UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

Nichirenism as Modernism: Imperialism, Fascism, and Buddhism in

Modern Japan



A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy



in



History


by


Gerald Scott Iguchi






Committee in Charge:

Professor Takashi Fujitani, Co-Chair
Professor Stefan Tanaka, Co-Chair
Professor David Luft
Professor Masao Miyoshi
Professor Pamela Radcliff




2006

iii







The dissertation of Gerald Iguchi is
approved, and it is acceptable in
quality and form for publication on
microfilm:


______________________________


______________________________


______________________________


______________________________
Co-Chair

______________________________
Co-Chair

University of California, San Diego
2006


iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Signature Page iii

Vita ... v

Abstract ... vi

Introduction .. 1

Chapter One: The Enigma of Tanaka Chigaku ...... 67

Chapter Two: Miyazawa Kenji: A Nichirenist Attempt to Actualize
an Ideal World in Literature and Life ............................... 122

Chapter Three: Senoo Gir! and Overcoming Nichirenism ......... 175

Chapter Four: Ishiwara Kanji, History as Contrapuntal Harmony, and
Modernity as the Dawn that Never Comes ........... 231

Conclusion 302

Bibliography . 314




v
VITA

1990 Bachelor of Arts, University of California, Santa
Barbara

1997 Master of Arts, University of California, San Diego

1998-2001 Teaching Assistant, Department of History, University
of California, San Diego

2005-2006 Associate in History (Instructor of Record),
Department of history, University of California, San
Diego

2006 Lecturer, Department of East Asian Languages and
Literatures, University of California, Irvine

2006 Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, San
Diego

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: History (Modern Japan)

Studies in Comparative Fascism
Professors David Luft and Pamela Radcliff

Studies in Globalization and Imperialism
Professor Masao Miyoshi





vi



ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION
Nichirenism as Modernism: Buddhism, Fascism and Imperialism in
Modern Japan

by

Gerald Scott Iguchi
Doctor of Philosophy in History
University of California, San Diego, 2006

Professor Takashi Fujitani, Co-Chair
Professor Stefan Tanaka, Co-Chair
In 1902 Tanaka Chigaku, the founder of the lay Buddhist
Nichirenism movement met Anagarika Dh!rmapala, the founder of
the international Mahabodhi Society and founder of the prevalent
form of modern Sri Lankan Buddhism. Chigaku and Dh!rmapala
were attempting to transform Buddhism into a foundation for their
respective national identities, using it as a pan-Asian basis for a new

vii
and better ordering of the world. They were confronting the
universalizing forces of the West. They differed in their respective
relationships with imperialism. Dh!rmapals Ceylon was a British
colony. Japan was constructing an overseas empire. Nichirenisms
good news was that the world is divine as it is; people just needed
to realize this. Nichirenists ultimately conflated Japanese imperialism
and nationalism with this realization.
For some Nichirenists, such as Ishiwara Kanji, solutions lay in
violent action. As a Colonel in the Kwantung Army he instigated the
Japanese takeover of northeastern China in 1931. Other Nichirenists,
such as the writer and agrarian reformer Miyazawa Kenji expressed
Tanaka Chigakus teachings in more innocuous ways. Miyazawa,
attempted to transform the world through his literature, and by
leading a grassroots cooperative. Senoo Gir" became the leader of a
Nichirenist youth group with conservative leanings in 1919, but by
1931 Senoo had become a vehement critic of Japanese imperialism.
He became staunchly opposed to what he saw as Japanese fascism.
In 1931 Senoo founded a socialist youth league that espoused his
beliefs on these matters and advocated Buddhist socialism.
Nichirenism complicates conceptualizations of the past. The
memory of many inside and outside Japan elides Miyazawas
relationship with Nichirenism due to his contemporary popularity.

viii
Scholars cite Ishiwaras relationship with the movement as an
example of why Japanese imperialism was rooted in irrationality,
highlighting the putative anachronism Nichirenism as Oriental.
These tendencies conceal the relationship between pre-1945 Japan
and modern societies more generally. By separating prewar Japan
from us so absolutely, historiography obscures the normality of
modern violence by portraying it as exceptional.
1
Introduction

If we are to think of our modernity as something more than culture
or the symptoms of culture (art, poetry, language, etc.), one method
alone is available, the discovery and conceptualization of the essential
contradiction or contradictions. This method, which is fairly well
known under the name of dialectic, is not easy to use. Generally,
contradictions come in tight knots, in closely woven textures. How
are we to grasp the threads which will lead us into the fabric?
Usually, if not always, we end up cutting them off. . In truth, the
contradictions are dialectical movements which knowledge attempts
to grasp, fully aware of the fact that these movements are
interconnected (another metaphor: a river), and that knowledge
operates by a process of separation and immobilization which kills
movements dead, and uses techniques operated by conceptual
apparatuses such as analysis and logic, etc.

Henri Lefebvre, What is Modernity?

There is nothing extraordinary about fascism. It is normality to the
extreme. Fascism is social Reason, and Reason is its own
revenge.

Brian Massumi, Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia


Sighing in a Relief That Never Comes
Nichirenshugi | (Nichirenism) was a pre-1945,
Japanese lay Buddhist movement that appropriated teachings of the
thirteenth-century monk, Nichiren, and used them in novel ways in
modern contexts. Despite the fact that many within Japan and
elsewhere have anachronistically and inaccurately labeled Nichiren
nationalist, Nichirenism arose only with the advent of the modern
nation-state. In the Japanese case, the modern nation-state began to
2
form around 1868 as part of the so-called Meiji Restoration. Part of
why scholars and others frequently call Nichiren himself a nationalist
is because of the influence of relatively recent figures associated with
Nichirenism, including rightwing terrorists, radical military officers,
and others who professed deep concern with Japans future during the
Interwar Period. Driven by such concerns these individuals
sometimes engaged in violent acts. They also projected onto the
historical figure of Nichiren an image of an idealized man of resolute
and iconoclastic action, usually in the name of the nation.
1
By the
late medieval period Nichirens Buddhism became the Hokkesh!
(Lotus sects), which had less precedent in continental Asia than for
example Zen and Pure Land forms of Japanese Buddhism.
2
This and
selective readings of texts authored by Nichiren also made it possible
to appropriate Nichirens image and use it as a native or
traditional basis for the promotion of quintessentially modern
enterprises, including nationalism, imperialist expansion, and
management of the social contradictions and societal strife
accompanying industrial capitalism.

1
Cf., Jacqueline Stone, Meiji Buddhism and the Nationalizing of
Nichiren, a 1994 conference paper given in Cambridge Mass. Cited
in Richard Jaffe, Neither Monk nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in
Modern Japanese Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001), 175.
2
Cf., James H. Foard, In Search of a Lost Reformation: A
Reconsideration of Kamakura Buddhism, Japanese Journal of
Religious Studies, vol. 7 no. 4 (December, 1980): 340.
3
Nichirenshugi is moreover a word that all but disappeared
from the Japanese language in 1945, much as with the word kokutai
[; (national polity, or body politic).
3
Not coincidentally,
major proponents of Nichirenism before 1945 frequently paired
Nichirenism with kokutai as twin conceptual supports for Nichirenist
conceptualizations of the Japanese nation and its role in world
history. Such Nichirenists include Tanaka Chigaku (1861-1939,
hereafter Chigaku) and Ishiwara Kanji (1889-1949); Chigaku coined
the term Nichirenshugi in 1901 and Ishiwara Kanjiwho thought
of himself as a disciple of Chigakuinstigated the Japanese takeover
of Manchuria in 1931. In fact while doing research on Nichirenism in
Japan, circumstances constantly forced me to verbally clarify the fact
that I was working on Nichirenshugi and not the relatively orthodox
Nichirensh! sect in the Nichiren tradition. With regard to kokutai,
whenever I mentioned it in Japan most people automatically assumed

3
English translations of kokutai are unusually diverse. Probably
the most common is national polity, which I do not use because it
does not seem to sum up the range of kokutais meanings. Another
common translation is national essence. Essence contradicts the
literal meaning of kokutai, the two ideograms of which ([;) mean
nation, state, or country combined with body, form, or condition
connoting substance and not essence. I prefer George Tanabes
translation, body politic, because it seems closest to the literal
meaning of the term. See George Tanabe, Tanaka Chigaku: The
Lotus S!tra and the body politic, in The Lotus S!tra and Japanese
Culture, ed. George Tanabe and Willa Jane Tanabe (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 191208.
4
I was referring to the homophonic abbreviation for an annual national
athletic meet.
The reason Nichirenshugi and kokutai (in the old sense)
virtually disappeared from the Japanese language following 1945 is
simple. Kokutai was such an important and inviolable ideological
construct that acting contrary to the kokutai before Japans defeat
constituted a capital offenseand the draconian law protecting
kokutai existed despite the fact that kokutais meaning was never
precisely clear. If you had to ask you did not know, and not knowing
in itself constituted a potential thought crime. Nichirenisms
prevalence did not match the universality of kokutaithe most
important Nichirenist organization, the Kokuch!kai, only had a
membership of around 7,000 at its height in 1924,
4
but there were
numerous Nichirenist groups and Nichirenisms influence extended
beyond their memberships. When the war ended, Japanese society
associated both words with the countrys erstwhile national mission
to liberate Asia from Western domination and more broadly to make
the world a much better place. Once defeat revealed that the obverse

4
"tani Eiichi, Kindai Nihon no Nichirenshugi und" (Modern Japans
Nichirenism Movement) (Tokyo: H#z#kan, 2001), 404; Stone, By
Imperial Edict and Shogunal Decree: Politics and the Issue of the
Ordination Platform in Modern Lay Nichiren Buddhism, in
Buddhism in the Modern World: Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition,
ed. Steven Heine and Charles S. Prebish (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 198.
5
of that mission and its material actuality consisted of a brutal
Japanese imperialism that did not differ significantly from its Western
counterparts, words previously used to articulate that discredited
mission disappeared.
In other words, when kindai (recent times) became gendai
(contemporary times), according to standard historiography within
Japan, people came to believe they could collectively sigh in relief.
They could be glad that the faux modernity Japanese and others could
thereafter call fascist or militarist was over. Japan could then become
the peace-loving nation that it supposedly was always meant to be.
Japanese historians use two systems of periodization. They modeled
one system upon Western history. In this system ch!sei equals
medieval, for example, and kinsei is the equivalent of early
modern. In Japan this Western-derived system is the one that makes
the gendai/kindai or modern/contemporary split. Historians of Japan
also use a traditional periodization that in modern times
corresponds to the reign names of emperors. Thus 1945 divides
kindai from gendai, but because the Sh#wa Emperor (Hirohito)
remained on the throne from his coronation in 1926 until his death in
1989 the kindai/gendai split manages a merely patchwork attempt to
conceal a continuity between the bad Japan of old and the good,
new Japan. Despite its 1945 renovation the Japanese emperor system
6
persisted, as did the reign of Hirohito, and as a result, the Sh#wa
period encompassed both the period of fascism/militarism and
imperialism, and Japans era of peace and increasing prosperity under
United States hegemony.
5


5
For an example of dual periodization in Japanese historiography see
Kodansha International, Japan: Profile of a Nation (Tokyo:
Kodansha International, 1999), 72-208. This works eight page
overview of Japanese history follows periodization analogous with
Western historiography, ending with The Modern Period (kindai)
and The Contemporary Era (gendai). The overview is followed by
a much longer and more detailed History of Japan: By Historical
Period (Nihonshi: Jidaishi), which begins with the ca 10,000 BCE-
ca 300 BCE J#mon period and ends with Heisei Period, which is that
of the current emperors reign. See also the section on history in
Nippon Steel Corporation, Nippon: The Land and its People (Tokyo:
Nippon Steel Human Resources and Development, 1988). This work
follows the same periodization as Kodansha. Both works are
designed to enable Japanese to explain Japan to outsiders. Nippon
Steel not only occludes the continuity of modern Japanese history
through a change of eras in 1945; it also elides its own role in the
development of what Herbert Bix defined as Japanese fascism. See
Herbert Bix, Rethinking Japanese Fascism,: Bulletin of Concerned
Asian Scholars14 (April-June 1982). 14. A typical account of
Japanese history in Japanese that articulates the kindai/gendai split
can be found in Ishii Susumu, ed., Sh"setsu Nihonshi [Japanese
History, a Detailed Account] (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1996),
where the last two chapters are Kindai Nihon to Ajia [Pre-1945
Modern Japan and Asia] and Gendai no sekai to Nihon [The
postwar modern world and Japan]. In contrast, a typical English
language textbook such as Peter Duus Modern Japan (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1998) follows its part III, Political Change, Crisis
and War, 1905-1945 with part IV, Peace, Prosperity, and Stability,
1945-Present. In Duus case 1945 is indeed a turning point in a
narrative of progressive development, but the radical break signified
by an entirely new historical period is absent. Lastly, for some
interesting musings on the intricacies of modern Japanese
periodization and their ramifications see Karatani K#jin and Seiji M.
Lippit, The Discursive Space of Modern Japan, Japan in the World,
Boundary 2, 18, no. 3, (Autumn, 1991).
7
Despite such attempts to obscure the relationship between a
modern past now abjected and a postwar world viewed through
overly rosy lenses, postwar Japan remains haunted by persistently
nagging suspicions that everything did not really change so much in
1945 after all.
6
For example, the countrys leadership hardly
changed. United States authorities sacrificed token war criminals
during the occupation, but one accused war criminal, Kishi
Nobusuke, became Prime Minister by the end of the 1950s. Even
more importantly, Japanese and non-Japanese characterize the pre-
1945 Japanese past as fascist, militarist, or imperialist, and these
signifiers refer to realities that many believe we have overcome. I
argue that these terms refer to conditions and processes that haunt our
world even today.
Fascism, militarism, and imperialism suggest comprehensive
violence and social, political, economic, and cultural crises, along
with systemic unevenness in the distribution of wealth and power.
Any sober look at daily headlines reveals that such conditions persist,
despite postwar formal decolonization and ongoing battles between
good and evil in the decades since. This work is an attempt to
confront the conceptual repression of the persistence of violence

6
On the concept of abjection and the lingering of the abjected
(instead of the return of the repressed) see Ann McClintock,
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial
Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), 71-2.
8
within the modern world before and after 1945. In other words, I aim
to investigate historical events and processes in order to address the
misrecognition of the present. I want to understand Nichirenism and
in so doing better understand the fundamental contradictions of
modern existence. At this juncture it appears that such contradictions
are not to be overcome automatically as scholars have frequently
imagined in a Hegelian or classically Marxist mode. To me it
appears that the genius of liberal capitalist modernity as a functioning
whole is that it thrives on its contradictions. It requires them.
Because of this, neither an automatic nor a humanly facilitated
progression to a more rational stage of development seems likely any
time soon. Faith in rationality and progress may turn out have more
to do with our problems than with any solution. On the other hand,
the temporality of the modern still demands displays of at least
feigned faith in development, especially of historians, despite
whatever cynicism we might actually possess.
7


7
On the relationship between cynicism and the modern, see Henre
Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes, trans. John
Moore (New York: Verso 1995), 228-9; Brian Massumi, A User's
Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze
and Guattari (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992), 136; Eugene W.
Holland, Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to
Schizoanalysis (New York: Routledge,1999), 79-80; Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Robert Hurley et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983), 250. Cf., two apologies for the belief in progress that
are separated by nearly forty years and yet are remarkably similar:
9
Historiography and Nichirenism
In reading about modern Japan prior to the end of the Second
World War, one comes across sporadic mentions of Nichirenismor
the Nichiren Buddhism of certain politically radical figures and
others whom I would define as Nichirenist. This happens in
surprisingly different contexts. Perhaps most characteristically one
runs across references to Nichirenism in studies of Japanese fascism,
militarism, rightwing terrorism, and imperialism. Western scholars
wrote such studies for the most part during the postwar decades, until
the 1970s.
8
Despite modernization theorys preference for studies of
the premodern foundations of Japans postwar success, these studies
were written during the heyday of Western historiographys depiction
of Japan as the global model minority.
9
In the context of such

Edward Hallet Car, What is History (New York: Vintage, 1967),
especially, 158; and Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth
Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge
(Hanover NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), especially, 155-6.
8
For historiography in English see especially Richard Storry, Double
Patriots: A Study of Japanese Nationalism (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1957), pp. 100-14; Ben-Ami Shillony, Revolt in
Japan: The Young Officers and the February 26, 1936, Incident
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973); George Wilson,
Radical Nationalist in Japan: Kita Ikki, 1883-1937 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1969); Mark Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji and
Japans Confrontation with the West (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1975).
9
On Japan as global model minority see T. Fujitani, Go For
Broke, the Movie: Japanese American Soldiers in the U.S. National,
Military, and Racial Discourses, in Perilous Memories, ed. T.
Fujitani, Geoffrey White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham: Duke UP,
10
writings Nichirenism was frequently something that needed to be
explained away along with the rest of Japans period within the dark
valley of the 1930s and early 1940s.
However, one of the first, albeit fleeting and indirect, postwar
treatments of Nichirenism came from a Japanese source. In the
immediate postwar milieu, Maruyama Masao condemned Inoue
Nissh# (hereafter Nissh#) while discussing the pathology of Japanese
fascism. Nissh# was the leader of the Ketsumeidan (Blood-Pledge
Corps), a group of terrorists who planned and executed the
eponymous Ketsumeidan Jiken (Blood-Pledge Corps Incident).
During this 1932 series of events a young follower of Nissh# shot and
killed Inoue Junnosuke, the leader of the Minseit# political party and
a former Minister of Finance. Later a Ketsumeidan member also
murdered Dan Takuma, the head of the Mitsui industrial combine
(zaibatsu). The Ketsumeidan Incident was part of events collectively
called the Sh#wa Restoration, something frequently involving
Nichirenism-grounded notions regarding the relationship between

2001), especially, 251-362. On Modernization theorys articulation of
Japan more generally also see Harry Harootunian, The Emperors
New Clothes: Paradigm Lost, and Regained (Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm Press, 2004), 77-89; Stefan Tanaka, Objectivism and the
Eradication of Critique in Japanese History, in Learning Places: The
afterlives of area studies, ed. Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 92-99; Sheldon Garon,
Rethinking Modernization and Modernity in Japanese History: A
Focus on State-Society Relations, The Journal of Asian Studies, 53
no. 2 (May 1994): especially, 346-350.
11
direct action and both national and universal salvation. As with those
planning or executing other such incidentsthe March Incident
(1931), the October Incident (1931), the May 15 Incident (1932) and
the February 1936 IncidentKetsumeidan members strove to purify
the nation by eliminating those whom they thought were betraying it
in international affairs or profiting from the misery of the people
during a time of economic hardship.
10

For Maruyama, Nissh# exemplified the extreme fantasy,
abstraction, and lack of a plan characterizing early Japanese fascism
or fascism from below. Maruyama quoted a statement Nissh#
made at his trial: I have no systematized ideas. I transcend reason
and act completely upon intuition. Maruyama noted that Nissh#
deliberately rejected any theory for constructive planning . In
the English edition of Maruyamas text his translator tells us in a
footnote that Inoue was a Nichiren priest and suggests that his
apparent anti-intellectualism was a product of Buddhist
philosophy.
11


10
On the Sh#wa Restoration in general see Storry, Shillony, Wilson,
and Peattie. Regarding the Sh#wa Restorations broader intellectual
underpinnings see Tetsuo Najita and H.D. Harootunian, Japanese
Revolt Against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the
Twentieth Century, in The Cambridge History of Japan vol. 6, The
Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press), 711-
774.
11
Maruyama wrote the essay in question, The Ideology and
Dynamics of Japanese Fascism, as a 1947 lecture he gave at Tokyo
12
Further analysis of Nissh#s biography reveals the fact that his
identity was significantly more complex. Nissh#s earliest Buddhist
training occurred in Manchuria. He was a continental adventurer
(tairiku r"nin) between 1910 and 1920, and between wild drinking
bouts, visiting brothels, doing odd jobs for Japans South Manchurian
Railway, and spying for the Chinese Republicans during the 1911
Revolution and the Japanese army during World War I, he also found
time to seek spiritual training from Japanese missionaries. He studied
and practiced on the continent with both Nichiren and Zen clergy.
After returning to Japan in 1920, Nissh# continued his Buddhist
training. He later reported in an autobiography that the practice of
Zen meditation only increased his mental anguish. Because of this
Nissh# soon switched to chanting the daimoku, a ritual praise of the
Lotus S!tra and the primary practice in the Nichiren tradition.
More specifically, Nissh# reported, he began to chant the
daimoku because of an earlier dream he had had in China, in which
finding himself in a life threatening situationhe saw the daimoku,
namu My"h" Rengeky" (praise to the Lotus S!tra of the Wondrous

University. It was translated and included in Thought and Behavior
in Modern Japanese Politics, ed. Ivan Morris (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1963). The quotes are from p. 53. Morris included
a glossary and biographies of terms and names. He notes that Nissh#
was a Nichiren priest of extreme rightist beliefs who before turning
to Buddhism had spent most of his life on the continent as a secret
agent for the Japanese army (303).
13
Dharma), engraved on a stone pagoda. After continuing to chant the
daimoku for several months a strange voice called out to him,
Nissh#! (Sun-Called), a name he subsequently adopted.
12
Later, as
he continued to chant, Nissh# heard the same voice telling him that he
was the savior, while he saw his surroundings become bathed in
light. He felt a serene peace that eased existential doubts that had
plagued him for decades
13

In the ensuing years Nissh# visited sacred sites of the
Nichiren tradition, and in the autumn of 1924 a strange voice spoke to
him again, telling him that he should study Nichiren with Chigaku,
which he did. He also attended lectures at the Tokyo headquarters of
Honda Nissh#, a priest who was second only to Chigaku as a
Nichirenist leader, but who did not rival Chigaku in terms of
charisma and influence. Later, in his own writings and while
standing trial for his involvement in the Ketsumeidan Incident,

12
Nissh# previously went by the name Akira . Nissh# | is
similar to the names ordained Nichiren clergy usually take because
the first Chinese ideograph (kanji) in the compound is |(sun), as was
the case with Nichiren |. Chigaku was originally known as
Tomoenosuke, and he started his own tradition when he named
himself (knowledge and learning). Chigakus disciples often
followed by taking names for themselves that began with chi
(knowledge).
13
Brian Daizen Victoria, The Ethical Implications of Zen-related
Terrorism in 1930s Japan, www.acmuller.net-zen-sem-2004-
victoria.html.html; Stephan S. Large, National Extremism in Early
Sh#wa Japan: Inoue Nissh# and the Blood-Pledge Corp Incident,
1932 Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 3 (2001): 536-539.
14
Nissh# credited Chigaku with confirming his own beliefs. These
beliefs centered on the identity of the national symbols of Japan,
including the imperial house, and the great life force (daiseimei),
which is of course nothing other than the cosmic, eternal original
Buddha of the Lotus S!tra.
In 1928 a former Imperial Household Minister, along with a
transportation tycoon, invited Nissh# to help found a temple near
Mito, Ibaragi Prefecture, northeast of the Tokyo area. Nissh# named
the temple the Rissh# Gokokudo (Temple to Protect the Nation [by]
Establishing Truth). At first Inoue declined involvement because the
temple lacked traditional parishioners, and therefore no apparent
source of income. This was however not a problem because military
and political elites supported the temple. The temples elite backers
designed it to cultivate the morality of Japanese youths, becoming a
foundation for the reform of the state. Accepting this mission,
Nissh# became the Rissh# Gokokudos priest, and he proceeded to
train young men there in do or die spirit grounded in Buddhism.
The Ketsumeidan Incident was the end product this training.
14

Maruyama discussed Nissh# in order to illustrate the putative
immaturity and lack of modern subjectivity defining Japanese
fascism. He did much the same with regard to other individuals and

14
Ibid.
15
groups involved in 1930s terrorism. Some of these also had a
relationship with modern Nichiren Buddhism, including the
radical nationalist Kita Ikki, and the young army officers under his
influence who led an infamous February 1936 coup attempt in
Tokyo.
15
Maruyamas celebration of Western modernity in
contradistinction to a Japanese pathological lack of subjectivity
reached its crescendo when he compared the behavior of Nazi leaders
at their war crimes trials with that of Japanese wartime leaders at
analogous trials in Tokyo. For Maruyama the Nazis were relatively
admirable fascists because, unlike Japanese, as Occidentals they
possessed modern subjectivity.
16

Later Western treatments of figures connected to Nichirenism
and modern Nichiren Buddhism sometimes go into greater detail
regarding the significance of these modern Buddhist forms, but they
never really break with Maruyamas at least implicit condemnation of
wartime and prewar Japanese for their lack of maturity. In other
words, from the perspective of the Christian or post-Christian
(secular) West, writers have characterized such individuals as Kita
Ikki and Ishiwara Kanji as not quite human (rational) in the way

