradition in a number of ways; nonetheless, many Buddhist doctrines and practices are clearly of Hindu origin. Indeed, as Mishima was to discover, the doctrine of reincarnation sits far more comfortably with a Hindu than with a Buddhist worldview. 16. Takeda (1975), 144. 17. Ibid. 18. MYZ (1973) 19: 70. All translations mine unless otherwise specified. 19. Ibid., 78. 20. Ibid., 114. 21. For a full analysis of Mishima’s extensive fictional use of Nietzsche’s ideas of active and passive nihilism, see Starrs (1994). 22. See Nagashima (2001).

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 274

6/30/2011 1:03:20 PM

From Mishima to Aum 275 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29 30 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Nietzsche (1967), 18. Ibid. Mishima (1975), 242. Ibid., 240–241. MYZ (1973), 19: 29. Nietzsche (1967), 21. MYZ (1973), 33: 397. Mishima (1978), 99. Stokes (1974), 6. MYZ (1973), 18: 589. Ibid., 787. Reader (2000), 249. Murakami (2000), 237. Ibid. Brackett (1996), 102–103. Mishima (1971), 74. Reader (2000), 66–67. Eco (1995), 7. Brackett (1996), 107–108. Garon (1995). Umehara (1968), 24. Griffin (2007), 98. MYZ 19: 29. Gentile (2000), 18. Griffin (2007), 276–277. Rauschning (1972), 27. Mishima (1982), 174. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 174. Skya (2009), 201. Mishima (1971), 74. Nathan (2004), 134. Nathan (2004), 131. Bellringer (1999). Reader (2000), 84–88, also for a description of Aum’s elaborate hierarchical system of ‘spiritual ranks.’ On the influence of science-fiction cartoons and comic books on Aum, see Reader (2000), 109 and 185–187. Reader (2000), 66. Ibid., 79. Ibid. Ibid., 89–90. Brackett (1996), 62. Reader (2000), 66–67. Ibid., 195. Ibid. See, for instance, his story, ‘Patriotism’ (Yūkoku). For a Lacanian interpretation of Mishima’s ‘extreme psychology,’ see Starrs (2009).

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 275

6/30/2011 1:03:20 PM

276

Roy Starrs

68. The remarkable charismatic power Asahara exercised over his followers is made evident by the documentary entitled simply ‘A,’ filmed by Mori Tatsuya about six months after the subway attack, featuring interviews with members who avoided prison and who, still loyal to Asahara, are trying to keep the sect alive. ‘A’ shows how extraordinarily devoted his followers were to their ‘sonshi.’ ‘A’ attempts to de-demonize Aum – and not just as another proof of the ‘banality of evil;’ these young people really are innocent and sincere spiritual seekers in a society that often seems determinedly antispiritual. Perhaps the most telling line in the documentary comes from one hapless young follower who says: ‘The master (sonshi) was the only person I could tell my troubles to.’

References Bellah, Robert (1985) Tokugawa Religion (New York: Free Press). Bellringer, J.D. (1999) From Modernity to Postmodernity (Twickenham, UK: Halovine Video). Berger, Peter (1990 [1967]) The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Anchor Books) Originally published by Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1967. Boardman, John et al. (eds) (1988) The Oxford History of the Classical World (Oxford University Press). Brackett, D.W. (1996) Holy Terror: Armageddon in Tokyo (New York: Weatherhill). Como, Michael (2008) Shotoku: Ethnicity, Ritual and Violence in the Japanese Buddhist Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press). Eco, Umberto (1995) ‘Ur-Fascism,’ The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995. Garon, Sheldon (1995) ‘State Suppression of New Religions in Prewar Japan and Its Lessons for Today,’ JPRI Critique, II (7), July. Gentile, Emilio (2000) ‘The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism,’ translated by Robert Mallet, in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religion, 1 (1): 18–55. Griffin, Roger (2007) Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Hane, Mikiso (2000) Japan: A Short History (Oxford: Oneworld), 89. Harootunian, Harry D. (1988) Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (University of Chicago). Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) (1995) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press). Itō Kimio (1998) ‘The Invention of Wa and the Transformation of the Image of Prince Shōtoku in Modern Japan,’ in Stephen Vlastos (ed.), Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press). Jansen, Marius B. (2000) The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Mishima Yukio (1971) ‘Yang-Ming Thought as Revolutionary Philosophy,’ translated by Harris Martin, The Japan Interpreter, vii (1), Winter.

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 276

6/30/2011 1:03:20 PM

From Mishima to Aum 277 Mishima Yukio zenshū (Collected Works of Mishima Yukio) (1973–1976) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha). (MYZ 1973) Murakami, Haruki (2000) Underground. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel. (New York: Vintage). Yukio Mishima (1975) Runaway Horses, translated by Michael Gallagher (New York: Simon and Schuster), 242. —— (1978) On Hagakure, translated by Kathryn Sparling (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle). —— (1982) ‘Shin fasshizumu ron,’ in Shōsetsuka no kyūka (Shinchōsha). Yoichi Nagashima (ed.) (2001) Return to Japan from Pilgrimage to West (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press). Nathan, John (2004) Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation’s Quest for Pride and Purpose (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin). Nietzsche, Friedrich (1967) The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House), 18. Rauschning, Hermann (1972) The Revolution of Nihilism (New York: Arno Press). Reader, I. (2000) Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: the Case of Aum Shinrikyō (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press). Satō Masahide (2004) Shōtoku Taishi no buppō (Kōdansha). Skya, Walter (2009) Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Starrs, Roy (1994) Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima (London: Curzon Press and Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press). —— (2009) ‘A Devil of a Job: Mishima and the Masochistic Drive,’ Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 14 (3): 85–99. Stokes, Henry Scott (1974) The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (New York: Ballantine). Takeda Katsuhiko and Mishima Yukio (1975) ‘Bungaku wa kūkyo ka,’ in Mishima Yukio (Tokyo: Kawade). Umehara Takeshi (ed.) (1968) Nihirizumu (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō).

9780230_240735_11_cha09.indd 277

6/30/2011 1:03:20 PM

10 Voices of Rage: Six Paths to the Problem of Yasukuni John Breen

Introduction The success of Hatoyama Yukio’s Democratic Party in the general elections of September 2009 marked the end of an era. For the previous fifty-four years, with only the briefest hiatus, Japan was ruled by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The Japanese post-war, in its achievements and failures, its aims and ambitions, has been defined by the conservative LDP. The passing of the LDP, however temporary, provides an opportunity to take stock and reflect. One defining feature of the LDP years was a series of attempts by administrations to redefine the relationship between state and religion. Article 20 of the Constitution provides for state–religion separation, but the LDP sought to question this; and it did so entirely on account of Yasukuni. Yasukuni is the Shinto shrine in Tokyo which enshrines the Japanese war dead as kami, and propitiates them in Shinto rites. As a Shinto shrine, Yasukuni is defined in law as a religious corporation (shūkyō hōjin), so LDP Prime Ministers encountered the obstacle of Article 20 whenever they wished to honour and mourn the war dead. 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 post-war Japanese society as a whole. Yasukuni has, for these reasons, been a problem of daunting complexity. When the Democratic Party swept to power in 2009, they let it be known they would take a different tack on the cluster of issues attaching 278

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 278

6/30/2011 1:03:49 PM

Voices of Rage 279

to Yasukuni. In July 2009, the party published Index 2009, a policy document which refers to Yasukuni on its very first page: It is problematic for the prime minister and his cabinet to visit Yasukuni shrine in an official capacity, given its enshrinement of Class A war criminals. We shall work towards the construction of a new national site of mourning with no specific religious character, in order that anybody and everybody can, without ill-feelings, honour the war dead and swear their commitment to non-war and peace.1 There are early signs that the Democratic Party will confront the vexed issues of Class A war criminals and religion by reinvigorating Chidorigafuchi, a government-funded, non-religious site, which accommodates the tomb of Japan’s unknown soldiers. For the brief duration of Hatoyama’s administration, Yasukuni ceased to be a problem, at least in Japan’s Asian diplomacy. But the Shinto establishment and Yasukuni’s many backers quickly stirred. Jinja Shinpō, the organ of the Shinto establishment, greeted Hatoyama’s approach with the lament that ‘Japan remains in a state of surrender to the interference of China and Korea in its internal affairs.’ The newspaper announced the creation of a new college for the study of Yasukuni, called the Yasukuni kassei juku, which was launched in spring 2010.2 It remains to be seen how Yasukuni’s more radical apologists will mobilize. It is certain they will bring to bear all the firepower at their disposal to thwart Democratic Party plans for a new national site. The Democratic Party has a fight – a bitter and possibly violent fight – on its hands. This chapter seeks to probe the complexities of the Yasukuni problem as it matured from the late twentieth through the early twenty-first century. It suggests six distinct but interlocking perspectives. The first of these is ‘constitutional,’ for Yasukuni prompts fundamental questions about the constitution’s provision of state–religion separation in post-war Japan. A second perspective is ‘diplomatic,’ since Yasukuni has played a vital, and unquestionably damaging, role in the construction of post-war Japan’s Asian diplomacy. ‘Emperor’ is a third critical category, since Yasukuni is fundamentally an imperial site, identified intimately with Japan’s imperial past and its very different imperial present. ‘Memory’ merits consideration as a fourth basic category, as Yasukuni has done much to shape modern Japan’s collective memory of the war. The authority of Yasukuni’s memory is enhanced immeasurably by the state’s patronage of the shrine. The fifth Yasukuni perspective I propose here is ‘religion.’ Yasukuni is, indeed, a religious site, but an egregious

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 279

6/30/2011 1:03:49 PM

280 John Breen

one, to which Article 20 is perhaps not, after all, meant to apply. Such, at least, is the view of apologists and conservative politicians alike. The sixth and final perspective is provided by ‘war criminals.’ It is the presence of fourteen class A war criminals in the Yasukuni pantheon that, for liberal Japanese and for Japan’s Asian neighbours, has made Yasukuni into the problem it is.3 By way of historical premise to the discussion below, it might be noted that Yasukuni is an invention of the modern state. The shrine was created in the early Meiji period (1868–1912) to honour the men who died fighting for the imperial cause in the civil conflicts either side of the Imperial Restoration of 1868. Styled originally Shōkonsha or ‘spirit summoning shrine,’ it was renamed Yasukuni or ‘shrine of the land of peace’ in 1879. Most of the fallen were of the warrior class, of course, but the shrine quickly transformed itself. With conscription and the creation of Japan’s modern army, it came to venerate men of all social classes who died fighting for modern Japan. Its enshrined spirits thus include the Japanese who fell in Japan’s conflicts with Taiwan in the 1870s, with China in the 1890s and, in the twentieth century, with Russia and many Asiatic nations. The vast majority of the Yasukuni war dead are, of course, the fallen from the Pacific War. It is worth noting that Yasukuni does not enshrine members of Japan’s post-war self-defense forces.

Constitution: the state and Yasukuni The Yasukuni problem, as it has taken shape since the 1980s, has a vital Constitutional dimension. When Prime Ministers visit Yasukuni, defined in law as a religious corporation, they appear to breach the Constitutional provision for the separation of state and religion. But do they? The jury, it seems, is still out. On first reading, Article 20 seems clear enough: Freedom of religion is guaranteed to all. No religious organization shall receive any privileges from the State, nor exercise any political authority. 2) No person shall be compelled to take part in any religious acts, celebration, rite or practice. 3) The State and its organs shall refrain from religious education or any other religious activity.4 Article 20 does not obviously allow the Prime Minister to patronize, and so privilege, Yasukuni Shrine or, indeed, any other religious institution in his capacity as Prime Minister. For, as such, he represents

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 280

6/30/2011 1:03:49 PM

Voices of Rage 281

the state. At the same time, it clearly guarantees his right as a private citizen to venerate at Yasukuni. So, when is a Prime Minister not a Prime Minister, but a private citizen? Some, like Tōgō Kazuhiko, insist it is nonsensical to suggest an incumbent premier can ever perform a ‘private visit’ to mourn the nation’s war dead.5 In practice, though, the answer has come to hinge on such niceties as how he signs himself in the shrine register; whether he arrives in an official or private car, and whether his shrine offerings come from his own pocket or the public purse. If Koizumi Jun’ichirō, say, conducted his visits as premier, then he was open to charges that he breached Article 20 of the Constitution. And yet, even this much is not clear. For, long before Yasukuni became a Constitutional problem, Article 20 was tested in the courts and found wanting. In 1977, a Communist member of Tsu City council in Mie prefecture filed a suit against the mayor. His offense? He had paid with public funds for a Shinto priest to perform a ground-breaking rite, essential to the construction of a municipal sports hall. In the councillor’s view, the mayor’s actions contravened Article 20 and also Article 89. The latter forbids expending public moneys ‘for the use, benefit or maintenance of any religious institution or association.’ The case was dismissed by the Supreme Court on appeal in a landmark ruling in 1977.6 The Supreme Court judge did not gainsay the religiosity of the event, but ruled that Article 20 did not forbid all state involvement with religion, ‘only that beyond an appropriate level.’ ‘Appropriate’ was to be determined by both the ‘object’ and the ‘effect’ of the state’s actions. Thus was born the so-called ‘object and effect standard’ (mokuteki kōka kijun). In this particular case, the judge ruled that ground-breaking was ‘entirely secular,’ and in accordance with ‘general social customs.’ In its effect, it neither aided nor promoted Shinto. This ruling made no reference whatsoever to Yasukuni, but it was historically important in establishing the idea that the post-war Japanese separation of state and religion was not intended to be absolute; that it was legitimate, in other words, for state and religion to engage with one another within certain limits. The Liberal Democratic Party and Yasukuni apologists rejoiced at the possibilities. After all, they could now quite reasonably argue that prime ministerial visits to Yasukuni were not intended to disseminate Shinto; neither was their effect the promotion of Shinto; state visits were meant uniquely to honour Japan’s war dead. This was the unambiguous conclusion of a study group convened by Justice Minister Okuno Seisuke in 1983. A second study group, the so-called Yasukuni kon, solicited expert opinions from a wider social spectrum, and submitted a report

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 281

6/30/2011 1:03:49 PM

282 John Breen

more nuanced but positive nonetheless. Both study groups were created at the behest of Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro in preparation for his planned official visit to Yasukuni on the fortieth anniversary of war’s end, August 15, 1985. Nakasone duly visited on the day, confident enough that his actions posed no serious challenge to Article 20. That Nakasone never returned to Yasukuni was for reasons entirely diplomatic, and not legal. In subsequent years, the constitutional dimension to state patronage of Yasukuni paled in comparison to diplomatic concerns, as we shall see. But, in the 1990s, the state–religion questions loomed large once more. In 1997, the Supreme Court gave a ruling on a case involving the governor of Ehime prefecture, who had been making annual offerings out of public funds to Yasukuni, and to the Ehime prefectural gokoku shrine. 7 Deploying the so-called object and effect standard, the judge ruled that the governor’s actions were not constitutional; they breached both Articles 20 and 89. The monetary offerings had a clear religious purpose, ruled the judge, and their effect was precisely to ‘assist, aid and promote’ the specific religion of Shinto. The governor was ordered to repay into the public purse the moneys he had expended. The object and effect standard had established two positions difficult to reconcile: 1) it is lawful to pay out of public funds for Shinto ground-breaking rites, but 2) it is unlawful to use public funds to pay for Yasukuni’s Shinto rites. Where, then, did this leave the prime minister and his personal patronage of the shrine? The answer had to await the premiership of Koizumi Jun’ichirō. On August 13, 2001, the first year of his premiership, Koizumi worshipped at Yasukuni. He went in an official car, accompanied by his Chief Cabinet Secretary, and signed himself Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō; his shrine offerings, however, came out of his own pocket. This visit was surely intended to trigger legal action, and it did. The suit that has attracted most media attention was that filed by a citizens’ group in the Fukuoka District Court. They sought remuneration from the state for the ‘spiritual damage’ inflicted upon them by Koizumi’s act of veneration. In 2004, Judge Kamekawa ruled that the plaintiffs may indeed have experienced ‘concern and apprehension,’ but there was ‘no infringement of legal interests.’ Judges in the Matsuyama and Osaka District Courts had reached the same conclusion in the previous year. What distinguished the Fukuoka suit, however, was that the judge exercised his right to make further comment by way of obiter dictum. It should be pointed out here that Japan, unlike, say, Germany, does not have constitutional courts, and so, to get a constitutional ruling in a

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 282

6/30/2011 1:03:50 PM

Voices of Rage 283

civil case, a plaintiff has to file a suit seeking compensation for infringement of one right or another. The presiding judge may then choose – but usually does not – to refer to constitutional issues. Judge Kamekawa chose to do so. The effect of the PM’s visit was indeed, he opined, to ‘aid, assist and promote Yasukuni shrine, a religious institution that disseminates Shinto.’ As a consequence, ‘one has to conclude that the Prime Minister’s visit to Yasukuni corresponds to those religious acts prohibited by Article 20.’ Newspapers that reported this as a ruling of unconstitutionality were, strictly speaking, incorrect. For an obiter dictum is the judge’s ‘expression of opinion on matters of law, which is not of binding authority’ (OED).8 In 2005, the Osaka High Court judge also issued a non-binding obiter dictum, which again deemed Koizumi’s actions unconstitutional. This helps to explain why Koizumi was undeterred and returned to Yasukuni with impunity in August 2006. Koizumi’s resolve was strengthened also by a Supreme Court ruling in June of that year, its first ever on the state’s patronage of Yasukuni. The presiding judge asserted that visits to a shrine by an individual – even a Prime Minister – are not such as to infringe any other citizen’s right to religious freedom, and do not warrant suits being filed for damages. This ruling has brought a degree of clarity to the situation, and may well discourage further suits, but, in truth, much remains unresolved.9 The ‘object and effect standard’ has proved of limited value. Welcomed by Yasukuni apologists as the all-clear for state patronage, it served also to inform the unconstitutional verdict in the Ehime case and the damning obiter dicta of the Fukuoka and Osaka District Court judges. The obiter dicta themselves are highly controversial. Some commentators insist they are vital, since the absence of constitutional courts means that civil case plaintiffs cannot seek direct verdicts on constitutional issues, even though this is clearly their desire. Others maintain that the Yasukuni obiter dicta are highly inappropriate, largely because the law does not allow the defendant to appeal against them. These un-binding observations have a habit of ‘sticking,’ although this was clearly not the case with Koizumi Jun’ichirō. A contextualizing factor bears mention here. Since the 1970s, it has been the custom for Japanese Prime Ministers to lead their cabinets to the Ise shrines at New Year. In Ise, they venerate the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu ōmikami, mythical founder of the imperial line, and typically pray for Japan’s flourishing in the year ahead. The Christian ōhira Masayoshi, the Socialist Murayama Tomiichi, and Hatoyama Yukio of the Democratic Party (Prime Minister at the time of writing) have all participated in clearly ‘official’ acts of Ise veneration. The media give

