Zen and the Art of Treason: Radical Buddhism in Meiji Era (1868–1912) Japan

Abstract

In the early decades of the twentieth century, as Japanese society became engulfed in war and increasing nationalism, the majority of Buddhist leaders and institutions capitulated to the status quo. At the same time, there was a stream of ‘resistance’ among a few Buddhist figures, both priests and laity. These instances of progressive and ‘radical Buddhism’ had roots in late Edo-period peasant revolts, the lingering discourse of early Meiji period liberalism, trends within Buddhist reform and modernisation and the emergence in the first decade of the twentieth century of radical political thought, including various forms of socialism and anarchism. This essay analyses the roots of ‘radical Buddhism’ in Japan by analysing the life and work of three distinctive figures: Tarui Tōkichi (1850–1922), Takagi Kenmyō (1864­–1914), and Uchiyama Gudō (1874–1911). While noting their differences, I argue these three collective represent both the problems and possibilities of radical Buddhism in an East Asian and specifically Japanese context.

Notes on contributor

James Mark Shields is Associate Professor of Comparative Humanities and Asian Thought at Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA), and Japan Foundation Visiting Research Fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Kyoto, Japan, 2013–2014). He conducts research on modern Buddhist thought, Japanese philosophy, and comparative ethics. In addition to various published articles and translations, he is author of Critical Buddhism: Engaging with Modern Japanese Buddhist Thought (Ashgate, 2011), and is currently completing a monograph on progressive and radical Buddhism in Japan.

Notes

¹William Theodore De Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur Tiedemann (eds) Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 2: 1600 to 2000, Part 2: 1868 to 2000, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 212–213.

²Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), p. 1.

³Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 177.

⁴Yamagata Aritomo, ‘Shakaihakaishugiron’ in Yamagata Aritomo ikensho (Tokyo: Hara shōbō, 1966), pp. 315–316.

⁵Tarui Tokichi, ‘Tōyō no kyomutō’ in Itoya Hisao and Kishimoto Eitarō (eds) Nihon shakai undō shishō shi, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1968), p. 129.

⁶ Digital Dictionary of Buddhism, s.v., jita byōdō.

⁷Tarui, op. cit., p. 130.

⁸ Digital Dictionary of Buddhism, s.v., tenmotsu.

⁹Spencer discourses on this topic in chapter 9 of his Social Statics (1851), ‘The Right to the Use of the Earth’, a work that would have tremendous influence on both modern China and Japan; see Akamatsu Katsumaro, Nihon shakai undō shi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 1952), p. 11.

¹⁰T0262.09.0020b18–b19.

¹¹Tarui, op. cit., pp. 130–132.

¹²Akamatsu Katsumaro, ‘The Russian Influence on the Early Japanese Social Movement’ in Peter Bergen, Paul F. Langer, and George O. Totten (eds) The Russian Impact on Japan–Literature and Social Thought (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1981), p. 91. Akamatsu adds: ‘I believe that the progressive intellectuals of Japan in his day were generally more or less of the same opinion’.

¹³Ibid., p. 91.

¹⁴Sawada Mitziko, Tokyo Life, New York Dreams: Urban Japanese Visions of America, 1890–1924 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 134.

¹⁵See Ōkōchi Kazuo and and Matsuo Hiroshi, Nihon Rodo Kumiai Monogatari (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1965), pp. 159–162, for a description of demonstrations organised by Heiminsha on 2 April 1901, during which protesters massed in various areas of Tokyo to carry banners and shout slogans proclaiming the adherence to socialism.

¹⁶Takagi Kenmyō, Yo ga shakashugi [My Socialism], trans. Robert Rhodes, The Eastern Buddhist, New Series, 33:2 (2002), p. 55.

¹⁷See Winston Davis, Japanese Religion and Society: Paradigms of Structure and Change (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 169–170; Brian Victoria, Zen at War (New York: Weatherhill, 1997), pp. 66–73; Ishikawa Rikizan, ‘The Social Response of Buddhists to the Modernization of Japan: The Contrasting Lives of Two Sōtō Zen Monks’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 25 (1998), pp. 87–115; Brian Victoria, Zen War Stories (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), pp. 204–207; see Wagatsuma Sakae (ed), Nihon seiji saiban kiroku: Meiji, go (Tokyo: Daiichi Hōki), for a record of the High Treason Incident.