15
Wilson produced the term Radical nationalist in an attempt to
categorize Kita.
16
See Masao Miyoshi, Off/Center: Power and Culture Relations
Between Japan and the United States (Cambridge: Harvard university
Press, 1998), 108-9.
16
that we are. Even recent and relatively very informative studies of
Nichirenists such as Tanaka Chigaku and Ishiwara by religious
studies scholars sometimes persist in implicit condemnation of
Nichirenism because of its millennialism, which signifies its
embrace of historical circularity, ritualized behavior, superstition, and
myth, contra our recognition of the value of progressive change or
differentiation, originality, rational transcendence, and science.
17

One runs across references to Nichirenism in other contexts as
well, and this is where the contradictions of Nichirenism become
apparent. In writings addressing the life and work of Miyazawa
Kenji (1896-1933), a poet and childrens writer, scholars often
mention that he was in some way connected with Buddhism,
Nichiren Buddhism, or Nichirenism. Works in English seldom
address the great degree to which Miyazawa idolized Tanaka Chigaku
for most of his adult life. Sarah Strongs Ph.D. dissertation is a
notable exception, but even her work spends little time exploring the
meaning of any possible contradiction between Kenji, whom

17
On the ways that religious studies consistently portrays the other
as not quite human in the same way that we seculars or Christians
are see Jonathon Z. Smith, A Slip in Time Saves Nine in
Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, ed. John Bender and David
Wellberry, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), especially 69-
70 and 76. On Nichirenism as Millennialism see Jacqueline Stone,
Japanese Lotus Millenarianism: From Nationalism to Contemporary
Peace Movements in Millennialism, Persecution and Violence:
Historical Cases, ed. Catherine Wessinger (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 2000).
17
innumerable fans regard as an extremely loveable figure, and
Nichirenism, which many scholars in Japan and elsewhere regard as
ultranationalistic, militarist, fascist, and inherently imperialistic. In
Japanese there is a much more extensive literature addressing
Miyazawas relationship with Buddhism, but rather than dwell upon
Miyazawa as a Nichirenist the writers of these works tend to suggest
that Miyazawas religiosity was a pure, generic form of universal or
Japanese Buddhism. In the second chapter of this dissertation I
address more fully the problematic way that we remember Miyazawa
and consume his work.
Those discussing Takayama Chogy! (1871-1902), the much-
celebrated novelist and cultural critic, also frequently mention
Nichirenism. As the story goes, he alternated in turn from
infatuations with Japanism (Nihonshugi), Nietzscheanism, and
Nichirenism before his suicide 1902. Reading Chigakus seminal
extended essay, Sh!mon no ishin (The renovation of our sect, 1901),
deeply moved Takayama. He subsequently met Chigaku and wrote
essays praising both Chigaku and Nichiren. His Nichirenist writings,
written at the very end of his life, suggest that Takayama conflated
his interpretation of the Nietzschian superman with Nietzsche,
18
Chigaku, and Nichiren.
18
Takayama, perhaps modern Japans most
famous avowed egoist, praised Nichiren as an individualist who
overcame the present to follow the dictates of his heart,
independently, freely.
19

Like many modern admirers of Nichiren, Takayama saw in
the medieval monk a model for a new, modern Japanese spirit that
was the antithesis of Orientalist clichs about the Japanese that
Takayama (and Maruyama) accepted, such as that the Japanese are
group-oriented or herd-like and lack a sense of individuality (or

18
Anesaki and Yamakawa Chi# (a Kokuch!kai intellectual and
scholar of Nichiren Buddhism) edited Takayamas writings on
Nichiren and Nichirenism, publishing them as Takayama Chogy!,
Takayama Chogy! to Nichiren sh"nin [Takayama Chogy! and Saint
Nichiren] (Tokyo Hakubunkan, 1913). In this volume particularly
see Tanaka Chigaku shi no Sh!mon no ishin [Mr. Tanaka
Chigakus Sh!mon no ishin], 15-20; Nichiren sh#nin [Saint
Nichiren], 21-23; and Nichiren sh#nin wa ikanaru hito zo [What the
hell kind of person was Saint Nichiren?], 24-53. The volume also
includes a preface by Tanaka Chigaku praising Takayama and a
collection of letters from Chogy! to Chigaku, Anesaki, and
Yamakawa. Essays on Takayamas Nichirenist religiosity by
Yamakawa and Anesaki are also appended. "tani (p. 288), notes that
during a 1920s boom in interest in Nichiren, Fujii Masazumi
published Ch"nin Nichiren (Nichiren Superman) (1923), suggesting
that Takayama was not the last to equate Nichiren with the
superman. "tani does not specify what kind of work it was, but
judging by the context it was a novel, a play, or a biography.
19
Harootunian, Beyond Politics and Culture: Authority and the
Ambiguities of Intellectual Choice in Imperial Japan, in Japan in
Crisis: Essays on Taish" Democracy, ed. Bernard S. Silberman and
Harootunian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 144. In
the same volume see pp. 146-155 regarding Takayamas conflation of
Nichiren and Nietzsche. In the quotation above Harootunian is citing
and quoting Takayamas 1902 Nichiren sh#nin to Nihonkoku
[Saint Nichiren and Japan].
19
subjectivity). This is somewhat ironic because the qualities that
Takayama discovered in Nichiren and Nichirenists are precisely the
ones that Maruyama found lacking in the fascist Japanese who
embraced Nichirenism. Takayama encountered Nichirenism and
Chigaku late in his short life and early in the movements history.
Perhaps his most lasting effect upon the subsequent development of
Nichirenism was his introduction of the thought of Chigaku to his
friend, the pioneering religious studies scholar Anesaki Ch#f! (pen
name, Masaharu, 1873-1949). Anesaki subsequently became a close
friend of Chigakus and remained so for the rest of the Nichirenism
founders life.
20

Anesaki wrote the first monograph on Nichiren in English,
Nichiren, the Buddhist Prophet (1916), publishing the work in
Japanese as Hokkeky" no gy"ja Nichiren (Nichiren: Practitioner of
the Lotus S!tra) in the same year.
21
He had already founded the

20
On Takayama and Nichirenism, see also Shinohara K#ichi,
Buddhism and the Problem of Modernity in East Asia: Some
Exploratory Comments Based on the Example of Takayama Chogy!
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 8, no. 2. (March-June 1981);
Takagi Yutaka, Kindai no Nichiren ron: Takayama Chogy! no baai
[On modernitys Nichiren: the case of Takayama Chogy!] in Kindai
Nihon no Hokke Bukky", ed. Mochizuki Kank# (Kyoto: Heirakuji
Sh#ten, 1968), 379-400. See especially Takagis part III, Chogy! no
Nichiren ron [Chogy!s discourse on Nichiren] and part IV,
Nihonshugi to Nichiren [Nietzschianism and Nichiren], 396-400.
21
Anesaki Masaharu, Nichiren, the Buddhist Prophet (Gloucester
Mass: P. Smith, 1966); Anesaki Masaharu, Hokkeky" no gy"ja
Nichiren (Tokyo: Kokush# Kank#kai, 1953).
20
Religious Studies section at Tokyo Imperial University, holding a
chair in the science of religion from 1905. Anesaki also taught
classes on Buddhism at Harvard as a visiting professor in the
Philosophy Department in 1913. Today, in Japan and abroad Anesaki
enjoys a reputation as a fine and liberal-minded scholar. However, he
was one of the earliest to articulate a purported Japanese mission to
synthesize the scientific civilization of the West with the spiritual
civilization of an Asia led by Japan. For Anesaki, Japan was clearly
superior to other Asian nations, which needed Japans guidance.
Such notions constituted the ideological core of Japanese imperialism
from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 until 1945.
22
It was no
accident that Anesaki and Chigaku were friends, nor, as I will argue
below, is it surprising that the institution of the scientific study of
religion was married to the irrationality of Nichirenism. Moreover,
the fact that Nichirenisms recruits read Hokkeky" no gy"ja Nichiren
as fervently as they read the extensive work of Chigaku and other,
more militarist Nichirenists attests to the significance of Anesakis
relationship with Nichirenism.
From a commonsense perspective it remains difficult to define
and comprehend Nichirenism. From such a viewpoint figures like

22
See James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji
Japan: Buddhism and its Persecution (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990), 217-8.
21
Anesaki and Miyazawa are great humanitarians who were leaders in
Japans successful approximation of the cultural modernity of the
West. Miyazawa has the reputation of a saint in contemporary Japan
and at the beginning of the twenty-first century Anesakis portrait still
hung on the wall of Tokyo Universitys Religious Studies
Departments office. In contradistinction to this people with
knowledge of Japanese history know Ishiwara as the man who began
the fifteen-years of warfare culminating in abject defeat in 1945.
Students of Japanese history know Nissh# as an irrational terrorist.
Those with knowledge of modern Japanese religions know Chigaku
as the man who influenced these two, as well as other violent
individuals. Nichirenism is ridden with contradictions. In this it is
similar to modernity itself. Both are only definable with reference to
their contradictions. In what remains of this introduction, I will
attempt to define Nichirenism and then modernity. Finally I will
address the relationship between Nichirenism and modernity.
Defining Nichirenism
Chigaku coined the word Nichirenshugi in a series of essays
culminating in Sh!mon no ishin. With the neologism he emphasized
the particularly modern character of the movement. The suffix
shugi translates as ism. Japanese translated the various forms or
systems (isms) of modern thought imported into Japan around the
22
time of the Meiji Restoration using shugi. Such terms included
capitalism (shihonshugi), nationalism (kokkashugi), imperialism
(teikokushugi), liberalism (jiy!shugi), communism (ky"sanshugi), and
anarchism (museifushugi).
Shugis older meaning of principle in premodern
philosophical discourse did not disappear from Nichirenist writings,
because Chigaku and others occasionally used it as a stand-alone
word, unlike ism in standard English. However, the fact that
Chigakus son, Satomi Kishio, published a book in English in 1923
titled Japanese Civilization: Nichirenism and the Japanese National
Principles suggests that Nichirenists took it for granted that shugi
equaled ism.
23
Buddhism does not include shugi when
translated into standard Japanese. Instead the Japanese word is
Bukky# (teachings of the Buddha). Bukky# was in most ways a
fully modern concept,
24
yet despite this the term fails to readily

23
Satomi, Kishio, Japanese Civilization: Its Significance and
Realization: Nichirenism and the Japanese National Principles
(London: Routledge, 1923).
24
In an unpublished paper, Transformations and Continuities in the
Vocabulary of Japanese Religion, p. 6, Levi McLauglin notes the
way that in premodern contexts words such as Bupp" [Buddha-
dharma, ] Butsud" [Way of the Buddha] were used more commonly
than Bukky". Buddhism did not have a standard translation before
the modern period because it did not form a discrete and singular,
identifiable essence as it generally does in the context of the modern.
Cf., note 28. See also Jonathon Z. Smith, Religion, Religions,
Religions in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C.
23
disclose its recent etymology. Clearly, Chigaku self-consciously
chose to connote a modernism with his choice of words.
Nichirenism, as an ism, manifests a dynamic and future-oriented
temporality. Liberalism, for example, tends to suggest the
progressive realization of a more equitable world. Nichirenism too
embodied a hope and a faith in the realization of a new and better
world.
25

Beginning with Chigaku, Nichirenists framed the better future
they imagined with two axiomatic propositions. The first was that the
divinity of an eternal, original Buddha permeates the quotidian world.
Various forms of Buddhism, Japanese and non-Japanese, have
espoused the immanence of Buddhist divinity; the differences are in
the details. Nichiren emphasized the Lotus S!tra, and especially the
sixteenth chapter, as the locus of the entire universes actualization of
awakening. In that so-called Fathoming the Lifespan chapter, the
historical Buddha $%kyamuni reveals the secret that he has
always, already been within in our world as a fully awakened

Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 269-284;
Shimazono Susumu, Sh!ky# to Religion #fu 87 (October 2001).
25
Cf., Reinhart Kosselleck, Space of Experience and Horizon of
Expectation: Two Historical Categories, Futures Past: On the
Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1985), 286-7. In this essay Kosselleck notes Kants distinction
between a republic as a defined objective, derivable from practical
reason and constantly present for mankind and republicanism as
the path to it, the process of displacing the rule of men by men
with the rule of men by law; i.e., to realize the republic.
24
presence. This runs counter to early Buddhisms focus upon the
Buddhas personal awakening. Instead, according to the Lotus,
$%kyamuni was a provisional manifestation of a more fundamental
cosmic Buddha that exists in perpetuity.
The Lotus S!tras sixteenth chapter suggests that absolute
awakening constitutes the general, but not necessarily actualized,
divine character of the entire universe. In accordance with this logic,
all one has to do is realize the secret of the Lotus and suffering will
end. Nichiren, like many medieval Japanese Buddhists, believed that
the world had entered mapp", the third, last, and most degraded
period of Buddhist history, because it was most temporally distant
from the actual presence of $%kyamuni. In that context Nichiren
taught that one could actualize the world and oneself as identical with
the cosmic Buddha only by chanting praise to the Lotus S!tra (the
daimoku). This would cause one to embody the realization that from
an ultimate perspective mapp" was irrelevant because the Buddha is
always present.
It is important to underscore that Nichiren subordinated
temporal authority to the teachings of Buddhism and did not privilege
the political powers on the Japanese archipelago during his lifetime
(shogun and emperor) in any way. He was a staunch critic of
reigning political authorities and they persecuted him. In the modern
25
context however, Nichirenists like Chigaku imagined the divine
immanence of the Buddha/Lotus S!tra as especially concentrated in
the modern nation-state of Japan and its imperial house. For modern
Nichirenism the activities of the modern nation-state of Japan and its
emperor were ipso facto the activities of the Buddha. They were able
to make the leap from Lotus Buddhisms affirmation of the whole
universe to the apotheosis of Japan through a logic grounded
Nichirens affirmation of where and when he lived, a space that
happened to correspond with the Japanese archipelago. In short,
Chigaku and Nichirenists made a conceptual jump from the
deification of this world and this life to the apotheosis of Japan as the
concrete embodiment of an especially divine form of human
existence.
26
In so doing they avoided privileging the transcendent,
bypassing the despotism of metaphysics, only to reinvest the nation
with a neo-despotism that reduced the universe from an infinity of
possible variations to be affirmed to a conformity to what must be,
imagined as national will and national destiny.
The second axiomatic proposition at the basis of Nichirenism
involves a geo-temporal logic that resonates in particular with
Hegelian notions about the relationship between time, geography, and
the development of Spirit espoused in The Philosophy of History

26
Cf., Jaffe, 179.
26
(1837). Hegelian conceptualizations of History and Spirit
furthermore influenced a secular discourse on Japan shared by such
writers as Okakura Tenshin (Ideals of the East, 1904) and Watsuji
Tetsur# (Koji Junrei, 1919).
27
The ideas of Hegel and their Japanese
manifestations in the work of Okakura and Watsuji also resonated
with Anesakis academic treatment of Buddhism and its relationship
with Japan and history. In the Nichirenist idiom, what one might call
the Spirit of Buddhism migrated eastward from India. As it

27
See Okakura Tenshin, Ideals of the East (Rutland Vermont:
Charles E. Tuttle, 1970); Watsuji Tetsur#, Koji Junrei [Pilgrimage to
ancient temples] (Tokyo: Iwanmi Shoten, 1953). In brief, Okakura
argued that Asia is one, but that Japan in particular was the
storehouse of the Spirit of Asian civilization because, historically,
that Sprit moved eastward with Asian art to Japan, where it found its
terminus. According to Watsuji, following the combination of the
Greek Spirit with Buddhist art in what is now northwestern Pakistan
during the Hellenistic age, the Greek Spirit traveled with Buddhism to
Japan along the silk roads, where it flourished. Watsuji thus
implicitly argued that the Spirit at the foundation of the Western
propensity to progress came to Japan in ancient times. Watsujis
work suggested that despite a long period of latency or dormancy,
Japans long-ago reception of the Greek Spirit explains and
legitimates Japanese modernity, Japanese superiority over other
Asians, and Japanese imperialism. On Okakura also see Stefan
Tanaka, New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 2004), 101-110; on Watsuji see Ibid., 177-179. On
Greco-Buddhist art see Stanley K. Abe, Curators of the Buddha:
Buddhist Art and the West in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of
Buddhism Under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1995), 63-10. Abes essay demonstrates
how imperialist discourses used the idea of Greco-Buddhist art to
portray an Indian loss of its own ancient, high (Aryan) cultural forms,
demonstrating an Indian need for British guidance. Watsuji co-
opted such discourses and used them towards new but related ends.
27
traveled towards the east it became more powerful, and upon reaching
Japan it blossomed as it had never blossomed before.
For many medieval Japanese, Buddhisms flowering in Japan
corresponded with mapp", but for Nichiren and later Nichirenists, the
flourishing of Buddhism in Japan also corresponded with the loss
of Buddhism on the Asian continent. According to Nichirens logic,
Mapp# inverted the logic of earlier times, meaning that previously
marginal Japan had the mission of saving China and India from
irreligion. In modern times, Nichirenist discourse conflated saving
regions west of Japan in a Buddhist sense with a mission to save Asia
and eventually even the rest of the non-West from Western
imperialism. Among other things, then, Nichirenism expressed one
set of Japanese versions of the Wests White mans burden or
civilizing mission. Japanese imperialist ideology in general
combined the imperative to save non-Westerners from themselves
with an imperative to deliver the non-West from the evils of Western
imperialism. In Tanaka Chigakus language this was the divine
mission (tengy" or heavenly task) of world unification (sekai
t"itsu), and by world unification he meant a rectification of the
heterogeneity that is uneven development by another name.
28


28
For a general definition of uneven development in the Marxist
tradition see Ernest Mandels entry on the term in Marxist Thought,
2
nd
ed., ed. Tom Bottomore (Cambridge Mass: Blackwell, 1991), 559.
28
In the chapter immediately following this introduction we will
see how Chigaku mediated the dialectical relationship between these
two fundamental propositions. I contend they are dialectical because
they exemplify the contradictory unity one finds within many modern
structures, including that of the nation-state. The nation-state requires
a faade of ahistorical, stable identity. This corresponds to
Nichirenisms view of Japan as the seat of eternal divinity. Yet the

My usage is most indebted to Lefebvre and Harootunian. In What is
Modernity? Lefebvre emphasizes that uneven development is all
pervasive (235), a fact intimately connected to what he calls the
ghost of the Revolution which never happened over here and the
ghost of the Revolution which was never completed over there (in
the Soviet Union) (236). Lefebvre furthermore proposes, using the
concept of uneven development to the full (emphasis in original),
applying it to everyday life, private life, morality, aesthetics, and not
simply to the modalities of the cumulative process. For me uneven
development is one way to conceptualize the apparently everlasting
perpetuation of contradictions and irrationalities in modern life. In
Overcome by Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000), Harootunian builds on Lefebvres concept of uneven
development, arguing that lived unevenness in both the political
economic and sociocultural domains constitutes the normal situation
in the context of global, liberal capitalist modernity (Preface, xxii).
He aptly characterizes this modernity as one of constant expansion
requiring permanent production of excess, surplus in order for it to
survive. He argues that permanent unevenness, permanent
imbalance between various sectors of social formations and the
sacrifice of some regions or social economic sectors for the sake of
others are the prices paid for that continual expansion (xv). Lastly,
Harootunian contrasts his own conceptualizations of uneven
development with the necessary illusion of eventual even
development (that constitutes) a kind of promissory note on the future
that is never delivered, even in the last instance. In this sense of
utopian dreaming of the evenness to come in an ill-defined future,
even development is most similar to Chigakus equally ill-defined
world unification.
29
nation-state must also embrace progress, and this corresponds with
Nichirenisms conviction that Japan and only Japan could save the
world by turning the geographical direction of Buddhisms
development around, causing all nations to realize the truth that is
both immanent within the world and imminent as an end of history.
This end of history corresponds with the end of Western exploitation
of the non-West, and would in other words be the end of divisive
conflict in general.
As I will subsequently argue, Chigakus incredible charisma
resulted from his simultaneous embodiment of such contradictory
propositions. He expressed contradictory tendencies as virtual
possibilities and thus avoided the impossibility of their simultaneous
actuality. Chigakus expertise at communicating pure virtualites
largely explains why he and his Nichirenism were able to inspire such
a wide variety of people and projects. He supplied pure inspirational
intensity (affect). Others supplied the content. As I will argue more
fully below, Chigakus impossibility links him with other
modernists against modernity,
29
Japanese and non-Japanese, who
were caught up in the conundrums of, as Harry Harootunian has put
it, trying to overcome an overcoming.
30


29
Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, xxi. The phrase is
Raymond Williams.
30
Ibid., 45, 94.
30
Modernity
In Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness Marlowe makes a sort
of pilgrimage to the interior of Africa on a boat journeying up the
Congo, where he meets Kurtz, the employee of a Belgian company
engaged in the ivory trade. Kurtzs incapacity to maintain a
distinction between his own civilized nature and the savages with
whom he consorts has led to a life-threatening dissipation. Kurtzs
worsening condition threatens profits, leading his company to send
Marlowe to manage the situation. Before Kurtz dies in the heart of
the dark continent he utters the famous last words, the horror, the
horror. It then becomes Marlowes responsibility to visit Kurtzs
fianc in Antwerp to explain the circumstances of his demise, which
Marlowe fails to do, as if telling her Kurtzs last words would itself
somehow transgress the boundary between sanity and insanity,
civilization and savagery, the line that Kurtz himself apparently
crossed.
When Conrads Marlowe describes events that occur in what
he calls the sepulchral city of Antwerp, he constantly evokes forms
of darkness within the Belgian city. By doing so he begins to call
into question the assumption that the heart of darkness is within
Africa alone. Marlowe confirms these suggestions when he notes the
piano in the room where Marlowe meets Kurtzs intended bride. The
31
piano and its ivory keys are an obvious reference to the
interrelationship between the real and imagined violence of the non-
West and the metropolitan centers of imperialist powers. Conrad
implies that the violence of the ivory trade, including the mass
slaughter of elephants in order to harvest their trunks while leaving
their carcasses rotting, was integrally connected to manifestations of
European high culture (music). To placate Kurtzs fiancs queries
regarding Kurtzs last words, Marlowe tells her that Kurtzs last
words were her name. With this Conrad equates her with the
horror. As an evocation of Victorian familial ideals she represents
the sham purity of bourgeois Europe. Conrad suggests that the true
horror lies in repressing the violence that makes Kurtzs bride-to-be
and her life possible. This is violence that from conventional
perspectives not only always takes place elsewhere, but also is always
someone elses fault.
Conrads representation of the interrelationship between the
dark continent and the sepulchral metropole suggests a general
definition of modernity. Most definitions of modernity until quite
recently define it as something possessed first of all by the West. The
rest of the world, according to such conceptualizations, would lie
somewhere along an evolutionary continuum, with sub-Saharan
Africa and similar regions defined as most primitive, and the Middle
32
East and most of Asia falling into the category of the semi-civilized
and perhaps the semi-modern. Japan, according to this mode of
thought, is the exception that proves the rule: the non-West can
become modern, more-or-less, but probably not quite, and the
measure for the non-Wests modernity is the degree to which it
approximates Western cultural forms. In contrast, my
conceptualization of modernity repudiates the notion that the
(modern) West and the (non-modern) non-West are or have ever been
hermitically sealed from each other. For me, modernity is only
comprehensible from a perspective that defines it as a set of
relationships between the West and the non-West since the so-called
age of discovery. In other words, modernity is definable only with
reference to relationships between what it supposedly is and what it
supposedly is not. Furthermore, as Conrad aptly implies, modernity
is an affair orchestrated by imperialist processes.
Even the Buddhism that figures such as Anesaki and Chigaku
attached their identities to, and the religion as most of us know it, is
itself largely a product of modernity and imperialism. When German
and Dutch scholars gave birth to the concept of a science of
religions (religionwissenshaft) during the late nineteenth century
they were vigorously engaged in a debate over another, now
prevalent, concept of world religions. Scholars would eventually
33
subsume Buddhism within this category, along with other reputedly
transnational, trans-regional religions such as Christianity and Islam.
However, according to Tomoko Masuzawa, at that time:
Buddhism had only recently been recognized as the
same tradition existing in diverse regions of South,
Southeast, East, and Central Asia. Until that time,
neither European observers nor, for the most part,
native practitioners of those various devotional,
contemplative, divinatory, funereal, and other ordinary
and extraordinary cults that are now roundly called
Buddhist had thought of these divergent rites and
widely scattered institutions as constituting a single
religion.
31