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 283

6/30/2011 1:03:50 PM

284 John Breen

this annual event very little critical attention, and it has so far prompted no legal action.10 Koizumi quite reasonably asked why he cannot venerate at Yasukuni, when he is free to worship annually at the Shinto shrines of Ise.11 Of course, it could equally well be asked why there is so little controversy over the state’s New Year patronage of Ise, given the legal controversy over Yasukuni. To these questions, no answers are presently sought.12

Diplomacy: Yasukuni in Asia Yasukuni is a problem not confined by any means to the Constitution and domestic Japanese politics. It is, as Mark Selden has persuasively argued, inseparable from Japanese nationalism, and as such it has impinged significantly and in the most damaging way on Japan’s relationships with its East Asian neighbours.13 When the Prime Minister patronizes Yasukuni, is he not glorifying the actions of the men who inflicted terrible suffering on Asia in the 1930s and 1940s? Is he not, in publicly venerating the war dead, at best insensitive to the feelings of Japan’s Asian victims? Yasukuni’s enshrinement of 14 Class A war criminals renders these questions especially pertinent.14 The depth of the diplomatic problem was laid bare during Koizumi Jun’ichirō’s premiership. In 2005, for example, Chinese President Hu Jintao unilaterally cancelled the Japanese Foreign Minister’s visit to China; Yasukuni as ‘the outstanding problem in Sino-Japanese relations’ was the reason. In that same year, and for the same reason, Vice Premier Wu Yi cancelled a meeting scheduled with PM Koizumi, and headed back to China. Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni also ignited widespread popular demonstrations against Japan in China; these duly triggered a backlash in Japan.15 Koizumi’s final Yasukuni pilgrimage on August 15, 2006 prompted the Chinese Foreign Ministry to declare it ‘an act that gravely offends the people in countries victimized by the war of aggression launched by Japanese militarists, and undermines the political foundation of China– Japan relations.’16 It is not difficult to sympathize; it is not surprising, either, that friends of Yasukuni respond by accusing China of interfering in Japan’s domestic affairs. The fallout from Koizumi’s patronage of Yasukuni, though, was a serious and worrying deterioration in SinoJapanese relations.17 As Caroline Rose points out, Japanese and Chinese motivations are more complex than they might at first seem. Koizumi’s actions were calculated to secure the support of the Japan Society for the War

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 284

6/30/2011 1:03:50 PM

Voices of Rage 285

Bereaved (Nihon Izoku kai), a constituency the LDP could not afford to alienate; to counter the surge in popularity of the Democratic Party; and to assert a strong foreign policy stance at a time when Japanese public opinion was sensitive to threats from Korea and China. Koizumi was, in brief, never motivated uniquely by his wish to ‘convey a sense of condolences to the fallen in battle.’18 He was playing nationalist politics, and very effectively so. His 2001 visit won the support of some 65 per cent of Japanese; his sixth and last, in 2006, still found favour with 50 per cent.19 But the Chinese, too, have made good political use of Yasukuni. Hu Jintao’s tough stance was calculated in part to shore up his weak powerbase at home, and especially to reassure those sceptical of his ability in foreign affairs. Anti-Hu forces in the People’s Liberation Army had to be won over with a show of robustness. Hu was also contending with outbreaks of rural violence and high levels of corruption at home. Yasukuni served to parry attention.20 Difficulties were exacerbated by the fact that each side was keenly aware of what the other was doing. Yasukuni was not always the defining issue in Sino-Japanese diplomacy that it has been since the 1980s, so the question arises as to when and how this developed. It is widely, and correctly, understood that Nakasone’s official visit on August 15, 1985 was the spark. Such was Chinese fury that Nakasone never returned to the shrine. He stayed away out of concern for Chinese President Hu Yaobang, with whom he enjoyed a very close friendship.21 There is, however, good reason to think that the Chinese government’s response in 1985 was less spontaneous than it first appears. The charge of Kobayashi Yoshinori, the ultraconservative polemicist and cartoonist, is that the Asahi Shinbun and, to a greater extent, the now-defunct Japan Socialist Party were entirely responsible for stirring up the diplomatic storm that broke over Nakasone’s head; and he has a point.22 This is what appears to have happened. On August 9, 1985 the aforementioned Yasukuni kon gave Nakasone a conditional all clear to make his historic Yasukuni visit. It was historic in that it was official and it took place on August 15. Nakasone, meanwhile, dispatched Noda Takeshi to China to reassure the Chinese government of his good intentions, and request them to play down the visit. This the Chinese agreed to do. Nakasone duly went to Yasukuni on August 15, and from the Chinese government, there was silence; no response, condemnatory or otherwise, was forthcoming. This was a consequence, indeed, of the Chinese keeping their promise to mute their criticisms. Efforts by the Asahi Shinbun, as detailed by Kobayashi,

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 285

6/30/2011 1:03:50 PM

286 John Breen

failed to agitate them. The first critical statement from the Chinese government emerged only on August 27, twelve days after the event. The prompt for the statement seems to have been the intervention of the Japan Socialist Party. A delegation, led by Party Secretary Tanabe Makoto, arrived in Beijing on August 26. Tanabe told Chinese leaders that Nakasone’s cabinet was distancing itself from traditional LDP policies; his Yasukuni visit was integral to LDP plans to transform Japan into a major military power. The first official Chinese attack on Nakasone came the very next day in a statement from Vice Premier, Yao Ilin. Then, on September 3, a speech condemning Nakasone’s worship of war criminals featured in the celebrations to mark the fortieth anniversary of Chinese victory: ‘Nakasone’s actions wound the feelings of Chinese, and of all Asian peoples.’ Criticisms now gathered momentum. On September 7, Peng Zhen demanded an end to prime ministerial Yasukuni visits, and by September 18, the anniversary of the 1937 Marco Polo incident, Chinese were out on the streets demanding the overthrow of Nakasone and ‘militaristic Japan.’23 It certainly appears that Tanabe’s visit enabled the Chinese to perceive, perhaps for the first time, Nakasone’s actions as a threat, and to grasp the political value of playing the Yasukuni card. As far as Kobayashi Yoshinori is concerned, Takebe and the Asahi are ‘arsonists’ who ‘set Asia alight’ with anti-Yasukuni sentiment; their crime is one of betrayal. It is impossible to disentangle adequately the complex motives at work here: those of the Asahi and Takebe and of the Chinese. But to read Kobayashi on this subject is to understand that his most cherished value is patriotism, and to suspect he does disapprove of freedom of the press.24 The Chinese interest in Yasukuni since 1985 is certainly most inconvenient for Yasukuni apologists, like Kobayashi. After all, the Chinese have, at the very least, forced successive Japanese administrations, and perhaps even the two post-war emperors, to think more carefully about how the last war and its millions of fallen should be remembered. This is no small achievement, and the wrath of men like Kobayashi is easy to understand.

The Emperor and Yasukuni The imperial family’s sixteen-petal chrysanthemum is everywhere evident at Yasukuni. Most strikingly it is embossed in gold on the great wooden gate (shinmon) that straddles the main path to the Worship Hall. The expansive cloth-drapes adorning the Worship Hall bear the chrysanthemum, as do the drapes on the Main Sanctuary and the lanterns

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 286

6/30/2011 1:03:50 PM

Voices of Rage 287

that illuminate it for night-time rituals. The imperial presence is physical too: Yasukuni’s Great Spring and Autumn Rites are regularly graced by imperial princes, and those same events feature an imperial emissary (chokushi) bearing gifts from the emperor himself. There is, then, no gainsaying the quality of the shrine: Yasukuni is an imperial site. Conspicuous by their absence from Yasukuni rites are emperors themselves. At least, this has been the case for a generation and more. The question is why. After all, Emperor Hirohito was a regular visitor to the Great Spring and Autumn rites from 1938 onwards. His presence alone gave meaning to the sacrifice of the men enshrined there. He visited at war’s end in 1945, and with some regularity after the Occupation ended in 1952. There can be no denying that his going to Yasukuni in the aftermath of defeat provided much solace to the bereaved. In November 1975, Emperor Hirohito went to Yasukuni to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of war’s end; this was his eighth visit, and it was to be his last in the post-war period. His son, the Heisei emperor Akihito, visited four times as Crown Prince, but has not returned since his enthronement in 1989. The first point to make is that the emperor’s absence from Yasukuni cannot be read as a strategy to disconnect the imperial institution from war responsibility. Far from it; the present emperor has made multiple memorial visits to war-related sites, in what one informed observer describes as his ‘lifework.’25 The emperor has visited Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Okinawa, the Ogasawara islands, and Iōjima. In 2005, he made an historic visit to Saipan, and stood at the cliff from which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Japanese soldiers and civilians leapt to their deaths. There he prayed for peace. Emperor and empress both attend the annual memorial event at the Budōkan hall in Tokyo on August 15. This state-funded event, inaugurated in 1963, is known as Zenkoku senbotsusha tsuitō shiki or the national rite of mourning for the war dead. Emperor and empress make offerings of flowers before a ‘stele’ of cypress bearing the words ‘The spirits of all the nation’s fallen.’ There, at noon, emperor and empress stand, leading a minute’s silence. The emperor then addresses the 6,000 or so representatives of the war bereaved and other invitees, expressing his deep sorrow at the tragedy of war.26 Why, then, does the present emperor stay away from Yasukuni, which has some claim to be the site of war memory in post-war Japan? More historically important is the question of why his father, the Showa emperor, stopped patronizing the shrine. The reason is finally now clear. The Showa emperor objected to the enshrinement of the 14

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 287

6/30/2011 1:03:50 PM

288 John Breen

class A war criminals, which took place amid great secrecy in 1978.27 It may never be known exactly what the emperor found objectionable; nor is it clear when he first learned of their enshrinement or first voiced his objections. 28 But object he did; recent revelations by men close to the emperor leave no doubt of this. The first evidence to emerge was the so-called Tomita memorandum, published by the Nihon Keizai newspaper in 2006. The memorandum takes its name from the emperor’s Chief Steward, Tomita Asahiko, who penned it following an audience with the emperor on April 28, 1988. This was a full ten years after the Class As had been enshrined. 1988 was an especially tense time in Japan’s diplomatic relations with China, not least because a member of the Takeshita cabinet, Okuno Seisuke, had demanded publicly to know ‘in precisely what sense’ Japan was the aggressor in the last war. Okuno was forced to resign, but this incident was perhaps what prompted the emperor to talk to Tomita about Yasukuni. What he said was this: I learned on one occasion that the Class As had been enshrined. And even Matsuoka and Shiratori as well ... I thought that Tsukuba had handled this with circumspection ... His successor, Matsudaira, is surely an advocate of peace? This is why I have never been back to Yasukuni ... Such are my true feelings ... 29 The characters referred to by the emperor in this rather enigmatic statement need identifying. ‘Matsuoka’ is Matsuoka Yōsuke, Foreign Minister responsible for Japan’s tripartite pact with Germany and Italy; ‘Shiratori’ is Shiratori Toshio, Japan’s ambassador to Italy and Matsuoka’s ‘brain.’ The emperor is known to have disliked both men. ‘Tsukuba’ refers to Tsukuba Fujimaro, Chief Priest of Yasukuni between 1946 and 1977; ‘Matsudaira’ is Matsudaira Nagayoshi, his successor. It was on Matsudaira’s watch that the Class A war criminals were enshrined. In April 2007, the Asahi newspaper published new evidence to rattle those who had doubted Tomita. This was the diary of Urabe Ryōgo, Hirohito’s chamberlain. In his entry for 28 April 1988, the very same day the emperor spoke to Tomita, Urabe wrote: [His Majesty] finished eating so we went to [the] Fukiage [quarter of the palace grounds]. Chief Steward [Tomita] came out after his audience, and I entered [the Emperor’s presence]: the Yasukuni enshrinement of the war criminals; Chinese criticisms and Okuno’s statement.30

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 288

6/30/2011 1:03:50 PM

Voices of Rage 289

This section, underlined by Urabe in red, confirms that the emperor spoke of the war criminals to Urabe on this day; it also supports Tomita’s claim that the emperor had earlier spoken to him. Urabe returned to the matter nearly a decade later. In a diary entry dated July 2001, he wrote: ‘The immediate circumstances behind the emperor terminating his Yasukuni visits: he did not approve the enshrinement of the Class A war criminals.’31 The trigger for this second entry, twelve years after the emperor’s death, was fevered speculation over whether Koizumi Jun’ichirō would keep his pre-election promise and make an official visit to Yasukuni Shrine on August 15. It remains the natural enough goal of organizations like the Japan Society for the War Bereaved that the reigning emperor should one day return and venerate at Yasukuni. This, of course, explains their newfound enthusiasm for the removal of the Class A war criminals from Yasukuni to some other, as yet unspecified, site.32

Memory and History: the View from Yasukuni In Hara Kazuo’s award-winning documentary, Yuki yukite shingun (Onward Imperial Soldiers!, 1987), there is a striking ‘Yasukuni moment.’ The film features Private Okuzaki Kenzō, who, forty years after the war, is in pursuit of NCOs and officers of his unit who murdered his comrades in the hell that was New Guinea. Their murderous purpose, he is convinced, was cannabalism. Faced with starvation, NCOs and officers shot his comrades to consume their flesh. In one scene, Okuzaki confronts a frail Sgt Yamada at his home, demanding he speak the truth and apologize. Yamada admits freely to the terrible suffering he and his unit endured, but to no wrongdoing. Yamada says, ‘I make offerings to the dead. I do it my way; you do it yours. I go to Yasukuni ...’ At the word ‘Yasukuni,’ Okuzaki flips. Screaming ‘You go to Yasukuni, you say? You think the glorious spirits of Yasukuni are redeemed do you, my friend?,’ he kicks Yamada, throws him to the ground and throttles him. Okuzaki loathed Yasukuni to the point of plotting an armed attack at the shrine’s spring festival, in the presence of the imperial emissary. It is possible to imagine why he did so, and why the very word prompted his assault on Yamada. Okuzaki was deeply traumatized by the war, obsessed with truth and its exposure, with issues of responsibility, and with bringing solace to his dead comrades. To his traumatized mind, Yasukuni’s apotheosis and propitiation of the dead served as absolution: Yasukuni rites absolved them all, high command, officers and men alike, of responsibility for the wrongs they committed by transforming them

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 289

6/30/2011 1:03:50 PM

290 John Breen

into ‘glorious spirits.’ Yasukuni thus denied the terrible suffering that Okuzaki knew was the truth. Yasukuni might bring solace to the living, but not to the war dead. Sgt Yamada was able to make annual offerings at Yasukuni precisely because it enabled him to bury the trauma. It can be imagined that Okuzaki thought in this way, but it is not, after all, certain. What is certain, however, is that Iida Susumu, another man traumatized by his experiences in New Guinea, thought in this way. Iida was in New Guinea as a civilian attached to a navy unit. He was arraigned at the Tokyo war crimes’ tribunal as a Class B war criminal for beheading two prisoners of war, and spent time in Sugamo prison reflecting on his own conduct and on the war itself.33 In a recent NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) special on Yasukuni, Iida spoke of Yasukuni and its ‘pacifying’ and ‘honoring’ the ‘glorious spirits’ (eirei) of the war dead.34 ‘These are fine words indeed ... They strike a chord with the bereaved, with comrades and, indeed, with a lot of Japanese. But from the perspective of one who fought in the war, I have to ask ‘Do these men merit honour as the nation’s glorious war dead?’ I beg to differ.’ Stressing that no fewer than 100,000 Japanese officers and men died of starvation in New Guinea, Iida continued: Whom did we despise? It was the military commanders who planned that New Guinea campaign. To reflect on this is to conclude that words like ‘glorious spirits of the war dead’ are simply designed to avoid the issue of responsibility. ... The [refusal] of these men [to accept responsibility] is insufferable.35 The linkage between Yasukuni rites, which commemorate the dead indiscriminately as ‘glorious spirits,’ and the shrine’s construction of war memory should be clear enough, but it is worth spelling out. Yasukuni rites of propitiation, in honouring all the fallen, recall vast numbers of Japanese going to war, two million and many more of whom gave up their lives in a glorious struggle for emperor and for Japan; they recall the fallen, to a man, as embodying the hallowed virtues of loyalty, patriotism, and self-sacrifice; they remember their deaths less as a tragedy to be mourned than as a glorious achievement to be celebrated; and they thus recall the war, though it ended in defeat, as a noble and significant undertaking. In these ritual acts of recall, the experiences of men like Okuzaki, Yamada, and Iida are consigned to oblivion. Yasukuni rites afford no space to remember that, in addition to the many who exhibited extraordinary courage, there were tens of thousands who died of disease and starvation, and others, too, who were murdered for their

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 290

6/30/2011 1:03:50 PM

Voices of Rage 291

flesh; nor that war is always brutal and squalid, perhaps nowhere more than it was in New Guinea; nor, again, that even those men and women who truly embodied the virtues of loyalty, patriotism, and self-sacrifice were still victims of Japanese militarism. Yasukuni is egregious among sites of memory in post-war democracies in integrating into its sacred space a war museum.36 The museum, known as the Yūshūkan, is located in the Yasukuni precinct, just north of the Worship Hall. Participants in shrine rites get free tickets to the museum, so that venerating the war dead and viewing the exhibits are complementary activities. Among the exhibition rooms on the second floor is one on the Pacific war; it has a panel devoted to New Guinea. The New Guinea panel does not relate the story of New Guinea as lived by Okuzaki, Yamada, and Iida. So what does it do? It exhibits a photograph of Combined Fleet Commander Yamamoto Isoroku poring over a map, apparently planning with care the New Guinea campaign, for which no real plans ever existed. His binoculars displayed in the cabinet suggest the sort of foresight that was entirely lacking in New Guinea. There are fuselage fragments from the aircraft carrying Yamamoto which crashed in the New Guinea jungle in 1943, killing him before the hell of New Guinea really began. There is Navy Lieutenant Yasuda’s cap, and a telegram Yasuda sent to Yamamoto before he led his men on a suicidal offensive. There is commentary, too, inviting us to reflect on ‘the humanity on display in New Guinea:’ The humanity on display in New Guinea left behind for posterity many tales to be told: suicide attacks in Buna, the tragedy of Danbir, and the crossing of the Sarawaket mountains. Here the incompetence of senior commanders, mass starvation, disease, and cannibalism, which defined the New Guinea experience of men like Iida, yield to suggestions of planning and foresight, endurance and heroism. There can be no doubting the extraordinary courage of men like Lieutenant Yasuda, though it is intriguing that the heroic tales told in the exhibits are not of the common soldier but uniquely of officers and NCOs. There is one other curious thing about the Yushukan’s New Guinea display, and, indeed, all displays at the museum: there is no representation and, indeed, no mention anywhere of the enemy against whom Yamamoto and Yasuda and others were fighting.37 The substantial absence of the enemy in the New Guinea panel discourages the recall of either defeat or wrongs perpetrated. It is easy enough to imagine that, for Sgt Yamada, say, the New Guinea exhibits have offered