¹⁸Davis, op. cit., p. 177, n. 53.

¹⁹Ichikawa Hakugen, Bukkyōsha no sensō sekinin (Tokyo: Shunshūsha, 1970), pp. 150–154; also see Christoper Ives, Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen's Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press), pp. 55–56.

²⁰Ives develops this argument – against Brian Victoria (Zen at War, Zen War Stories), but also, to some extent, against Ichikawa himself – in chapter 4 of his Imperial-Way Zen, pp. 101–127.

²¹Takagi, op. cit., p. 54; in the following discussion of Yo ga shakaishugi I have used Robert Rhodes's translation, while adding fragments from the original Japanese as necessary.

²²Ama Toshimaru, ‘Towards a Shin Buddhist Social Ethics’, Eastern Buddhist, New Series, 33:2 (2001), p. 49.

²³In November 1903, along with Sakai Toshihiko, Kōtōku founded the short-lived but influential radical newspaper Heimin Shimbun (The Commoner's Newspaper), the mouthpiece of the Heimin-sha (Commoners' Society). Sakai and Kōtōku were also responsible for the first Japanese translation of The Communist Manifesto. After reading the work of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) in prison, Kōtōku would renounce Marxian socialism for ‘radical anarchism’, eventually corresponding with Kropotkin and translating the latter's Conquest of Bread in 1909. See Frederick G. Notehelfer, Kōtoku Shūsui, Portrait of a Japanese Radical (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

²⁴As anarchist Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923) relates in his autobiography, among the four acknowledged leaders of the Commoner's Society – Kōtōku, Sakai, Nishikawa Kōjirō (1876–1940) and Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876–1956) – only the last ‘did not despise religion’; Ōsugi Sakae, The Autobiography of Ōsugi Sakae, trans. Byron K. Marshall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 121–122.

²⁵In the words of Shinran (1173–1262): ‘[H]owever precious a treasure one may offer before the Buddha or give to a teacher, it is meaningless if one lacks shinjin. And even though one may not make a donation of even a single sheet of paper or half a penny to the sangha, if one yields one's heart to Other Power and one's shinjin is deep, one is in accord with the essential intent of the Vow’; Shinran, The Collected Works of Shinran, vol. 1 (Kyoto: Jōdo Shinshū Hongwanji-ha, 1997), p. 677; see Ugo Dessì, ‘Introduction: Shin Buddhism and Japanese Society’ in Ugo Dessì (ed) The Social Dimension of Shin Buddhism (Leiden: Brill, 2010), p. 4.

²⁶Alfred Bloom (ed.) Living in Amida's Universal Vow: Essays in Shin Buddhism (Bloomington: World Vision, 2004), p. 23.

²⁷Takagi, op. cit., p. 55.

²⁸The emphasis on the ‘human’ Buddha had become a standard trope in Japanese Buddhist modernism from the early Meiji period; see Judith Snodgrass, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 97–102, for discussion of this emphasis within nineteenth-century Western scholarship on Buddhism, dating back at least to R. Spence Hardy's Eastern Monachism (1850) and Sir James Emerson Tennent's Christianity in Ceylon (1850); though, as Snodgrass notes, Hardy and some other early Western scholars (though not Tennent) employed this as part of a critique of Buddhism (and the Buddha) as being ‘uninspired’ and thus insufficient as a solid basis for morality or religion: ‘atheistic in ideal and idolatrous in practice’ (p. 99).

²⁹Takagi, op. cit., p. 56.

³⁰Takagi, op. cit., p. 56.

³¹Cf. Dessì, op. cit., p. 243.

³²Takagi, op. cit., pp. 56–57.

³³Ibid., pp. 57–58.