31
Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or How
European Universalism was preserved in the Language of Pluralism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). The above quotation
is from p. 122. On the origin of world religions see Chapter three,
The Birth Trauma of World Religions, 107-120. Also see Richard
King, Orientalism and the Discovery of Buddhism in his
Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and The
Mystic East (New York: Routledge, 1999), 143-160. Lastly, for a
fascinating account of the way that modern conceptualizations of
culture, religion, and Buddhism transformed Japanese society see
Jackie (Jacqueline) Stone, A Vast and Grave Task: Interwar
Buddhist Studies as an Expression of Japans Envisioned Global
Role in Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals During the
Interwar Years, ed. Thomas Rimer (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1990), 217-233. Stone demonstrates how Japanese clergy and
scholars of Buddhism adjusted to and in several cases fully accepted
Western Buddhologys focus on early Buddhism. She also shows
how and why Japanese co-opted the modern study of Buddhism.
When these Japanese intellectuals did so they sometimes claimed a
historically improbable special relationship between Japan and early
Buddhism. Moreover, some such scholars and clergy clearly saw the
use-value of Buddhism in promoting and legitimizing Japanese
imperialism. Modern Japanese custodianship of Buddhism
established both an affinity with continental neighbors as fellow
Buddhists, as well as a putative Japanese superiority over them
because Japanese scholarship that took Asian cultural forms such as
Buddhism as their object of investigation appropriated the scientific
34

Until relatively recently, in other words, educated Europeans were
unaware that there was a religion called Buddhism in Asia, instead
of a relatively irrelevant hodgepodge of primitive idolatrous practices.
This burgeoning consciousness of Buddhism had two effects.
On the one hand, Europeansand eventually educated non-
Europeans as wellbegan to denigrate the actual practices of
Buddhists. People came to deny the authenticity and the purity of
centuries of heterogeneous religious activities across the Asian
continent, religiosities that for example had always combined
Buddhist cultural forms originating elsewhere (places that may or
may not have been within the Indian subcontinent) with local cults,
producing endlessly novel and variegated manifestations. On the
other hand, Europeansand eventually otherscame to regard an
imagined original Buddhism located in certain texts, which referred
to ideas attributed to the so-called historical Buddha, as the only true
Buddhism. Modern thought conceptually transformed the
religiosities of an immense number of people from a vast collection
of infinite and infinitely interesting singularities in variation into a

prestige previously enjoyed only by Westerners. For an interesting
account of the relationship between Japanese science and Japanese
imperialism more generally, see Tomiyama Ichir#, Colonialism and
the Sciences of the Tropical Zone: The Academic Analysis of
Difference in the Island Peoples Positions 3, no. 2: 367-391.
35
pathetic and equally large collection of different and consistently
inferior versions of one and the same true Buddhism.
Such processes were literally and materially linked to
imperialism. One of the foundational moments in the modern
construction of Buddhism transpired when a British East India
company agent residing in Katmandu in the early nineteenth century
came across certain Sanskrit manuscripts. He forwarded them to the
Asiatic Society of Calcutta, the Royal Asiatic Society of London, and
the Societe Asiatique of Paris. Nothing much came of the Calcutta
and London documents, but philologist Eugene Burnhouf acquired
the Paris shipment. Burnhouf was the mentor of one of the most
important early science of religion scholars, Orientalists, and
Buddhologists, F. Max Muller. Burnhouf was among the first
Europeans to recognize the apparent sameness of what we now call
the Buddhism of Tibet, Mongolia, China, and Ceylon. He was also
among the first to argue that since the Buddhisms of these various
nations had a common origin in India, one ought to primarily study
Sanskrit documents of Indian origin.
32

One face of modernity, then, is the imposition of conceptual
systems tending toward entropically determined identities: all forms
of degenerate Buddhism are Buddhism, however degenerate

32
Masuzawa, 125-6.
36
particular cases may be, and all world religions are indeed religions.
They are also hierarchically arranged to be sure. From the standard
Western perspective Christianity is clearly superior to Buddhism and
Islam, but they are all categorically reduced to religion, abstracted
from diverse histories and experiences. Also, because it is
Protestantism that eschews the religiosity of everyday life above all
that modern thought models its general conception of religion upon,
we have come to increasingly identify generalized, homogenized
forms of religion as separate from everyday life, as something that
one does on one day of the week and forgets about for the rest of
mundane existence.
33
.
What I am calling this face of modernity, in turn, corresponds
with imperialism as a system imposing order upon more
heterogeneous collectivities. This imperialism itself, furthermore, is
not something that takes place only in colonies. It takes place in the
heart of the metropole. Nation-states were formed through processes
similar to those that formed both Buddhism and world religions,
because the nationalism too privileged an abstractly defined
homogeneityin language, race, cultureover a lived, material
heterogeneity.

33
On the topic of the formation of what many scholars term
Protestant Buddhism, for example, see King, especially, 149-152.
37
The abstraction of religious forms from lived experience and
the packaging of them as religion also corresponds with the way that
capitalist exchange brings heterogeneous labor and capital into
isomorphic relations through the intermediary of money as a general
medium of exchange. It does not matter who produces a commodity
or where a commodity is produced, nor does it matter who consumes
where. Money and the global marketplace have at least since the
nineteenth century generated a system in which the kinds of uneven
and unequal social, political, economic, and cultural relations Conrad
evokes have been increasingly generally possible.
Capitalist and imperialist modernity continually homogenizes
the heterogeneous and this is not simply analogous with the processes
that constructed Buddhism, and the various nations across the planet.
It is one and the same process. However, the homogenization of the
heterogeneous at the global level of academic or elite discourse in the
realm of concepts or the global market in the economic realm does
not eliminate heterogeneity. Just as the sepulchral cities of
nineteenth-century Europe were in a dependent relationship with the
very different realms of colonized spaces and populations, the
homogenizing processes of elite conceptualizations of culture on the
one hand, and global capital accumulation on the other, are each
38
dependent upon and in a relationship with processes that exceed
them.
Deleuze and Guattari conceive of the economic and non-
economic relationships I am describing in terms of axioms versus
codes. For them, axiomatic logic characterizes modern, capitalist
societies and the logic of codes characterizes non-modern, non-
capitalist societies. The axiomatic deals directly with purely
functional elements and relations whose nature is not specified .
[C]odes, on the other hand, are relative to those domains and express
specific relations between qualified elements .
34
For example, in
medieval and ancient Japan certain communities were responsible for
providing the imperial household with particular products, such as sea
bream or textiles. This was a coded relationship because of the
specificity involved. It differs from the axiomatic, modern situation
in which people pay taxes in money that homogenously represents
value in an abstract way, a way that has only tenuous relationships
with the heterogeneous and concrete ways value is generated.
Eugene W. Holland describes the differences between axioms
and codes in the following way:
[Coding] depends upon customon symbolic systems
of conduct, meaning, and belief. Axioms, by contrast,

34
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi Trans. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 454.
39
directly join together heterogeneous flows of matter or
energy that have been quantified. Axiomatization not
only does not depend on meaning, belief, and custom,
but actively defies and subverts them, giving
capitalism its distinctive dynamism and modernism.
Quantified flows under capitalism get conjoined solely
on the estimation that this or that conjunction will
produce surplus-value . [T]he qualities attributable
to axiomatized flows arise from the conjunction itself,
rather than pre-existing it: in commodity-production
and consumption, the qualities of the product (use-
values), as well as the qualities with which the
consumer is endowed by consuming it (taste), and
also the qualities of the labor-power (skills) and of
the capital invested in machinery (technologies)
required to produce itall depend on the conjunctions
effected in the market via the medium of money as
abstract universal equivalent.
35


Because with axioms nothing qualitative is necessarily specified but
everything is reduced to the quantitative, with capitalist relations of
exchange or debt and modern social structures there is a great deal of
flexibility and freedom. This flexibility allows the conjunction of the
superficially contradictorysuch as Africa and Belgium during the
age of high imperialismwhile preventing homogenization, which
allows us to pretend that such things are not in a real and necessary
relationship.
36


35
Holland, 66-7.
36
For more on axioms and codes see Ibid., 453-473; Deleuze and
Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, especially, 244-262 and 335-337; Fredric
Jameson, Marxism and Dualism in Deleuze, in A Deleuzian
Century? ed. Ian Buchanan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999),
17-22; Holland, especially, 66-68; and Alberto Toscano,
Axiomatic, in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005), 17-18.
40
The axiomatic ordering of the heterogeneous modern world
has traditionally allowed us to believe in modernization as a process
leading to perpetually greater rationality, prosperity, and both
technological and social development, because it occludes the
necessary relationship between the impressive development of some
aspects of metropolitan civilization on the one hand, and the ruin of
most aspects of imperialized societies on the other. The
interrelationship between those supposedly at the vanguard of
modernizationdefined characteristically as rational, White, male,
heterosexual, and bourgeoisand those defined otherwise is all the
more cruel (and complex) because processes of capital accumulation
not only tolerate heterogeneity within modernity as a global system,
they encourage it because in its perpetual search for new sources of
profit, capitalism continually axiomatizes other qualitatively
dissimilar resource flows, transforming them into quantitatively
exchangeable commodities on the market: flows of raw materials and
labor skills, to be sure, but also of scientific knowledge, consumer
preferences, and so on.
37
The conspicuous role of Communist
nation-states (inexpensive) labor in the current global capitalist
economy well exemplifies capitalisms ability to appropriate the
dissimilar.

37
Holland, 67.
41
Taking such contradictory matters into account, it becomes
increasingly difficult to understand the workings of modernity. Brian
Massumi tries to overcome such obstacles by conceptualizing two
tendencies within modern societies, each of which are impossible to
realize: he identifies a drive towards entropyunderstanding and
fixing everything once and for allwith the pole of fascism-
paranoia and the drive towards the dissolution of all form with the
pole of anarchy-schizophrenia. For Massumi absolutely victorious
fascism-paranoia would absolutely mean death, and he is right, but
absolute anarchy-schizophrenia would be a kind of death as well
one is either frozen to death or shattered into innumerable pieces.
Modernity means living in the zone between these two forms of
death.
38

Massumi argues that twin tendencies towards fascism-
paranoia and anarchy-schizophrenia coexist in social organizations at
every level, from the individual to the national or international.
39

Nichirenism, and its particular manifestations such as the person of
Tanaka Chigaku or his Kokuch!kai organization also contain, are
composed by, these twin tendencies. This explains why and how
Chigaku could have offered his readers and listeners the absolute
freedom of union with the eternal, original Buddha, which suggests

38
Massumi, 116-17.
39
Ibid.
42
the dissolution of all form, all difference, all duality, and all
hierarchy, on the one hand, while on the other hand he could also be
in full support of the modern Japanese, imperialist nation-state, with
all the hierarchy and differentiation on an international and national
level that entailed. Chigaku gave his audiences the feeling that
impossibilities are possible and Nichirenism in general functioned as
an imaginary resolution to basic and inescapable contradictions of the
modern milieu, such as that between the dream of unlimited
accumulation and its impossibility, that between the approximation of
political equality and economic unevenness, or that between
nationalism and democracy.
Nichirenism & Modernity
Nichirenism must be understood as a species of what Donald
Lopez has defined as a specifically modern Buddhism.
40
Its basis, its
structure, was not that of coding and cyclicality. Nichirenism and its
adherents never repudiated the progressive temporality of the modern.
They did make use of an idiom connected to premodern
understandings of time and cosmology with the idea of mapp", but a
mixed temporality in which futurism characterizes the modern more
than anything else. Nichirenisms focus remained a compensatory

40
See Lopezs editors Introduction to Modern Buddhism:
Readings for the Unenlightened (New York: Penguin, 2002),
especially, xli.
43
future. In this dissertations final chapter, my interpretation of the life
and thought of Ishiwara Kanji will make this point clear. But even
more fundamentally, the much earlier thought of Tanaka Chigaku,
circa the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, embedded
Nichirenism as a discourse within modern times. In those early years
Chigaku unequivocally embraced the decoding tendencies of the
modern and this embrace had first of all to do with his renunciation of
clerical status.
Chigakus decision to become a layman stemmed from his
frustration with Nichirensh! sectarian orthodoxy during the Meiji
period (1868-1912). The sects policy was accommodation and
compromise with other religious persuasions. As part of the
premodern Tokugawa states attempt to police the archipelago all
individuals throughout the country were registered with given
temples, and they were by law not allowed to change their religious
affiliation. In that context, Nichirensh! leaders resigned themselves to
the futility of proselytizing. The Tokugawa system was a coded one
par excellence. However, the Meiji state abolished the rigidity of the
Tokugawa system through various reforms, including the
establishment of religious freedom.
41


41
Jaffe, 195. Note: Nichirensh! is one of several traditional sects of
Nichiren Buddhism. It was the sect operating the Nichiren Daiky#in.
44
Chigaku entered the Nichiren Daiky#in (Nichiren Great
Academy) in 1870. As a Nichirensh! priest-in-training there,
Chigaku apparently realized something his teachers did not, that with
religious freedom the rationale for accommodating the religious
beliefs of others disappeared. To be sure, Chigaku saw the emphasis
on aggressive proselytizing that he adopted as a return to the origins
of his sect, a return to the teachings of Nichiren. Nonetheless, he
simultaneously embraced a situation in which the solid was melting
into air. As a young man he grew to increasingly favor the abolition
of the codes of the old system. These codes had been designed to
prevent change of any kind, and only their dissolution made the
imagination of a new and better future possible. The first instance of
his Chigakus pronounced repudiation of coding occurred when he
became a layman. In other words, when he left the priesthood
Chigaku began a rejection of tradition and an infatuation with the
modern that would characterize the rest of his life.
Chigakus laicization in 1879 at the age of nineteen led to his
formation of three lay societies in turn: the Rengekai (Lotus Flower
Society) in 1881, the Rissh# Ankokukai (Rectification of Justice and
Protection of the Nation Society) in 1885, and the Kokuch!kai
(National Pillar Society) in 1914. The year after formally leaving the
seminary Chigaku got married. His renunciation of clerical status
45
was deeply related to his attitudes regarding marriage. Soon after
becoming a layman Chigaku still hoped to renovate the Nichirensh!
sect. In this context Chigaku became one of modern Japans earliest
advocates of marriage for Buddhist clergy. But by the first decade of
the twentieth century Chigaku had completely abandoned the idea of
clerical marriage. Instead he began denouncing the Buddhist
priesthood altogether. In so doing he embraced a completely lay
religiosity that left the old codes and the traditional Buddhist
establishment behind.
42

Chigaku had a solid logical foundation supporting his views
on marriage, the Buddhist establishment, and lay religiosity. He
called attention to the fact that in the Meiji Period clerics had lost the
special status they enjoyed during the Tokugawa Period. In Japanese
the word shukke (one who leaves home) signifies the status of priest
or monk, whereas zaike (one who resides in the home) refers to
laymen. Chigaku noted, however, that in the modern period priests
and monks did not leave behind the quotidian world signified by the
home. The Meiji state required clergy to retain family names, register
at the offices of local government with those names, and make
themselves available for conscription. In short, the state treated the
clergy as legally identical with every other citizen. At first Chigaku

42
Jaffe, 185.
46
argued that there was no logical reason why religious professionals
should not marry. Later he would come to argue that priests or
monks as such no longer even existed. His views on marriage were
related to his apotheosis of the nuclear family. He saw this as
consistent with Buddhist notions regarding the sanctification of the
even the most mundane of lifes elements. But his interpretation of
Buddhist doctrine also buttressed the primacy of the family as the last
bastion of natural social hierarchy in the context of capitalist
modernitys tendency to liquidate the stability of codes.
43

As part of his valorization of marriage and the nuclear family
Chigaku created one of the earliest Buddhist wedding ceremonies in
Japan. In these ceremonies Chigaku utilized the trappings of
Nichiren Buddhism in novel ways, for example, performing the
ceremony in front of a calligraphic representation of the daimoku
called a honzon (object of worship), and instructing the bride and
groom to chant the daimoku. The extended family attended and
witnessed, but did not participate. The most remarkable element of
Chigakus Buddhist wedding ceremony was the extent to which the
extended family is moved from the center stage. The parents of the
bride and groom have become members of the audience, along with

43
Ibid., 187.
47
more-distant relations and friends. Only the leader, the bride and
groom, and the go-betweens actually are engaged in the ceremony.
44

As Richard Jaffes study of modern Buddhism and clerical
marriage makes clear, we can link Chigakus concern with the
nuclear family to the late-nineteenth-century milieu, in which
Japanese modernizers influenced by Christianity and the newly
empowered bourgeoisie were popularizing the ideal of the conjugal
home of the nuclear family (katei in Japanese or h"mu
in Japanized English), as superior to the extended household (ie in
Chinese ideographs). According to its proponents, the home
consisted of the married couple and their children living as a self-
contained unit in isolation from the extended family and such non-
family members as servants and workers. While the ie was old-
fashioned, Chinese, and anti-industrial, the katei was modern,
Western, and the family unit best suited for Japans industrial
transformation.
45

Chigaku promised to break all of the old codes of the
premodern, pre-capitalist milieu, and his real or imagined relationship
with Nichiren and the Buddha resided in the fact that Chigaku
believed that breaking all such codes, and becoming what from

44
Ibid, 172-3.
45
Ibid, 172.
48
another perspective might be called truly modern, was the latent
promise of both Buddhism and Nichiren.
46
It is remarkable that
Chigaku even found and emphasized a doctrine of male-female
equality in the Lotus S!tra in an episode within the text wherein a
female becomes a Buddha. But as Jaffe points out, Chigaku failed to
mention that in the sutra the dragon girl who becomes a Buddha
must first transform into a male.
47
In other words, Chigaku produced
a strained interpretation of the Lotus in order to make it cohere with a
progressive position on gender.
However radical or even egalitarian some of Chigakus
discourse may have been, he inevitably returned to an axiomatic
recoding. He promised ineffable communion with the eternal,
original Buddha and corollaries for this included celebrating freedom
from the rigidities of the Tokugawa period, along with calling for the

46
Thus there is similarity between Nichirenism and the more general
phenomenon of modern Buddhism, meaning such Modern Buddhism
as that of the Zen Master, Suzuki Daisetz (D. T. Suzuki), Japanese
Orientalist scholars of Buddhism, and Buddhist figures in other parts
of Asia. There was a trend among such modern Buddhists to see in
Buddhism a philosophy or mode of experience at the avant-garde of
progressmeaning that Buddhism was more rational than other
religions, Christianity in particular, and that in the case of Japan, the
country that had received the Enlightenment in one sense from the
West, could return enlightenment in an equally rational but
spiritualized form. See Stone, Interwar Buddhist Studies, 227.
See also Donald S. Lopez, editors Introduction to Modern
Buddhism; and Robert Sharf, "The Zen of Japanese Nationalism," in
Curators of the Buddha.
47
Jaffe, 181, Note 39.
49
dissolution of hierarchical relationships between men and women.
However, Chigakus teachings also rhetorically promoted the
retention of certainties that promised to stabilize experience in the
face of the ceaseless change characterizing modern life. For example,
as some of his writings make clear, he believed in the equality
between women and men in theory, but at the practical level the roles
for women in the ideal society he envisioned were separate but
equal, which as always meant not really equal after all.
48

Chigaku turned to the nuclear family as what appears to be a
natural hierarchy even in the context of industrial capitalism and its
dislocations. He then used the family as a model for all social
structures. In a lecture that Chigaku gave for the Meiji Emperor and
Empress on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1894 Chigaku
made the following propositions:
Father and son, lord and vassal. All human ethics
arises from the husband-wife relationship. It is the
beginning and end of human ethics. It is the basis of
social interaction. If there are male and female but
they are not combined together into a conjugal couple,
then the vigorous and vital secret creative power of
heaven cannot function. Men and women cannot be
properly ordered. The mind cannot be pacified. The
body cannot be subdued. The ordering of the family,
the ruling of the nation, and the pacification of the
realm cannot occur. That is to say, society cannot be
maintained.
49



48
Ibid, 188.
49
Translation is Jaffes, 182.
50
In short, for Chigaku the husband-wife relationship was axiomatic,
and the always already given hierarchy it signified functioned at the
microcosmic level of the nuclear family and at the macrocosmic level
of the nation-state, in which the national family (kazoku kokka)
corresponds with the body politic (kokutai) as an unquestionable set
of givens. Chigaku ultimately subordinated everything to the nation
as the axiomatic proposition above all others.
In mathematics axioms delimit realms of possibility because
they are not themselves questionable and yet they provide a basis for
operations that would otherwise not be possible. The twin ideas of
the nation and the family are similar. For one thing, the nation as
axiomatic bedrock of modern societies makes possible the
perpetuation of fundamental social contradictions such as those
between people who have wealth and power and those who do not.
Nationalism informs us that we are all in it together, and that
those who have less wealth and power than others are the nation-as-
familys equivalent of children. Nichirenism as a supplement to the
nation (and by extension the more-or-less smooth continuation of
capital accumulation) promised only imaginary or short-term
resolutions to the fundamental contradictions of modern life.
For these reasons it is not surprising that Nichirenists such as
Ishiwara would have been involved in what others termed an
51
attempted overcoming of modernity, one that merely reproduced the
problems purportedly to be overcome, such as imperialism as a
corollary of industrial success. Imperialism too was and is only a
temporary fix (as David Harvey puts it) for the endemic crises of
industrial capitalist modernity.
50
But as with liberalism, Nichirenism
in general and Ishiwara in particular dealt with the fundamental
differences between expectation and experience by consigning
modernitys utopian promises to an ever receding horizon in the
indefinite future, a future that nonetheless justified much sacrifice for
oneself and others in the experiential present. However, as Georges
Bataille argued in many of his works, there is in sacrifice an
expenditure that is more than an unfortunate byproduct of a social
formations shortcomings. It can become an end in itself.
The Limits of Modernity? The Limits of Nichirenism?
As a young man Egawa Ch!ji (1905-1938) developed an interest in
Nichirenism through his exposure to the writings of Takayama
Chogy!.
51
Along with the socialist Nichirenist Senoo Gir#, who is
the subject of this works third chapter and Inoue Nissh# Egawa also

50
David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (New York: Verso, 1999),
441-45.
51
On Egawas reading of Ch#gy! see Hosaka Masayasu, Shin"dan
jiken: gunkokushugika no ky"shin to danatsu [The lets die incident:
fanaticism and oppression under militarism] (Tokyo: Renga Shob#,
1972), pp. 33-4. Hosakas book is the only extensive study of the
Shin"dan Jiken of which I am aware and almost all of what I know
about the incident is included in Hosakas work.
52
frequently visited the headquarters of Honda Nissh#. In 1925 Egawa
formed the Nichiren Kai (Nichiren Association) as a study group that
would also preach in front of train stations in the Tokyo region.
Members would dress completely in black, beating drums and
hoisting a banner proclaiming that their focus was a simple faith in
Nichiren and his teachings. By 1931 they had 500 members.
In 1933 Egawa changed the name of the Nichiren Kais youth
group from the Nichiren Kai Seinenbu (Nichiren Society Youth
Section) to the Nichiren Kai Junky# Sh! Seinent# (Nichiren Society
Mass Martyrdom Youth Party, henceforth Martyrdom Youth). Before
the formation of the Martyrdom Youth, Egawa had already begun to
emphasize Nichirens doctrine of not caring about ones own body
or life (fushaku shinmy"), which in Nichirens context referred to
literally giving ones all for the sake of the salvation of the world
through disseminating his version of Buddhism. Nichiren combined
M%hayana Buddhist altruism with the Buddhist teaching that the self
as a discreet being in a dualistic relationship with other phenomena is
an illusion.
During the first month of 1933, Ch!ji articulated the
importance of fushaku shinmy" in a manifesto that he distributed to
the 28 young people who would become members of the Martyrdom
Youth: Lets die for our homeland (sokoku)! Lets die for our
53
principle (shugi)! Lets die for our religion! Lets die for our
founder! Lets die for our comrades!
52
The activities and ideas of
Egawas group aroused the condemnation of the media, and both the
surveillance and persecution of the police, causing the Martyrdom
Youth to lose most of its membership. Events of ensuing years such
as the Ketsumeidan Incident and the February 1936 incident only
made matters worse.
By 1936 Egawa and his fellow martyrs resolved to die in
order to awaken contemporary Japanese society to what they
perceived as the truth. They initially chose the method of starvation,
but problems with the disposal of bodies caused by one-by-one death
through starvation forced them to discontinue the practice and to
advocate death by suicidal disembowelment (seppuku). However, at
the same time some members of the Martyrdom Youth had
misgivings about dying. Egawa responded by convincing five of
them to commit seppuku in public, but without dying. Each of the
five simultaneously appeared in front of the Diet Building, the
residence of the foreign minister, the Imperial Palace, the Tokyo
Metropolitan Police headquarters, and the Home Ministry, where they
chanted lets die, lets die, lets die, and stuck swords into their
abdomens. Nobody perished. The next year Egawa died from

52
Hosaka, 111.
54
tuberculosis, three female members who attended him subsequently
killed themselves with poison, one male follower ended his own life
by self-disembowelment, and another male member of Egawas
group drowned himself in the sea.
53

Bataille associated religious experiences of divinitys
immanence with what he called an intimate order.
54
This was
for him a realm of continuity between subject and object, between
humanity and the universe. He furthermore correlated this sacred
mode of experience with the world of animals that humanity left
behind when it began to use tools. He contrasted intimacy with what
he called the order of things.
55
This realm of things, for Bataille,
was one in which people and other sentient and insentient entities are
reduced to discontinuous objects. For him this was a fallen or
degraded situation in which man himself became merely one of
the things of the world.
56
Despite points in his work where he
connects things to the commodity,
57
Bataille usually seems to
ahistorically define religiosity, as when he states in both the first