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 291

6/30/2011 1:03:50 PM

292 John Breen

a source of comfort. At the very least, they can have done nothing to unsettle the horrific memories he had buried deeply – until, that is, Okuzaki came calling. There is one other striking feature of war memory, as preserved and related by Yasukuni and its apologists. It concerns what I have elsewhere referred to as ‘corner stone theory.’ This is the idea that the war dead are the ‘corner stone’ (ishizue) upon which the peace and prosperity of postwar Japan are constructed. Japan, in brief, owes its good fortune to the sacrifices of these men. This ‘take’ serves the vital purpose of according meaning to millions of deaths, which otherwise struggle for meaning. A short but clear example of ‘cornerstone theory’ may be found in a Jinja Shinpō editorial in October 2009. Jinja Shinpō is the Shinto establishment’s official weekly organ; the piece in question was written to mark the 140th anniversary of Yasukuni’s foundation. The editorial reflects on Yasukuni ‘as a site for all Japanese, and for people of all nations, to offer up prayers to the glorious spirits who laid the cornerstone of the nation’ (emphasis added).38 The literature of the Japan Society for the War Bereaved and the Glorious War Dead Society (Eirei ni kotaeru kai) reiterates, mantra-like, the idea of post-war Japan in all its splendour as founded on the sacrifices of the war dead.39 Kobayashi Yoshinari, the most graphic of Yasukuni’s apologists, writes in the same vein: ‘Our present is constructed upon the cornerstone made of the corpses of the fallen.’40 It is important to understand that cornerstone theory is not the preserve of Yasukuni and its apologists. It is voiced by senior politicians, including successive Japanese Prime Ministers, and even by the emperor himself. The cumulative effect is to accord it the status of official history. At the Budōkan event in August 2009, for example, soon-to-depart PM Asō Tarō insisted that ‘the peace and security of today’s Japan are built upon the noble sacrifices of the men who lost their lives in war.’ The word ‘cornerstone’ is absent, but the sentiment is the same. It was dutifully reiterated by Asō’s short-lived predecessors, Abe Shinzō and Fukuda Yasuo. Its greatest advocate, however, was Koizumi Jun’ichirō. In the last year of his premiership, 2006, Koizumi defied taboo and visited Yasukuni on August 15. When asked subsequently about his feelings, he replied: I say this every time, but Japan must reflect on past wars, and never wage war again. The peace and prosperity of today’s Japan has not been achieved simply with those alive today. Rather, today’s Japan exists today [sic] because of those people whose precious lives were sacrificed in the last war.41

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 292

6/30/2011 1:03:51 PM

Voices of Rage 293

The emperor has been more circumspect. In his annual Budōkan address, for example, he voices profound sadness at the suffering endured by those Japanese who died in the war, and by their loved ones. He then says: ‘The peace and flourishing of today’s Japan is due to the ceaseless endeavour of the Japanese people in the [ ... ] years since war’s end.’42 At the celebrations to mark the twentieth anniversary of his enthronement, he spoke of post-war Japan owing all to the efforts of post-war Japanese.43 He spoke in different terms, however, before his historic visit to Saipan in June 2006. Recalling the terrible suffering endured by hundreds of Saipanese, thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers, he concluded: ‘We must move forward, always bearing in mind that Japan today is built upon the foundations (laid by) all these many people.’44 ‘Cornerstone theory’ forms a perfect fit with Yasukuni’s reading of history. After all, the theory discloses an understanding of the war dead as indiscriminately heroic; they fought, died and, in their dying, constructed the nation of Japan in all its prosperity and peace. They were honourable and ethical, as all heroes are, and their battle, like heroic battles everywhere, was inevitably one of good against evil. Good, as modern Japan bears witness, prevailed. The most incisive critic of this approach to history is the aforementioned Iida Susumu. Iida writes of encountering these very sentiments time and again in prayers offered up to the war dead at rites performed by Yasukuni priests: ‘Today’s economical prosperity is built upon your sacrifice. Please rest in peace.’ Iida, traumatized by his experiences of New Guinea, asks: ‘Whereabouts is one to find, in the soldiers who starved to death, the origins of Japanese prosperity? I believe I can feel voices of mad rage emanating from the war dead. The reason [for their rage] is that [these sentiments] might bring solace to the living, but they do not prompt reflection. They contribute only to justification [for the war]. And that is indeed what has happened.’45

Ritual, Ethics, and Religion at Yasukuni When is a religion not a religion, and when is a Shinto shrine not a Shinto shrine? The question was implicit in the historic visit paid by Nakasone to Yasukuni on August 15, 1985. He declined the ritual washing of hands; he refused a ritual purification (oharai); he chose not to adhere to the established, but very modern, Shinto etiquette of twobows, two-claps, one-bow; and he made no offerings of sakaki leaves. Nakasone was seeking to convert his actions into something other than

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 293

6/30/2011 1:03:51 PM

294 John Breen

Shinto, something other than religious. He succeeded only in infuriating Chief Priest Matsudaira, who suggested he come next time in his underpants. Yasukuni Shrine is defined in law as a religious corporation. Although not a member of the National Association of Shrines, Yasukuni is a Shinto shrine, and bears all the symbolic paraphernalia common to such shrines across Japan. There are torii gates across its main path, and there is both a Worship Hall (haiden) and a Main Sanctuary (honden), containing a ‘tabernacle’ (nainaijin) to accommodate the kami, that is, the spirits of the glorious war dead. The kami are propitiated daily by a resident Shinto priesthood, whose members are trained at either Kokugakuin or Kōgakkan University, although often the Chief Priest has no Shinto background at all.46 Yasukuni exists for the performance by its priests of sacred rites, which are of two types: rites of apotheosis, which enshrine a man or woman as a kami; and rites of propitiation, which consist of offerings to the kami to pacify them and ensure they bestow their blessings on Japan, the emperor, and his subjects. The latter take place every morning and evening of the year, but the two most important are the Great Spring and Autumn rites. The imperial emissary’s presence endows these two great seasonal rites with a powerful ethical meaning. The emissary’s presence reminds participants that the men venerated in Yasukuni were sacrificed on behalf of the emperor, fighting for imperial Japan. The imperial rites of spring and autumn – for ‘imperial’ is what they are – honour their sacrifice. In so doing, the rites become a celebration of those imperial values embodied by the war dead. As time and space collapse in these ritual performances, it is not only the war dead and their virtues that are celebrated, but the emperor himself. After all, it was he, or rather his father, who inspired the heroism of the war dead. At Yasukuni, the living and the dead gather to pay homage to the emperor.47 It is vital to understand that, as Yasukuni rites celebrate the ethical values of the war dead, so its priests and its apologists seek to disseminate them. A few examples will suffice to make this point. Chief Priests Matsudaira and Yuzawa, for example, both wrote and spoke passionately about Yasukuni’s role in the moral reinvigoration of post-war Japanese society.48 The Yasukuni Worshippers Society (Yasukuni sūkei hōsankai) was re-launched in 1999 very much with this aim in mind: ‘[We seek] not only to comfort and honour the glorious spirits, but to inherit their hearts, to establish state ethics (kokka dōgi), and contribute to the fashioning of a healthy national ethic (kokumin dōtoku) and the stability of state and society.’49 The Japan Society for the

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 294

6/30/2011 1:03:51 PM

Voices of Rage 295

War Bereaved is similarly committed to reforming post-war Japanese society, inspired by the war dead. Its declared objective is ‘to honour the glorious war dead, to enhance welfare for the bereaved of the fallen, to make possible their solace and help. At the same [we] strive for the enhancement of ethics (dōgi no kōyō) and the promotion of the moral person. ...’50 This position is dramatized in Mitama o tsugu mono, one of two movies permanently on show in the Yushukan theatre.51 The movie narrates the metamorphosis of the main character, Ishigami Takanobu, from a slob of a youth into a well-dressed, well-mannered, non-smoking, socially aware young man. Naturally, he finds inspiration in the virtue of the kamikaze pilots. In the final scene, Takanobu heads off to New Guinea, under the glorious spirits’ watchful eye, there to continue the work of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. Yasukuni and its satellite organizations have not fought a lone battle in this regard. The Liberal Democratic Party has been a passionate advocate of Yasukuni as a moral beacon for post-war Japan. The first item of the LDP’s Outline of a Bill on Yasukuni (Yasukuni hōan yōkō, 1956) has this to say: ‘The shrine exists to venerate the dead, to honour their posthumous virtue and thus to bring about a revival of the ethics of contemporary Japan.’ Note the conjunction ‘and thus,’ which suggests that mourning the dead and reflecting on the tragedy of war are very much secondary concerns. Here, the idea is clearly that shrine and war dead be deployed in the service of post-war Japanese society. Emeritus Tokyo University professor, Kobori Keiichirō, fantasizes about Yasukuni transforming Japanese society: ‘[If only the Prime Minister and the emperor venerate there], the attitude of the young toward Japan will be quite transformed. [The young] will come round to the belief that Japan is a nation to be proud of. The solution to the Yasukuni problem will exert a profoundly beneficial effect on national ethics.’52 It is, perhaps, little wonder that Yasukuni is ambiguous about its status in law as a religious corporation. Its status, of course, guarantees it protection from unwanted interference by the state, for example. At the same time, however, it places Yasukuni on a par with all other Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples, and Christian churches. That Yasukuni and its apologists have greater ambitions should be clear from the examples cited above. Yasukuni aspires to be what it was in pre-war Japan, a supra- or non-religious national site for the cultivation of ethical virtue.53 From the late 1960s through the early 1970s, this aspiration had the support of the LDP, and it took the form of a series of (vain) attempts to pass a Yasukuni Bill. The Bill’s purpose was to ‘transform Yasukuni from a ‘religious corporation’ into a non-religious ‘special corporation’

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 295

6/30/2011 1:03:51 PM

296 John Breen

(tokushu hōjin),’ and so ‘return Yasukuni to the state.’ The use of the word ‘shrine’ (jinja) to describe Yasukuni was ‘not to be interpreted as implying an understanding of Yasukuni as religious.’ A generation later the Yasukuni Shrine Bill appears a horrible muddle, but the principle of stripping Yasukuni of its ‘religiosity’ and returning it to the state has periodically resurfaced. It did so, for example, in a position paper by Asō Tarō shortly before he became prime minister in August 2006.54

War Criminals and the Yasukuni Pantheon Yasukuni’s enshrinement of Class A war criminals is at the core of what we might call the ‘symbolic’ dimension of the Yasukuni problem. The presence of war criminals in the shrine’s pantheon has been read as symbolic of its empathy with the barbaric actions of war criminals. State patronage of a site so encumbered leads to accusations that the Prime Minister himself and, indeed, the Japanese people he represents have not reflected adequately on past wrongs; that they are, at best, insensitive to the feelings of imperial Japan’s victims. Of course, many vociferous others adopt a position entirely contrary. For Yasukuni apologists, like Nitta Hitoshi, the Class A war criminals were guilty of nothing more than fighting to defend Japan; they were simply the victims of an intolerable and humiliating ‘victor’s justice,’ and their presence at Yasukuni is no impediment to state patronage.55 Tōgō Kazuhiko holds a middle position. He cannot accept that his grandfather, who worked to prevent war, should have been convicted as a Class A war criminal; yet he acknowledges that ‘Japan was the perpetrator of wrongs, and must adopt a position of humility.’56 In any case, the presence of the Class A criminals is now the defining feature of the Yasukuni problem. Their presence animates the Chinese and the Koreans; it is highly problematic within Japan, too, as the Showa emperor’s reaction makes clear. The emperor may or may not have known in advance of their enshrinement, but he was certainly not consulted. Nor was the shrine’s greatest backer, the Japan Society for the War Bereaved, given advance notice. It is of great interest that resistance to the enshrinement of the spirits of these men began not in China or in the liberal Japanese media, but within Yasukuni itself. Enshrinement was even opposed, for a time at least, by the post-war Shinto establishment. The rite of enshrinement (reiji hōan sai) for the 14 Class A war criminals took place on the night of October 17, 1978. The rite was not for them alone; rather, they were included among 1,766 others. It was not until the following spring that news got out. The war

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 296

6/30/2011 1:03:51 PM

Voices of Rage 297

criminal enshrinements were carried out in secret, then, nearly a generation after the last of their number had died. How is this intriguing situation to be explained? The first Yasukuni chief priest in the post-war period was Tsukuba Fujimaro, an interesting man. He was born a prince but became a commoner; he was active in the post-war peace movement, and established a shrine within Yasukuni for the dead of imperial Japan’s victims in the war.57 He was known to dislike military men, and even jokingly referred to himself as a ‘white [as opposed to full-blooded red] Communist.’58 The relevance of this is that it helps explain why Tsukuba resisted – for resist he did – the enshrinement of the war criminals. New sources published in 2007 reveal that it was the government, and not Yasukuni, which made the running. In 1958, the Health Ministry approached Yasukuni for the first time, urging them to go ahead with enshrinement, but Tsukuba did nothing. The Health Ministry returned to the shrine on several further occasions, but to no effect. In 1966, the Ministry then upped the pressure by dispatching to Tsukuba the personal details of the fourteen war criminals, but still he took no action. In 1970, Tsukuba came under intense pressure from his assistant chief priest and the shrine’s trustees, but still he resisted. He was adamant that the war criminals would not be enshrined, at least in his lifetime.59 It was around now that the government began work on its Yasukuni Bill, and the Health Ministry stepped back, fearful that war criminal enshrinement would play into the hands of the Bill’s opponents.60 The Bill was abandoned in 1974, and it was another four years before enshrinement went ahead. The decisive event in the meantime was Tsukuba’s death in 1977 and the appointment of his successor, Matsudaira Nagayoshi. Enshrinement was carried out the following year. Matsudaira can claim for his legacy not only the Class A war criminals. He also reopened the Yūshūkan war museum, for the first time since the war ended, and erected a steel fence around the Chinreisha. But the war criminals’ enshrinement was the most controversial of these measures. This was so not least because it was opposed by the most influential figure in the post-war Shinto establishment, Ashizu Uzuhiko. Ashizu hoped Yasukuni might ‘return to the state,’ notwithstanding the failure of the Yasukuni Bill, and he was incensed that Matsudaira’s actions effectively scuppered those chances.61 But Ashizu was opposed for other reasons besides. He spoke of the ‘vulgar theory’ of enshrining every last person killed by Japan’s enemies. The war criminals who ‘misled Japan to tragic defeat in war’ were, for him, one enshrinement too far. 62

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 297

6/30/2011 1:03:51 PM

298 John Breen

Opposition to the enshrinement of the Class As is echoed in other groups orbiting Yasukuni. Two officer veterans of the Kaikōsha told this author they believed these men should be removed from Yasukuni. This was not because they accepted the verdicts of the Tokyo war crimes tribunal, but because ‘those who led us into war should be treated differently from those who did not.’63 The president of the powerful Japan Society for the War Bereaved, Koga Makoto, is also opposed. The society itself, founded in the immediate post-war period to represent the interests of the war bereaved, is split down the middle over the issue. As soon as it became known in 2007 that the emperor had been boycotting Yasukuni on account of the Class A war criminals, Koga founded a study group to contemplate how they might encourage him to return. Inevitably their deliberations focused on what to do with the Class As. The study group met eleven times before reporting back in December 2009.64 The verdict was that the war criminals should be ‘entrusted to the care of the Chief Priest’ (gūji azukari). The practical implications of this are not entirely clear at the time of writing, but this is clearly a call for their removal from the Yasukuni pantheon. As a spokesman said, ‘Our views have nothing to do with the demands of the Chinese or Koreans. We believe that the men who led Japan to war should not be enshrined at Yasukuni. In order to facilitate the return of the emperor and empress to Yasukuni, we advocate removal.’65 It remains to be seen whether Koga Makoto can unite the Society around this position, and whether the Society will have any success in persuading Yasukuni priests to act. It seems unlikely. One final observation is in order here. The presence of Class A war criminals in the Yasukuni pantheon is of immense importance if we are to make sense of Yasukuni and the international problem it has become. Their presence is important for another reason, though. The Class A war criminals serve a polemical purpose, similar to that of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They frame Japan as victim of the injustice of the Tokyo war crimes tribunal. This is far from inconvenient for Yasukuni apologists. The Class A war criminal issue enables the argument to focus on the actions of the men who launched ‘aggressive war,’ not on the subsequent conduct of the army unleashed on Asia. The A criminal presence also serves usefully to deflect discussion away from those convicted of B and C class crimes, including some of whom inflicted untold suffering on innocents throughout Asia. About the B and C class criminals, their actions and their trials, almost nothing is said – and nothing written.

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 298

6/30/2011 1:03:51 PM

Voices of Rage 299

Conclusion In Li Ying’s earnest but flawed film Yasukuni (2008), there is a memorable scene that takes place on August 15, 2006. It begins with Tokyo mayor Ishihara Shuntarō waxing eloquently before an enthusiastic audience on a canopied stage in the Yasukuni precinct. He descends the stage to great applause, and the national anthem follows. As the anthem is sung with gusto, two students move into camera shot. Shouting condemnations of prime ministerial patronage of Yasukuni, they try but fail to unfold a banner. Immediately they are set upon; one is wrestled to the ground. Both are forced to retreat by a snarling, aggressive mob to the refrain ‘Go back home to China!’ (Chūgoku ni kaere). As the young men (both of whom are in fact Japanese) are hounded out of the shrine precinct, the police intervene, and things turn worse before they get better. One student is punched in the mouth. The police arrest the student, and do nothing about his attacker. Yasukuni on August 15 is always intimidating. On the same day in 2009, a Japanese-speaking Canadian took offense at a talk given there by Tamogami Toshio, former Chief of Staff of the Self Defense forces, dismissed for denying that Japan was an aggressor in the last war. After his speech, the Canadian told him calmly to his face that if he had been in Germany his comments would have got him arrested. The Canadian was then surrounded, manhandled, threatened, and finally, at the urging of one of the thugs, arrested by the police.66 Yasukuni means ‘land of peace,’ but Yasukuni is also a place of violence and aggression. There is often a whiff of menace in the air at Yasukuni, thanks to the presence of ultra-right-wing paramilitary groups, who swagger about in combat gear, heads shaven or hair tightly permed, ready for action. They and their military-style trucks, plastered with signs proclaiming such sentiments as ‘Revere the emperor! Expel the barbarian!’ have privileged access to Yasukuni space, but undermine its claims to be a site of peace. There are ironies aplenty in Yasukuni’s identification with these men of violence. Their presence would make Yasukuni a highly problematic site even if the problems over the constitution and the Class A war criminals were to be solved. The shrine and its apologists remain entirely deaf to those voices of rage to which Iida Susumu demands we all listen; rather, they find common cause with men who have no experience of war but advocate violence. They are guilty of using the war dead for their own political purposes. It is this author’s view that the Democratic Party’s proposals for the creation of

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 299

6/30/2011 1:03:52 PM

300 John Breen

a new, unencumbered national site of mourning and commemoration are greatly to be welcomed.