³⁴Ibid., p. 58; Mōri Saian (1872–1938), Shingon priest, journalist and publisher of the socialist newspaper Murō shinpō, founded in 1900. A member of the New Buddhist Fellowship, Mōri was arrested and jailed at one point for slandering an official.

³⁵Ibid, pp. 58–59.

³⁶Ibid., p. 59; Takagi's language here, as radical as it may have sounded at the time, echoes the contemporary Constitution of the Shinshū Ōtani-ha, which states the goal of the sect as nothing less than the ‘actualisation’ of a ‘society based on [Buddhist] fellowship’ (dōbō shakai); see Ama, op. cit., p. 38 n. 7.

³⁷Takagi, op. cit., p. 60.

³⁸See Leo N. Tolstoy, Government is Violence: Essays on Anarchism and Pacifism, edited by David Stephens (London: Phoenix Press, 1990); Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ in The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose (London: Penguin, 2001); Thich Nhat Hanh, Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1998).

³⁹Takagi, op. cit., p. 56.

⁴⁰Takagi, op. cit., p. 59.

⁴¹See Ketelaar, op. cit., p. 126.

⁴²Ama Michihiro, op. cit., p. 26.

⁴³See Ketelaar, op. cit., p. 249 n. 67.

⁴⁴Ama Toshimaru, op. cit., p. 50.

⁴⁵See Victoria, Zen at War, chapter 3: ‘Uchiyama Gudō: Radical Soto Zen Priest’, pp. 38–48; see also Ishikawa, ‘Two Sōtō Zen Monks’, for a treatment of Gudō and the nationalist Sōtō Zen priest Takeda Hanshi (1864–1911).

⁴⁶See, e.g., Yoshida Kyūichi, ‘Uchiyama Gudō to Takagi Kenmyō no chosaku’, Nihon rekishi 131 (1959), pp. 68–77; Inagaki Masami, Kindai Bukkyō no Henkaku-sha (Tokyo: Daizō Shuppan, 1975); Kashiwagi Ryūhō, Taigyakujiken to Uchiyama Gudō (Tokyo, 1979); Morinaga Eizaburō, Uchiyama Gudō (Tokyo: Ronsōsha, 1984); Yoshida Kyūichi, Nihon kindai bukkyōshi kenkyū (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1992), pp. 402–408.

⁴⁷According to the collective research and statistical work of Aoki Kōji, Yokoyama Toshio, and Yamanaka Kiyotaka, Echigo was one of only six provinces (out of 71) to experience more than 100 ikki (armed peasant revolts) between 1590 and 1867. As Bix notes, memories of this legacy ran deep within the collective cultural bloodstream: ‘The traditions and practice of dramatic human sacrifice, of people victimised on behalf of their village communities, helped peasants realise the righteousness of their cause and sustained them in pursuing it’ (Bix, op. cit., pp. xxiv–xxv).

⁴⁸Ishikawa notes, in particular, the ‘germination of the idea of the “self” of “self-awakening”’ in Gudō's Heibon no jikaku (Ordinary Self-Awakening), which may have come from Inoue; Ishikawa, op. cit., p. 99.

⁴⁹Ibid., pp. 102–103.

⁵⁰Victoria, Zen at War, p. 39.

⁵¹Whereas Victoria's remarks come across as somewhat dismissive of the intellectual work of these activist monks, Yoshida Kyū’ichi goes to the other extreme, proclaiming that, ‘Uchiyama Gudō was not a thinker like Kōtoku [Shūsui]. His socialist and anarchist ideas emerged from his experience’ (Yoshida, Nihon kindai bukkyōshi, p. 402). Here Gudō is presented as a something more than ‘merely’ an armchair radical.

⁵²Ishikawa, op. cit., p. 102.

⁵³Jansen, op. cit., p. 114.

⁵⁴Bix notes the increase in the power of landlord families over tenants throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, citing it as the primary reason for the growth of peasant riots during the same period; Bix, op. cit., p. xx.

⁵⁵On this issue, Yoshida argues that both Gudō and Itō Shoshin (1876–1963) shared a fundamental belief in the difference between ‘the way of original Buddhism’ (bukkyō honrai no michi) and the forms of sectarian Buddhism existent in Meiji Japan (Yoshida, Nihon kindai bukkyōshi, p. 406).