53
For my synopsis of events surrounding the Shin#dan Jiken, I
partially relied upon a brief account included in Nichiren no hon:
mapp" no yo o utsu Nichirens Book: A Prophecy fired at the World
of Mapp#) (Tokyo: Gakken, 2001), 162-3. .
54
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1: Consumption, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 59.
55
Ibid.
56
Ibid., 57.
57
Ibid.,132.
55
volume of The Accursed Share and in Theory of Religion that,
universally, religion is a search for lost intimacy.
58
For Bataille,
the means employed towards the end of a return to intimacy differ
according to historical context, yet he celebrated less modern
practices such as sacrifice and mysticism most of all, bemoaning the
fact that for him intimacy was all but lost in modern times.
A more historicized version of Batailles theory of religion
may provide insight into the meaning of events such as the Lets Die
Incident, as well as that particular events relationship with
Nichirenism as a whole. Chigaku and other, more normal,
Nichirenists reduced what they privileged first and foremost
religion, Buddhism, the nation, the emperor, even the cosmic
Buddhato things. The axiomatic logic of the modernity they
enthusiastically accepted conceptually forestalled apprehension of a
heterogeneity exceeding simple ways of defining such entities.
Nichirenism promised the delivery of what Bataille would call
intimacy or immanence, but that was a promise that I would
argue remained always forthcoming. Again, this is structurally

58
Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Zone Books, 1989), 57. Cf., Accursed Share, 57. Here
Bataille characterizes humanitys strange myths and cruel rites as
evidence that man is in search of a lost intimacy from the first.
Religion, he continues in the next paragraph is this long effort and
this anguished quest: It is always a matter of detaching from the real
order, from the poverty of things, and destroying the divine order.
56
related to the temporality, the perpetual not yet, of liberalism.
Liberalism and Nichirenism also structurally cohere with the deferred
gratification, the famous (Protestant) asceticism, that is inextricable
from normal capital accumulation. Promised gratification may be
deferred by choicebecause, for example, one may prefer investing
in the futureor it may be deferred involuntarily because no
gratification is actually forthcoming anyway. The salient point at this
juncture is that in the face of the temporality of the modern, refusal to
be patient refusing to wait for gratification, even development,
world unification, or communion with the immanence of the Buddha
that is also the cessation of oppressive hierarchymay often take the
form of a refusal to live as life is conventionally defined. Refusal to
live as conventionally defined might itself take many forms, most of
them tragic perhaps, and the Lets Die Incident was an example of
one of them.
Deleuze and Guattari argue that each social formation has
something called antiproduction built into it. By this they mean that
for the most part, historically, societies have been much more
concerned with social discipline than any potential lack of goods and
resources. Because of this, according to them, all social formations
have organized the destruction of goods and resources in such a way
that their over-accumulation does not threaten the social balance.
57
They argue that in non-modern societies antiproduction was either
integrated into a ritual calendar featuring carnivalesque orgies of
wasteful consumption, or it was built into a tributary system in which
surplus transformed into gold eventually found its way into the
bottomless treasuries of despots. With capitalism and its axiomatic
organization of society, however, such things become impossible
festivals and tributary economies require believability.
59

David Harvey calls antiproduction occurring in the capitalist
milieu the devaluation of capital (including money, commodities, and
labor). Harvey, drawing from Marxs Capital, argues that the
extreme efficiency of capitalist economies leads to overproduction,
leading to insufficient markets for commodities produced and
concomitant economic crises, which themselves lead to social and
political crises. His model case is the Great Depression, and both he
and Deleuze and Guattari note that policies such as the new deal or
Keynesianism in the US and attempts at regional autarky in Europe
and Asia were fixes that did not work. The only effective solution
for the Depression, they argue, was the Second World War, with its
massive destruction and resultant clean slate for the US to carve out a
new kind of global hegemony. This hegemony was one in which
social equilibrium in the first world was maintained by the hyper-

59
For a good summary of the workings of antiproduction according
to Deleuze and Guattari, see Holland, 58-78.
58
exploitation of the third, a neo-imperialist exploitation made all the
more palatable (and crueler) because of its non-codified informality.
Postwar capitalist modernity also ensured the perpetuation of social
equilibrium through devaluation/antiproduction concomitant with the
unsuccessful wars pursued by the United States as police actions
and undeclared wars in Korea and Vietnam.
60

I am not claiming the existence of ongoing conspiracies
perpetrated by, for example, a military-industrial complex, nor do I
believe in the automatic and smooth-running social functionalism
of an antiproduction-production system per se. The role of the
aleatory, on the other hand, cannot be underestimated. As insurance
companies know, we have little idea who will or will not lose their
lives in automobile accidents in a given year, but this does not reduce
the calculability of the approximate numbers of those who will.
61

Moreover, economic crises are inevitable outcomes of the over-
accumulation of capital, which does not mean that such crisesor the
imperialist wars national leaders turn to in order to deliver us from
themare planned. Figures like Chigaku, Anesaki, and Miyazawa

60
For the devaluation of capital see especially Harvey, The Limits,
425-442; for anti-production see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus,
335-337; for the historical function of the second World War vis--
vis the Great Depression and the postwar settlement see A Thousand
Plateaus, 461-3 and Harvey 442-445.
61
Lefebvre, 204.
59
did not cause the Lets Die Incident, but they produced and were part
of a discourse that gave rise to it.
Nichirenism as a whole stimulated antiproduction. While its
more moderate participants such as Chigaku and Anesaki maintained
a distance from illicit violence, Chigaku flirted with a radical
dissolution of things. Ultimately the supreme beings (nation,
Emperor, Buddha) that he venerated above all as agents of the
transformation of the world into something more intimate were
themselves things nonetheless. A fundamental irony obscures the
relationship between events like the Lets Die Incident and the
Nichirenism of Chigaku and Anesaki: Buddhism and the nation as
abstract entities formed through a process denying the heterogeneity
of lived experience constituted part of the problem of modern
existence, not the solution, and yet Egawa and his followers never
imagined destroying the realistic facades of those things. Instead
their desire for an apparently lost intimacy led to them destroying
themselves. As for more normal Nichirenism it worked within
the confines of acceptable discourse and behavior, as long as utopian
impossibility could be endlessly deferred to the indefinite future.
Moreover, as articulated by Maruyama, the fascism from
below of the Sh#wa Restorations radical Nichirenism was integral
to development of fascism from above, which for him was
60
shorthand for the conservative forces that capitalized on 1930s
terrorism in Japan. The Lets Die Incident had a similar function.
Signifying nihilism with their well-publicized suicides, along with
other Nichirenist terrorists, the Martyrdom Youth helped prepare
Japan for mass commitment to an apparently meaningful and equally
self-effacing national mission: the defeat of Western imperialism.
Maruyamas discussion of the two fascisms anticipated the
dichotomy discussed by Massumi as fascism-paranoia and
anarchy-schizophrenia.
If Maruyama got something wrong regarding such questions,
however, it was in the way he misrecognized how the two poles of
modern society are so often present in one and the same entity, as was
the case with Nichirenism, Nichirenist organizations, and
Nichirenists. The threads binding the apparently contradictory in the
modern are axiomatic. It was more form than content, and because of
this it was as indifferent to particular meanings as money linked to
the purchase of any particular commodity. The meaning of
Nichirenism was not as important as the latent potentials that could be
actualized in its name at any given moment: for example, as a
Miyazawa poem, as an Anesaki biography of Nichiren, or as the Lets
Die Incident. Nevertheless, Nichirenism of all types embodied the
desire to overcome or escape modern life, which was futile because at
61
its most fundamental level, as with the temporality of modernity in
general, Nichirenism proposed an imminent meeting with an
immanent utopia that remained only possible in an imaginary future.
In other words Nichirenism was a part of modernity, not antithetical
to it.
The horror of modern life begins with the recognition that
threads indeed connect our own experienceand from a first world
perspective, our privilegeto more unsavory realities and practices.
In scholarly discourse to date, Nichirenism in its totality has
constituted a threat to our collective desire to maintain an order of
things conceptually separating us from them, liberals from
fascists, and good from evil. I believe that relations between
these hierarchically opposed binary terms are a great deal more
intimate than most people commonly suppose. I furthermore believe
that the only way to connect with a meaningful and politically
hopeful experiential present is to stop misrecognizing this fact. As
Lefebvre suggested, orthodox historiography has often functioned as
a strange ceremony that is like a ritual of purification,
62

designed consciously or unconsciously to conjure away the horror
accompanying recognition that we are not so different from

62
Lefebvre, 225.
62
them. Whatever its shortcomings the present work attempts to do
otherwise.
Rationale of Chapters that Follow
From the start I have intended for this dissertation to
juxtapose the Nichirenist elements that writers seem so reluctant to
place side-by-side with one another. I chose to focus on four
individuals who best exemplify the range of Nichirenism. As my
research developed and as I began to write, I realized that Chigaku
was Nichirenisms seminal figure, and that he planted what one might
call the seeds of Nichirenism in the wide variety of followers that I
have already mentioned, and the chapters that follow are arranged
accordingly.
Chapter one is on Chigaku himself. In this chapter I devise an
interpretive logic that accounts for his charisma. I make the case that
his charisma was not because of his message but because of he
essentially lacked one. He was a master at wielding the empty words
that are the ideological powerhouses of modernity. For example, in
our contemporary milieu political figures can use the word freedom
without reference to its content. It has become an empty shell of a
concept because nobody would dare to be against freedom. Asking
what it means is in effect taboo. Chigakus use of language was
analogous wit this. His charisma largely arose from the fact that his
63
audiences could supply content their own content to his messages.
This content expressed their own desires, and I believe that this
accounts for the diversity of manifestations of Nichirenism.
Chapter two addresses Miyazawa Kenji. I argue that he
actualized Chigakus discourse in a particular way, as did the two
other major foci of this dissertation. Miyazawa created a utopian
literature, one that broke down the barriers between the hierarchically
arranged binary oppositions that compose modern commonsense. I
love his work. However, when Miyazawa attempted to actualize that
utopianism in the material world by leading a farmers cooperative
organization, the result was unsuccessful. In chapter two I attempt to
discern why that was the case.
In chapter three I examine the thought and career of Senoo
Gir#. Of all the figures in my work, he was the one least connected to
Chigaku. Nonetheless, in his youth he read Chigakus work and it
deeply inspired him. Later he joined a rival Nichirenist faction that
was standard insofar as it was supportive of the liberal capitalist
status quo, the Japanese nation, and the imperialist project. Senoo
soon formed a Nichirenist youth group and served as its leader.
Later, following the Japanese expansion into northeastern China
discussed below, he reversed course, becoming opposed to
imperialism and what he called Japanese fascism. He then forged
64
what he called Buddhist Socialism. Because of his radical
transformation Senoos biography indicates how far Nichirenism
could go in directions antithetical to what seem like its fundamental
premises.
Chapter four focuses on Ishiwara Kanji. Ishiwara was deeply
impressed with the thought of Chigaku, and for that reason he
formally joined the Kokuch!kai in 1920, as did Miyazawa.
Ishiwaras mode of actualizing Nichirenisms promise however was
more this worldly, and more violent. He was the main conspirator
behind the Manchurian Incident in 1931, when the Japanese army
exploded a section of the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway
and blamed it on Chinese bandits. They then used that false flag
incident as a pretext for the takeover of a large section of northeastern
China, setting up a Japanese controlled puppet-state. Ishiwara was
driven to undertake these activities by his desire to facilitate and help
win a Last War between an Asia led by Japan and a West led by the
United States. He sincerely believed that this Last Warwhich he
did not confuse with the actual World War IIwould usher in an
epoch of peace and endless progress.
Lastly, I use the word modernism in my title to describe
Nichirenism. Despite a plethora of meanings frequently attached to
the term, I see it first of all as a word signifying the variety of avant-
65
garde movements in literary and other arts during the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, including Dadaism, Expressionism and
Abstract Expressionism, Futurism, and the literature of Joyce, Kafka,
and Robert Musil.
63
This entails the notion that modernism
challenges the putatively standard rationality of modernity or the
human rationality that supposedly increases universally through
processes of modernization.
64
I furthermore agree with
Harootunians suggestion that modernism is the cultural supplement
of modernity defined as the social, political, and economic milieu of
capitalism, and that in this capacity it extends into realms beyond the
purely aestheticalthough comparisons between modernist forms of
literature and other arts and modernism more generally may be
conceptually useful. As Harootunian writes, modernism is the

63
Various specialized dictionaries define modernism, showing the
variety of ways various people have defined it as well as noting
specific examples movements labeled as modernist. See for example
the entry on the term in J.A. Cudden and CE Pearson, Dictionary of
Literary Terms and Literary Theory (New York: Penguin Books,
1999), 515-516, and David Edwards definition in The New Fontana
Dictionary of Modern Thought, Third Edition, ed. Alan Bullock and
Stephan Tromley (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 539-540. For an
extended introduction to the terms application to a more purely
literary field see Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An
Introduction (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1992), 1-15.
64
Cf., Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of
Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1998). Sass compares and contrasts the experience
of schizophrenics with experience represented in modernist art. His
book suggests a dialectical relationship between the rationalizing
processes of the modern and the in some ways schizophrenic
tendencies of modernism.
66
historical watermark of lived unevenness, and as such it represents
strategies and activities that can both celebrate the creative and
destructive ceaseless change of the modern, and deplore it, while
longingly looking backwards and forwards towards imaginary origins
and destinies. Nichirenism is an example of how a modernist
movement can express a plurality of such things at once.
65



65
Harootunian, Overcome by, xx-xxvii.
67
Chapter One: The Enigma of Tanaka Chigaku
Introduction: A Problem of Classification
The cat who is the target of the dogs aggression is an aggressor to
the mouse. With people as well there are mutually aggressive
relations of strength, relations of wealth and relations of knowledge.
In the affairs of holy men, in morality, in law and in academia in all
these instances the way one greets opposition has an aggressive
character. Aggression is the way the universe works. However,
there is bad aggression and there is good aggression, inferior
aggression and superior aggression, mundane aggression and holy
aggression. The Lotus S!tra aggression I am referring to now is
superior aggression, good aggression, holy aggression .

Tanaka Chigaku, Sh!mon no ishin
Tanaka Chigaku titled the compilation of his writings that he
published during his lifetime the collected works of the lion king
(Shishi" zensh!). Was he a noble and infinitely compassionate lion
king in the manner of the Buddha or a fierce practitioner of the
Buddhism of the Lotus S!tra,
1
or was he an ultranationalist, fascist
and/or militarist? For scholarship during most of the postwar period

1
See Ishida Mizumaro, Reibun Bukky"go daijiten [Great dictionary
of Buddhist terms with examples) (Tokyo: Sh!gakkan, 1997], 425 for
shishi as Buddha. According to Honge seiten daijirin [Great
dictionary of our sects sacred texts] (Tokyo: Shishi!bunko, 1963
(1923)), vol. 3, 6371, a three volume reference work compiled under
Chigakus direction, however, a shishi" is one who personally
exemplifies traits valued within the Nichiren tradition among
common people, and one with a shishi" no kokoro or lion heart
exemplifies the courage of the votary or practitioner of the
(principles/teachings o the) Lotus S!tra, a.k.a., Nichiren.
68
Chigaku has represented a problem of classification.
2
In this chapter,
I will argue that the difficult to classify nature of Chigaku
demonstrated his most essential and appealing qualities. In other
words, the vacancy or evasiveness of Chigakus Nichirenism
discourse fueled it as a mobilizing force. The vacancy or evasiveness
at the movements core also explains why Nichirenism as a
movement had an uncommonly diverse set of manifestations.
The Religious Studies scholar Sat! Hiroo has placed
Chigaku in of the first of a three-part division of modern Nichirenism,
a movement as a whole that Chigaku inaugurated with his invention
of the neologism, Nichirenshugi (Nichirenism). Chigaku first used
the term in a seminal set of journal articles that became the 1901
extended essay, The Renovation of Our Sect (Sh!mon no ishin).
3

Sat!s tripartite scheme for begins with Nichirenism as a nationalistic
and right wing movement. This first category includes Chigaku,
Ishiwara Kanji, and Inoue Nissh!. Sat!s second category is
Nichirenism as a nation-state-transcending movement attempting to
construct a global universalism grounded in the Lotus S!tra and

2
I am following "tanis convention in abbreviating Tanaka Chigaku
in this way, making this choice because Tanaka is one of the most
common Japanese names and Chigaku [wisdom and learning], the
name he gave himself is uncommonly singular. Thus I will avoid
confusion with others named Tanaka, including the various
descendents of Chigaku who have been active leaders and writers in
the Nichirenism movement.
3
"tani, 15, 69.
69
Nichirens teachings. This group includes Miyazawa Kenji,
Takayama Chogy#, and Senoo Gir!. Sat!s third category is
Nichirenism as a new religion focused on the concerns of common
people. This third category includes primarily postwar lay
organizations such as Soka Gakkai and Rissh! K!seikai.
4

The problem with these categories is that not only were
Takayama and Miyazawa moved to become Nichirenists directly
through exposure to Chigakus writings and personality, Miyazawa
and Ishiwara both enthusiastically joined Chigakus organization, the
Kokuch!kai in the same year (1920).
5
Even the Socialist Senoo read
a number of Chigakus works and at one point fervently desired his
tutelage. Moreover, the Reiy#kai was a lay group with spiritualist
leanings founded by Kubo Kakutar!, a man who had been
influenced by the Nichirenist ideas of Tanaka Chigaku in the 1920s,
and Kubos group at one time included the founders of Rissh!
K!seikai and most of the several other Nichirenist new religions, with
the exception of Soka Gakkai.
6
I would add that calling postwar

4
Tamura Yoshir!, Kindai Nihon no Ayumi to Nichirenshugi, [The
development of modern Japan and Nichirenism] in K"za Nichiren 4:
Nihon kindai to Nichirenshugi (Nichiren lectures 4: Modern Japan
and Nichirenism) ed. Tamura and Miyazawa Eish# (Tokyo:
Shinj#sha, 1972), 2-7.
5
"tani, 252.
6
Robert Kisala, Prophets of Peace: Pacifism and Cultural Identity in
Japans New Religions (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1999), 103. Makiguchi Tsunesabur!, the founder of Soka Gakkai did
70
movements such as Soka Gakkai and Rissh! K!seikai Nichirenist
is problematic because those movementsunlike mostly pre-1945
movement that is the subject of this dissertationdo not use that
word to describe themselves.
Historian Kobayashi Hideo on the other hand unhesitatingly
regards Chigaku to be a Sh!wa fascist. In what seems to be an
elaboration of Maruyama Masaos famous analysis of fascism from
below and fascism from above, Kobayashi divides Japanese fascists
into those concerned with constructing a new system, those who
sought the dissolution of the current order, and the technocrats of the
period following fascisms systemization.
7
For Kobayashi, Chigaku
fits into the shintaisei k"sakuha or those concerned with constructing
a new system. This group also includes Ishiwara. However,
Kobayashi acknowledges the influence of Chigaku over the genj"
hakaiha, or those concerned with the dissolution of the current order.
The latter category includes Inoue Nissh!, a former army spy turned
informal Nichiren priest who led a terrorist organization known as the

for a time attend lectures given by Chigaku however ("tanis preface,
ii), although the contemporary Soka Gakkai stance is predictably that
Makiguchi was neither impressed nor influenced by the experience.
See Ikeda Daisaku, John Dewy and Tsunesaburo Makiguchi:
Confluences of thought and Action,
eddiv.homestead.com/files/John_Dewey_and_Tsunesaburo_Makiguc
hi.htm.
7
Kobayashi Hideo, Sh"wa fashisuto no gunz" (Portraits of Sh!wa
fascists) (Tokyo: K!so Shob!, 1975), 28.
71
Blood Pledge Corps (Ketsumeidan). The Ketsumeidan infamously
murdered politicians and business leaders in a set of 1930s incidents.
8

Recent scholars such as "tani Eiichi in his monograph
Kindai Nihon no Nichirenshugi und" (2001) and Jacqueline Stone in
her Japanese Lotus Imperialism: From Militant Nationalism to
Contemporary Peace Movements (2000) wisely avoid facile
categorization. However, "tanis well-researched and detailed
account, over half of which is focused on Chigaku, leaves us
wondering what the precise connections were between Chigaku and
the imperialism, fascism, and militarism that other writers so often
associate with him. Stone is largely correct in her suggestion that
differences between postwar Nichiren-based peace movements and
the prewar nationalistically and imperialistically oriented Nichirenism
of Chigaku can be explained with reference to the divergent contexts
of prewar and postwar Japan.
9
In contradistinction to this, I intend to
suggest that Chigaku and Nichirenism represent problems integral to
the modern world that we still inhabit, instead of a world left behind
in 1945.
Chigaku authored an expansive number of publications and
gave a similarly voluminous number of lectures. Through them he
detailed Nichirenisms role and the role of Japans national principles

8
Ibid., 110.
9
Stone Japanese Lotus Millennialism, 261-280.
72
or kokutai in the reconstruction of the country and Japans mission to
subsequently reconstruct the world. Chigaku expressed the idea of
world reconstruction in various phrases he invented or innovatively
used modern incarnations. He most consistently termed
Nichirenisms and Japans mission sekai t"itsu, a phrase
translatable as world unification. However, he offered few details
of what that phrases realization would mean.
Any set of answers to the problem of Chigaku should begin
with a look at the opening years of the twentieth-century, when he
published Sh!mon no ishin, a relatively short but exceedingly
influential work. In a commonly cited passage of Sh!mon, Chigaku
explains that the 13
th
century monk Nichiren was the Supreme
Commander of the World-Unifying Armed Forces and that the
people of Japan continued to be the soldiers of Heaven under his
figurative command.
10
The Chigaku of this text expressed aggression
and militancy, but the degree to which he meant the texts violent
rhetoric to be taken literally is ambiguous. His apparently extreme
nationalism seems consistent with the mission-consciousness of

10
These phrases translated in Ruben L. F. Habito, The Uses of
Nichiren in Modern Japanese History, review article, Japanese
Journal of Religious Studies, 1999 26/3-4. Parts of the same passage
are also translated and quoted in Edwin Lee, Nichiren and
Nationalism: The Religious Patriotism of Tanaka Chigaku
Monumenta Nipponica vol. 30, no. 1 (1975), p. 26; Stone Japanese
Lotus Millennialism, 267-8. Stone uses Lees translation.
73
public figures within imperialist nation-states in general. But what he
was advocating remains ambiguous because he conflated his ideal
Nichirensh# sectwhich he wanted to organize like a modern nation-
statewith the Japanese nation-state proper. In other words, it is not
clear at this point in his career whether he was advocating Japanese
nationalism and aggressive imperialism or whether he was indeed
advocating the renovation of his sect and its successful global
missionary activity. It is worth noting that Chigaku at times defined
sekai t"itsu in terms such as this: It definitely does not mean taking
over territory with military force. The goal of world unification as
he understood it was consistent with peace.
11

In the following section I will attempt to illustrate the
complexities of Chigakus position on such matters. I will begin to
do so by discussing his meeting with a Ceylonese nationalist and
religious reformer named Anagarika Dh$rmapala (1864-1933).
When they met in 1902 they were much in agreement on various
matters. Their later reputations would differ greatly. Many would
come to think of Dh$rmapala as a great man and some would come to
call Chigaku a fascist. Later I will discuss how and why Chigaku
could affect so many different people in such different ways. These

11
Tanaka Chigaku, Hokkekai no shokan (Impressions of the
Hokkekai), Hokke [Lotus flower] vol. 5, no. 2 (1915): 39. The
Hokkekai [Lotus Society] was a group of Nichirenist intellectuals.
Chigaku sometimes published in Hokke, their journal.
74
two themes are connected by the fact that the multiple, varied
manifestations of Chigakus apparent message are grounded in the
ambiguity and manifold contradictions of the modern.
The Meeting of Chigaku and Dh!rmapala
Chigaku met Dh$rmapala in Kamakura Japan.
Hagiographical accounts of Chigakus life often cite this event.
12

Dh$rmapala reformed the Ceylons Buddhism, creating an altogether
new form of Buddhism in the process. In this he had much in
common with Chigaku. Dh$rmapala was both an epigone of the early
Theosophy movement and the 1891 founder of the Mahabodhi
Society, an international body that at the time remained primarily
devoted to ceding the Buddhas birthplace in India to Buddhist
control. Dh$rmapala also became a minor global celebrity following
a speech he gave in English at the World Parliament of Religions at
the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Because of his service in
the cause of Sri Lankan nationalism, Dh$rmapala to this day is a

12
See for example the inclusion of The Visit of Mr. Dh$rmapala
[Darumapara shi no raih!] in Tanaka Chigaku sensei no omoide
[Memories of the teacher Tanaka Chigaku], ed. Tanaka K!ho
(Tokyo: Shinsekaisha, 1989). The account of the meeting of Chigaku
and Dh$rmapala included in the 1989 publication was originally
published in the journal My"h" in August, 1903.
75
national hero resembling a Buddhist and Sinhalese version of
Gandhi.
13