Notes 1. Index 2009, 1. The document can be downloaded at http://www.dpj.or.jp/news/?num=16667 (accessed January 4, 2011). 2. For details of the school, its curriculum, and its lecturers, see http://www. yasukuni.jp/~sukei/page226.html (accessed January 4, 2011) 3. In recent years, there has been a growth in English-language writing on Yasukuni. In addition to the essays in Breen (ed.) (2008), see especially Nelson, ‘Social memory as ritual practice,’ Selden, ‘Japan the United States and Yasukuni nationalism,’ and O’Dwyer, ‘The Yasukuni Shrine and the Competing Patriotic Pasts of East Asia.’ 4. The Constitution can be viewed online at http://www.solon.org/Constitutions/Japan/English/english-Constitution. html (accessed January 4, 2011) 5. Tōgō (2008), 54. The author is a former diplomat whose grandfather, Tōgō Shigenori, is one of Yasukuni’s fourteen Class A war criminals. This book includes thought-provoking reflections on the war, the war tribunal, the fate of the author’s father, and Japan’s post-war relations with Asia. 6. For the National Association of Shrine’s behind-the-scenes role in this court case, see Jinja Shinpo sha (ed.) (2008), 171–172. 7. Gokoku or ‘state protecting’ is the generic term for a category of shrines established in the Meiji period. There is one in each prefecture. They, like Yasukuni, venerate the spirits of local men and women who died fighting for Japan. Unlike Yasukuni, these gokoku shrines do venerate the spirits of members of Japan’s Self Defense forces. 8. This author is guilty of having made a similarly hasty assertion in an earlier essay. See Breen and Teeuwen (2010), 216. 9. Okumura (2007), 68–69. 10. The Catholic Bishops of Japan constitute an isolated voice of concern at the annual Ise pilgrimage. They espied ‘an intention to revive state Shinto’ in (Catholic) PM Asō Tarō’s 2009 Ise pilgrimage. The full text of the Bishops’ protest can be seen online at: http://www.cbcj.catholic.jp/ jpn/doc/cbcj/090109–2.htm (accessed January 4, 2011) See also Breen (2010b). 11. See his interview on August 15, 2006 at http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/koizumispeech/2006/08/15interview.html (last accessed 4.1.11) This category of question has been asked before, of course. See for a striking example Nelson, ‘Social memory as ritual’, 457. 12. For a discussion of a recent state-Shinto dispute as it unfolded around two shrines in Hokkaido, see Breen (2010a). 13. Selden (2008). 14. See Rose (2008), 296–8. 15. Rose, 31, 39. 16. Rose, 23–24.

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 300

6/30/2011 1:03:52 PM

Voices of Rage 301 17. For two passionate but contrasting Chinese approaches to Yasukuni, see Wang Zhixin, “Unlocking the Secrets of Yasukuni: A Chinese Perspective” in John Breen ed., Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past, Columbia University Press, 2008, and Seki Hei “Plumbing the Depths: The Yasukuni Controversy in China” in John Breen ed., Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past, Columbia University Press, 2008. 18. Rose (2008), 42. 19. Mainichi Shinbun, August 20, 2001; August 17, 2006. 20. Rose (2008), 40. 21. Nakasone (2001). 22. Kobayashi (2005), ‘Asahi wa Yasukuni o kōshite gaikō ka-do ni shitateta.’ 23. Kobayashi, ‘Asahi wa Yasukuni o kōshite gaikō ka-do ni shitateta,’ 64–66. 24. Kobayashi is unabashed about his loathing of democracy (Kobayashi [2005], 201). 25. Yamamoto, Tennō heika no zenshigoto, 253–258. The author of this valuable little book was the Sankei newspaper’s court reporter between 2003 and 2005. 26. See Yamamoto, Tennō heika no zenshigoto, 265–267. 27. See in the section on war criminals, 296–298. Note also that the Showa emperor stopped visiting prefectural gokoku shrines following Yasukuni’s enshrinement of the Class A war criminals (Sankei Shinbun, August 6, 2006). When the present emperor made a rare visit to the Tochigi gokoku shrine in 1996, the Imperial Household Agency first sought confirmation that no Class A war criminals were venerated there. (On this see Yuzawa [2005], 55.) 28. There is conflicting anecdotal evidence as to whether Hirohito was informed of enshrinement before or after its taking place. See on this Tokoro (2006), 94, n. 20 and Yuzawa (2005), 55. 29. Nihon Keizai Shinbun, July 20, 2006. 30. Mikuriya Takashi and Iwai Katsumi (eds) (2007) Urabe Ryōgo, Shōwa Tennō no sokkin: Urabe Ryōgo jijū nikki, 3 (Asahi Shinbunsha), 341. 31. Mikuriya and Iwai (eds) Urabe Ryōgo, 378. 32. On the war criminals’ removal, see in the section on war criminals, 296–298. 33. For Iida’s account of his crimes, and for evidence of his profound remorse, see Iida (2008), 135–157, and Iida (2009), 65–128. 34. Sengo rokujū nen: Yasukuni mondai o kangaeru (2005). 35. Iida offers further reflections throughout his books Jigoku no Nihon hei and Tamashizume e no michi. For the former, see especially pages 175–182; for the latter, pages 222–228 and 341–360. 36. For a thoughtful critique of the presence of a history museum at a site dedicated to mourning the war dead, see Tōgō (2008), 48–53. For diverse takes on the museum and its exhibits, see Nelson (2003); Breen, ‘Yasukuni and the loss of historical memory;’ and Nitta, ‘And why shouldn’t the Prime minister?’ 37. On the absence of the enemy in the Yūshūkan, see Breen, ‘Yasukuni and the loss of historical memory’, 152–153. 38. Emphasis added. Jinja Shinpō, October 26, 2009. 39. For the former, see, for example, the speech by president Koga Makoto at celebrations to mark the sixtieth year of the society’s founding at http://www. nippon-izokukai.jp/index2.html (accessed January 4, 2011). For the latter, see, for example, the Glorious War Dead Society website at http://eireinikotaerukai.com/concept/prospectus.html (accessed January 4, 2011), and,

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 301

6/30/2011 1:03:52 PM

302 John Breen

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

especially, the closing scenes of the society’s documentary film Watashitachi wa wasurenai (‘We will not forget’). The film is shown several times daily in one of two Yūshūkan movie theatres. Kobayashi (2005), 144. In this regard, note that the Japan Society for the War Bereaved styled its newsletter Ishizue. http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/koizumispeech/2006/08/15interview.html (accessed January 4, 2011). All of the emperor’s addresses can be viewed on the Imperial household agency’s website. Those for 2009 are at http://www.kunaicho.go.jp/ okotoba/01/okotoba/okotoba-h21e.html (accessed January 4, 2011). http://w w w.kunaicho.go.jp/okotoba/01/okotoba/okotoba-h21e.html (accessed January 4, 2011). http://www.kunaicho.go.jp/okotoba/01/speech/speech-h17e-saipan.html (accessed January 4, 2011). Iida (2008), 177–178. See also Iida (2009), 224–227, 344–346. Such is the case with Kyōgoku Takaharu, Chief Priest at the time of writing. His predecessor Nanbu Toshiaki also had no Shinto training or qualifications. Kyōgoku, whose early modern ancestors were powerful warlords, was a businessman in the shipping industry. For a discussion of the dynamic construction of Yasukuni rites, see Breen, ‘Yasukuni and the loss of historical memory’, 144–151. For Matsudaira, see Nitta (2005), 115–116; for Yuzawa, see Yuzawa, ‘Goaisatsu’. ‘Go sōritsu hyaku yonjūnen kinen taisai ni yose,’ Jinja Shinpō, October 28, 2009. http://www.nippon-izokukai.jp/index2.html. Last accessed January 11, 2011. The title might be rendered clumsily as ‘We who inherit the legacy of the souls [of the war dead].’ For a fuller discussion of these points, see Breen, ‘Yasukuni and the loss of historical memory’, 158–159. On the modern construction of Shinto as non-religious, see Nitta (2000). See ‘Yasukuni ni iyasaka are’ (Long live Yasukuni) at: http://www.aso-taro.jp/lecture/talk/060808.html (accessed January 4, 2011). For a positive appraisal of the ideas Asō articulates here, see Tōgō (2008), 58–59. For this author’s verdict on Asō’s arguments, see Breen (2010b). For a strident defence of Yasukuni’s enshrinement of the Class A war criminals, see Nitta (2005), 79–98 and, in English, Nitta, ‘And why shouldn’t the PM worship at Yasukuni?’ 130–133. For Tōgō’s views, see Tōgō (2008), 258–300. See, also, Doak, ‘A religious perspective,’ 55–57. Tōgō (2008), 29–30. The shrine is called the Chinreisha. On the character of Tsukuba and the fortunes of the shrine, see Breen, ‘Introduction,’ and Mainchi Shinbun (2007), 99–150. Mainchi Shinbun (2007), 100–102. Ibid., 103–105. The sources referred to are Shinpen Yasukuni jinja mondai shiryō shū, compiled by the Diet library with the somewhat limited cooperation of the Yasukuni shrine. The entire collection is available online at:

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 302

6/30/2011 1:03:52 PM

Voices of Rage 303

61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

http://www.ndl.go.jp/jp/data/publication/document2007.html (accessed January 4, 2011). Mainchi Shinbun (2007), 159–162. See also the fascinating interviews that Sakamoto Koremaru, professor at Kokugakuin University, gave to the Mainichi newspaper on Ashizu and Yasukuni (Mainchi Shinbun [2007], 161, 163–166). Breen, ‘Introduction’, 10–11. For the detail of these and other interviews, see Breen (2004), 88–90. On Koga’s stance, see, for example, the speech he delivered in Aichi prefecture in August 2008 calling on the bereaved to make a ‘mighty decision’ (Sankei Shinbun, August 16, 2008). It should be pointed out that removal is not a question of disinterring, since there are no human remains at Yasukuni. Mainichi Shinbun, December 15, 2009. The incident, which was featured and discussed on the right-wing Sakura TV channel, can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO4DEOhkWYw (accessed January 4, 2011)

Books/articles Breen, John (2004) ‘The dead and the living in the land of peace: a sociology of the Yasukuni shrine,’ Mortality, 9 (1). —— (2008) ‘Yasukuni and the loss of historical memory,’ in Breen (ed.) Yasukuni, the war dead and the struggle for Japan’s past. —— (ed.) (2008) Yasukuni, the war dead and the struggle for Japan’s past (Columbia, NY University Press). Breen, John (2010a) ‘“Conventional wisdom” and the politics of Shinto in postwar Japan,’ Politics and religion, 4 (1). —— (2010b) ‘Popes, bishops and war criminals: reflections on Catholics and Yasukuni in post-war Japan,’ The Asia-Pacific Journal, March 9, 2010. Breen, John and Teeuwen, Mark (2010) A new history of Shinto (Wiley-Blackwell). Doak, Kevin (2008) ‘A religious perspective on the Yasukuni shrine controversy,’ in Breen (ed.), Yasukuni. Iida Susumu (2008) Jigoku no Nihonhei: Nyu-ginia sensen no shinsō (Shinchōsha). —— (2009) Tamashizume e no michi: BC kyū senpan ga toitsuzukeru sensō (Iwanami Shoten). Jinja Shinpō sha (ed.) (2008) Kenshō Jinja Honchō 60 nen: sennin no ashiato (Jinja Shinpōsha). Kobayashi Yoshinari (2005) Yasukuni ron (Shōgakkan). —— (2005) ‘Asahi wa Yasukuni o kōshite ‘gaikō ka-do’ ni shitateta,’ Yasukuni ron (Shōgakkan). Li Ying (2009) Yasukuni (Asahi Shinbun Shuppan). Mainchi Shinbun Yasukuni shuzai han (2007) Yasukuni sengo hishi: A kyū senpan o gyōshi shita otoko (Mainichi Shinbunsha). Mikuriya Takashi and Iwai Katsumi (eds) (2007) Urabe Ryōgo, Shōwa Tennō no sokkin: Urabe Ryōgo jijū nikki, 3 (Asahi Shinbunsha). Nakasone Yasuhiro (2001) ‘Watashi ga Yasukuni sanpai o dannen shita riyū,’ Seiron, September.

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 303

6/30/2011 1:03:52 PM

304 John Breen Nelson, John (2003) ‘Social memory as ritual practice: commemorating spirits of the military dead at Yasukuni Shinto shrine,’ Journal of Asian Studies, 62 (2). Nitta Hitoshi (2000) ‘Shinto as a ‘non-religion’: the origins and development of an idea,’ in John Breen and Mark Teeuwen (eds), Shinto in history: ways of the kami (Curzon Press). —— (2005) Shushō ga Yasukuni o sanpai shite doko ga warui!! (PHP). —— (2008) ‘And why shouldn’t the Japanese Prime Minister worship at Yasukuni?: A personal view,’ in Breen (ed.), Yasukuni. O’Dwyer, Shaun (2010) ‘The Yasukuni Shrine and the Competing Patriotic Pasts of East Asia,’ History and Memory, 22 (2). Okumura Fumio (2007) ‘Koizumi Yasukuni soshō to wa nan datta no ka,’ Kenpō Ronsō, 14. Rose, Caroline (2008) ‘Stalemate: The Yasukuni problem in Sino-Japanese relations,’ in John Breen (ed.), Yasukuni. Seaton, Phillip (2008) ‘Pledge fulfilled: Prime Minister Koizumi, Yasukuni and the Japanese media,’ in Breen (ed.), Yasukuni. Seki Hei (2008) “Plumbing the Depths: The Yasukuni Controversy in China” in John Breen ed., Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past, Columbia University Press. Selden, Mark (2008) ‘Japan the United States and Yasukuni nationalism: war, historical memory and the future of the Asia Pacific,’ Japan Focus, 2892. http:// www.japanfocus.org/-Mark-Selden/2892. Last accessed 1 June 2011. Tōgō Kazuhiko (2008) Rekishi to gaikō: Yasukuni, Ajia, Tōkyō saiban (Kōdansha). Tokoro Isao (2006) ‘Yasukuni saijin no yōken to gōshi no raireki,’ Geirin, 55 (2). Yamamoto Masahito (2009), Tennō heika no zenshigoto, Kōdansha. Yuzawa Tadashi (1999) ‘Go aisatsu’ in Yasukuni no inori, Sankei Shinbunsha. —— (2005) ‘Kinkyū intabyu-: Yasukuni no iibun, eireitachi no koe,’ Seiron, August. Wang Zhixin (2008) “Unlocking the Secrets of Yasukuni: A Chinese Perspective” in John Breen ed., Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past, Columbia University Press.

Sources Film media Mitama o tsugu mono, director Yamada Takeyuki, 2007. Sengo rokujū nen: Yasukuni mondai o kangaeru, NHK, 2005. Watashitachi wa wasurenai, Producer Eirei ni kotaeru kai. Yasukuni, Director Li Ying, 2008.

9780230_240735_12_cha10.indd 304

6/30/2011 1:03:52 PM

Afterword: A Comparative Glance at Politics and Religion in Modern Japan Prasenjit Duara

Covering a century and a half of Japanese history, this volume gives us a long view of the relationship between religion and politics in Japan. As such, it allows us to ask questions about continuities and discontinuities that elude more period-bounded conventional histories and also enables us to ask comparative questions. In this afterword, I want to interrogate these essays about the modern Japanese experience of religion and politics at two comparative registers: in comparison with the Abrahamic religions of northern Europe, and with the non-Abrahamic religions of Asia, especially China. The two levels permit us to explore the relevance of culturally conditioned conceptions of religion and secularism derived from the West and the relevance of Asian religions with a longer and more intimate presence in Japan. In this way, we may be able to ask not only what was distinctive about Japan, but what the Japanese experience may be able to tell us about secularism as a dimension of global modernity. One of the most influential recent works on religion and politics has been Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age,1 which outlines a master narrative of north-western Europe’s history of religion and secularism. It is a vast and complex work that weaves together philosophy and historical sociology, so my brief interpretation of it here will necessarily be reductive. I am especially interested in seeing how this master narrative applies – not in the sense of a theory or template, but as an effect – on non-Western societies. In other words, how does the Western notion of secularism – and, consequently, a reconstituted conception of religion – influence the demarcation of the field of religious activities in nonAbrahamic Asian societies? Taylor sees secularism as evolving out of developments within Christianity and retaining some of the values that the latter cherished 305

9780230_240735_13_aft.indd 305

6/30/2011 1:04:33 PM

306 Prasenjit Duara

during this evolution. Secularism for him is not only the demarcation of a specific and restricted institutional sphere in the modern state (secularism I), nor is it only the diminishment of beliefs about God and the supernatural (secularism II). Rather, it is fundamentally a condition in which belief in God is an ‘option’ together with non-belief and several positions between the two (secularism III). This is particularly evident in contemporary liberal democracies whose constitutions permit this option and allow tolerant religious practices in the public sphere. Taylor is a Catholic and appears to find this system most congenial to his practice. To be sure, the option was not easily available in earlier periods of modernity, especially during the Age of Mobilization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when God and religion were often transferred to the imagined community of the nation, national church, or civil religion – a situation that students of modern Japan will recognize all too clearly. Basic to Taylor’s narrative is the transition from a society which was dominated by belief and where the self was porous, open to determination by non-physically connected phenomena such as spirits and supernatural forces, to one in which the model self becomes the modern ‘buffered self’ that rejects the shaping effect of these supernatural forces upon nature and the self within. Three historical forces create and generalize this ‘buffered self’ from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The most significant is perhaps the Protestant Reformation, in which the interiorization of faith in every individual lodged God within the self and apart from the natural world. Ultimately this selfsufficiency reached a point where God too became unnecessary, and Man could appear as Subject with the potential to control the world of objective nature. This evolution is, however, also assisted by the ‘civilizing process’ discussed by Norbert Elias, which sought to discipline raw nature in individuals and society, and, finally, an institution-building process from within that is akin to Foucault’s notion of governmentality. Although Taylor does not delineate a specific historical understanding of the relations between the three processes in the formation of the buffered self, he does succeed in putting the question of religion at the centre of historical study. Note that, in Taylor’s account, belief does not disappear but becomes an option, and a very necessary one if the world is to regain some sense of the fullness of life. Such a capacious work has, of course, aroused a great deal of both appreciation and criticism, some of which may be sampled in the volume Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age.2 I will dwell only on one criticism, which affects our own project to understand religion in Asia.