⁵⁶Interestingly, Gudō seems to have arrived at his preference for anarchism prior to Kōtoku Shūsui's famous lecture at Kinkikan Hall in Kanda, Tokyo, on 28 June 1906, entitled ‘The Tide of the World Revolutionary Movement’ (Sekai kakumei undō no chōryū) in which the founder of the Heimin-sha announced his break with social democratic (i.e., parliamentary) tactics in favour of revolutionary syndicalism, effecting an irrevocable split in Japan's young socialist movement; see Notehelfer, op. cit., pp. 133–137.

⁵⁷Inagaki, op. cit., pp. 112–113; translation is from Victoria, Zen at War, pp. 40–41, with minor modifications by me.

⁵⁸Inagaki, op. cit., p. 113.

⁵⁹Although it is often said that Gudō, following the lead of Kōtoku Shūsui and Sakai Toshihiko, abandoned socialism for anarchism, in fact he never makes a clear theoretical distinction between anarchism, socialism, or communism – just as he never makes a clear distinction between Buddhism and these economic and political theories; see Yoshida, Nihon kindai bukkyōshi, p. 405.

⁶⁰Originally published in Heimin Shimbun 10 (17 January 1904); reprinted in Kashiwagi, op. cit., p. 29; translation taken from Victoria, op. cit., with my modifications.

⁶¹T0374.12.0402c08–09.

⁶²See, e.g. T1723.34.0656a19.

⁶³T1701.33.0167a09.

⁶⁴See, e.g., T0235.08.0751c24.

⁶⁵T1716.33.0698a17.

⁶⁶See, e.g., Sallie King, who argues against the Critical Buddhists that Buddha nature is both ‘impeccably Buddhist’ and useful as a foundation for Engaged Buddhism (‘The Doctrine of Buddha-Nature is Impeccably Buddhist’, in Paul L. Swanson and Jamie Hubbard (eds), Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997); also Sallie King, Buddha Nature (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991). Ishikawa notes the similarities between Gudō and Dr B.R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) on the issue of employing Buddhist teachings to battle discrimination and promote social equality, as well as the struggle to connect Marxism and Buddhism (Ishikawa, op. cit., p. 100).

⁶⁷Shimaji Mokurai, Shimaji Mokurai zenshū, volume 3 (Kyoto: Honganji Shuppan, 1973), pp. 285–296.

⁶⁸Ketelaar, op. cit., p. 134; Ketelaar argues that this bifurcation became ‘a dominant theoretical position of late-nineteenth-century Buddhist thought’. I concur, with the caveat that this paradigm would persist in much of twentieth-century Buddhist thought, as well, including the work of the primary figures of the Kyoto School.

⁶⁹Abe Iso'o, ‘Socialism in Japan’, In Shigenobu Ōkuma (ed.) Fifty Years of New Japan, vol. 2 (London: Smith, Eldeb & Co., 1909), p. 494; also see Crump, who all too readily dismisses such claims as ‘bizarre’; John Crump, The Origin of Socialist Thought in Japan (New York: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 29. Although he avoids the term ‘socialism’, well-known pre- and postwar Buddhist historian Tsuji Zennosuke writes of the ‘social welfare’ foundations of the imperial state – and thus of the Japanese as a whole – in several books translated into English by the Japanese Red Cross society in the early 1930s (and thus presumably for foreign consumption); see Tsuji Zennosuke, Nihonjin no Hakuai. Tokyo: Kinkōdō Shoseki, 1932; republished together with Nihon Kōshitsu no Shakai Jigyō in 1934.

⁷⁰See Crump, op. cit., p. 24.

⁷¹Along these lines, just as they have always been scholars who question the ‘authenticity’ of the transmission of Buddhism to Japan (or, more recently, to the United States), so too we encounter scholars who question the legitimacy of Japanese socialism; Crump, a self-proclaimed ‘real socialist’, stands at the forefront of these; Crump op. cit., pp. xi–xii.