Chigaku and Dh$rmapalas conversation depended on
translation from Dh$rmapalas English into Chigakus Japanese and
vice-versa. A disciple of Chigakus named Yamakawa Chi!
subsequently recorded their words in a modern variation of classical
Japanese. Yamakawa, Takayama Ch!gy#, and others present that
day also intermittently participated in the conversation. Yamakawa
published the proceedings in My"sh!, the organ of Chigakus Rissh!
Ankokukai, the Kokuch#kais precursor. It would be nave to assume
that Yamakawas Japanese text transparently represents the
Dh$rmapalas words (or those of anyone else) on that day, but the
Dh$rmapala represented in the text is consistent with his own
writings and existing accounts of the man.
14

The Visit of Mr. Dh$rmapala (Darumapara-shi no raih!),
as the text is titled is useful here because it introduces Chigakus
ideas and it connects them in context to a world in which Japans

13
See the mention of Dh$rmapala on the website of the Sri Lankan
embassy to the United States,
http://www.slembassyusa.org/srilanka_us_relations/historical_context
.html.
14
See for example Ananda W. P. Gurge, The Unforgettable
Dh#rmapala: A Miscellany on the Life and Achievements of the
Angarika Dh#rmapala (1864-1933) (Los Angeles: 1
st
Books Library,
2002) and Donald Lopez, Introduction in Modern Buddhism, xix-
xxi, 54-58.
76
military, industrial and cultural endeavors were just beginning to
challenge the hegemony of the European and American Powers.
Crucially, 1902 fell between the Sino-Japanese war (1894-1894) and
Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). Those wars coincided with
Japans initial development as an imperialist power. The first
resulted in Japans initial colony, Taiwan, and the second resulted in
Japans growing foothold on the Asian mainland with increasing
influence and control over Korea and southern Manchuria. The two
wars also first demonstrated the Japanese ability to defeat a much
larger nation in the case of China and even a European power in the
case of Russia. In this context, Darumapara-shi suggests how
Chigakus words and personality could resonate with the concerns of
Dh$rmapala.
Chigaku and Dh$rmapala each confronted a historical
commonsense that buttressed Western global supremacy. This
supremacy involved the British control of Ceylon, and it was this
supremacy that the Japanese nation-state was beginning to challenge
with Japans own successes as an imperialist power. Taking this
context into account, Chigakus novel interpretations of Nichirens
teachings took on contemporary significance. In Darumapara-shi
Tanaka tells Dh$rmapala that:
The doctrine of Saint Nichiren is truly on the verge of
uniting the world. Nichiren taught us just as it was a
77
wonderful thing that the Dh$rma of the moon tribe
[Indians] came to Japan like the moon moves from
east to west, it is also a wonderful thing that the
Buddhist Dh$rma of Japan [where the sun rises] will
replace the Buddhism of the moon tribe.
15


In Nichirens own context the logic of this statement was grounded in
his thirteenth-century understanding that the demise of the aristocratic
Heian governments hegemony within the archipelago during the late
12th century, along with various contemporary natural disasters,
indicated that he was living in the third, final and most degraded of
periods within Buddhist cosmology, mapp".
Nichiren taught that within mapp" all centers were
transformed into peripheries and vice-versa. One of his most
innovative tendencies was the degree to which he regarded this
situation positively. During Nichirens age the far-eastern Kant!
region that once formed the hinterland of aristocratic, Heian Japan
had become the seat of political power at Kamakura and this fit
Nichirens logic vis--vis mapp". On the one hand, he was able to
celebrate his here and now when in the new capital. This celebration
of the quotidian present was consistent with and an intensification of
a long tradition in Buddhism. But on the other hand, he was from
Awa province, a region to the northeast of Kamakura and even
further removed from the old capital. Traditionally Nichiren is

15
Yamakawa Chi!, Darumapara shi no raih!, 548.
78
supposed to be the son of a fisherman, making him all the more
marginal. Thus his celebration of the peripheral in the age of Mapp!
was essentially an apotheosis of his own situation.
In a related move Nichiren also theorized that the Japanese
archipelago in general became the center of the Buddhist cosmos vis-
-vis continental Asia and the former center of that cosmos, India. In
Kenbutsu mirai ki, a text that Chigaku indirectly referenced in his
conversation with Dh$rmapala, Nichiren claimed that the Chinese
monk Zhanran (711-82) of the Tiantai School knew that Buddhism
had already ceased to exist in India. In this text, Nichiren also notes
that Buddhism had been lost in China because of the invasion of the
Mongols. In Kenbutsu mirai ki, Nichiren claimed that another Tiantai
monk, Zhushi (964-1032), knew that Buddhism was going to return
to its original ground in the west. Nichiren claimed that this is the
place where the moon appears (India) and that Buddhism was
going to return there from the east where the sun rises (Japan).
16
In
another work, the Kangy" Hachiman sh", Nichiren explicitly refers to
Indians as the moon tribe and the people of Japan as the sun
tribe. Hitherto, wrote Nichiren, the Buddha Dh$rma of India had
spread from west to east. But like the moon, its light is feeble; it

16
Stone, Placing Nichiren in the Big Picture: some ongoing Issues
in Scholarship, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 1999 26/3-4,
415. Quotes from the In Kenbutsu mirai ki and Kangy" Hachiman
sh" are her translations.
79
could never dispel the darkness of the Final Dh$rma age [mapp"].
Now it was the time for the Buddha Dh$rma of Japan to rise like the
sun, moving from east to west, and illuminate the world.
17

Chigaku deployed Nichirens logic of hierarchy
inversions, as Jacqueline Stone puts it,
18
in a modern context where
it took on a meaning with respect to Japans position in a global order
of colonized and colonizers. Chigakus thought was consistent with
similar attempts by intellectuals such as Okakura Tenshin (1862-
1913). Okakura was an art historian who claimed that over centuries
Japan became Asias living museum. This meant that all of the
art/civilization of the continent flowed eastward to Japan, its
terminus. There Japanese preserved, synthesized, and developed it.
According to Okakura, following modernization beginning around
1868 with the Meiji Restoration, Japan also started to successfully
synthesize pan-Asian civilization with the industrially grounded
civilization of the West. Because of this, Okakura argued, Japans
mission became to lead the entire world into a more harmonious and
better age.
19


17
Ibid., 416.
18
See Ibid, 417 and Stones Original Enlightenment Thought and the
Transformation of Japanese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1999), 298.
19
See Okakura Kakuzo (Tenshin), Ideals of the East, especially, 5-
10.
80
Chigaku usage of Nichirens logic of inversion in the modern
context also resonated with Dh$rmapalas own project of bolstering
Sinhalese nationalism via both a nuanced interpretation of history and
what one might call a fundamentalism characterizing his modern
Buddhism. Dh$rmapala clearly articulated his vision of history in a
pamphlet he published in 1902 in California, immediately following
the trip to Japan when he met Chigaku. In the pamphlet, Dh$rmapala
writes that 2,400 years previously the British lived in a barbaric state
and they were conquered and sold as slaves by Romans. He writes
that barbarity still characterized the British, citing [c]ruelty,
drunkenness, slaughter of innocent animals, wife-beating [and the]
promiscuous dancing of men and women regardless of the laws of
decency. Dh$rmapala claimed that [c]ompassion, gentleness, [and]
mercy are divine qualities which are absolutely foreign to the savage
British.
Dh$rmapala declared in the piece that Sinhalese colonists
left Bengal 2,400 years previously in search of fertile pastures. They
found the island of Lanka he continued, naming it Tambapann. He
stated that Sinhalese have never been conquered and that they are
ethnologically unique. They have, he wrote, no slave blood in
them and they have never been conquered. He stressed the way that
neither Tamil nor European vandals had been able to subdue the
81
Aryan Sinhalese. Lastly, Dh$rmapala wrote that Aryan
Sinhalese made their bright beautiful island into a paradise
before its destruction by barbaric vandals. Presumably, the earlier
vandals were the Dutch and Portuguese colonists and the latter ones
were the British.
20

The word Aryan in the writings of Dh$rmapala refers to
the European construct of a pure race that had come to India from the
west in prehistoric times, where they conquered and brought
civilization to the indigenous Dravidian race. Unfortunately
however, from the European perspective, Aryans also racially
intermingled with the aboriginal population. Because of this, the
story goes, civilization was lost in South Asia after the initial
flickering represented by Vedic culture and it was definitively
eradicated after ninth century Muslim invasions. According to some
Western accounts these invasions completely diminished the effects
of a revitalization of Indianand especially Buddhist Indian
civilization cased by Greek incursions into northeastern India and
Central Asia in the fourth century CE. Luckily enough, however,
from the perspective of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
common sense, these Aryans, also known as the Indo-Europeans,

20
Angarika Dh$rmapala, History of an Ancient Civilization,
collected in Return to Righteousness: A Collection of Speeches,
Essays and Letters of Angarika Dh#rmapala, ed. Ananda Gurge
(Colombo: The Government Press, Ceylon, 1965), 479-80.
82
came to Europe as well and were the ancestors of the Greeks and
civilized Europeans in general.
21

Dh$rmapala turned the racist historical logic legitimizing
Western imperialism on its head. In so doing he did not necessarily
challenge the logic legitimizing imperialism, nationalism and racism.
He believed in the superiority of Aryans. He just found the
purest embodiment of the race on his native island instead of first
Ancient Greece, and more recently northwestern or central Europe.
As part of his historically questionable celebration of his island
nations pure history, Dh$rmapala also constructed what Gannath
Obeyesekere labeled Protestant Buddhism.
22
Dh$rmapala
attributed possession of what in actuality were ideal Christian forms
of morality to the Buddhist Sinhalese in their pure state, before the
encroachment of outsiders. He intended his reforms to lead to a
return to this state. In the construction of this new Buddhism, what

21
See, for example, J.P. Mallory, Indo-Europeans: Language,
Archeology and Myth (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), especially
the first chapter on the Indo-European hypothesis, and the epilogue
on the genealogy of the Aryan concept.
22
See H. L. Seneviratne, The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in
Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 25-6.
Senevirante notes that what he calls Buddhist Modernism and
Neo-Buddhismsynonyms for Obeyesekeres Protestant
Buddhismsignify in effect a new religion developed by the elite
classes of Sri Lanka under the British. He writes they had accepted
the politics, the economics, and the culture of the colonial master and
inevitably had to do the same with religion. While rejecting
Christianity as a faith (they) consciously or unconsciously
modeled their religion on it.
83
Donald Lopez terms a specifically modern Buddhism,
23

Dh$rmapala selected, abstracted, or isolated elements from a much
more complex and diverse, traditional Sinhalese Buddhism. The
older Buddhism was characterized by ritual, superstition and other
characteristics that had no meaning from the perspective of the
progress-oriented rationality of modern nationalism.
24

Dh$rmapalas rhetorical strategy expressed qualities that also
characterized Chigakus Nichirenism. As planned in Sh!mon no
ishin, Chigaku wanted to start by unifying the Nichirensh# sect of

23
In Modern Buddhism Lopez defines the term as follows: The
relation between classical Buddhism and what I refer to is more
than a matter of simple chronology or a standard periodization .
Certainly, modern Buddhism shares many of the characteristics of
other projects of modernity, including the identification of the present
as a standpoint from which to reflect upon previous periods in history
and to identify their deficiencies in relation to the present. Modern
Buddhism rejects many of the ritual and magical elements of previous
forms of Buddhism, it stresses equality over hierarchy, the universal
over the local, and often exalts the individual above the community.
Yet modern Buddhism does not see itself as the culmination of a
long process of evolution, but rather as a return to the origin, to the
Buddhism of the Buddha himself. There is certainly a criticism of the
past, but that critique is directed not at the most distant Buddhism, but
at the most recent. Modern Buddhism seeks to distance itself most
from those forms of Buddhism that immediately precede it, that are
even contemporary with it (xi). Later Lopez argues that contrary to
the claims of many modern Buddhists it is perhaps better to consider
modern Buddhism not a universal religion beyond sectarian borders,
but as itself a Buddhist sect. Lopez finally notes that just as with
traditional sects, modern Buddhism has its own lineage (and) its own
doctrines (xli).
24
See Seneviratne, especially, 3-24 on the issue of the character of
traditional religion in Sri Lanka and the difference between it and
what he calls Buddhist Modernism.
84
traditional Nichiren Buddhism. In the end he wanted to unify all
thought, faith and knowledge, discerning and imposing one correct
way to exist in the universe in general. He wanted to return to
harmony with a singular and pure monistic truth. In post-Meiji
Restoration Japan, Chigaku embraced the de-ritualization of religion
that the government enforced: modernity gave him the freedom to
deny the value of centuries of religious history in Japan and
supposedly work his way both backwards and forwards to a
harmonious utopian condition that he believed the Lotus S!tra and
Nichiren mutually envisioned. In his will to arrive at a state
hierarchically at the cutting edge of progress and at a timelessness
outside of the vicissitudes of historical, Chigaku embodied to a large
degree the manifold contradictions of modernity itself.
The Wondrous Logos
In Darumapara-shi, Dh$rmapala asks Chigaku what the
particular characteristics of Nichiren Buddhism are and Chigaku
answers that Nichiren Buddhism is distinct because of the way that it
interprets the Lotus S!tra. Chigaku notes that Nichiren taught that
the entirety of Buddhist teachings are discussed in the Nyorai jury"
[fathoming the lifespan of the Buddha] chapter which is [or
contains] the fundamental teaching of the Lotus S!tra,
25
an

25
Yamakawa, 550.
85
extremely important text in M$hayana Buddhism.
26
In the sixth
century, the Tiantai School of Chinese Buddhism began a tendency to
apotheosize the Lotus text. This started in China with Zhiyi, the
founder of the school. Zhiyi and those who followed him in the
tradition began to see the text as a perfect crystallization and
embodiment of all of Buddhist teachings, which in were already the
highest form of truth.
In other words, Zhiyi and Tiantai thought came to
increasingly to regard or treat the Lotus as not just a reflection or
representation of universal truth, nor even merely as an embodiment
of that truth. They came to think of the sutra as the absolutely
ultimate truth itself. The apotheosis of the Lotus occurred through a
logic of resemblances and correspondences grounded philosophically
in two insights. The first is what is called ichinen-sanzen in the
tradition, which we can literally translate as three thousand realms in
one thought-moment. Ichinen or three thousand realms is shorthand

26
M$hayana (Jpn., Daj!; Eng., Greater Vehicle) Buddhism began to
coalesce as a movement in India some time before the second century
CE. It is contrasted with the Theravada tradition, which is called
Hinayana (Jpn., Sh!j!) or Lesser Vehicle from the M$hayana
perspective. With M$hayana there was an increasing focus on
compassion and practices aimed at alleviating the suffering of others
instead of being concerned with ones own liberation. M$hayana is
extremely inclusive in the sense that a wide variety of beliefs and
practices are subsumed within it and their multiplicity is grounded in
the idea that a wide variety of means is legitimate and/or necessary in
assisting others.
86
for every thing that exists and sanzen or one thought moment is
shorthand for any given moment of consciousness. The implication
of ichinen-sanzen is that every single thing in the universe contains or
participates in every other thing. For example, hell contains heaven
and everything in between and vice versa, and even the most vile
person or thing is identical with the Buddha. The second insight is
that proper practice involves compassionately using expedient
means (Skt., upaya, Jpn., h"ben) to end suffering. According to this
mode of thought, seeing the ultimate truth in the Lotus text and
encouraging people to have faith in the text is a useful tool or a
medicine for troubled souls. After Zhiyi, followers of Lotus
teachings entertained a variety of views regarding the texts actual
status as an embodiment of ultimate truth, but believers in Lotus-
centered Buddhism consistently valued the sutra as key in
expedient efforts to work towards ones own salvation and the
salvation of others.
Nichiren trained as a monk within the Tendai tradition,
meaning that he became a monk in the school that was the Japanese
version of Chinese Tiantai. He built on the ideas of Zhiyi, Saich!
(the eighth century monk who brought Tendai to Japan) and
subsequent Tendai thought, going further still in discerning the locus
of ultimate truth within a narrowly defined textual space within the
87
Lotus S!tra. He proclaimed that the truth of Buddhism/the universe
is contained in its entirety within the Lotus Jury" nyorai chapter.
By Japans medieval period Tendai had thoroughly
assimilated esoteric Buddhism, a form of monistic, immanentist
thought that in Japans esoteric school proper, Shingon, privileged the
cosmic Buddha, Dainichi Nyorai (Great Sun Buddha, Skt.,
Mah$vairocana).
27
M$hayana thought and belief spawned and
encompassed innumerable Buddhas as divine and soteric figures that
Buddhologists contrast with the historical Buddha, %$kyamuni. In
(Shingon) esoteric thought, however, all Buddhas including
%$kyamuni, as well as everything else in the universe are emanations
of Dainichi.
Chigaku tells Dh$rmapala in Darumapara-shi that in the
Jury! (or lifespan, as it is often abbreviated) chapter of the Lotus,
the historical Buddha proclaims that he is actually none other than
the one and only supreme Buddha who attained true awakening in

27
See David Gordon White, Introduction to Tantra in Practice, ed.
White (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 9. This is
Whites elegant general definition of Esoteric/Tantric Buddhism,
which in Japan is called mikky" or secret teachings: Tantra is that
Asian body of beliefs and practices which, working from the principle
that the universe we experience is nothing other than the concrete
manifestation of the divine energy of the godhead that creates and
maintains the universe, seeks to ritually appropriate and channel that
energy within the human microcosm, in creative and emancipatory
ways. However, White continues, the definition of Tantra or
Esoteric Buddhism must be modified according to its contexts.
88
the infinitely remote past.
28
Chigakus interpretation of the Jury!
chapter reflects Nichirens appropriation of medieval Tendais
tendency to identify the cosmic Buddha of esotericism with the
Buddha of the second half (honmon or original teaching) of the
Lotus S!tra. From the perspective of Nichiren Buddhism, the
Original Buddha or Honbutsu that appears in the Lotus S!tras
second half reveals its true essence as the original ground (honji) of
which the historical Buddha was only a trace manifestation
(suijaku). This revelation occurs in the Jury! chapter. The Lotus
tradition that found its extreme expression in Nichirens thought in
contradistinction to Shingon Buddhism particularly emphasized the
absolute identity of %$kyamuni, the Buddha who manifested on this
earth, and the cosmic and eternal Buddha of the Jury! chapter.
Nichiren Buddhism thus in general teaches that
worldlings, as Stone translates shuj" (living things including
humans), constitute the body and activity of the cosmic, original and
eternal Buddha, despite the fact that we usually do not realize it.
Notably, in some forms of this type of thought, which modern
scholars call hongaku shis" or original awakening thought,
believers hold that even grass and trees embody the fully awakened

28
Yamakawa, 557.
89
substance of the Buddha and/or his activity.
29
Hongaku thought
articulates that the degraded world in which we live is always
already the pure-land of the Buddha, andin extreme casesthat
even insentient elements of this world are part of that Buddha, part of
that purity.
The only true problem then for those who understand
hongaku shis" remains realizing or actualizing themselves and the
experiential world as part and parcel with the Buddha and the
ontological space or place of the Buddhas existence. In his mature
thought Nichiren advocated chanting of the title of the Lotus S!tra, or
namu my"h" renge ky" (hail to the lotus flower S#tra of the
wonderful law). In the tradition the chant is known as the daimoku.
Nichiren taught chanting the daimoku as an exclusive practice that
would in any given moment actualize the awareness of ones identity
with the original Buddha of the Jury! chapter.
Interestingly, in texts, such as Darumapara-shi, Sh!mon no
ishin and Honge sh"shakuron, Chigaku does not particularly
emphasize chanting the daimoku, chanting of the Lotus title. Rather,
in Darumapara-shi he privileges what he calls faith-practice or
shingy". For example, at one point Dh$rmapala tells Chigaku that he

29
Hongaku shis" is not exclusive to Nichiren, Tendai or even
Japanese Buddhism. However, particularly pronounced forms of it
have occurred in the Japanese context.
90
practices the ten p#ramit#s, a set of practices or literally perfections
that govern the activity of bodhisattvas, ideal figures in the M$hayana
tradition who vow to assist others in this world instead of selfishly
becoming otherworldly Buddhas. The ten p#ramit#s include the
practices of generosity, morality, and meditation. Chigaku responds,
saying Nichiren denied that the practice of the ten p#ramit#s is
directly the practice of the wondrous law.
30

Historically, East Asian Buddhists have generally disparaged
traditional Ceylonese Buddhism as a lesser vehicle. Perhaps
Dh$rmapala was attempting to impress Chigaku with the ecumenical
spirit evidenced by his observance of the ten p#ramit#s. However, in
Chigakus Nichirenism such activities were peripheral and in
Darumapara-shi Chigaku tells Dh$rmapala that there are two
general types of practice: shingy" and h"gy" or dh$rma-practice. The
ten p#ramit#s, Chigaku tells Dh$rmapala, are mere h"gy". H"gy",
Chigaku says, focus primarily on assisting others in a way
inappropriate in the age of mapp". But shingy" meant not caring
about ones own body or life or fushaku shinmy", while having faith
or belief in the truth of the wondrous law, or my"h". Chigaku

30
Yamakawa, 561.
91
emphatically underscores for Dh$rmapala that one should
fundamentally practice only shingy" in the present degenerate age.
31

Dh$rmapala then tries to maintain that even if faith-practice
without caring for ones body or life is foundational, concrete
practices imbued with principles such as the ten p#ramit#s are still
important. Dh$rmapala suggests that because ordinary people do not
possess the spiritual powers of Nichiren, perhaps faith coupled with a
spirit of fushaku shinmy" is not enough. Chigakus response is:
What I am talking about now are fundamental principles. What you
are talking about are methods for putting the my"h" into effect. In
short, Chigaku remains adamant that the most important and
foundational Buddhist practice has become a deep faith in the my"h",
a faith expressed in the spirit of fushaku shinmy". All else, for
Chigaku, would follow from that.
32

Chigakus usage of the term my"h" in his conversation with
Dh$rmapala makes it difficult to define. The second part of the
compound, h", is the Sino-Japanese translation of the Sanskrit term
Dh$rma, which in Buddhism means the teachings and/or the practices
of the Buddha and his followers. It is written in East Asia with the
Chinese ideograph that also means law. Thus it traditionally refers to
teachingssuch as that of the perpetual flux of all things and the

31
Ibid., 562
32
Ibid.
92
interrelationship (dependent origination) of all phenomenathat
seem to subvert the possibility of fixed laws. At the same time
my"h" seems to have exactly the opposite meaning of a fixed law on
the other. The first part of the compound, my", means something like
mysterious or wonderful. In Chigakus usage, together they
mean the fundamental and governing principle and/or order of the
cosmos.
The meaning of my"h" resembles that of the word logos in
European languages. One definition of logos notes that it can mean
word, speech, and principle. It also notes that in pre-Socratic
philosophical contexts logos often meant reason, that in Plato and
Aristotle it meant nous (mind or reason), that in Stoicism it
took on the meaning of reason and speech, and that in early
Christianity it expressed the creative power of God.
33
That
my"h"s use as an abbreviation of the Lotus text is itself does not
contradict its definition as logos. The Tiantai, Tendai, and Nichiren
lineages tend to identify the text with the truth or order of the
universe and not simply as a representation or even simple
embodiment of that truth. It is particularly appropriate for
comparison that Western thought identifies logos with speech
because these forms of Buddhism suppose that (or act as if) the Lotus

33
Geedes MacGregor, Dictionary of Religion and Philosophy (New
York: Paragaon House, 1989), 386-7.
93
S!tra represents the direct words of the eternal or original Buddha.
The Nichiren tradition also holds that it is possible to express and
realize ones identity with the Honbutsus immanence linguistically,
via the chanting of the sacred title of the s#tra as if singing it in
harmony with the cosmos.
We can find several examples of my"h" as logos in
Darumapara-shi. For example, early in the text, Dh$rmapala, in
confirming what he is learning from Chigaku, says what I am
hearing is that Saint Nichiren appeared in Japan, that the my"h" is the
great law [daih"] of the universe, and that by means of this wonderful
law [my"h"] he taught that the world should be unified.
34
Chigakus
affirms this understanding. Notably, the text depicts my"h" here as
an immanent, singular mode of being to which it is possible to return.
Later, in response to Dh$rmapalas concern regarding difficulties that
are possible in spreading Buddhism to places like America, Chigaku
says that, the various ideals of the universe are to be fused in the
ideals of the Lotus S!tra. For this reason to sublate the ways (h") of
the various peoples of the world and cause them to reenter the my"h"
is the proper way to spread the teachings of Buddhism.
35

The definition of my"h" as logos is also consistent with the
way that Chigaku defined and used the term in a compilation of his