9780230_240735_13_aft.indd 306

6/30/2011 1:04:34 PM

Afterword 307

Taylor defines religion in terms of Belief even in the face of a vast scholarship that does not see this facet as necessarily central, and, particularly, in the face of Talal Asad’s more radical critique of the very idea of ‘religion’ as a modern Western invention. In this view, religion came to be centred upon Belief and Faith only as it became interiorized, separated from the secular and the natural. Rituals, cultivation, disciplines, and virtuoso practice, among other activities, were and continue to be distributed along an axis of power that is resistant to a single notion of Religion based on Belief.3 Nonetheless, for our purposes, Taylor’s narrative presents a plausible account of the conditions of the very production of Religion and secularism as a modern coupling. It permits us to gauge the impact of this product under very different historical conditions, because the coupling travelled into all societies in the world from the nineteenth century onwards as a sign of modernity and as a condition of state-building. The long-term transformation of religiosities (to utilize a provisional word for the more encompassing formations) into Religion under Taylor’s conditions of secularization was evidently a more organic historical process in north–central Europe than it was in Asian societies. Nonetheless, the coupling was attractive to Westernizing states and elites in Asia, although often for a range of different reasons. Common to all of them was the idea that, in order to meet the challenge of Christianity in their societies, they would need to mobilize their own religious traditions into something like Religion. At the same time, this interiorized, if not privatized, Religion would ideally function strictly in the regulatory ambit of the modern secular state. A trend towards Christianization, and specifically Protestantization, of religions in Asia was developing gradually over much of the nineteenth century, although it accelerated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In India, although the colonial state remained unmotivated to mobilize communities for or against religion, Hindu reformist religious groups which emerged in the public sphere through debates with Christian missionaries sought not only to reform or purify popular religion but also to nationalize it. The reform movements, from the Arya Samaj to Gandhi, advocated highly Christianized notions of Religion, even if Gandhi sought to accommodate many of the realities of everyday religiosities. Anne Blackburn’s recent study of Sri Lankan Buddhist reform shows that such reformism employed both the new discourse and practices of Religion and also historical concerns and networks among monks in the ancient Theravada world of the Indian Ocean.4

9780230_240735_13_aft.indd 307

6/30/2011 1:04:34 PM

308 Prasenjit Duara

In China, the political mainstream after the May 4 movement rejected a role for religion and religiosity as such. The religiosities of the popular masses were a symbol of backwardness for the enlightened elite of China. For the early twentieth-century Chinese state, secularism was attractive because it potentially allowed the organization of the vast energies, resources, and capacities in the realm of informal religiosities to be put at the service of the state-controlled sphere of Religion. But, from the late nineteenth century until Liberation in 1949, there were many religious movements – which I have dubbed ‘redemptive societies’ – that sought to meet the challenge of Christianity and modernity by revamping older syncretic and redemptive traditions. Some of these had connections with the simultaneous appearance of the new religions in Japan. Perhaps the most well-known of the fin de siècle responses was the Confucian Religion movement of Kang Youwei. Kang’s movement sought to Christianize Confucianism and establish it as a modern national religion. For various reasons the movement did not succeed on the Chinese mainland (although it survived and even flourished among the Chinese diaspora) and disappeared into a Confucianized redemptive society known as the Morality Society. In Japan, Hirata Atsutane’s nineteenth-century synthesis of the new Shinto appeared to incorporate the idea of a unique creator God from Christianity and drew from Buddhist funeral rites, among others, to produce an early modern conception of Religion.5 As Isomae Jun’ichi has suggested, the impact of the West on religiosity in Japan – and, we may add, elsewhere in Asia – led to the twofold, simultaneous and often contradictory trends towards transcendentalism (as part of the Protestantization) and nationalization (or entanglement with identity politics) of religiosities or teachings (jiao/kyō, as they were often called in East Asia).6 Several of the new religions in Japan, such as the Ōmotokyō (which had close links with redemptive societies in China), were also characterized by this contradictory urge to transcendental universalism and nationalism.7 Despite the vast differences between the Abrahamic traditions and the historical understanding of religiosities in China and India, there is one important similarity between them. All three traditions drew upon a developed conception of the transcendent which was first theorized by Karl Jaspers and elaborated by S.N. Eisenstadt in the theory of the Axial Age. Key to Axial civilization is the split between transcendence and the mundane. The goals of these civilizations were embedded in a divine transcendent realm. Axial civilizations represented a new type of reflexivity that gave expression to a vision of the world that could

9780230_240735_13_aft.indd 308

6/30/2011 1:04:34 PM

Afterword 309

be different from the here and the now. As the vision became institutionalized, the transcendent realm became a new ontological basis for universal ethics in these religions. The conception of axial transcendence has several problems in its earlier formulations. Perhaps most obvious is that, historically, few conceptions of transcendence exist in pure form, and they inevitably become associated with practices of human flourishing and ritualism. Much of Axial Age theory is also associated with modernization. While there may or may not be an elective affinity between conceptions of transcendence and potential for modernity, it is not my purpose to explore that question. Rather, I am interested in transcendentalism as a consequential Archimedean position that propelled historical change. As an alternative source of sacred and ethical authority, it fuelled rebellion, millenarian renewal, and self-transformation. Although this is not the place to undertake the nuanced elaboration of transcendent ideals in India and China, which resided primarily in the conception of Heaven or tian, suffice it to say that, throughout the history of these two societies, the transcendent furnished an alternative position for the prophet or sage to throw a moral challenge to the sacralized order of the priest or the emperor. Popular groups in Chinese society often fashioned a composite notion of transcendence, combining ideas of Heaven with Buddhist ideals, to undertake moral and, not infrequently, political renovation of the social order. In India, from the Buddhists to the medieval Sufi and Bhakti saints to Gandhi, the transcendent has played a powerful historical role. Again, we can hardly undertake to study the continued role of the transcendent alternative in contemporary Asia here, but the subject is of importance for a comparative study of the non-Abrahamic traditions of Asia. Taylor, too, subscribes to the Axial position regarding transcendence in the Christian tradition and argues that the Reformation represented a culmination of the transcendent vision, which now became directly accessible to every individual. This culmination of Christian transcendence (together with the other forces), however, led to what I like to call the ‘transcendence of transcendence,’ when God himself finally drops out of the buffered self for many and loses his authorizing power for political legitimacy or self-formation. In this context, it is interesting to ask how the authors in this volume deal with – or presuppose – these questions in the Japanese case. Is there a transcendent position in Japanese historical society that could foster an alternative to the established order? If so, where does it reside? What happens to the transcendent/immanent relationship once the modern

9780230_240735_13_aft.indd 309

6/30/2011 1:04:34 PM

310 Prasenjit Duara

state declares itself to be secular? We noted that something resembling Religion emerged in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan; how did it accommodate the transcendent on the one hand and the secular state on the other? Another set of questions dealt with in these essays leads us to inquire about contemporary issues of globalization and what has been called ‘methodological nationalism’ in the study of religion. It might be fair to say that the traditional view on the question of Japanese civilization or culture is that it is non-transcendent (Kitagawa, Eisenstadt, Bellah, etc.). Even while there may have been transcendent strains brought in with Chinese conceptions of Heaven and Buddhist notions of nirvana – or Dao and Dharma, according to Kitagawa – the dominant force was an ‘immanent theocracy’ which ruled over a national community that was also a soteriological community. ‘In short, both Shinto and Buddhism were transmuted, thanks to newly created myths which sanctioned their amalgamation, and served the cause of immanental theocracy, which permeated every aspect of national community.’8 In Robert Bellah’s view, the Japanese polity knew early and well the implications of the transcendental position. The rulers sought to ‘use the axial to overcome the axial,’ and he dubs Japanese civilization a tradition of ‘submerged transcendence.’9 Today this position may seem to take culture and society to be overly monolithic (or essentialist), and one cannot discount the role of transcendence-based appeals to alternative moralities among Buddhists, the hidden Christians, the conception of tian/ten, neoConfucians, or in popular traditions. Certainly, in this volume, the essays by Fabio Rambelli on the Buddhist transcendence of Kaiseki, Brian Victoria’s study of the Buddhist Youth League in the twentieth century, and Erica Baffelli’s study of Soka Gakkai’s ideals of Dharma, as well as the many references to popular, new religious groups such as the Ōmotokyō and Tenrikyō, suggest that they developed their moral and religious conceptions at varying angles from the established ‘theocracy’ of the state. Nonetheless, it is unquestionable that the state power in the postRestoration period, as well as perhaps in the pre-Restoration period, maintained a firmer control on these ‘heterodoxies’ than in other Asian societies. Several of the essays point to the continuing role of the ‘immanent theocracy’ in the post-Restoration state. Kyu Hyun Kim suggests that the emperor may have lost whatever element of transcendence the institution might have possessed soon after the Restoration; even the Satsuma rebels, who might be thought to have taken his divinity most seriously, had a more functional understanding of his role as an imma-

9780230_240735_13_aft.indd 310

6/30/2011 1:04:34 PM

Afterword 311

nent leader of the nation (although Kim also refers to alternative conceptions of the emperor as a living god in the new religions). This interpretive strain of overwhelming state domination of access to the divine culminates in the essays by Alan Tansman, Roy Starrs, and John Breen (though it is not necessarily the explicit argument of the latter two essays). The wartime state transfigured the ‘immanent theocracy’ into what we might call an insistent and coercive ‘regime of authenticity.’10 Imperial divinity was transformed into the embodiment of national authenticity, a symbol of timelessness that gave and gives ultimate coherence to the meaningless evolution of the historical nation. It is this particular figuration of coherence that also seems to be behind the terroristic dramas of Mishima and Asahara (Starrs refers to it as the quest for the ‘sacred canopy’) as well as the politics of the Yasukuni priests and partisans. The second, weaker strain detected by these writers in pre-1945 Japanese society of expressions of transcendence or alternative beliefs and religious conceptions that survived under statist hegemony is provocatively framed by Kevin Doak, who argues that the pre-war Japanese state was a secular rather than a theocratic state. According to him, the Japanese state ideology was something closer to civil religion emphasizing moral suasion than a theocracy. How else could the Christians have survived in a theocracy? Here I think it is important to refer back to the essays by Yijiang Zhong and Kyu Hyun Kim concerning the religious question in the Meiji Restoration. They show us how Shinto was emerging towards the middle of the nineteenth century as a Religion built upon ideas of purity, morality, and salvation (through the transformation of individuals into kami by means of appropriate funerary rituals). But, precisely as it was doing so, its moment was stolen by the politics of the Restoration. Sect Shinto was separated from State Shinto, and Shinto rituals were absorbed by the state in a formally secular state. What we have here is a technical definition by the state of itself as a secular entity. While this does have some reality effects – it can permit the people to choose their religion if they like – the earlier pre-Meiji power of state religiosity is incorporated into the secular realm of state power. Here we see the ability of a strong Asian state to apply the requisite categories of secular nationhood developed in a secularizing West upon a different historical society, to its great advantage. By converting its control over the divine into overwhelming control over national authenticity, it gained the modern power of mobilization that few other states possessed at the time.

9780230_240735_13_aft.indd 311

6/30/2011 1:04:34 PM

312 Prasenjit Duara

I believe that the question of transcendence continues to be important for contemporary society, but not in an abstract or ungrounded way. As mentioned earlier, few conceptions of transcendence remain untouched by desires of fulfilment in the here and now. Conversely, one might argue that the Japanese state tradition of ‘submerged transcendence’ also knew that it had to come to terms with ideals of transcendence in society. As Bellah has argued, the transcendent vision of Nichiren and Pure Land followers and others could be accommodated in the pre-Meiji period as long as it did not constitute a political challenge.11 Similarly, the Meiji state could also tolerate transcendent traditions (of the Christians and Nichiren) as long as they accepted the sovereign authority of the nation-state. Of course, the orbit of the nation-state was greater and deeper than that of the shogunate, and the transcendent universalism of Religions became legitimated by the expansionist nation-state. It is in this context that the study of religion in Japan needs to break out of the methodological nationalism which limits a fuller understanding of how these religions were affected by global forces – such as the changing conceptions and legitimating strategies that I have pointed to here. To some extent, this kind of methodological nationalism may reflect the very success of the state’s control and imposition of nationalism upon religion. Most pre-war Japanese religions followed the empire, and many – such as the Buddhists and Ōmotokyō – preceded it as well. In pursuing the study of these religions we may note not only the power of an immanent theocracy but, perhaps equally, the outward, if expansionist, drive of a religious universalism. Does the compromised nature of this drive change under different political circumstances? Japanese Buddhists such as the Soka Gakkai have expanded phenomenally outside Japan in the post-war era.12 Is it perhaps time to see how the outside may be influencing the pattern of the strong and weak trends we have been able to observe in twentieth-century Japan?

Notes I would like to thank Levi McLaughlin and Yijiang Zhong for their very helpful comments on the first draft of this essay. 1. Charles Taylor (2007) A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University). 2. Michael Warner, Jonathan Van Antwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (eds) (2010) Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

9780230_240735_13_aft.indd 312

6/30/2011 1:04:34 PM

Afterword 313 3. By ‘belief’ with a small b, I mean that a certain measure of belief is necessary in the efficacy of supernatural power. Such a belief does not prevent the worshipper from turning to other, more efficacious, gods or objects if one god does not deliver. In the Abrahamic faiths, ‘Belief’ – symbolized by the preparedness of Abraham to sacrifice his son – represents a condition for access to the transcendent, revealed truth, salvation, and belonging in a community of believers, with implications for non-believers and for proselytization. 4. Anne M. Blackburn (2010) Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 5. Shigeyoshi Murakami (1980) Japanese Religion in the Modern Century, translated by H. Byron Earhart (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press), 7–8, 55. 6. Isomae Jun’ichi (2005) ‘Deconstructing ‘Japanese Religion’ A Historical Survey,’ Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 32 (2): 235–248, © 2005 Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture. 7. Susumu Shimazono (2004) From Salvation to Spirituality: Popular Religious Movements in Modern Japan (Melbourne: Trans-Pacific Press); Murakami (1980), 70–75. 8. Joseph M. Kitagawa (1974) ‘The Japanese ‘‘Kokutai’’ (National Community): History and Myth,’ History of Religions, 13 (3), 209–226; 221, 223. 9. Robert N. Bellah (2003) Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press), 7–9, 13. 10. For the ‘regime of authenticity’ see Prasenjit Duara (2003) Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield). 11. Bellah (2003), 20–21. 12. See Levi McLaughlin, ‘Interpreting Religion in a Transregional Context: Case Studies of Sōka Gakkai in the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Korea,’ Presentation May 7, 2010 at an international symposium entitled ‘From Area Studies to Transregional Studies? Contours of Globalization in Asia’s Re-integration’ at the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA.

9780230_240735_13_aft.indd 313

6/30/2011 1:04:34 PM

9780230_240735_13_aft.indd 314

6/30/2011 1:04:34 PM

Index Abrahamic, non-Abrahamic religions, 305, 308, 309, 313 absolutism, 65–6 activism, 39, 42, 51, 143, 151, 221, 253 Adorno, Theodor, 165, 182 aesthetics, 182, 184, 263 Africa, 186 age of the gods, 97, 182 agriculture, 117, 118, 123 Aizawa Seishisai, 28, 50, 62–4, 67, 73, 164, 248. See also New Theses (Shinron) Akihito, Emperor, 4, 7, 49, 287 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 176 alayavijnana, 250 alienation, 32, 121, 232, 256, 266 All Japan Federation of Buddhist Youth Organizations (Zen Nippon Bukkyō Seinen-kai Renmei), 149 Allied Occupation, 7 Amakasu Incident, 195 Amaterasu (Sun Goddess), 46, 52, 57, 59, 61, 64, 69, 92, 94, 95, 96, 159, 168, 260, 283 America, 2, 3, 15, 17, 24, 49, 69, 79, 84, 105, 185, 186, 204, 206, 211, 239, 254, 255, 266, 272, 293 anarchism, 18, 193, 195 anarcho-socialists, 193 anatman, 249 Andō Kisaburō, 197 Andō Shōeki, 248 Anglicanism, 62, 194 Anglo-Saxons, 128 animism, 85, 87 anomie, 127, 135, 261, 266 anti-bakufu, 52, 62 anti-Buddhism, 20, 29, 40, 44, 129, 136, 149, 244, 245, 248, 268 anti-capitalism, 125. See also Buddhist economy anti-Chinese, 183

anti-Christianity, 45, 67, 187, 188, 201, 203, 213 anti-colonialism, 152, 153, 154 anti-communism, 5 anti-foreignism, 57, 83, 182, 245 anti-globalism, 135 anti-government, 138, 195, 211 anti-modernism, 14, 54 anti-monarchism, 195 Anti-Nazi Fascism Annihilation League (Han-Nachisu Fassho Funsai Dōmei), 151 anti-religion, 22, 144, 145 anti-Semitism, 17, 24, 259 anti-war, 151, 159, 160 anti-West, 132 anti-Yasukuni, 286 Antoni, Klaus, 9, 23, 25, 27, 84, 99, 100, 101, 102, 277 apocalypse, 61, 260, 269, 271 arahitogami, 157 aristocracy, 73, 81, 119, 124, 248 Armageddon, 25, 257, 276 Armageddon complex, 258, 259, 273 Article 3 of the Meiji Constitution, 192 Asad, Talal, 307 Asahara Shōkō, 21, 216, 241–2, 256–9, 261–2, 265, 268–72, 276, 311 Asahi Shinbun, 285, 301, 303 Asano Kenshin, 125, 131, 136, 139 Ashida Hitoshi, 203 Ashikaga dynasty, 13, 14, 56, 58, 82 Ashikaga Tadayoshi, 13 Ashizu Uzuhiko, 297 Asia, 4, 7, 12, 16, 26, 27, 81, 94, 102, 183, 238, 245, 253, 266, 278, 284, 286, 298, 300, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 313 Asia-Pacific, 303 Asō Hisashi, 208 Asō Tarō, 292, 296, 300 assassination, 193, 195, 201, 213, 245, 254