34
Yamakawa, 554-6.
35
Ibid., 563.
94
lectures on Nichirenism that he published in 1934, Nichirenshugi
gairon (an outline of Nichirenism). There he predicts that sekai
t"itsu (world unification) will mean that the world will return to the
one my"h", people will live in the one my"h" and we will reach [the
point where] the three thousand things [i.e., everything] will
automatically be realized as fused in one principle [y!h" ].
36
In
a 1910 text, Nichiren Sh"nin no ky"gi (Saint Nichirens doctrine),
Chigaku wrote similarly that according to Nichirens Kanshin
honzonsh" the time must come for people all over the world to
return to oneness in the my"h" and in a headnote on the same page
Chigaku defines my"h" no ikka or becoming one in
the my"h" in this way: the affair whereby everybody in the world
becomes the people of the my"h" [my"h" no tami] and Nichirens
great goal.
37

My"h", however, remains a mysterious logos. The
indeterminate nature of my"h" means that its meaning is adaptable to
a variety of circumstances. With respect to Darumapara-shi,
adherence to my"h" would correspond to an end of injustice on the
level of Western imperialism. Chigaku, along with Dh$rmapala and
people such as Okakura, were attempting to invent an anti-Hegelian,

36
Tanaka Chigaku, Nichirenshugi gairon (Tokyo: Atoreisha, 1936).
37
Tanaka Chigaku, Nichiren Sh"nin no ky"gi (Tokyo: Kokuch#
Sangy!, 1910), 194.
95
Hegelian telos grounded in forms of Asian logos. Jean-Paul Sartre
once wrote of something similar when he referred to the moment of
the boomerang, a time when the contradiction between the
humanism of the West and the Wests inadequate treatment of the
colonized non-West would lead to the violence of imperialism turning
back upon the West.
38
According to Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri this moment of negativity, for Sartre, is posed as the
necessary first step in transition toward the ultimate goal of a raceless
society that recognizes equality, freedom, and common humanity of
all.
39

The meeting of Dh$rmapala and Chigaku brings to mind
something similar to Sartres boomerang effect. Sartres boomerang
of the non-West turning back on the West reminds one of the
boomerang of Nichiren Buddhism as articulated by Chigaku. In other
words, Nichiren projected the return of Buddhism from Japan in the
East to India in the west. In the mind of Tanaka Chigaku, there was
conceptual slippage between the west as India and the West as the
center of a modern world dominated by the nations of Europe and the
North America. In other words, Nichirenism fostered an alternative
logic to the one stipulating the inferiority of the non-West. This

38
Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to The Wretched of the Earth, by Franz
Fanon (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 20.
39
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2000), 130-1.
96
alternative mode of thought attempted to re-center the world. The
center in Chigakus mind could and would become Japan as the
nation-state representative of the principles or spirit of the Lotus
S!tra.
Dh$rmapala and Chigaku skillfully deployed the rhetoric of
a modern nationalism that drew from images of a mostly imaginary
past and what seemed like traditional local culture. But the formation
of an independent Sri Lankan nation-state and Sinhalese nationalism
certainly brought no racism-free utopia to the island, and Chigakus
Nichirenism undoubtedly encouraged modern Japanese versions of
not only nationalism but also an imperialism that victimized subject
populations at least as much as Western Imperialism. It would be
best, however, not to treat Nichirenism and Chigaku as indications of
some sort of lack, a necessary step in a Japanese or global dialectic
(or any other kind of process) towards freedom, equality and/or the
eradication of violence and racism. This is because, for one thing,
Chigaku and Nichirenism obviously functioned quite well. People
were mobilized and affected, which is not to say that Chigaku and his
Nichirenism were good for Japan or the world. The appropriate
question to ask at this point is how (even before why) Chigakus
Nichirenism discourse, his employment of wondrous or
mysterious ideals, worked.
97
Chigaku, Evasiveness and the Power of Affect: The Axiomatic
Logic of Nichirenism

According to George Tanabe, the Lotus S!tra expresses an
emptiness, and not in exactly in the famous sense of Buddhist
philosophy (as $unyat#).
40
He notes that [e]very text is caught in
an intricate web with its interpreters. But the Lotus S!tra possesses
one characteristic that lends itself more easily to this process. In a
real way, the text is empty insofar as the real Lotus S!tra is never
preached. Instead the S#tra is largely made up of parables
encouraging faith in the S#tra, along with praises for the efficacy of
faith in the text itself. Tanabe notes that as the chapters of the Lotus
unfold praises for the Lotus S!tra mount with increasing
elaboration, and it is easy to fail to notice that the preaching of
the Lotus sermon never takes place. The text, so full of merit, is a

40
The concept of emptiness or $unyat# dates back to early M$hayana.
It does not have a single interpretation. Several lineages or schools
over the long history of M$hayana have articulated a variety of
discourses on the terms meaning. These discourses also
corresponded to a variety of very specific and complex rituals and
practices. In general, $unyat# corresponds the notion that any given
identitysuch as the selffrom an ultimate perspective has no
permanence. Emptiness in this sense is the historical foundation of
such notions as ichinen sanzen and the M$hayana emphasis on
compassion (because the self does not have an independent
existence), which led to the concept of upaya. I do not believe that
emptiness as $unyat# is what Tanabe had in mind when he described
the Lotus S!tra because most Buddhist discourses on $unyat# are
exceedingly and paradoxically full in terms of philosophical
sophistication.
98
lengthy preface without a book.
41
In a separate essay and with
particular respect to Chigaku, Tanabe argues that [s]ince the text is
empty, it means that what Tanaka saw was not his own personal
interpretations drawn in the context of the Nichiren tradition, but a
clear mandate issued by a scripture whose meaning, as far as he was
concerned, was as absolutely self-evident as it was absolute.
42

In other words, Chigakus doctrine and his interpretation of
the Lotus were at their core tautological. However, within the
confines of Chigakus self-referential logic there was much room for
creativity. This was especially evident by the late part of the 1910s,
when Chigaku divined various correspondences between three vows
made by Nichiren and Esoteric Buddhist teachings. He became even
more creative when he then made systematic connections between
these vows, conflated with Esoteric Buddhist teachings, and what he
considered to be the three essential characteristics of Japans national
polity (kokutai). Finally, Chigaku correlated the three core teachings
of Nichiren Buddhism with those same three elements of Japans
kokutai.
In a 1918 lecture that was published in book form in 1923
Chigaku explained the three great vows Nichiren made in the

41
George Tanabe, introduction to The Lotus S!tra and Japanese
Culture, ed. George and Willa Jane Tanabe (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1989), 2.
42
Tanabe, Tanaka Chigaku, in Ibid., 207.
99
Kaimokush". Nichiren wrote there that he would be the pillar, the
eyes and the great vessel of Japan and according to Chigaku, a Japan
with no pillar is a Japan that is destroyed. A Japan with no eyes is a
Japan that is in darkness. A Japan with no vessel is a Japan that
sinks. Chigaku next stated that in making his three great vows
Nichiren intended to save the world and that this is nothing other
than the teaching of the eternal original Buddha. Chigaku
furthermore notes in this context that three bodies of the Buddha
correspond to Nichiren's three great vows.
In M$hayana esotericism,
43
the original or cosmic Buddha is
often divided into the Truth Body or dh$rmak$ya (h"shin), which is
all pervading abstract immanence; the Enjoyment Body or
sambhog$ya (h"jin), which is the Buddha that exists in extra-
terrestrial realms; and the Emanation Body or nirm$nak$ya ("jin),
which is the Buddha as manifested in our world, as was the case with
%$kyamuni. For Chigaku, the Truth Body corresponded with the
pillar of the nation, the Enjoyment Body corresponded with wisdom

43
The dividing line between M$hayana Buddhism in general and the
teachings of the various esoteric schoolsin Japan and elsewhereis
somewhat fuzzy. It is probably best to say that theories such as those
of the Buddhas three bodies as voiced by Chigaku express an
Esoteric or Tantric Buddhist tendency within a form of Buddhism
that is not Esoteric in any proper sense.
100
or the eyes of the nation, and the Emanation Body corresponded with
compassion or the great vessel of the nation.
44

Chigaku next references the eighth-century compilation of
national origin myths, Nihon shoki to assert that the foundational
principles (kenkoku no shugi) of Japan, which he calls the three great
fundamentals (san taik") are also correlated with Nichirens three
great vows on the one hand and the three bodies of the Buddha on the
other. The san taik" according to Chigaku are the cultivation of
justice (y"sei), which he equates with the heart/mind of filial piety
and loyalty; the acquisition of brightness (ch"ki), which he equates
with knowledge or wisdom; and the accumulation of happiness
(setsukei), which he equates with compassion. In short, the argument
here is that y"sei is the pillar of the nation, ch"ki corresponds to the
eyes of the nation, and setsukei is the same as the great ship of the
nation.
45

Later, first in a series of articles published in 1921 in the
Kokuch#kai organ Tengy" minp" then in the form of a book titled
Nihon kokutai no kenky! (1922), Chigaku correlated y"sei, ch"ki and
setsukei with the sandaimih", which is abbreviated as the sanpi, of
Nichiren Buddhism. The sanpi are three concrete components of the

44
Tanaka Chigaku, Nichiren sh"nin no san daiseigan (Tokyo:
Shishi! Bunko, 1998), 178-9.
45
Ibid., pp. 38, 180.
101
actualization of the knowledge that we everyday worldlings are
identical with the eternal original Buddha. The first of the sanpi is
the daimoku, or the chanting of the S#tras title explained above. The
second is the honmon no honzon or the true object of worship. This
is the eternal original Buddha as revealed in the jury" chapter
conflated with his/its representation in the form of a mandala, a visual
or otherwise material representation of the cosmos common to
esoteric forms of Buddhism. The honmon no honzon mandala
features a calligraphic representation of the daimoku, namu My"h"
Rengeky". The third of the sanpi is the honmon no kaidan. The
honmon no kaidan is literally the ordination platform of the true
teaching. For Nichiren it also came to mean wherever one practices
the Buddhism of the Lotus S!tra. For Chigaku the Honmon no
Kaidan came to mean the Japanese nation-state.
According to Chigaku in Nihon kokutai no kenky!, the sank"
(y"sei, ch"ki and setsukei), which he earlier correlated with the three
great vows of Nichiren, are also correlated with the sanpi of Nichiren
Buddhism.
46
Looking at this text together with Nichiren sh"nin no
seigan we can infer that (1) y"sei, the cultivation of justice through
loyalty and filial piety, equals the pillar of Japan and the foundation
of the heart/mind, which moreover is the same as the honzon, the

46
"tani, 255-257, for summary.
102
object of worship; (2) ch"ki, the acquisition of brightness, is the same
thing as the eyes of Japan and the foundation of knowledge, which is
the same thing as the daimoku or the chanted sacred title of the Lotus;
and (3) setsukei, the accumulation of happiness, is the same thing as
the great ship of Japan and the foundation of virtue, which equals the
kaidan or the place of practice. If this seems like a form of
mathematical reasoning it is because, like arithmetic, it is for the most
part an axiomatic logic.
47
In other words, its meaning is purely
formal and it is performative more than it is semantic.
The kinds of connections Chigaku made between, for
example, y"sei and the honmon no honzon were nothing new in
Buddhismthere is a long tradition of similar exegetical practices
that have probable roots primarily in Indian, Tibetan and Chinese
Esoteric Buddhism. However, in such contexts ritual governance of
the transmission of knowledge ensured practical content that differed
greatly with Chigakus.
48
The end of Chigakus performative logic
was a unification of the world to be carried out by the Japanese,
whom in Darumapara-shi he calls the people of the my"h"

47
Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
248-251; Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, 453-473.
48
On the issue of premodern contexts difference from modern ones,
see Rueben Habito, The Logic of Nonduality and Absolute
Affirmation: Deconstructing Tendai Hongaku Writings, Japanese
Journal of Religious Studies vol. 22, nos. 1-2 (1995): 98-99.
103
(my"h" no minzoku) and in Nihon kokutai no kenky! he calls Tengy"
minzoku, or people of the heavenly task or tengy" . Chigaku took the
term tengy" from the Nihon shoki, where it signifies the divinely
ordained mission of Jimmu, the first mythical emperor of Japan.
Chigaku sometimes used the phrase sekai t"itsu no tengy" or the
heavenly task of uniting the world, along with either simply tengy" or
heavenly task or sekai t"itsu, to sum up the mission he proposed for
Japan.
In further extrapolating from the Nihon shoki, Chigaku also
described this mission in terms of putting the eight quarters of the
universe under one roof or hakk" ichiu. This phrase became a
universal slogan for Japans putative mission to save the world from
Western imperialism during the fifteen-years of war that ended in
1945.
49
In the context of the Nihon shokis compilation such
concepts probably meant pacifying and unifying a relatively
small portion of present-day Japan and certainly not the world as we
know it. For Chigaku and those who later utilized his slogans, the
slogan meant unifying, pacifying and/or conquering the entire
world or even the whole universe.

49
"tani, 188. Chigaku first used the term, which he coined from a
longer passage in the Nihon shoki, in a 1913 essay titled Jimmu
tenn! no kenkoku [the national foundation of emperor Jimmu]. The
article was carried over three issues of the Rissh! Ankokukai organ,
Kokuch! shinbun.
104
To be sure, Chigaku at times indicated that the whole world
would become a Buddhist pure land or this-worldly heaven.
Chigaku usually imagined this pure land as the Land of Ever-
Tranquil Light (Jakk!-do).
50
At times Chigaku wrote of Jakk!-do in
terms of its immediate actualization at the level of individual
believers through an absolute faith in the spirit of fushaku shinmy",
51

at other times Chigaku stressed the relationship between the advent of
this tranquil light and the moral unification of the world to be
brought about by shakubuku or aggressive proselytizing.
52
At still
other times he made a direct connection between the establishment of
a world of tranquil light (jakk" sekai) and the global
mission/destiny of the Japanese nation-state and its kokutai.
53

In accord with the teachings of Nichirenism, simply
affirming that everything exists is ultimately identical with an eternal
original Buddha and his activities may be good for a collective self-

50
In Original Enlightenment (185-6) Stone notes that the concept of
this land, going back to Chinese Tiantai denoted, in principle
that which is prior to the arising of the single thought-moment, before
the myriad things have been differentiated, in other words primal
unity, while in concrete actuality (it) denotes the differentiated three
thousand realms that comprise the phenomenal world in its entirety.
Ishidas lexicon notes that Jakk!-J!do is the Buddha land of
universal and eternal truth, Reibun Bukky", 491.
51
Tanaka Chigaku, Hokkeky" no konpaku [the spirit of the Lotus
S!tra] (Tokyo: Tengy! Minp!sha, 1931).
52
See for example, Tanaka Chigaku, Nichirenshugi ky"gigaku taikan
[overview of the study of Nichirenism doctrine], vol. 1 (Tokyo:
Kokusho Kank!sha, 1970 (1915), 202-3.
53
"tani, 257. "tani is referring here to Nihon Kokutai no Kenky!.
105
esteem. But it in some very actual sense such beliefs mean changing
nothing at all, for the better or worse. After all, the doctrine is that
everything is already the Buddha and an appropriate response to this
assertion may well be so what? The danger is a slippage into a
blessed conservatism that simply accepts whatever the status quo may
be or projects for the realization of a better world that accord with the
wishes of the powerful in any given context. But such forms of
slippage are possible despite and not because of the meaning of
Nichirenisms affirmation of divinity of the here and now, which
could also manifest as Miyazawa Kenjis benign attempts at societal
reform.
Chigakus discourse was at its core neither heinous nor
benign. It was meaningless. The equations he made between the
concepts espoused by the Nihon shoki and Nichirens writings
exemplify this well. They are abstractions that seem to mean
something because of their complexity, but at best they are as
meaningful as a series of mathematical sentences that are true only
within their own tautological universe. For the most part, however,
no one asks what arithmetic means. Arithmetic too is an expedient
means, a method of abstractly quantifying in useful ways. What
matters is a pragmatic utility enabling us to invent, construct, market,
and purchase commodities or tools through the manipulation of
106
numbers. The manipulation of numbers, in other words, can be quite
useful but it does not make numerical sequences expressions of truth.
People used Chigakus Nichirenism discourse similarly. They used it
like a multipurpose tool emptied of specificity, one that could be
applied in a variety of contexts toward various ends. But there was
more to Chigakus power to move people, although that power too
was very much connected to a kind of emptiness that he embodied. I
will now address the way that Chigakus discourse worked and why it
was so powerful.
The Affect Factory of Tanaka Chigaku
Miyazawa Kenji wrote about Chigaku in this way in 1920: I
feel, I believe, I look up to, and I am moved by the my"h" that is truly
and clearly pulsating through Tanaka Sensei. Miyazawa also wrote
that Even if he ordered me to go to the frozen tundra of Siberia or
the interior of China I would go. I would moreover even be the shoe
attendant at the Kokuch#kai headquarters. If I were able to do that
my life would be complete
54
In 1901, before meeting Chigaku,
Takayama Chogy# wrote similarly of the great spirit of Chigaku
that was evident in his writings, comparing Chigaku to Nichiren
himself. Takayama admired Chigaku for the way that allegedly he
unbendingly confronted obstacles in upholding his principles.

54
Yoneda Toshiaki, Miyazawa Kenji no tegami [the letters of
Miyazawa Kenji] (Tokyo: Taish#kan Shoten, 1995), 143.
107
According to Takayama, this was akin to the way that Nichiren
obstinately confronted and opposed the Kamakura state. Interestingly
Takayama believed that Nichiren was a Japanese example of the
Nietzschian superman. It thus follows that, for Takayama, Chigaku
too was such a superman.
55

One wonders just what it was that moved such individuals to
perceive such a spirit or wondrous law itself working through
Chigaku. If ideas such as that the world and normal human beings
are the Buddha and that the world needs to be unified are some
lacking in content, it makes sense to look for something extra-
semantic in order to explain Chigakus affect upon people. Because
Sh!mon no ishin was probably his best known and most influential
text, and it is a text that celebrates what he called an aggressive
attitude proper to Nichiren Buddhism, it also makes sense to closely
read that text and to try to find that extra-semantic message at the
level of a set of attitudes that he transmitted.
Sh!mon no ishin is a manifesto for the revolution of the
Nichirensh# sect.
56
Chigakus plans included reorganization of the
sect in a way that mirrored the organization of the nation-state, with

55
Takayama Ch!gy#, Tanaka Chigaku-shi no Sh!mon no ishin
[Mr. Tanaka Chigakus Sh!mon no ishin], in Takayama Chogy! to
Nichiren sh"nin, eds. Anesaki and Yamakawa (Tokyo: Hakubunsha,
1913), 21.
56
"tani, 70. Chigaku considered the Rissh! Ankokukai and the
Kokuch#kai to be lay organizations affiliated with Nichirensh#.
108
the priests as officials, temples as government offices, the sect
headquarters at Mt. Minobu as the seat of government, the sect rules
as the law, the sect doctrine as the constitution, and Nichiren as the
ruler. With Sh!mon Chigaku was criticizing his contemporary
situation in which there was no ruler (Nichirens posthumous role)
and no people, whom he claims in the text are the motive power
behind the Nichirensh# sect-as-nation-state that he imagines. At
times, Sh!mon blurs the distinction between the nation state of Japan
and the Nichirensh# sect-as-nation-state.
57

Among other things, Chigaku also proposes a more
rationalized system for sect taxation of believers. With the money
raised every year from tax-payers, Chigaku estimates that three to
ten armed merchant ships could be constructed and that they would
have names such as the my"h" maru. In times of peace, he plans,
the ships would make regular voyages, and Nichiren believers would
proselytize to the passengers. The ships, he writes, would take
believers on pilgrimages to Mt. Minobu and return trips from there
would be free. In the country's time of need, these ships would be
used to subdue the enemies of the country and the court (ch"tei). He

57
See for example, Sh!mon no ishin, 151. Except where noted,
translations from Sh!mon no ishin are mine. The Japanese text I
consulted is compiled in Kindai Nichirenron (On modern Nichiren),
ed.Maruyama Terau (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1981).
109
calls his maritime plan a great benevolent task that is in accord with
the teachings of Nichirenism.
58

As Edwin Lee notes, Chigaku accompanied the main text of
Sh!mon with diagrams and charts in an appendix in which, not only
did he maintain that the sect could and should convert the world
within 50 years he also made a number of detailed predictions: for
example, that within one year (by 1902) the sect would have 800
students, 500 teachers, and three million adherents. He projected that
in fifty years there would be 19,900 students, 19,200 teachers, and
23,033,250 believers. Chigaku also provided a timetable with the
order of cities throughout the globe to be converted.
59

The enduring and wide-ranging power of Sh!mon however
lay in Chigaku's utilization of the nearly synonymous constellation of
terms, shinryaku taido or an aggressive attitude, shakubuku, and
fushaku shinmy". As Chigaku puts it at one point, genuinely and
truly the essential quality of our sect is without a doubt shakubuku-
ism [the practice of aggressive prosetelyzing, shakubukushugi ]. In
other words this is nothing other than a shinrayku-teki taido
[aggressive attitude].
60
He furthermore writes that the four
ideographs [ji] of Hokke shakubuku [lotus flower shakubuku, or the

58
Sh!mon, 152.
59
Edwin Lee, Nichirenism and Nationalism, Monumenta
Nipponica 30, no. 1 (1975), 27.
60
Sh!mon, 136.
110
shakubuku of the Lotus S!tra] are a declaration of war that is
unlimited.
61
He claims that both the laity and the priests of the sect
are commanded to proselytize aggressively. He moreover compares
the Lotus to the Koran, asserting that it is the Lotus and not the
Islamic scripture that is comparable to a sword. Don't pray for
benefits in this world, don't pray for your body, dont pray for your
parents, dont pray for your teacher, he writes, only pray for
aggression, pray to die for the sake of aggression.
62

Chigaku furthermore writes that without aggression there
are no words, there is no movement, there is no seeing, there is no
hearing and missionary activities will not be productive. He writes
that without aggression the sect will soon disappear. He then states
that what he has in mind is that with 7000 monks and 3,000,000
believers joined together in one voice with an aggressive charge,
mountains will shake and seas will tremble.
63
In short, Chigaku
advocated following the pure sound (bonon) of the bugle of the
advancing army (shingun) that he imagined entering unlimited war
for the universe in order to bring a spiritual world (reikai).
64
In so
doing he promised a shattering of restrictions inherent in what he
considered an overly materialist modern life.



61
Sh!mon, Ibid.
62
Ibid, 137.
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid., 134.
111
From the perspective of what the rationality at the basis of
that modern life is supposed to be, Chigakus vague and empty
slogans do not make sense. His original accommodation of Nichiren
Buddhism to modern Shinto ideology seems equally empty.
However, his words were building blocks of the logic similar to the
logic required to build buildings. Yet why anyone would want to
dwell in such structures? And why would anyone be persuaded to die
for these constructs as in Sh!mon Chigaku suggests?
However, the conceptual foundations for modern rationality
are themselves axiomatic in essence. For example, following a
staged confrontation with radical doubt, Descartes establishes his
own existence with the cogito, an axiomatic and tautological
proposition. It is taken for granted that an I exists because there is
thinking but little interrogation of what I and thinking are. In the
Latin of the Meditations, the sentence cogito ergo sum does not
even have an I. Its existence is only inferred by
translators/interpreters because thinking exists. The point here is not
that Descartes was wrong because the foundation he gave to modern
philosophy and epistemology was tautological. His discourse served
as the starting point of any modern philosophy.
65
In other words, it
worked in building a structure that would resist multidirectional

65
Hassan Melehy, Writing Cogito: Montainge Descartes, and the
Institution of the Modern Subject (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 105.
112
transformations
66
and provide the effect of certainty within a
perpetually shifting modernity driven by the creative-destructive
forces of capital accumulation and technological development.
The example of Descartes is instructive because recent
vehement Japanese Buddhist critics of original enlightenment
thought idolize the philosopher as the father of a modern rationality
they deem indispensable. Chigakus teachings that this world as is
always already expresses the divinity of an eternal original Buddha
were very much a variety of the original enlightenment thought that
such critics despise.
67
However, the purely tautological bases of
rationality, I would argue, are everywhere in modernity. Modern
economics as a social science, for instance, still faces the ultimate
barrier to its mode of thought when it comes to crises it can neither
adequately account for nor predict, and as Georg Lukacs argued it is
the very success with which the economy is totally rationalized and
transformed into an abstract and mathematically oriented system of
formal laws that creates this barrier.
68


66
Ibid, 106
67
See Hakayama Noriaki, Critical versus Topical Philosophy, and
Jamie Hubbard, Topophobia, in Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm
Over Critical Buddhism, ed. Hubbard and Paul L. Swanson
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press: 1997).
68
Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, in History and
Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1997), 105-110.
113
The law of supply and demand and the Cartesian cogito
provide provisional answers that both govern and orchestrate an
ordered chaos of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call the
deterritorialized flows of, for example, labor, capital and desire.
Chigakus discourse provided his audiences with something similar.
Chigaku promised the imminent return to an immanent law that in an
impossible way abolishes all laws. In Darumapara-shi he
articulated this law in terms of the my"h", a wondrous logos that
tends to obstinately conserve the power of its mystery. In Sh!mon he
began to suggest the violent implications of any real attempt to adhere
to this impossible law. Chigaku remained conservative in the sense
that with him this violence remained only potential or virtual.