315

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 315

6/30/2011 1:05:14 PM

316 Index assimilation, 173 astronomy, 14, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 117, 125, 127, 130, 135, 136, 137 atheism, 11, 18, 195, 203 Aum Shinrikyō, 21–2, 25–6, 186, 213, 216, 218, 226, 235, 240–1, 256–60, 265–9, 271–2, 275–7 autocracy, 66, 73 Axis Powers, ix, xii Baffelli, Erica, 22, 216, 310 bakufu (shogunal government), 24, 27, 37, 40–3, 52, 107, 132, 231 baptism, 188, 193, 204, 205, 213 barbarians, 34, 35, 36, 37, 43, 57, 61, 133, 299 Barrett, Tim, 86, 101 Bataille, Georges, 135, 139 Beijing, 286 Bellah, Robert, 157, 160, 274, 276, 310, 312, 313 Bellringer, J. D., 275, 276 Benares, 249, 250, 251 Benedict XV, Pope, 206 Benedict XVI, Pope, 185 Benjamin, Walter, 133, 141 Bentham, Jeremy, 80 Berger, Peter, 163, 181, 261, 276 Bergson, Henri, 171, 176 bhakti, 309 Bielefeldt, Carl, 24, 25 Bix, Herbert, 157, 160 Blood League Incident, 201 bodhisattva, 124, 272 Bolitho, Harold, 100, 101 bonreki (Indic calendrical sciences), 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 125, 135, 136 bonreki undō, 106, 108, 110 Boshin War (1868–9), 117, 119 Boxer Rebellion, 205 boycott campaign against foreign goods, 122, 139 Brackett, D. W., 25, 269, 274, 275, 276 Brahma, 109 Brazil, 206 Breen, John, 7, 23, 25–6, 48–9, 52, 99, 101–3, 215, 267, 278, 300–2, 304, 311

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 316

Britain, 61, 62, 71, 139, 266 Buddha, 24, 26, 44, 69, 86, 110, 113, 115, 129, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148, 149, 151, 158, 174, 221, 227, 229, 247, 259 Buddha Amida, 69, 141, 148 Buddha-dharma, 227 Buddhahood, 10 Buddha-nature, 26 Buddhism and Confucianism, 14, 59, 86, 88, 96, 127, 129, 174, 231 Buddhist-Christian relations, 25 Buddhist democracy (bukkyō minshushugi), 218, 225, 226, 233 Buddhist economy, 124 Buddhist fundamentalism, 110, 131, 132 Buddhist Reformation Society (Korean, Han’guk Pulgyo Yusinhoe), 152 Budōkan, 287, 292, 293 Bukkoku rekishō hen, by Entsū, 110, 136, 137 Bukkyō sōseiki, by Sada Kaiseki, 107, 137, 138, 141 bunmei kaika (civilization and development), Sada Kaiseki’s view of, 126–7, 140, 141 buppoō, 227 burakumin, 151 Bureau for Moral Suasion, 210 bureaucrats, 2, 52, 70, 84, 85, 203, 242, 258 burial, 39, 42, 91, 105 Burke, Edmund, 170 bushi, 258, 265 bushidō, 244, 247, 254 Butler, Lee, 63, 79, 81 cabinets (government), 190, 193, 201, 202, 204, 209, 279, 282, 283, 286, 288, 291 cannibalism, 289, 291 capitalism (market), 3, 118, 122, 144, 145, 147, 148, 151, 156, 157, 158, 231, 254, 267, 271 capitalists, ix, 118, 122, 125, 144, 145, 147, 148, 156, 254, 267, 271 Cassano, Franco, 135, 139 Catholic Japanese, 204, 206

6/30/2011 1:05:14 PM

Index Catholicism, 6, 7, 17, 69, 79, 187, 188, 193, 195, 203–7, 211, 213–14, 218, 300, 303, 306 censorship, 150, 163, 181, 183, 214 ceremonies, 4, 7, 58, 74, 76, 81, 124, 164, 169, 207, 254 Chambon, Archbishop, 204, 207, 215 charisma, 55, 65, 82, 241, 260, 276 China, 24, 26, 56, 61, 66, 93, 109, 122, 130, 141, 159, 165, 173, 201, 206, 217, 225, 245, 249, 279, 280, 284, 285, 288, 296, 299, 301, 305, 308, 309, 313 Chinda Sutemi, 194, 201 Chinese, 5, 57, 78, 89, 90, 91, 94, 130, 164, 173, 183, 208, 214, 215, 229, 266, 284, 285, 286, 288, 296, 298, 301, 308, 309, 310 chingo-kokka, 13 Chinreisha, 297, 302 Christ, 79, 202, 210 Christianity, ix, x, 3, 6, 9–11, 14, 25, 28, 30–1, 35, 37–8, 45–6, 52–3, 60, 62–3, 67, 76, 79, 95–6, 107–8, 110, 127, 129, 130, 147, 160, 162, 186–95, 201–14, 218, 236, 243, 244, 256, 258, 261, 268, 285, 305, 307–12; Buddhist attitudes against, 107–8, 110, 127, 129, 130 Christianization, 307–8 Christians, 11, 45, 67, 130, 188, 193, 194, 201, 203, 214 church and state, 2, 7, 8, 12, 13, 15, 19, 187, 196, 211, 272 Church of England, 211 civil religion, 186, 192, 306, 311 civilization and development (bunmei kaika), 126, 127, 140, 141 civilization and enlightenment, 165, 210 Clean Government Party, 22, 217, 223, 224 Collcutt, Martin, 13–14, 24, 25 communism, ix, 18, 155, 166, 201, 208 Communist Party, 151, 193, 200, 203 communists, 5, 151, 193, 200, 201, 201, 297

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 317

317

Confucianism, 14, 18, 28, 32, 35, 39, 42, 50, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 71, 76, 80, 86, 88, 90, 96, 98, 109, 118, 124, 127, 129, 132, 164, 171, 174, 188, 210, 211, 231, 240, 244, 308, 310 Constitution of the Empire of Japan, 191–2 corner stone (ishizue), 292 corporeality, 2, 55, 81 cosmology, Shinto, 51, 61, 96, 101; Buddhist, 109, 115, 126, 136, 140, 141. See also bonreki undō; Jambudvīpa; Mount Sumeru coups, 179, 183, 200, 201, 240, 258, 270, 272 cremation, 39, 42 Criminal Affairs Bureau (of the Ministry of Justice), 154 Critical Buddhism, 12, 20 cults, 85, 87, 104, 129, 135, 141, 195, 200, 211, 212, 241, 266 cultural nationalism, 97 cultured elite, 181 Daihōrin (Great Dharma Wheel) magazine, 154 daijōsai, 7, 58 Daikyō–in, 188 daisei inin, 62 Dan Takuma, 201 dango (rice cake) effect, 120 Daoism, 10, 86, 310 Daumal, René, 134, 139. See also bonreki undō; cosmology, Buddhist; Sada Kaiseki Deguchi Onisaburō, 53, 197 deification of the emperor, 88, 91 deities, 7, 33, 46, 57, 58, 64, 66, 69, 90, 91, 94, 95, 109, 148, 171, 188, 221, 264, 269 demagogues, 180 demi-gods, 61 democracy, 18, 21, 22, 72, 78, 180, 185, 186, 189, 192, 218, 226, 231, 232, 233, 238, 241, 245, 257, 261, 263, 265, 272, 301 Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), 217, 225

6/30/2011 1:05:14 PM

318 Index democratism, 166 democratization, 152, 219 dharma, 110, 154, 221, 222, 226–9, 231, 235–8, 310 dharma protection, 110 dictatorship, 13, 53, 242, 257 diplomacy, 52–3, 203–5, 279, 284, 300 direct rule (by emperor, shinsei), 71 divine country, 8, 92 divine emperor, ix, 87, 157, 192, 241, 264, 272 divine nation, 1, 79, 99, 270 divine ruler, 90, 94, 97 divinity, 2, 30, 34, 35, 40, 46, 48, 52, 54, 55, 60, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69, 95, 255, 261, 272, 310, 311 Doak, Kevin, 4, 6, 7, 11, 22, 23, 25, 185, 215, 259, 302, 303 Dobbins, James, 13, 24, 25 doctrine, 3, 5, 6, 7, 15, 18, 20, 21, 29, 31, 45, 46, 47, 53, 67, 68, 73, 90, 92, 93, 108, 147, 181, 227, 236, 244, 249, 250, 263, 272, 274 doomsday cults, 21, 242, 266 Drought, Father James, 204 Duara, Prasenjit, 305, 313 Dutch studies (rangaku), 108, 136 earthquakes, 78, 208, 229, 257 Eastern Shining Capital (Tōshōgū), 56, 59 Eco, Umberto, 258, 273, 275, 276 economic development, Sada Kaiseki’s view of, 121–6. See also Buddhist economy Edo (or Tokugawa) period, 6, 38, 40, 96, 97, 98, 100, 110, 118, 124, 140, 187, 211 Eirei ni kotaeru kai, 292, 304 Ekayana Buddhism, 20, 21, 24 eliminate Buddhism (haibutsu), 129, 245 emperor as a sacerdote, 2, 56–63, 64–5, 73, 78 emperor as living god, 54, 55, 63–71, 74, 79, 88, 157, 311 emperor as sacred. See divine emperor

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 318

emperor system ideology, 2, 8, 9, 23, 28, 55, 78, 79, 151, 157, 158, 159, 220 emperor-worship, 16, 17, 54, 247, 248, 255, 263, 264, 267, 270, 271 emperor’s body, 54, 66, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79 emperor’s divinity. See divine emperor emperor’s ‘true visage’ (go-shin’ei), 76, 78 empire, 12, 64, 93, 97, 117, 130, 152, 177, 191, 192, 218, 244, 270, 312 Endō Jun, 96, 101 engaged Buddhism, 159 England, 154, 192, 194, 211 Entsū (Fumon Entsū, 1755–1834), 105, 110–14, 136, 137, 141. See also bonreki undō; cosmology ersatz religion, 186, 192, 210, 211 Essence of the National Polity. See Essentials of the National Polity Essentials of the National Polity, 9, 10, 163, 178 eternity, 64, 165, 169, 171, 172, 181 ethics, 77, 124, 169, 173, 211, 293, 294, 295, 309 ethnicity, 6, 24, 31, 69, 87, 88, 262, 276 ethnocentrism, x, 93, 94, 97, 98 Europe, ix, x, xii, 3, 9, 10, 11, 20, 54, 62, 69, 77, 97, 108, 110, 140, 149, 181, 184, 186, 194, 195, 205, 206, 246, 259, 264, 305, 307 ex-Ko¯meito¯, 224 exoteric-esoteric (kenmitsu) system of rule, 13 exoticism, 98 expansionism, 143, 312 extreme cults, 195 extremism, 197, 201 family state. See kazoku kokka fanaticism, 16, 54, 69, 78, 179 farmers, 42, 71, 119, 120, 121, 122, 146, 151, 183 fascism, viii, ix, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 23, 25, 27, 28, 54, 70, 151, 162, 163, 166, 179, 184, 208, 245, 246, 253, 255, 257, 258, 259,

6/30/2011 1:05:14 PM

Index 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 270, 272, 273, 276, 277 fascist Zen, 15–19 fascists, 3, 8, 9, 11, 15, 16, 17, 23, 25, 26, 139, 163, 245, 246, 253, 255, 259, 262, 264, 270, 272, 273 fascization, 180 February 26 coup attempt, 183, 200–1 Feldman, Noah, 233, 239 feudalism, viii, 97, 129, 131, 139 filial piety, 68, 76, 77, 175 First World War, 9, 205 Fisher, Philip, 180, 184 Five Article Charter Oath, 65 Five Mountains, 13, 24, 25 folk-belief, 70 folklore, 63, 65, 69–71 Foucault, Michel, 80, 81, 306 France, 81, 83, 134, 178, 205, 206 Freedom and People’s Rights movement, 210 freedom of religion, 67, 68, 73, 78, 190, 192, 194, 202, 219 French, 81, 83, 178, 205, 206 Freud, Sigmund, 273 fudoki, 91 Fujii Saishō (1838–1907), 114, 115, 136 Fujita Satoru, 63, 74, 80, 81 Fujitane Mitsue, 174 Fukuba Yoshishizu, 187 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 68, 70, 80, 81, 117 fundamentalism, 3, 79, 86, 111, 132, 185, 192 funerals, 29, 30, 31, 32, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 269, 308 Furukawa Mitsura, 35, 36, 41, 43, 50 Futabatei Shimei, 52 Garon, Sheldon, 193, 194, 202, 212, 213, 215, 260, 275, 276 Gentile, Emilio, 9, 23, 25, 262, 275, 276 geopolitics, 108 Germany, 5, 8, 23, 25, 27, 76, 149, 150, 156, 157, 162, 178, 209, 253, 262, 277, 282, 288, 299 Gibbon, Edward, 244 global modernity, 305

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 319

319

globalization, xi, 26, 119, 125, 135, 158, 310, 313 Glorious War Dead Society, 292 Gluck, Carol, 79, 81, 163, 182 gohōron (Dharma protection), 107, 110 Go-Mizu-no-o, Emperor, 57, 79 Gotō Shimpei, 201, 213 Grass Roots Fascism, 179 Great Depression, 146 Great Dharma Wheel, 154 Great Japanese Empire, 64, 177 Great Shrine of Izumo, 94 Great Thanksgiving Festival. See daijōsai Griffin, Roger, viii, xii, 9, 10, 23, 25, 262, 275, 276 Hagakure, 277 haibutsu kishaku, 129, 245 Hakamaya Noriaki, 20 Hara Takashi, 80–1, 188, 193–5, 206, 212 Hardacre, Helen, 5, 6, 23, 25, 49, 80, 81, 96, 101, 138, 140 Harootunian, Harrry, 49, 96, 101, 274, 276 Hashida Kunihiko, 202 Hatoyama Ichirō, 203 Hattori Nakatsune, 51, 96 Havens, Norman, 86, 99, 102 Hayashi Razan, 244 Hayashi Senjurō (General), 154 heaven, x, 19, 36, 39, 90, 94, 109, 113, 114, 130, 135, 136, 167, 168, 171, 177 heavenly eye (tengan), 113 Heian period, 1, 35, 89, 227 Heidegger, Martin, 15 Heisei Emperor, 78, 257, 287 Heisig, James, 15, 23, 24, 26, 27, 274, 276 heretics, 52, 82, 140, 160, 231 heterodoxies, 38, 194, 211, 310 hidden Catholics, 188 Hideyoshi, 58, 214 Higashi Honganji branch (of the Shin sect), 111, 149 High Treason Incident, 159, 193, 195 Hinduism, x, 249, 250, 251, 255, 258, 268, 269, 274, 307

6/30/2011 1:05:14 PM

320 Index hinomaru, 70, 71 Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, 133, 141 Hiranuma Kiichirō, 190, 201, 202, 209, 213 Hirata Atsutane, 32, 36, 37, 40, 51, 61, 63, 95, 96, 97, 102, 244, 248, 308 Hirata Kanetane, 64, 187 Hirata Seikō, 18 Hiroe Hikozō (born 1784), 136 Hirohito, Emperor, ix, 1, 7, 73, 80, 157, 160, 194, 195, 205, 206, 266, 287, 288, 301 Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, 163 Hitler, Adolf, ix, xii, 5, 11, 23, 25, 149, 150, 164, 246, 262, 264, 276 Hitonomichi Kyōdan, 194, 195, 196, 200, 213 Hōjō no umi, 247 holy war, xi, 8, 9, 10, 16, 179, 183, 245, 246, 256, 264, 272 Honda Nisshō, 227 Hōnen, 174, 229 Horkheimer, Max, 165, 182 Hosokawa Tadaoki, 58 House of Peers, 182, 206 Hozumi Yatsuka, 77, 192, 200, 246 Hu Jintao, 284, 285 Hu Yaobang, 285 I.R.A.A, 209 Ichikawa Hakugen, 16, 18, 24, 26 Ienaga Saburō, 162–3, 181 Ieyasu (Tokugawa Ieyasu), 56, 66 Iida Susumu, 290, 299, 303 Ikeda Daisaku, 22, 214, 218, 223, 224, 226, 230–2, 235, 238–9 Imperial Army, 4, 209, 214, 241, 254, 255 Imperial Constitution (1889). See Meiji Constitution imperial court, 36, 37, 90, 93, 104, 111 Imperial Diet, 206 imperial emissary, 287, 289, 294 Imperial Household Laws, 73 imperial Japan, 4, 53, 185, 212, 235 imperial lineage, 166, 169, 175 Imperial Memorandum on Moral Suasion, 210

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 320

Imperial Rescript for Sailors and Soldiers, 75 Imperial Rescript on Education, 76, 169, 171, 174, 189 Imperial Rule Assistance Association, 209 Imperial University of Tokyo, 206 Imperial Way (kōdō), 8, 19, 202, 210, 252 Imperial Way Buddhism (kōdō bukkyō), 19 Imperial Way religion (kōdō shūkyō), 210 imperialism, ix, 4, 16, 17, 54, 69, 86, 104, 156, 180, 245 imported lamps leading the country to ruin, 107, 122, 123 Inagaki Masami, 143, 160 Index 2009, 279, 300 India, 26, 53, 109, 135, 165, 173, 249, 250, 251, 252, 268, 269, 271, 307, 308, 309 Indonesia, 94 Inoue Junnosuke, 201 Inoue Kowashi, 68, 82, 189, 212 Inoue Nisshō, 201 Inoue Tetsujirō, 76, 77, 102 intellectuals, 20, 21, 77, 106, 108, 109, 125, 133, 135, 180, 256, 263 Inukai Tsuyoshi, 201 invented tradition, 5, 6, 28, 49, 73, 91 Ireland, 192 Irokawa Daikichi, 74, 81, 82, 140 Ise, 59, 65, 84, 85, 102, 159, 221, 254, 283, 284, 300 Ishihara Shuntarō, 299 Islam, 246 Isomae Jun’ichi, 82, 308, 313 Italy, 8, 23, 25, 135, 192, 205, 253, 262, 288 Itō Hirobumi, 65, 67, 73, 76, 83, 212 Itō Kimio, 245, 276 Itō Takashi, 199, 202, 213, 215 Itō Yahiko, 189 Ives, Christopher, 16, 24, 26 Iwakura Tomomi, 38, 52, 53, 65, 66 Izanagi and Izanami, 95

6/30/2011 1:05:14 PM

Index Izumo, 33, 46, 53, 94, 95, 96, 99, 101, 102 Izumo myth, 94, 99 Jambudvīpa (Jp. Enbudai, Nansenbushū), 109, 114 Jamesian tropes of turning, 180 Japan Communist Party, 193 Japan Farmers Union (Nihon Nōmin Kumiai), 151 Japan Moral Suasion Institute, 210 Japan Society for the War Bereaved (Nihon Izoku kai), 289, 296, 298, 302 Japanese Catholic minority, 187 Japanese empire, 97, 152 Japanese mythology, 90, 92–4 Japanese national character, 163, 173, 248 Japanese Protestantism, 202 Japanese self, 177 Japan’s religious history, 187 JCP. See Japan Communist Party Jews, 17, 25, 69, 149, 150, 178, 259 Jimmu, Emperor, 71, 73, 77, 93, 127, 182 Jinja Shinpō, 279, 292, 302, 303 Jiyū-Minshutō. See Liberal Democratic Party Jiyūtō. See Liberal Party Joachim of Flore, x Jōdo Shinshū, 105, 114, 188, 189, 210, 213 Judaism, x Jung, Carl, 133, 139, 140 Kada no Azumamaro, 248 Kaikōsha, 298 Kakehi Katsuhiko, 246 Kamei Kan’ichirō, 203, 208 kami (Shinto gods), 6, 27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 44, 46, 48, 51, 52, 59, 60, 65, 68, 69, 85, 86, 95, 101, 102, 103, 104, 129, 135, 141, 142, 278, 294, 304, 311 kamikaze, 214, 295 Kamo no Mabuchi, 174, 244

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 321

321

Kanchū (Mukyūshi Kanchū Zenki, 1790–1859), 105, 114, 117. See also bonreki undō; cosmology, Buddhist Kaneko Kentarō, 194 Kang Youwei, 308 Kant, Immanuel, 134, 170 Kanto earthquake, 208 Kapleau, Philip, 17, 26 karma 115, 250, 253 Katayama Sen, 193 Katayama Tetsu, 203 Kawabata Yasunari, 252 kazoku kokka, 64 Keizō Obuchi, 225 kenpakusho (policy statements and opinions), 106, 117, 119, 130, 136, 140, 141 Ketelaar, James, 52, 80, 82, 138, 140, 154, 160 Kigensetsu (Emperor Jinmu’s coronation day), 71, 73 Kim, Kyu Hyun, 8, 54, 82, 310, 311 Kinkakuji, 247 Kita Ikki, 201 Kitahara Hitomi, 207 Kizuki Shrine, 94 kōan, 18 Kobayashi Yoshinori, 266, 277, 285, 286 Kobori Keiichirō, 295 kōdō. See Imperial Way Kōfuku Jitsugentō (Happiness Realization Party), 216, 217 Kōfuku no Kagaku, 216 Koga Makoto, 298, 301 Kōgakkan University, 84, 294 Koide Chōjūrō (1797–1865), 136 Koizumi Jun’ichirō, Prime Minister, 281, 282, 284, 289, 292 Kojiki, 3, 46, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 100, 102, 253, 262 kokka Shintō. See State Shinto kokugaku, 29, 32, 35, 38, 39, 40, 42–4, 49, 50–1, 59, 60–1, 64–5, 67, 80–1, 95–6, 98, 174 Kokugakuin University, 50, 84, 294, 303 kokuritsu kaidan, 227, 228, 234

6/30/2011 1:05:14 PM

322 Index kokutai, 3, 8, 9, 23, 25, 34, 50, 62, 64, 76, 77, 81, 88, 92, 97, 98, 100, 101, 156, 163, 164, 168, 169, 170, 172, 174, 175, 178, 179, 182, 197, 227, 248, 249, 257, 259, 260, 264, 265, 266, 267, 270, 271, 272 Kokutai no hongi, 9, 163, 164, 168, 170, 172, 174, 175, 178, 179, 182, 249 Kōmei Seiji Remmei or Kōseiren (League of Fair Statesmen), 223 Kōmeitō (Clean Government Party), 22, 216, 217, 218, 221, 223, 224, 225, 226, 230–8 Konkōkyō, 69 Konoe, Prime Minister, 202, 203, 204, 208, 209, 215 Korea, 72, 93, 130, 138, 152, 213, 217, 279, 285, 313; imperialist policies against, 130, 138 Korean Buddhist Youth League (Han’guk Pulgyo Ch’ŏngnyŏnhoe), 152 Korean Independence Declaration, 152 kōsen rufu, 223, 228, 233 kotodama, 10, 166, 167, 174 Kōtoku Shūsui, 194 Kuroda School, 84 Kuroda Toshio, 13, 24, 25, 84–9, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101–3 Kyoto School philosophy, 15 Lacan, Jacques, 273, 275 Language of the Third Reich, 162, 178, 181 LDP. See Liberal Democratic Party League of Fair Statesmen, 223 League of Nations, 204 left-wing politics, 17, 18, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, 164, 197, 200, 201, 205, 209, 264 leisure, Sada Kaiseki theory of, 118, 124, 125, 135, 139 lèse-majesté, 70, 76, 194, 196, 197, 221, 260 Li Ying, 299, 303, 304 Liberal Democratic Party, 22, 217, 224, 225, 278, 281, 285–6, 295 Liberal Party, 225 liberalism, 60, 193, 208, 220

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 322

liberals, 149, 156 Liberation of Living Creatures Ceremony (hōjōe), 58 living god (emperor as a), 54, 55, 64, 69, 70, 74, 79, 88, 157, 311 Lotus Sutra, 13, 217, 221, 223, 227, 229, 231, 238 Loy, David, 158 Lytton Report, 204 magical power of words. See kotodama Mahavagga (section), 158 Mahayana Buddhism, 20, 24, 125, 231, 269, 272 Makiguchi Tsunesaburō, 159, 160, 217, 221 Makino Nobuaki, Count, 201, 203 Malay-Polynesian region, 93 Manchuria, 150, 179, 183, 204, 214, 313 Manchurian Incident, 179 Manyōshū, 165, 175 mappō, 221, 229, 236 Maraldo, John, 15, 23, 24, 26, 27, 274, 276 market capitalism, 120, 124, 158, 267 Marxism, 126, 133, 141, 147, 148, 160, 162, 165, 192, 193 Matsudaira Nagayoshi, 288, 297 Matsudaira Sadanobu, 61, 62 Matsumoto Shirō, 20 Matsuoka Yōsuke, 203, 204, 214, 288 Matsu’ura Fumio, 150 Matsuura Shinjirō, 202 Meiji Constitution (1889), 189, 191 Meiji emperor (Mutsuhito), 2, 54–5, 63–77, 80–1, 169, 171. See also divine emperor; emperor’s body Meiji government, 4, 6, 14, 29, 38, 45, 46, 47, 52, 53, 65, 67, 68, 70, 104, 105, 107, 111, 119, 124, 126, 129, 130, 132, 135, 187, 189, 248, 254 Meiji imperial state, 191 Meiji Restoration, 5, 6, 28, 31, 32, 42, 56, 63, 71, 96, 97, 100, 157, 222, 245, 311 Meiji state, 2, 6, 29, 30, 31, 38, 46, 48, 53, 55, 65, 67, 98, 106, 119, 126,

6/30/2011 1:05:14 PM

Index 183, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 260, 312 Mein Kampf, 11, 164 Meishō Empress, 57 memory, war, 7, 27, 160, 278, 279, 287, 289–92 Mencius, 90 messhi hōkō, 179, 183 Methodists, 194 methodological nationalism, 310, 312 Middle Ages, 99 Mikado, 54–6, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81–3 Miki Tokuchika, 196 Miki Tokuharu, 195, 196, 213 militarism, 12, 15, 16, 19, 20, 54, 70, 78, 85, 143, 149, 151, 152, 154, 156, 159, 179, 244, 245, 247, 259, 263, 264, 270, 284, 286, 291 military fascization, 180 Mineo Setsudō, 143 Ministry of Divinity (Jingikan), 30, 34, 35, 48, 65, 67, 68 Ministry of Doctrine, 53, 67 Ministry of Doctrine Officers (kyōdōshoku), 67 Ministry of Education, 76, 163, 180, 182, 183, 202, 204, 207, 210, 215 Minobe Tatsukichi, 182, 200 Minoda Muneki, 200 minorities, 11, 197, 211 minority Christian, 193 minshushugi, 218, 225, 233 Minshutō, 225 Mishima Yukio, 21, 240–77, 311 Mitama o tsugu mono (2007 film directed by Yamada Takeyuki), 295, 304 Mito school, 28, 29, 50, 62–4, 92, 245 mixed marriage, 129 Mizuno Tadakuni, 61–2 modern press, Buddhist, 107 modernism, 2, 25, 67, 97, 111, 133, 228, 238, 276 modernity, 9, 14, 25, 26, 27, 53, 55, 70, 74, 76, 97, 104, 141, 170, 172, 262, 266, 270, 276, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 313

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 323

323

modernization, 54, 72, 97, 104, 105, 107, 110, 118, 126, 132, 133, 152, 186, 309; Buddhist attitudes towards, 104, 105, 107, 110, 118, 126, 132, 133 mokuteki kōka kijun (‘object and effect standard’), 281 Monnō (1700–1763), 110, 136. See also cosmology, Buddhist Montesquieu, Charles, 127, 138 moralism, 193 morality, 36, 60, 67, 70, 76, 118, 173, 209, 308, 310, 311 morals, 183, 194, 210 Mori Arinori, 52, 190, 212 Mori Yoshirō, 1 Motoda Eifu (Nagasane), 67, 71, 72, 77, 82, 210 Motoori Norinaga, 32, 40, 51, 59, 60, 61, 80, 82, 89, 92, 96, 110, 244, 248 Mount Sumeru (Shumisen), 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 125, 139 Mukyūshi Kanchū Zenki, 114 Murakami Haruki, 257, 272, 275 Murakami Shigeyoshi, 28, 48, 51, 52, 237, 313 Muromachi era, 82 Mussolini, Benito, 25, 131, 163, 246, 259, 264, 276 musubi, 37, 168, 175, 176 Musubi no kami, 95 Mutobe Yoshika, 32–7, 41, 49, 50 Mutsuhito, Emperor. See Meiji emperor mystical union, 8, 10, 181, 246, 255, 272 mysticism, 114, 247, 267 myth, 23, 93, 94, 97, 171, 262, 263, 268, 313 mythology, 3, 16, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 253, 262 myths, 81, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 99, 182, 262, 310 Nagasaki, 61, 133, 136, 287, 298 Nakamura Hajime, 20, 24, 26 Nakamura Masanao (1832–1891), 125, 188

6/30/2011 1:05:14 PM

324 Index Nakano Tsuyoshi, 219, 220, 222, 223, 235, 236, 237, 239 Nakaoka Kon’ichi, 195 Nakasone Yasuhiro, Prime Minister, 266, 282, 285, 286, 293, 301, 303 naked public square, 185, 186 Nanba Daisuke, 195 Nathan, John, 266, 275, 277 nation-building, 6, 30, 92, 170 nation-protecting religion, 3, 12, 227 nation-transcendence, 12 National Association of Shrines, 294 national body (kokutai), 62, 64, 68, 73, 76, 80, 164, 168, 169. See also kokutai; national essence; national polity national essence (kokutai), 3, 9, 23, 156, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 175. See also kokutai; national body; national polity national governance entrusted by the emperor (daisei inin), 62 national learning, 174 national polity (kokutai), 3, 8, 9, 16, 23, 92, 97, 98, 100, 202, 227, 242. See also kokutai; national body; national essence national Shinto, 3, 248, 254, 265, 267, 270, 271 national socialism, 156–8, 200, 260 National Spirit Mobilization, 207, 208, 209 National Spirit Summons, 208 national teaching (kokukyō), 67 national tours (junkō, of the emperor), 55, 70, 74 nationalism, 3, 8, 9, 12, 23, 25, 26, 27, 48, 56, 69, 87, 97, 104, 147, 191, 200, 214, 225, 227, 238, 243, 244, 246, 247, 248, 267, 276, 277, 284, 300, 304, 308, 310, 312 nationalists, 3, 5, 93, 152, 245, 263, 266, 270 nativism, 49, 82, 98, 101, 102, 126, 244, 276 nativist studies. See kokugaku nativists, 29, 37, 92, 118, 243–5, 248–50 Naumann, Nelly, 88, 93, 100, 102

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 324

Nawrocki, Johann, 25, 27, 101, 102, 277 Nazism, 5, 9, 11, 15, 23, 131, 149, 150, 153, 156, 166, 169, 176, 178, 181, 209, 253, 259, 262 nenbutsu, 125 neo-Confucianism, 14, 59, 240 neo-socialism, 225 Neuhaus, Richard, 185, 186, 192, 210 New Buddhist Youth League, 200 New Guinea, 289, 290, 291, 295 New Kōmeitō, 22, 217, 224, 225 New Political Alliance of Japan (Shin nihon seiji rengō), 220, 234 new religions, 8, 9, 21, 22, 69, 118, 187, 194, 195, 197, 200, 212, 217–20, 226–7, 234, 241, 246, 260, 268, 269, 271, 308, 311 New Theses (Shinron), 62, 83, 164 Nichiren, 13, 19, 22, 143, 159, 160, 201, 217, 221–3, 227–9, 231–6, 238, 312 Nichiren Buddhism, 13, 22, 201, 227, 228 Nichiren Shōshū, 160, 217, 221, 223, 233, 238 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 251–3, 255, 261, 275, 277 nihilism, 240, 244, 252, 253, 255, 261, 262, 274, 277 Nihon Izoku kai, 285 Nihon Kirisuto Kyōdan, 202 Nihon shoki, 12, 46, 88, 89, 91, 92, 100, 102, 274 Nihongi. See Nihon shoki nihonjinron, 20, 24, 85, 87, 98 Nikkō, 56 Ninigi no mikoto, 92, 95 nirvana, 250, 310 Nishi Honganji, 129, 210 Nishida Kitarō, 16, 26 Nishimura Shigeki, 68, 71, 76 Nitobe Inazō, 194, 201 Nitta Hitoshi, 84, 296, 304 no-church movement, 76 norito, 34 no-self, 173, 250 no-soul, 249 nostalgia, 82, 182–3

6/30/2011 1:05:15 PM

Index nothingness, 10, 255, 261 Nuremberg Laws, 150 Ō no Yasumaro, 91 Ōbayashi Taryō, 89 object and effect standard (mokuteki kōka kijun), 281–83 obscurantism, 61, 79 ōbutsu myōgō, 22, 222, 224, 228, 229, 241 Occupation period (1945–1952), 7, 84, 213, 219, 220, 287 Ogasawara, 287 Ogata Hiroshi, 154–6 Ogyū Sorai, 59 Okada Masahiko, 110, 111, 113, 115, 136, 137, 138, 140 Ōkawa Ryūhō, 217 Okinawa, 287 Ōkubo Toshimichi, 65, 72, 74, 81 Ōkuni Takamasa, 29, 65, 187 Ōkuninushi, 33, 37, 40, 46, 94, 95, 96, 101 Okuzaki Kenzō, 289–92 Ōmotokyō, 53, 69, 70, 118, 179, 194, 196, 197, 200, 213, 218, 260, 308, 310, 312 oneness, 16, 17, 174 ontology, 55, 122, 129, 250, 309 Oranda tensetsu, by Shiba Kōkan, 108 ordination, 222, 227, 228, 229, 230, 234, 236 organizations, 149, 192, 201, 202, 218, 219, 220, 234 Osaka, 36, 62, 66, 70, 105, 108, 119, 196, 212, 224, 245, 282, 283 Ōtani University, 149 Ōtsuka Kōichi, 196 Ozaki Hotsumi, 201, 203 Ozaki Yukio, 201 Pacific War, 7, 18, 54, 92, 160, 161, 181, 197, 241, 244, 247, 251, 254, 266, 267, 278, 280 pacifism, 160, 162, 244, 254, 258 pan-Asianism, 203, 243, 267 Pantheon Dispute, 96 patriotism, 69, 77, 78, 130–1, 183, 205, 206, 207, 210, 275, 286, 290,

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 325

325

291; Sada Kaiseki’s critique of, 130–1 philosophy, 15, 16, 18, 20, 25, 26, 29, 60, 62, 141, 193, 201, 231, 232, 250, 251, 253, 263, 276, 305 piety, 68, 76, 77, 175 pilgrimage, 59, 62, 83, 124, 268, 277, 284, 300 police, 12, 74, 75, 76, 143, 146, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 162, 193, 195, 196, 200, 209, 212, 299 populism, 193, 246 postmodernity, 21, 265–71, 276 post-Restoration Japan, 30, 36, 47, 310 postwar Japan, 2, 3, 7–8, 16, 17, 21, 28, 92, 93, 159, 184, 186, 187, 209, 211, 216, 218–22, 228, 242, 260–1, 263, 265, 266, 278–81, 286–7, 291–8, 300, 303, 312 propaganda, 9, 10, 38, 55, 170, 171, 176, 179, 183, 207, 259 propagandist, 95 prophecy, 236, 257, 260–1 propheta, 262 prophets, 19, 53, 309 proselytism, 218, 222, 230, 233 protection of the state, 13 Protestantism, 79, 181, 187, 202, 218, 306 Protestantization, 307, 308 Protestant-ness, 181 Protestants, 202, 203, 205 proto-fascist, 258 pseudo-emperor, 271 pseudo-guru, 271 pseudo-religion, 9 purification, 6, 30–5, 38–9, 41, 43, 45, 48, 70, 185, 223, 258, 262, 270–1, 273, 293, 307 purity, 6, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 244, 268 Quakerism, 76 racism, 69, 78, 264 radicalism, 11, 97, 189 Rambelli, Fabio, 12, 14, 19, 104, 141, 310

6/30/2011 1:05:15 PM

326 Index Rangaku. See Dutch studies Ranpu bōkokuron (‘imported lamps are leading the country to ruin’), 107, 123. See also Buddhist economy; Sada Kaiseki rape, 195, 196, 204, 211 Rauschning, Hermann, 262, 275, 277 reactionaries, 70, 110, 120, 125, 129, 132, 135, 150 Reader, Ian, 235, 256, 268 Reagan, Ronald, 266 rebellion, 117, 157, 166, 205, 241, 243, 270, 309, 310 Record of Ancient Matters. See Kojiki reform, 44, 52–3, 61, 125, 144–5, 147, 148, 151–3, 157, 203, 208, 209, 219–22, 263, 295, 306–7, 309 reformism, 36, 152, 307 Reich (Third). See Third Reich Reigen, Emperor, 58 Reimeisha, 42–3 reincarnation, 109, 170, 248–51, 273, 274 Reiyū kai, 227 religio-fascism, 257 religio-politics, 4, 21, 225, 227, 240, 242–3, 245, 257–9, 261, 264–5, 271, 272 Religious Charter of the Empire of Dai Niphon, 191 Religious Corporations Law, 22, 219, 226 Religious Corporations Ordinance (Shūkyō hōjin rei), 219 religious cults, 13, 19, 22, 86, 186, 212, 250, 252, 269 religious freedom, 22, 187, 188, 189, 192, 196, 197, 202, 203, 204, 205, 209, 210, 260, 282 religious minorities, 11, 194, 197, 211 Religious Organizations Bill, 202 Religious Organizations Law (Shūkyō dantai hō), 187, 260 religious persecution, 193, 212 religious terrorism, 11, 195 Rengekai, 227 Renge-kyo¯ . See Lotus Sutra right-wing politics, 4, 7, 20, 125, 131, 146, 156, 157, 179, 201, 206, 209,