In a discussion of Ronald Reagan, Brian Massumi articulates
an interesting theory of the virtual. He writes that Reagan
politicized the power of mime. Reagans words and the non-verbal
cues he gave while speaking did not match, according to Massumi.
This is like what mimes do because they decompose movement,
breaking the continuity of everyday movement up with a potentially
infinite number of infinitesimal interruptions. At each of the spaces
or moments of interruption there is what Massumi calls a jerk.
With each one of these jerks there is a consciously imperceptible
instant during which there seems to be the possibility of an
114
innumerable variety of changes in direction. Massumi says that
[t]his compresses into the movement under way potential
movements that are in some way made present without being
actualized.
69

The effect of this mime-like quality, Massumi argues, is that
Reagan mastered virtuality. In other words Reagan communicated
relatively little and actualized almost nothing. This apparent
inadequacy, according to Massumi, coupled with his beautiful
vibratory voice was appealing because it manifested an incipience
that remained virtual. Reagan was, Massumi argues, unqualified
and without content and it was on the receiving end that the Reagan
incipience was given content. Reagans audiences locally actualized
his message, and that is why the president could be so many things
to so many people; that is why the majority of the electorate could
disagree with him on so many issues but still vote for him.
70

Massumi calls what Reagan as a political mime transmitted to his
audiences affect or intensity.
71
Massumi also alludes to long
modern history of the communication of affect through virtual means

69
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2002), 40-1.
70
Ibid., 41.
71
Ibid., 28.
115
that allows audiences to actualize a single message in diverse
ways.
72

I would argue that Chigakus charisma was also grounded in
this kind of affect or intensity. Chigakus words inspired people, not
because of their meaning, but because of the indefinite quality of a
fantastic futurity masked by a plethora of details at an intermediate
level. Chigakus slogans and his tautological logic functioned like
little ditties that Nichirenists could sing, along with the daimoku, as
they figuratively followed him into an open future. To be sure, there
is a fine line between unqualified intensity and traces of qualification
that clung to both Reagan and Chigaku, mostly in the form of
jingoistic nationalism entwined with a personal confidence that was
also highly contagious.
73
But here is the difficulty. Chigaku excelled
at having it both ways when it came to incorporating the modern state
and its rationality and offering an escape from that rationality.
While Chigaku evoked images of unbounded bliss, he
simultaneously worshiped a hierarchical state structure that entailed
the maintenance of restrictions and knowing ones place. I believe
that his audiences ignored this contradiction because they too desired
to experience an unbounded freedom while simultaneously refusing
to challenge a status quo that was both restricting and comforting. To

72
Ibid., 42-3.
73
Ibid., 41.
116
adjust to modernity entails feigning belief in permanences such as
the nation.
74
This requires resigning oneself to ones place within a
putatively unquestionable hierarchy of social, political, and economic
relationships modeled on the family.
75
However, living within a
milieu driven by capital accumulation and concomitant perpetual
technological and social change requires a concomitant
epistemological adjustment to the very real experience of an
apparently boundless and never-ending transgression of every limit
imaginable.
Conclusion: Virtual and Actual Nichirenism

Chigakus discourse and Nichirenism more generally
combined what Deleuze and Guattari called the war machine with
what they called the apparatus of capture.
76
Their war machine is
not per se a military organ such as the army or navy of any given
nation-state. It is essentially a quality manifest, for example, in

74
See discussion of the function of the dialectic between permanence
and flux under capitalism in David Harvey, Justice Nature and the
Geography of Difference (Blackwell: New York, 1996).
75
I am thoroughly opposed to any analysis suggesting the
inevitability of Oedipalization, but one cannot deny the power of the
family-model as what Foucault called a technology of power in
modern societies. This is nowhere more the case than in pre-1945
modern Japan where the image of the nation-state as a family-
nation or kazoku-kokka with the emperor as national father was
emphatically promoted by organs of the state and private media.
76
Deleuze and Guattari dedicate one chapter or plateau to the war
machine in A Thousand Plateaus, 1227: Treatise on Nomadology
The War Machine, 351-423, and one to the apparatus of capture,
7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture, 424-473.
117
science, art and philosophy, and sometimes religion.
77
It represents
whatever is creative in breaking down oppositions and in operating
outside of conventions. Within modernity the war machine is
inseparable from forces of capital accumulation that constantly
obliterate all certainties, all permanence.
The apparatus of capture, for Deleuze and Guattari is most
typically represented by the state. The apparatus of capture attempts
to arrest the violent processes of war machines through political
power or the power of the state to police.
78
In modernity this might
mean, for example, either cracking down on dissidents or the
establishment of restrictions on trade and commerce.
The apparatus of capture and the war machine are not in
simple opposition. The state, and particularly the modern state, tends
to appropriate the war machine and make an all-too-uneasy alliance
with it.
79
This alliance is necessitated by a competition-driven need
for growth and change precipitated by the forces of capital
accumulation and technological development. Unchecked
development can also lead to problematic overproduction. Literal
wars also then have the function of legitimizing a necessary squander,

77
See especially, A Thousand Plateaus, 361-374 for an exact yet
rigorous science as a war machine; 374-380 for philosophical and
artistic war machines; and 383-384, for religion as a war machine.
78
See Deleuze & Guattaris citation of Paul Virilio in A Thousand
Plateaus, 386.
79
See Ibid., 335.
118
with the side-effect of transferring wealth from taxpayers in general
to those owning defense-related industry. This situation has often
(if not always) led to real war, hot or cold. These wars have been
against rival nation-states and abstractions such as crime.
80
Within
individuals and social, political and/or artistic movements, I would
argue that similar alliances between war machines and apparatuses of
capture exist, alliances often precipitated by attempts or inducements
to adjust to the irresolvable contradiction between relatively
permanent structures, such as the nation or nuclear family, and
incessant destructive creativity.
In Chigaku, the resolution of these contradictions remained
largely virtual. His affect was grounded in the presence of a glorious
resolution that was simultaneously immanent and imminent. It was
not coincidentally philosophically grounded in the idea of the
presence of an equally immanent and imminent Eternal Buddha. As
the chapters that follow will demonstrate, later Nichirenists attempted
to actualize Chigakus teachings in more concrete but equally
fruitless ways.
Ishiwara Kanjis attempted to resolve the contradiction in
question, but his resolution remained on what Reinhart Kosselleck

80
On the relationship between literal wars that include cold ones
and ones directed against abstractions or even unspecified enemies,
on the one hand, and both the war machine and the apparatus of
capture, on the other, see Ibid., 419-423 and 471-472.
119
might call the ever-receding horizon of expectation.
81
In a more
pronounced manner than is evident in Chigakus discourse, he
rejected the world of lived experience and sought to actualize the
utopia of world unification. The first step in his plan was to blow-up
a section of the South Manchurian Railway as a pretext for the
establishment of the puppet-state of Manchukuo in 1931. Ishiwara
was true to Chigakus stance on the role of Japan in bringing about
the futures utopia.
Other Nichirenists, such as terrorists who murdered civilian
elites and sometimes killed themselves in various incidents within
Japan in the 1930s were relatively more anti-state, but they were not
anti-nation, as their tendency to erotically revere the emperor
revealed. They transgressed everyday rationality in a way combining
eroticism, violence and religious experience.
82
Their actions were
usually attached to political ends, but the social, political and
economic rationality of such terrorist actions were grounded in an
inability to come to terms with the material contradictions of the
everyday experience within capitalist modernity. They often

81
See Reinhart Kosselleck, 267-288, on the horizon of expectation
versus the space of experience.
82
For a fascinating, if somewhat ahistorical, articulation of
relationship between eroticism, violence, and religious experience,
see Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality (San
Francisco: City Lights, 1986).
120
succeeded in permanently escaping the limitations of their world, if
only through meeting the literal permanence of death.
Lastly, Miyazawa Kenji attempted to represent the pure
land of the Eternal Original Buddha in the pages of a literature that
typically broke down common sense distinctions between such things
as the Orient and the West, science and religion, and representation
and reality. He even tried for a while and in vain to actualize
Chigakus promise of a utopia here and now in the late 1920s and
early 1930s by helping the impoverished farmers of his home
prefecture, Iwate, in northwestern Japan. He set up a cooperative
organization and tried to use it to implement Chigaku-inspired
Buddhist thought combined with the ideas of Tolstoy, William Morris
and others. For the most part, Miyazawa unfortunately failed in
bettering the material circumstances of anyone, although his work
does continue to stimulate the imaginations of his readers.
I will later argue that Miyazawas failure was largely due to
the fact that his means of actualization of Chigakus Promised Land
were escapist. His ultimately idealist attempt at reforming the world
was stymied by his misrecognition of the material conditions within
his milieu. It made little difference in this regard that he celebrated
this world as that which is most holy and pure. Much the same can
be said regarding Ishiwara and the Nichirenist terrorists mentioned
121
above. The question haunting the present work is: is there a non-
escapist escape from the fundamental dissatisfaction with modernity
that was at the root of Nichirenism and its appeal? The imperialism
Dh$rmapala and Chigaku rhetorically battled in 1902 for the most
part ceased to formally exist after World War II, but the
dissatisfaction in question persists into the present.

122
Chapter Two: Miyazawa Kenji: A Nichirenist Attempt
to Actualize an Ideal World in Literature and Life

Introduction: Miyazawa Kenji and Tanaka Chigaku
Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933) is beloved as both a poet and
childrens writer in contemporary Japan. Japanese also fondly
remember him for his attempts at grassroots social activism. All of
this is despite the fact that Miyazawa joined Tanaka Chigakus
notorious Kokuch!kai in 1920 and there are indications that he
remained loyal to the group and most of its Nichirenist teachings until
his death at the age of 37. What follows will not indict Miyazawa. I
will argue, however, that there are profound connections between
Miyazawas life and work, on the one hand, and Tanaka Chigaku and
his teachings on the other. I will furthermore suggest that the
relationship in question is something that both those who love
Miyazawa for various reasons and those who dismiss Chigaku as a
fascist should not ignore.
The fundamental connection between the thought of Chigaku
and that of Miyazawa centers on their notion that this world, just as it
is, is a Buddha realm and that all living things are ultimately the same
in essence and substance as the Buddha. In more secular terms this
means that an ideal world is always living things are thoroughly
imbued with the purest divinity. What within our reach and that all


123
remains for human-beings is to actualize this preexisting reality.
Over his lifetime Chigaku became increasingly convinced that the
imperialist Japanese nation-state had to be the agent of that
actualization. He believed that the world was corruptly dominated by
the Western imperialist powers and that because of this the
actualization of this world as a Buddha realm was inseparable from a
Japanese mission to supplant the power of the West. Because the
modern nation-state that Chigaku attached himself to was also the
instrument and instigator of various forms of repression and violence
within Japan and overseas, however, the unbounded liberty that
Chigaku promised always remained on an ever-receding horizon. In
other words it tended to remain virtual.
Through his literature, Miyazawa attempted to actualize the
ideal world indicated by the teachings of Tanaka Chigaku. That he
was a success in this is attested to by his popularity over the decades.
However, his literary endeavors generally remained only that. When
he attempted to put his and Chigakus thought vis--vis world
transformation into practice more materially and actualize the divinity
or Buddha-nature of the world he failed. His ideals remained
unrealized for reasons that I attempt to make clear below. I will
begin my discussion with a brief overview of the phenomena of


124
Miyazawas lingering popularity, followed by a biographical sketch
centering on the authors direct relationship with Nichirenism.
The Deification of Miyazawa Kenji
In his introductory comments to a collection of Miyazawa
Kenjis poems, the translator Hiroaki Sato states, Miyazawa Kenji
is probably the only modern Japanese poet who is deified.
1

Miyazawa has not technically been deified under the auspices of any
of Japans formal religions but Satos laudatory comments reflect the
ubiquity of Miyazawas good reputation in prewar and postwar Japan.
Enthusiastic acclaim for Miyazawas life and work arose immediately
after his death in 1933. However, there was also a major Kenji
boom in the 1990s, when Miyazawas admirers celebrated the 100
th

anniversary of his birth. In this context, there were numerous TV
specials on the writer and a number of filmmakers also made
animated versions of his stories. The Japanese postal service
moreover issued a commemorative stamp with Miyazawas image.
In addition, a large number of books and shorter publications on
Miyazawa appeared in Japanese during that decade.
Miyazawas appeal continues into the present century. For
example, every year on the anniversary of his death there is an annual
Kenji Festival in Miyazawas hometown of Hanamaki in Iwate

1
Hiroaki Sato, A Future of Ice (San Francisco: North Point Press,
1989), xiii.


125
Prefecture. Participants offer flowers, read his poems, sing songs he
composed, stage plays he wrote, and have a roundtable discussion.
Remember Kenji groups have related events during the festival at
the Hanamaki agricultural school where the author once served as a
teacher.
2
There is also a museum in Hanamaki dedicated to
Miyazawas life and work and there is a cultural center in the town
that regularly holds symposiums on matters related to the writer. On
a more national level, as recently as the summer of 2002, I witnessed
posters featuring images of Miyazawa and "hatovu, or his fantastic
and semi-fictional version of Iwate on the walls of train stations all
over greater Tokyo. They were part of a Japan Railways advertising
campaign promoting tourism in Iwate.
The popularity of Miyazawa in Japan also means that he has
become a cultural commodity that many Japanese wish to export
abroad as an example of qualities essentially Japanese yet somehow
universal. An English/Japanese-language website maintained in
Japan, The World of Miyazawa Kenji, notes that [j]ust as Japan
was embarking on her rapid journey toward modernization,
Miyazawa Kenji was busy putting down deeper roots in the remote
rural setting from which he created a wealth of literature whose
universality would someday touch the hearts of people all over the

2
http://www.city.hanamaki.iwate.jp/main/english3/e-
4season/autumn/e-kenjisai.htm


126
world.
3
The site also features downloadable translations of some of
Miyazawas work, a number of essays, and a gallery of paintings and
other media inspired by the author. A great number of Miyazawas
works are published in translation in English. In some cases there are
several translations of the same story or poem. Sarah Strong and
others sponsor some of the best translations of Miyazawas childrens
literature by the International Foundation for the Promotion of
Languages and Culture (IFLC). This Tokyo-based body defines its
mission as primarily translating Japanese authors for the rest of the
world to read because of Japans increasingly important 21
st

century role in the realm of cultural and linguistic exchange. Such
exchange, they hope, will further mutual understanding throughout
the world.
4

All of this Kenji boosting tends to come with a willed
ignorance of the relationship between the writer and Tanaka Chigaku.
People who adore Miyazawa often do not even acknowledge his
relationship with Chigaku and the Kokuch!kai. When they do
acknowledge the relationship they often do not get basic facts correct.

3
http://www.kenji-world.net/english/
4
See the mission statement (Purpose and Background) at the end of
each book in the Kenji Miyazawa Picture Book Series (Tokyo: IFLC,
various 1990s publications).


127
For example, a website maintained by Hanamakis city office it
repeatedly states incorrectly that Tanaka Chigaku was a priest.
5

Miyazawa and the Kokuch!kai
Miyazawas first exposure to Tanaka Chigaku and the
Kokuch!kai occurred some time between December 1918 and March
of the following year. He accompanied his mother to Tokyo at the
time because his sister became ill while attending college in the
capital and had to enter the hospital there. When not by his sisters
side Miyazawa went to the Ueno library, saw plays, and visited the
Tokyo office of the Kokuch!kai at least once. He also heard Chigaku
give a twenty-five minute speech that deeply moved him. He wrote a
letter to his friend Hosaka Kanai in 1920 in which he referred to the
speech, describing Chigaku in glowing terms. He also declared his
allegiance to the Kokuch!kai leader and exhorted his friend to
convert to Chigakus Nichirenism.
6

Miyazawa formally joined the Kokuch!kai after returning to
Iwate. He subsequently became a fervent member and ultimately
returned to Tokyo to participate more fully in the activities of the

5
www.city.hanamaki.iwate.jp/main/english3/ e-kenji/e-
kenjibungaku.htm
6
Oh Sunhwa, Miyazawa Kenji no Hokkeky! bungaku: H!k! suru
tamashii [the Lotus S!tra literature of Miyazawa Kenji: the
wandering spirit] (Tokyo: T#kai Daigaku Shuppansha, 2000), 17-18
and Ishikawa Yasuaki, Nichiren to kindai bungakushatachi [Nichiren
and modern writers] (Tokyo: Pitaka, 1978), 113.


128
group. He joined through a mail-order transaction and soon received
a copy of the organizations version of the Nichiren mandala, a
symbolic representation of the cosmos featuring a calligraphic
representation of the name of the Lotus S"tra. After ritually
consecrating the mandala, Miyazawa and his cousin Seki Tokuya led
meetings of what became an informal local chapter of the group.
Miyazawa also intensively engaged in proselytizing efforts in his
hometown. During this period he began to publicly post freshly
published copies of the Kokuch!kai organ, the Tengy! minp! (People
of the heavenly task report) outside of his home. He also attempted
to publicize works by Chigaku including Nichirenshugi no ky!gi (The
doctrine of Nichiren), Sekai t!itsu no tengy! (The heavenly task of
world unification), and My!sh" shikimoku K!giroku (Lectures on the
systematic formulation of the wondrous sects teachings). In a
famous incident on January 30, 1921, however, Miyazawa suddenly
left the family pawnshop where he was worked in Hanamaki and
headed for the Kokuch!kai offices in Tokyo. Two books of
Nichirens writings falling off a shelf and onto his back at the family
business prompted this trip to Tokyo in 1921. Miyazawas
biographies suggest that he took this as a supernatural sign that he
should leave for Tokyo. But years of tension between Miyazawa and
his father motivated to his decision to leave Hanamaki with nothing


129
other than the two books, his honzon (object of worship, the
Nichiren mandala) and an umbrella. Tension between Miyazawa and
his father had been exacerbated by the young mans conversion to
Nichirenism. The traditional sect of the family was J#do Shinsh! or
the True Pure Land Sect and despite this the young Miyazawa made
futile attempts to convert his entire family to the teachings of
Chigaku.
7

After arriving in Tokyo, Miyazawa went directly to the
Kokuch!kai offices in Ueno. Takachio Chiy# (,j), one of
the Kokuch!kais lecturers and the manager of the Kokuch!kaikan
(Kokuch!kai Building, the Tokyo branch office), met him at the
door. According to the combined recollections of the two men
Miyazawa informed Takachio that he had joined the Kokuch!kai the
previous year and that the reason he had come to the organizations
Tokyo offices was because he wanted his whole family to convert to
the societys teachings. Miyazawa confessed that his father refused
to convert and he attributed this to his own lack of spiritual
cultivation. Miyazawa then asked Takachio if the (Kokuch!kai
might have use for him as for example a shoe attendant or someone
who posts handbills. Takachios answered, I understand that you are

7
Ishikawa, 217-18. Cf., Sarah Strong, The Poetry of Miyazawa
Kenji, Ph.D. dissertation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990), 67.


130
a member of the society but we are not particularly looking to
recruit anyone now [to do such work]. Takachio noted that a case
such as yours is very common. Changing the religion of ones
mother and father is generally impossible. [H]aving an emotional
fight and leaving ones family is also common. Takachio then said
that after having a chance to compose himself somewhere Miyazawa
might then be able to consult with the Kokuch!kai leaders in a more
appropriate and relaxed way. Takachio furthermore suggested that
Miyazawa attend the societys nightly lectures.
Miyazawas responded to Takachios less than warm
welcome by assuring him that he had not come to Tokyo on a whim,
that silly fantasies had not motivated his arrival. He also promised
that he would return for guidance.
8
Miyazawa impressed Takachio as
a sincere and unpretentious lad, but Takachio had no idea that
Miyazawa had any particular literary genius or any kind of
exceptional future whatsoever.
9

Miyazawa spent the night with family friends. The next day,
by canceling a book subscription, he raised enough money to find a
place of his own in the Hongo ward near Tokyo Imperial University.

8
Ishikawa, 219.
9
Mori Soichi, Miyazawa Kenji to Hokkeky! [Miyazawa Kenji and the
Lotus Sutra] (Tokyo: Futsusha, 1960), 36. Ishikawa, 220.


131
He found work at a mimeograph printing shop the following day.
10

Miyazawa did not like his boss because he believed that the older
man was a self-serving imperialist. Interestingly, he remarked in a
letter that if Chigakus concept of nation (kokka) had anything in
common with his employers thought, he would absolutely turn his
back on the Kokuch!kais leader.
11

During the approximately nine months of Miyazawas stay
in Tokyo he attended lectures at the Kokuch!kai regularly and
participated in other activities with the group, including sidewalk
proselytizing in Ueno Park and passing out copies of the Tengy!
minp! there in an effort to increase the organs readership.
12

Miyazawa also reportedly made eloquent speeches in the park
himself.
13
The frequent topic of lectures at the Kokuch!kai as
explication of the My!sh" shikimoku K!giroku, later published in five
volumes as the Nichirenshugi ky!gaku taikan (abbreviated below as
Taikan). As we shall see, the text had a profound influence upon
Miyazawa. Miyazawa completely read the dense 3308 pages of text
five times according to his cousin Seki.
14


10
Sarah Strong, The Poetry, 68.
11
Ishikawa, 221.
12
Mori, 38.
13
Ishikawa 217-18.
14
The Nichirenshugi ky!gi taikan resulted from a lecture series that
Chigaku gave at the onetime headquarters of the Rissh# Ankokukai in
Osaka, the Rissh#kaku. The lectures lasted from April 1903 to April


132
Takachio was Miyazawas primary contact with the
Kokuch!kai leadership. He graduated from Waseda University
graduate with a degree in philosophy. As a student Takayama
Chogy!s writings on Nichiren impressed him greatly and, later,
while working as a middle school teacher in Fukushima prefecture, he
took part in the first two years (1910 and 1911) of an annual lecture
series, the Honge Bukky! kaki k!sh"kai (our sects Buddhist summer
lecture series), which Chigaku and the Rissh# Ankokukai held at their
national headquarters at the time in Miho, Shizuoka Prefecture.
Takachio formally joined the organization the second year and, with
the encouragement of Chigakus prominent disciple, Yamakawa
Chi#, he then resigned from the public school teaching post that he
had held for eight years, becoming a professor for what the Rissh#
Ankokukai called the Honge Daigaku Junbikai (group for the
preparation of a university of our sect). This position in practice
meant that he acted as a lecturer and general manager of the Tokyo

1904 and Yamakawa Chi# recorded the lectures. The originally five
volumes of text were published as the My!sh" shikimoku K!giroku
between 1904 and 1910. The volumes were republished as the
Nichirenshugi ky!gi taikan in 1915. See entry on My#sh!
shikimoku K#giroku, in Shin Miyazawa Kenji goi jiten [new
glossarial dictionary of Miyazawa Kenji], ed. Hara Shir# (Tokyo:
Tokyo Shoseki, 2000), 691.


133
offices of the Rissh# Ankokokukai, which became the Kokuch!kai in
1914.
15

In the posthumously discovered notebook that he used to
write perhaps his most famous poem Ame ni mo makezu
(Undaunted by the rain), Miyazawa wrote that Takachio suggested
that he write a Lotus literature (Hokke no bungaku). There is a
reason to doubt the truthfulness of this statement because Takachio
himself later did not remember ever discussing literature with
Miyazawa.
16
What is certain is that Miyazawas interaction with
Takachio and other Kokuch!kai members during his time in Tokyo
had significant impact on his writing. This is despite the fact that it is
unlikely that Miyazawa ever actually met Chigaku, who himself was
an amateur playwright. Miyazawas time in Tokyo corresponded
with an intense bout of writing on his part, a kind of writing that was
the first expression of the more idiosyncratic aspects of his art.
17

Miyazawa maintained a relationship through correspondence
with Takachio for the rest of his life, as evidenced by a letter he wrote
the Kokuch!kai lecturer in 1933. In the brief note he mentions his
illness and respectfully promises to do his best to recover.
18


15
biographical sketch, see Hara, entry on Takachio Chiy#.
16
Strong, The Poetry of, 70.
17
Cf., Strong, The Poetry of, 71-73 and Ishikawa, 221-2.
18
Miyazawa Zensh! (Tokyo: Chikuma Bunsho, 1986-1994),Vol. 9,
546.