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 326

220, 221, 246, 248, 253–6, 263, 270, 303 Rinzai Zen, 25, 105, 114, 143, 247 Risshō ankokuron (of Nichiren), 13, 226 Risshō Kōsei Kai, 216, 225, 227, 237 rites, 4, 5, 7, 23, 30, 35, 49, 58–9, 63, 65, 67, 68, 71, 73, 80, 169, 190, 197, 201, 214, 215, 236, 262, 278, 280–2, 287, 289, 290, 291, 293, 294, 296, 302, 308 Ritsumeikan, 142 ritsuryo¯ system, 35, 50 ritualism, 29, 34, 35, 39, 48, 56, 309 rituals, 6, 7, 30, 31, 32, 35, 37, 38, 39, 44, 45, 47, 51, 59, 68, 80, 102, 152, 262, 287, 307, 311 Rōdō Zasshi (Labour Magazine), 151, 201 rōmanha, 184 Rome, 203, 204, 206, 244 Rorty, Richard, 139, 141 Rōyama Mitsuru, 197 Rubin, Jay, 179, 183 Russia, 61, 135, 186, 280 Russo-Japanese War, 78, 205, 246 Ryūkyū Kingdom, 130 sacerdotalism, 56, 59, 63, 71 sacerdote, 2, 56, 62, 64, 65, 73, 78 sacralisation (of politics), ix, xi, 2, 9, 25, 242–3, 259, 262, 276, 309 sacrality, 8, 22, 190, 207, 211, 218, 234, 272 sacred canopy, xi, 181, 261, 264, 311 Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, 207, 215 Sada Kaiseki (1818–82), 14, 104–42 Saibai keizairon, by Sada Kaiseki, 107, 117, 120, 137, 138, 141 saisei itchi (unity of rites and governance), 35, 50, 63, 65, 190, 197, 201 Saitama, 71, 75, 85 Saitō Makoto, 201, 213 Saitō Takao, 203 Saitō Tomō, 189, 212 Sakaguchi Ango, 261 sakaki branch, 254, 293

6/30/2011 1:05:15 PM

Index Sakamoto Koremaru, 83, 84, 99, 102, 303 Sakhalin, 72 salvation, 6, 8, 10, 22, 31, 46, 96, 148, 174, 218, 220, 221, 229, 232, 259, 311, 313 samurai, 35, 36, 51, 54, 60, 72, 106, 119, 213, 241, 244, 247, 254, 256 Sandaikō, 41, 51, 96 Sandaikō debate, 96 sangha, 12, 147 Sanjō Sanetomi, 190 Sanskrit, 110, 228, 229, 269 Sanskritists, 134 sarin gas attack, 21, 22, 186, 216, 241, 256, 259 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 250 Sasaki Takayuki, 68, 71, 72, 73, 81 Satō Masahide, 244, 277 satori, 17–19 Satow, Ernest, 96, 101, 102 Satsuma, 52, 66, 72, 310 saviour, 242, 273 Scheid, Bernhard, 24, 27, 96, 99, 100, 102, 103 science, 14, 91, 94, 105, 107, 109, 110, 111, 113, 115, 117, 127, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 180, 216, 237 science-fiction, 268, 271, 275 scientific positivism, 134. See also Western science scientists, 134, 136, 270 SDF, 265 SDP, 224 Sea of Fertility, 247, 249, 252 Seaton, Phillip, 4, 5, 23, 26, 304 Second World War, 4, 16, 93, 187, 214, 216–8, 222. See also Pacific War sectarianism, 11, 24, 25, 47, 111, 143, 144, 148, 194, 243 sects, 13, 19, 145, 148, 155, 160, 210, 218, 241, 257, 269 secular state, 4, 189, 190, 191, 192, 200, 210, 307, 310, 311 secularism, 3, 4, 11, 12, 18, 54, 59, 62–5, 70–1, 86, 185–7, 189–92, 195, 200, 203, 208, 210, 211, 226, 234, 261–2, 272, 276, 281, 305–8, 310–12 secularists, 66, 188, 190, 194

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 327

327

secularization, 22, 186, 211–12, 307, 311 Seichō no Ie, 216, 220, 221, 236 Seiji to shūkyō (Religion and Politics), by Ikeda Daisaku, 230 Seikyō shimbun (Holy Teaching Newspaper), 222, 238 seishin (spirit), 168, 207, 208, 215, 254, 258 Seizelet, Eric, 8, 23, 26 self-abnegation, 10, 176 self-annihilation for one’s country, 179 self-cultivation, 67, 68 self-immolation, 174, 273 self-love, 251 self-sacrifice, 5, 180, 272, 290, 291 self-sufficiency, 135. See also Sada Kaiseki selfhood, 170 selfishness, 179, 210 selflessness 147, 148, 168, 173, 174, 183 Senō Girō, 143, 146–52, 159–60, 200–1 separation of church and state, 2, 7–8, 12, 13, 15, 19, 187, 196, 211, 231, 272 separation of rites and governance (seikyō bunri), 67, 71, 73 seppuku, 21, 241, 255, 256, 264 Seraphim, Franziska, 5, 23, 27 sermons, 108, 148, 149, 155 Seventeen-Article Constitution, 3, 12 sexuality, 195, 212, 213, 251, 255, 277 SGI, 217, 223 SGT, 289, 290, 291 shakaishugi. See socialism shakubuku, 222, 227, 231, 233, 237 Shakyamuni, 145 Shanghai, 183 sheltering sky, 262, 265, 272 Shiba Kōkan (1747–1818), 108, 136 Shijitsutōshōgi ki shohen, by Sada Kaiseki, 107 Shimabara Rebellion, 243–4 shimaguni, 93 Shimaji Mokurai, 53, 66, 188 Shimazono Susumu, 28, 29, 30, 48, 49, 235, 313

6/30/2011 1:05:15 PM

328 Index Shin (True Pure Land) sect, 149, 150 Shin Kōmeitō. See New Kōmeitō shinbutsu bunri, 129, 248 Shingyō (1774–1858), 114, 137 Shinkō Bukkyō, 143, 147, 150, 160 shinkoku (divine land), 97, 99, 138, 141 Shinran, 69, 174 Shinritō (Supreme Truth Party), 216, 241, 256 Shinron, 28, 50, 83, 164 Shinshintō (New Frontier Party, NFP), 224 Shinshūkyō. See new religions Shinto/Buddhist divide, 245 Shintō Directive, 84, 219 Shintō in History, 84, 85, 86, 99, 101 Shinto nationalism, 200 Shinto Political League, 1 Shinto theocracy, 4, 188, 189, 209 Shintoist state, 189 Shintoists, 154, 187, 188, 189, 191, 245 Shirane Haruo, 3, 5, 23, 27 Shitenno¯ji, 105, 108, 245 Shiva, 258, 269, 270, 273 shogunate, 5, 13, 14, 37, 50, 60, 82, 236, 312 shoguns, 13, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 108 shokubun (role), 62, 65, 67. See also shokushō shokushō, 66 Shōtoku, Prince, 2, 12, 14, 15, 19, 20, 26, 104, 244, 245, 276, 277 Shōwa emperor, 75. See Hirohito Showa Holy Salvation Association (Shōwa shinseikai), 218 Shōwa Japan, ix, 49, 55, 70, 73, 80, 157, 184, 193, 197, 206, 208, 213, 218, 266, 287, 296, 301 Shōwa Research Association, 208 Shōwa Restoration (Shōwa Ishin), 157 Shōwa-ki, 199, 213 Siam (present-day Thailand), 150 Sinicization, 90, 91, 245 Sino-Japanese relations, 284, 285, 304 Sino-Japanese War, 55

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 328

Sinophilia, 244 Skya, Walter, ix, 8, 23, 27, 191, 192, 197, 200, 212, 213, 245, 246, 264, 274, 275, 277 Social Democratic Party (SDP), 224 Social Masses Party, 203, 208 socialism, 147, 148, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 166, 193, 203, 208, 218, 226, 231 socialists, 77, 135, 145, 156, 158, 193–5, 201, 203, 205, 263, 283, 285, 286 Soka Gakkai International (SGI), 217 Sōka Kyōiku Gakkai, 221 Sōkagakkai, 232–3, 237 sonnō jōi (revere the emperor, expel the barbarians), 37, 43, 65, 133 Sonoda Minoru, 85, 87, 99, 103 Sonoda Yoshiaki, 195, 212, 213 Sophia University, 206, 207 Sorge, Richard, 203 South Seas, 94 Southeast Asia, 94 sovereignty, 3, 63, 83, 95, 130, 192, 248, 313 Soviet Union, 158 Special High Police [Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu], 154 spirit of words (kotodama), 10, 166, 174, 175, 177 spiritualism, 87–9, 126, 134, 231 spirituality, 89, 148, 208, 258, 271, 313 split between spirit and body, 174 Stalker, Nancy, 53, 183, 218, 235, 239 State Buddhism, 16 State religion, xi, 7, 8, 28, 188, 228, 265, 278, 279, 282 State Shinto, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 16, 28, 29, 30, 31, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 64, 84–6, 89, 92–3, 96, 99, 100, 102–3, 129, 138, 187, 192, 203, 208, 211, 212, 219, 222, 257, 260, 264, 272, 300, 311 sublimity, 166–72, 175, 177, 182 Sueki Fumihiko, 150, 159, 160, 187, 211 Sugamoto Yasuyuki, 133, 135, 139, 141

6/30/2011 1:05:15 PM

Index suicide, 69, 240, 241, 245, 255, 256, 273, 291 Suiko, Empress, 127 Sun Goddess, 7, 46, 52, 57, 59, 61, 64, 66, 92, 164, 260, 286 Susanoo, 94 sustainability, 121. See also Buddhist economy sutras, 13, 137, 138, 158, 217, 221, 223, 227, 229, 231, 238, 247, 251, 269 Suzuki, D. T., 15–16, 18, 24, 26, 150, 159, 160 Swastika Party (Korean, Mandang), 153 swords, 162, 240, 241, 254 synchronicity, 131, 133–5, 140 syncretism, 5, 188, 190, 210, 248, 267, 271, 308 taboo, 70, 184, 292 Taguchi Yoshigorō, 203–5, 214 Taishō democracy, 180, 245 Taishō Japan, 80, 137, 138, 141, 180, 193, 195, 245–6 Taishō liberalism, 193 Taiwan, Japanese imperialist policies against, 107, 130, 146, 280 Takagi Kemmyō, 143, 161 Takahashi Korekiyo, 201 Takahashi Tetsuya, 5 Takamimusibi, 95 Takano Sen’ya, 71 Takano Toshihiko, 58, 59, 79, 83 Takeuchi Yoshimi, 180, 184 talisman, 10, 169, 171 Tamogami Toshio, 299 Tanabe, George, 227, 238 Tanabe Hajime, 181, 184 Tanabe Makoto, 286 Tanaka Chigaku, 201, 227, 228, 238 Tanaka Hisashige (founder of Tōshiba, 1838–1907), 114, 115, 137 Tanaka Kōtarō, 206 Tanaka Sen’ya, 71 Taniguchi Masaharu, 236 Tanikawa Minoru, 108, 129, 136, 138, 139, 141 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, 252

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 329

329

Tansman, Alan, ix, 8, 9, 10, 11, 23, 27, 162, 249, 311 Tantric Buddhism, 268 Taoism, 101, 139 Taylor, Charles, 305–7, 309, 312 Teeuwen, Mark, 24, 27, 49, 85, 86, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 135, 142, 300, 303, 304 Temmu, Emperor, 88 Temple Law (K. Sach’allyŏng), 153 Temple of Dawn, 249 Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 247–8, 255 Tenchi-kane-no-kami, 69 Tendai sect, 136, 227 Tenjiku. See India tenkō, 151, 200 tenkōhin, 121 tennō, 81, 82, 83, 90, 93, 97, 101, 102, 192, 254, 264, 301 Tennō-ki, 2, 80, 82 tennōsei (emperor system), 28, 52, 81, 82, 180 Tenrikyō, 219, 221, 310 Tenryu ¯ ji, 114 terrorism, 11, 25, 195, 200, 201, 240, 245, 255, 262, 269, 276, 311 terrorists, 21, 54, 157, 186–7, 197, 200, 201, 240–2, 245, 253–5, 258–60, 262, 263, 265, 270, 272, 273 Thailand, 150, 248–9 Thatcher, Margaret, 266 theocracy, 3, 4, 38, 187–9, 191, 192, 197, 200, 201, 207–11, 231, 265, 272, 310, 311, 312 theocratic Shinto state, 197 theologians, 95 theology, 9, 46, 47, 65, 68, 71, 89, 95, 96, 102, 140, 194 Third Reich, ix, xii, 5, 23, 27, 162, 178, 181 Three Great Secret Laws (sai dai hihō), 229, 233 Tibet, 26 Tikhonov, Vladimir, 153, 160, 161 Toda Jōsei, 159, 217, 221–3, 228, 230 Tōgō, Admiral, 205 Tōgō Kazuhiko, 281, 296, 300, 301, 302, 304

6/30/2011 1:05:15 PM

330 Index Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu, 154 Tokugawa era, 14, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 49, 50, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 66, 67, 79, 82, 83, 89, 92, 97, 100, 101, 108, 110, 111, 130, 132, 134, 136, 160, 244, 245, 248, 276, 310 Tokugawa shogunate, 14 Tokyo War Crimes Trials, 4 Tolstoy, Leo, 135 Tomita Asahiko, 288, 289 Toranomon Incident, 195 Totalitarian Movements and Political Religion, viii, 25, 276 totalitarianism, 8, 11, 17, 23, 166, 173, 174, 202, 259, 265, 276 Toynbee, A. J., 135, 139, 142 transcendence, 163, 169, 174, 181, 185, 174, 308–13 transcendentalism, 8, 60, 65, 69, 308, 309, 310 True Pure Land, 69, 143, 148 Tsuda Sōkichi, 93, 98 Tsukuba Fujimaro, 288, 297, 302 Tsuwano domain, 29, 40, 43, 51, 52, 64, 65 U.S.A. See America Uchida Ryōhei, 197, 213 Uchimura Kanzō, 76, 77, 194 Uchiyama Gudō, 135, 143, 147, 159 Uesugi Shinkichi, 200, 246 ujigami, 33 ultraconservatism, 285 ultranationalism, 8, 23, 27, 78, 79, 85, 191, 212, 245, 246, 263, 264, 266, 270, 277 ultra-right-wing politics, 299 Umebayashi Seiji, 116, 137, 138, 142 Umehara Takeshi, 20, 261, 275, 277 underclasses, 131 unemployment, 146, 179 Unitarianism, 194 United Church of Christ, 202 unity of rites and governance (saisei itchi), 63, 65, 67, 190, 197, 201 universalism, 308, 312 uprisings, 117, 146, 157, 183

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 330

Urabe Ryōgo, 89, 96, 288, 289, 301 Urabe/Yoshida Shintō, 96 ur-fascism, 258, 273, 276 ur-Shinto, 102 Utoku-o, 229 Utopia, 88, 217, 262 Vatican, 206, 207, 214 Vedanta, 268 Victoria, Brian, 15, 16, 19, 274, 310 Vinaya Pitaka, 158 violence, 9, 10, 21, 43, 94, 117, 156, 157, 160, 161, 162, 170, 176, 180, 182, 183, 193, 235, 240, 241, 242, 243, 245, 252, 253, 254, 256, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263, 265, 269, 270, 271, 273, 276, 277, 279, 285, 299 Vogel, Ezra, 266 Wakabayashi, Bob, 60, 79, 80, 83, 182 war criminals, 4, 279, 280, 284, 286, 288, 289, 290, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 309 warriors, 9, 10, 35, 37, 173, 180, 253, 254, 255, 272, 280 wartime, 4, 8, 16, 17, 18, 55, 64, 156, 162, 190, 196, 197, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210, 211, 253, 262, 263, 311 wartime Japanese state, 209 Washburn, Dennis, 53 Washington, 180, 183, 190, 214 Watanabe Jōtarō, 201 Watsuji Tetsurō, 163, 169 Way of the Subject, 210 wealth-diffusion, 123 wealth-production, 123 West, the, representation of in Sada Kaiseki, 105, 111, 113, 117, 128, 129, 131, 133, 134 Western science, 14; astronomy, geography, 105, 111, 113, 117, 131, 149 Westerners, 3, 17, 56, 128, 129, 134 Westernization, 73, 133, 188, 248, 252, 307 World War II. See Pacific War; Second World War

6/30/2011 1:05:16 PM

Index worldviews, 13, 59, 72, 109, 110, 111, 113, 115, 177, 247, 248, 250, 252, 255, 259, 268, 269, 271, 272, 274 worship, 4, 5, 8, 27, 59, 65, 69, 77, 103, 130, 148, 159, 206, 228, 229, 243, 270, 284, 286, 291, 294, 302, 304, 313 Wu Yi, 284 Xian-Sheng, 51 Xihuangdi, 66 Yabe Teiji, 209, 215 Yamagata Bantō (1742–1821), 109, 142 Yamagata Daini, 60, 63, 80, 89 Yamagata Daini, 60, 63, 80, 83 Yamamoto Shinjirō, 194, 195, 203, 204, 213, 214 Yamato, 91, 94, 253 Yanagawa Heisuke, 209 Yanagita Kunio, 98 Yang-ming thought, 240, 276 Yano Harumichi, 37, 64, 187 Yasuda Yojūrō, 167, 180, 184 Yasukuni Shrine, 4, 5, 6, 7, 23, 25, 29, 31, 39, 42, 43, 48, 51, 65, 78, 207, 214, 215, 221, 267, 278–304 Yasukuni Shrine Bill, 296 Yasukuni Worshippers Society (Yasukuni sūkei hōsankai), 294

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 331

331

Yasutani Haku’un, 17 Yijiang Zhong, 6, 28, 311, 312 Yoshida Shigeru, 209 Yoshimi Yoshiaki, 179, 189 Young Officers Uprising, 157, 189 Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism (Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei), 149 Yuishiki (Mind Only) sect of Buddhism, 248, 249, 250, 252 Yuki yukite shingun, (film Onward Imperial Soldiers!, 1987), 289 Yūshūkan war museum, 4, 291, 295, 297, 302 zaibatsu (financial combines), 146, 157, 158 zealotism, 135, 139 Zen at War, 17, 24, 27, 142, 155, 159, 161, 274 Zen Buddhism, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26, 27, 105, 142, 143, 147, 149, 150, 155, 159, 160, 161, 247, 248, 268, 274, 276 Zen War Stories, 17, 24, 27, 142, 155, 160, 161, 274 Zennists, 18

6/30/2011 1:05:16 PM

9780230_240735_14_ind.indd 332

6/30/2011 1:05:16 PM