134
However, Miyazawa left Tokyo in August 1921 and never made the
city his residence again. The recurrence of his beloved sisters illness
ultimately prompted his departure, but his fervent desire to convert
his family to Nichirenshugi beliefs had begun to wane slightly by the
previous month, prompting perhaps a rapprochement with them.
19

The precise nature of Miyazawas relationship with Tanaka Chigaku
and the Kokuch!kai thereafter remains somewhat in dispute among
scholars and others.
20
At one extreme, is Tanaka Chigakus
granddaughter $hashi Fujiko. She holds that despite Miyazawas
separation from Kokuch!kai activities after moving back to
Hanamaki, he never separated himself from the group in his heart.
She claims that his literary work and attempts at social activism are
evidence for this.
21
She also argues that egoistic nationalism is not
consistent with the true teachings of her grandfathers aim to establish
the moral nation of Japan as a Buddha-realm in accordance with
Nichirens prophetic vision.
22

$hashis evaluation of Miyazawas relationship with the
Kokuch!kai after 1921 is diametrically opposed to that of
intellectuals such as the philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke and the

19
Strong, The Poetry of, 73.
20
Hara, Tanaka Chigaku, 452-453 and Takachio Chiy#, 444.
21
$hashi Fujiko Miyazawa Kenji: Makoto no ai [Miyazawa Kenji:
True love] (Tokyo: Shinsekaisha, 1996), 156.
22
Ibid., 152.


135
editors of a 1990 special issue of Bukky! (Buddhism). The journal
volumes opening piece is a roundtable featuring Tsurumi, Ky#t#
University clinical psychologist Kawai Hayao and the editors,
Yoshimoto Takaaki, Yamaori Tetsuo and Komatsu Kazuhiko. In the
discussion Tsurumi proclaims that although Miyazawa had great
enthusiasm for the Kokuch!kai, he broke with the group completely
and as a result his literature had no connection with Tanaka Chigaku.
Tsurumi reasons that Miyazawa once admired Chigaku because he
was sort of fresh from the country, he didnt know anything, and
obviously he just ate that stuff up. The editors agree with Tsurumi
that the Kokuch!kai and Chigaku had no relationship to Miyazawas
work.
23

It is not surprising that in the fourteen articles that follow
this opening talk mention Chigaku and the Kokuch!kai only once.
The articles tend to refer to a timeless dehistoricized Buddhisms
relationship with Miyazawa. These intellectuals from a variety of
fields thus replicate the tendency of several prewar and wartime
fascist intellectuals, who had much in common with the
Kokuch!kai and its leaders. In short, the writings collected in this
special edition of Bukky! conceive of cultural forms such as

23
Miyazawa Kenji: burakku bokksu no kaidoku [Miyazawa Kenji:
deciphering a black box] in Bukky# [Buddhism] vol. 13, no. 10
(1990), Tokush! [special edition] = Miyazawa Kenji, 14-34, 30, 31.


136
Buddhism and Japan in almost precisely the same way that early-
1940s and earlier modern Japanese intellectuals conceived the very
same timeless essences in their ultranationalist willed ignorance of
history.
24

Judgments that Miyazawa essentially remained a Chigaku-
inspired Nichirenist depend upon an apologist defense of the
Kokuch!kai, while claims that Miyazawa became completely
estranged from the group are integrally related to an attempt to
condemn the group. Both judgments are grounded in misrecognition
of the fact that from a pre-1933 perspective Miyazawa and Japanese
society in general did not regard the Kokuch!kais views as
abhorrent. In fact, prewar liberals and anti-imperialists around the
globe (especially those enamored with the mysteries of the East)
were just as likely to praise the Kokuch!kai as they were to condemn
it. This is not so much because they failed to see the truth, but
because historical judgment had not yet created the truth that the
Kokuch!kai was abhorrent.

24
See in particular Kino Ichir#, Miyazawa Kenji to Hokkeky#
(Miyazawa Kenji and the Lotus S"tra) 80-85, 83, where the author
states that in his opinion Miyazawa, Nichiren, and the thirteenth-
century founder of the S#t# Zen sect D#gen were three Japanese who
understood the universal idea of this unique sutra (the Lotus). Kino
ignores the differences in historical context between modern
Miyazawa and the medieval sect founders.


137
Paradoxically, by understanding the Kokuch!kai in a more
historically contextualized way it will be possible to understand ways
how the problems we tend to associate with a bygone prewar period
are still very much with us. In the remaining sections of this chapter I
will analyze some key elements of Miyazawas work in order to show
connections between what Miyazawas fans have tended to praise in
his fiction, on the one hand, and key concepts disseminated by
Chigaku and the Kokuch!kai, on the other. In so doing I will address
the way that Miyazawa and Nichirenism are mutually emblematic of
the problematic character of the modern condition.
Haru to Shura and the Freedom to Transform
Haru to shura (({) Spring and asura, published in
1924) is one of Miyazawas paradigmatic poetic works. It is subtitled
Mental Sketch Modified in Japanized English, the idea of a mental
sketch signified Miyazawas personal poetic methodology. This
methodology consisted of wandering through Iwates countryside,
jotting down notes on his thoughts and impressions during these
extended strolls.
25
While on these walks Miyazawa experienced an
ecstatic breakdown or dissolution of his personality.
26
Later, he
would modify the written sketches that resulted. In other words he

25
Strong, The Poetry, 133.
26
Ibid., 232-3.


138
would revise them, crafting them into works of colloquial, free-verse
poetry. Secondly Haru to shura, with its methodological subtitle, is
also paradigmatic because it served as the title piece for the three
volume collection of poetry, Haru to shura, which Miyazawa wrote
and published at his own expense during a period spanning most of
his adult life. This is an excerpt from the poem:
Out of the minds steel-gray images /
::.!.
Akebia tendrils entwine the clouds, /
:_.
Tangle of wild rose and humus marsh; /
:i|
Over everything everywhere, flatterys twisted pattern
/ '".'".F,]]
(when, more dense than woodwind music at noon
fragments of amber pour down) /
1_`'..
)
The bitterness and blueness of anger! /
'...,
At the bottom of the light of Aprils atmospheric strata
spitting gnashing, pacing /
)|.]"`:`'

I am an asura / 1|:{)/
(the landscape quakes in my tears) /
d:/.'|)
Shattered clouds as far as the eye can see /
!|).
Holy crystal winds traverse
The radiant sea of heaven / ;d.
|',.:
ZYPRESSEN, a row of spring /
ZYPRESSEN('|
Blackly inhale ether
Through their somber trunks /


139

|'@.:
Shines the snowy edge of the Mountains of Heaven /
{{..
(shimmer of heat haze, white polarized light) /
.'+'])
but the true words are lost /
::`/:|
Clouds tear apart, flying across the sky /
:|
Ahhh, through the depths of glittering April
Gnashing, burning, pacing /
..)]
:`_'
I am an asura / 1|:{)/
27


I am an asura is an ontological statement, one grounded in
Miyazawas reading of Tanaka Chigakus Taikan and Chigakus
interpretation there of Nichirens Kaimokush! and other writings.
According to various forms of Mahayana Buddhist teachings
including those of Nichiren there are six realms of existence in the
degraded sphere of transmigration and ignorance. These realms are
those of: (1) hell-dwellers, (2) animals, (3) hungry ghosts or those
who can never be satisfied, (4) asuras, (5) humans, and (6) divinities.
Above these six realms there are the realms of private buddhas and
voice-hearers. These two categories refer to practitioners of
Theravada Buddhism. They are pejorative names from the M%hayana

27
The poem is translated in full in Strong, The Poetry, 125, and I
am using the Japanese text collected in Miyazawa Kenji zensh" vol.
1, 29-32.


140
(greater-vehicle) perspective for those who practice Hinayana
(lesser-vehicle) Buddhism. Bodhisattvas exist in the next higher
realm. A bodhisattva is an ideal practitioner of M%hayana Buddhism,
a figure who refuses to become a Buddha, but instead chooses to
compassionately work for the salvation of others. The tenth and final
realm is that of the Buddha. An asura (shura in Japanese) is
comparable to the titans of Greek mythology who battle the
Olympian divinities. Asuras in ancient Indias Vedic literature fight
divinities such as Indra, but M%hayana Buddhism assimilated the
concept of asuras and in Nichirens thought they are the occupants of
one of the six lower realms of existence.
Chigakus Taikan particularly emphasizes the concept of
ichinen sanzen (). According to the philosophy developed
in Tendai/Nichiren thought, the basic ten realms of existence can be
divided into three-thousand mutually interpenetrating realms and sub-
realms of existence. Ichinen sanzen means that the three-thousand
(sanzen) realms coexist in one moment of thought (ichinen). In more
elaborate cosmological schemes Tiantai, Tendai, and Nichiren
Buddhisms break the ten realms explained above into ten thousand
sub-realms. Thus ichinen sanzen means that in one moment of
personal thought, in a monadic way, the entirety of spatial-temporal
reality is involved. The implication is that all the various realms are


141
constantly interpenetrating at every imaginable level. What this
interpenetration of the ten realms or j"kaigog" ((|) means
ultimately is that an ordinary person attached to worldly desires is
immediately the Buddha and that the Buddha is immediately an
ordinary person attached to worldly desires (butsu soku bonpu, bonpu
soku butsu).
28
According to Sait# Bunichi Miyazawa became
attached to the idea that an asura can also become a Buddha when he
first read the Taikan in the period between 1919 and 1921. In this
connection Sait# cites a letter Miyazawa wrote to a friend in 1919 in
which he proclaimed that his true name was asura of the human
world that attains Buddhahood.
29

The idea that the ordinary person or an asura is immediately
the same as the Buddha correlates with the idea that the external
world too can be transformed. In Haru to shura this idea is
actualized in the transformation of conventional reality into a
phantasmagoric surrealism. Thus akebia tendrils entwine clouds,
fragments of amber with the density of woodwind music pour down,
holy winds traverse the radiant sea of heaven, Zypressen (German

28
Sait# Bunichi, Miyazawa Kenji: Shijigenron no tenkai [Miyazawa
Kenji: the development of a four dimensional theory] (Tokyo:
Kokubunsha, 1991), 132. In the Taikan see in particular vol. III.,
Taik# mon, 1634-1645.
29
Letter no. 165, Miyazawa Kenji Zensh" vol. 9, 231. Quoted in
Sait#, 133.


142
for Cypress trees) blackly inhale ether, and the poet himself is
transformed into a gnashing, spitting, pacing asura whose anger is
blue and who has the landscape quaking in his tears. The world is
transformable in Miyazawas literature. Reality is transformed. It is
perpetually in a state of transformation.
Miyazawa intended to emphasize that even the experience of
oneself as demonic was from an ultimate perspective the same as
being the essence and substance of the Buddha. Because of this it is
important to underscore the promise of profound liberation in the
work of Miyazawa. To put it simply, his poems and stories stimulate
his audiences to imagine the world as otherwise. In an expression of
ichinen sanzen, Miyazawa suggests that despite appearances in any
given moment a human being is also a Buddha and an asura. This in
turn suggests that despite appearances of the permanence of
conditions in any given time or place, it is possible to change those
conditions. Socially, politically, and economically this implies that
oppressive realities are not permanent or ordained by divine forces.
In short, they can be changed. Miyazawa denied his status as a
conventional human being in his poetry and in this he implicitly
argued that the external or social world can always be changed
because it too is not fixed in any necessary sense.


143
In some of his childrens stories and poetry he also created,
for example, a semi-imaginary space that he sometimes called
"hatovu. This word refers to the setting of his work as a place that is
both imaginary and real at the same time. The fact that it sounds like
Iwate is not an accident (the difference between ha and wa
being negligible in Japanese). In an advertisement for a collection of
stories he published he called "hatovu dreamland Iwate. At the
same time he wrote that it was the site of the adventures of Lewis
Carrolls Alice, in that it encompassed the fictional Tepantar Desert
of Tagores poetry, and that it was the site of the kingdom of Ivan in
Tolstoys Tale of Ivan the Fool.
30
One of the more interesting
etymological hypotheses about "hatovu, or "hatovo as Miyazawa
sometimes wrote it, is that it is derived from the German phrase, Ich
weiss nicht wo (I know not where).
31
One can say that "hatovu
exists nowhere and precisely because of this it can exist as a realm of
possibility that is everywhere, despite the fact that Miyazawa
identified it particularly with the site of his immediate experience,
Iwate Prefecture. "hatovu is only one name for and set of imaginary
spaces that Miyazawa constructed. He sometimes termed such spaces
more generally i-k"kan ([[ other spaces). He depicts the most

30
Miyazawa zensh", vol. 8, 602-603.
31
Hara, entry on Ihatovo, 59-60.


144
famous of his other spaces in the sophisticated childrens story, The
Night of the Milky way Railway.
Ginga Tetsud" no yoru
The Night of the Milky Way Railway (Ginga tetsud# no yoru)
is Miyazawas longest story and perhaps his most popular work. It
was discovered among the vast unpublished material he left behind
when he died in 1933, and was published in 1934.
32
It is the story of
Giovanni, a young boy from a town for the most part like Miyazawas
native Hanamaki. On the night of a festival dedicated to the
Centaurus constellation, Giovanni sits on a hill with a strange
weather wheel pillar behind a dairy where he suddenly sees a
strange train coming. He hears a conductor calling out, Milky Way
Station. He next finds himself riding on the train with his friend
Campanella, whose jacket is curiously wet. The boys soon realize
that they are riding across the galaxy on the train. Miyazawa
represents the galaxy as a river upon which the train travels. This is
related to the fact that the Milky Way is called Ginga in Japanese and
this means silver river. It is also called the river of heaven (Ama
no Kawa) and Miyazawa sometimes uses this name for the galaxy as
well.

32
Scholars assume that Miyazawa was working on the story during
the last years of his life. See Strong, The Poetry of, 119.


145
The boys make several stops and meet various interesting
characters on the train as they pass a number of uncommon places
and stations that correspond to constellations and other bodies in
outer space. They pass for example an observatory at the
constellation of Beta Cygni, which Miyazawa calls by its Arabic
name Albireo. They make a stop at Aquila Station, which
corresponds to the constellation of that name. They pass a place
resembling the Colorado plateau where they hear Dvorzaks New
World Symphony. At this point they also see the Sagittarius
(archer) constellation, which they take to be a Native American with
a bow on horseback. One particularly interesting character they meet
is a man whose job is catching wild geese that resemble chocolate in
texture and taste. The last set of Giovannis and Campanellas fellow
travelers are three victims of the recent sinking of the Titanic, a little
boy, a little girl and a young man. The three speak about their ship
hitting an iceberg, they were forced into the cold water where they
apparently drowned. They are also Christian Westerners with
Japanese names. The Christians get off to find their heaven at the
Southern Cross, leaving the boys alone to proceed towards their own
destination.
The train then nears a black nebula called the Coal Sack. A
black nebula is the site of a large amount of interstellar dust that


146
absorbs light because of its gravity. The Coal Sack, visible from
Earths southern hemisphere, appears like a window of darkness in
the Milky Way.
33
At first the Coal Sack seems frighteningly cold and
empty, but Giovanni declares that in the interests of the happiness of
everyone he would not be afraid to be right in the middle of the dark
void of the nebula. Campanella then sees beautiful fields and his
deceased mother in the dark void. Campanella says he wants to go
there. Giovanni sees nothing but as he looks out the window he
reiterates that he wants to come along. When Giovanni turns to
where his friend was sitting in the galactic train, however, his friend
is no longer there. An anguished Giovanni cries out in tears.
Suddenly there is darkness and when Giovanni can see again he
realizes he has been dreaming. After collecting milk from the dairy
for his mother he walks towards the river in the center of town where
he sees a commotion. Giovanni soon realizes that Campanella has
drowned. A discussion with Giovannis father reveals to Giovanni
that his own father, who had been in prison, is on his way home.
As with many of Miyazawas works, Chigakus thought
informs particular elements of The Night of the Milky Way Railroad.
In a section of the Taikan on the concept of fushaku shinmy!

33
Strong, The Readers Guide in Miyazawa Kenji, The Night of the
Milky Way Railway, Strong trans (New York: 1991), 117.


147
(|} not begrudging ones bodily life) Chigaku discusses an
esoteric interpretation of the Lotus S"tras eleventh Beholding the
Appearance of the Jeweled Stupa chapter (], kenh#t# bon).
In the chapter, while &%kyamuni Buddha is preaching the Lotus
sermon to a myriad of beings, a stupa (] t!, a reliquary or pagoda)
that is covered with jewels appears from out of the earth. &%kyamuni
says that this is the stupa of a buddha named Tah# Nyorai (abundant
treasures) who made a vow in eons past that whenever a buddha
preaches the Lotus S"tra he would reappear.
It is important to note that according to the Nichirenist
interpretation of the sutra, Tah# and &%kyamuni are actually one in
the same. Tah# is a past existence of the Buddha and one that now
generally abides outside of the world as we know it. &%kyamuni in
the Lotus is or was the present temporary incarnation of the Buddha
in our degraded or saha world (1( shaba sekai). Both Tah#
and &%kyamuni are emanations of the original eternal Buddha whose
complete identity with &%kyamuni is later revealed in the Lotus
sixteenth, Nyorai jury# hon (Fathoming the lifespan) chapter. In
other words, as Chigaku indicates at another point in the Taikan,
Tah# represents a relatively static and eternal place of truth (seiteki
riky!), while &%kyamuni represents the dynamic knowledge (d!teki


148
chi) of living beings,
34
and the permanent unity of the two is
expounded in the Nyorai jury# hon.
The last part of the Beholding the Appearance of the
Jeweled Stupa chapter is key to the way that Chigaku interpretation
of it in terms of fushaku shinmy!. In accordance with Tah#s original
vow, when he appears in his stupa that rises from the earth,
&%kyamuni is supposed to assemble all the innumerable buddhas that
reside in various directions to the place where he is preaching in our
degraded world. As he does so, he transforms this world into a pure
and wonderful place. &%kyamuni then opens the pagoda doors and
reveals Tah#. Tah# next invites the &%kyamuni to sit with him in the
Pagoda. &%kyamuni agrees and in order that the Lotus sermons vast
audience can better join with the two thus enthroned Buddhas,
&%kyamuni and Tah# cause the assembly to rise up with them into the
sky. The assembly stays there in the sky from the end of the chapter
until chapter 22. The assembly of the various buddhas and others in
the sky is called the kok"-e (assembly in the empty sky ,).
As Sait# Bunichi points out, in Taikan Chigaku cites a
k"den or a medieval apocryphal esoteric oral transmission that has
been circulated within Nichiren/Tendai circles and attributed to

34
Sait#, 123.


149
Nichiren (that was subsequently written down and made available to
people like Chigaku in modern times). The quotation states:
The Beholding the Appearance of the Jeweled
Stupa [chapter] states that we are one body.
Existing in middle of emptiness/middle of the sky
[ k"ch"] means that we living things pass away
and return in the end. Today Nichirens fellows
worship by chanting namu my!h! rengeky! [hail to
the Lotus S"tra of the wonderful law] and in their
true heart and mind where they exist in emptiness;
they exist in the assembly in the empty sky [,
kok"-e].
35


In his commentary on the passage Chigaku explains that there are two
kinds of self, one of which lives and then dies as a material being.
This first kind of self corresponds with the this-worldly emanation of
the Buddha, &%kyamuni, who was born and who died. Then Chigaku
writes that if one is willing to offer ones bodily life in protecting or
adhering to the teachings of the Lotus S"tra in the spirit of not
begrudging ones bodily life or fushaku shinmy!, then another self
perpetually resides in the middle of emptiness. This self second kind
of self neither lives nor dies in a conventional sense. This ever-
abiding self corresponds with the buddha Tah# in the Beholding the
Appearance of the Jeweled Stupa chapter. One whose actions are
imbued with the spirit of fushaku shinmy! abides then, according to

35
Tanaka Chigaku, Nichirenshugi ky!gi taikan (Tokyo: Kokusho
K#kankai, 1975), 2974. Quoted also in Sait#, 204.


150
Chigaku, in an eternally pure and blessed state not unlike that of Tah#
in his jeweled Stupa.
Sait# points out two further practical examples of what
Chigaku meant by fushaku shinmy!, both of which are related to the
work of Miyazawa in general, and The Night of the Milky Way
Railroad in particular. The first is Chigakus concept of a dying act
(rinj" j!rei) done in the spirit of fushaku shinmy!. Tanaka assured
his readers that such a dying act would expiate one of all past
wrongdoing.
36
Such an act appears in Miyazawas story when the
train passes the constellation of Scorpio. At this time one of the
children from the Titanic recounts the story of a scorpion that lives by
eating smaller insects. The scorpion becomes the prey of a weasel,
but before being caught falls into a well. Unable to escape, the
scorpion laments:
I cant even remember the number of lives I have
taken before today. And now when this self same I
was about to be caught by a weasel, what an effort I
made to escape. Yet look what has become of me in
the end. Truly, everything in life is uncertain. Oh,
why did I not offer my own body without complaint to
the weasel? Had I done so, the weasel would have
extended its life for one more day. Please, God, look
into my heart. In my next life let me not throw my life
away in vain like this, but rather, use my body for the
true happiness of everyone.
37



36
Sait#, 205. Taikan, 2981.
37
Strong, The Night, 69. Miyazawa Kenji Zensh", vol. 7, 286-288.


151
On saying this prayer, the scorpion sees his own body burn,
becoming a beautiful crimson fire that lit up the darkness of the
night as the Scorpio constellation.
38
In this way, the past crimes
of the scorpion lead to his willingness to give his body so as to bring
the beauty of his light as a constellation in the sky to others and this
constitutes an extremely noble act on the part of the scorpion.
At the point in The Night of the Milky Way Railway when the
train approaches the Coal Sack black nebula and before Campanella
sees his mothers image within it, Giovanni says even if I were in
the middle of that huge darkness, I wouldnt be afraid . I really am
going to go and search for the true happiness of everyone.
39
This is
a pledge that Giovanni makes with the spirit of fushaku shinmy! and
it has much in common with the scorpions desire to have his body be
of value to others. However, unlike the scorpion and Campanella,
Giovanni does not lose his life as conventionally defined. He does
not stay in the thoroughly transfixed world of the Milky Way either.
Miyazawa was suggesting that there are deep connections between
the everyday world (Giovannis village), the world of possibility that
opens up when conventional identity, rationality or common sense
breaks down (the Milky Way), and the absolutely mysterious void of
death as conventionally defined (the Coal Sack). Thus, even though

38
Ibid.
39
Strong, The Night, 76. Miyazawa Kenji Zensh", vol. 7, 293.


152
Campanella dies he has not completely left Giovanni. Miyazawa
implies a fundamental connection between the everyday world of
Giovannis village, fantastic world of the Milky Way, and the world
of the dead or the Coal Sack Nebula that is Campanellas final
destination.
The model for the interrelationship between the fantastic
realm of the Milky Way and normal reality is the assembly in the
empty sky or kok"-e in the Lotus S"tra as interpreted by Chigaku.
Importantly, in the sutra, the original site of &%kyamunis sermon,
sacred vulture peak or Ry!juzen ({) in India, is itself already a
transformed time and place. The level of unconventionality or
enchantment at Ry!juzen in the sutra corresponds, I would argue, to a
Japanese village where children have non-Japanese names like
Giovanni and Campanella. Just the fact or realization that there is a
relationship between this world and one where normally impossible
things are possible (the Milky Way or the site of the kok"-e) changed,
for Miyazawa and Chigaku, the nature of this mundane world.
Miyazawas story signifies the transformability of the mundane world
as both immanent and imminent. For both Miyazawa and Chigaku
Losing oneself as that self is normally constituted in the spirit of
fushaku shinmy! was the key to a more general and permanent
transformation of the real world. In other words, fushaku shinmy!


153
was requisite, as they saw it, in order to make the supposedly
imminent and immanent presence of the Buddha manifest and real in
the here and now.
Miyazawa uses an image that brings to mind the jeweled
stupa of the Lotus S"tra to connect the world of Giovannis village
and the other world of the Milky Way and beyond. Before Giovanni
hears the Milky Way Railroads conductor yells Milky Way Station
and just before he finds himself aboard the galactic train he notices
what the text refers to as a weather wheel pillar (tenkirin no hashira).
The author describes it as flickering on and off like a firefly.
40
The
meaning of this weather wheel pillar of is one of the more hotly
debated questions in the study of Miyazawas work. Arguments often
begin with the idea that the weather wheel pillar has to do with
Buddhism, that it is an apparent allusion to the wheel of the dharma
(| h!rin), which is a very common symbol of various Buddhist
teachings. Sait# suggests however that the weather wheel pillar is an
allusion to the jeweled stupa from the Lotus S"tras eleventh
chapter.
41
This suggestion is not contrary to more common theories
centering on the notion that the weather wheel pillar is an Eliadean-
style axis mundi, a point of convergence between the other world and

40
Strong, The Night, 25. Miyazawa Kenji Zensh", vol. 7, 248-249.
41
Sait#, 205.


154
this.
42
In a way related to the concept of an axis mundi, the
appearance of the stupa in the Lotus initiates the complete rupture in
the middle of the everyday world that reveals a newly magnificent
space-time.
43

This sense of rupture in the middle of mundane existence is
characteristic of almost all of Miyazawas work. His forte was to
show us the relationship between an everyday world outside of our
immediate control and the transformed and transformable world of
his imagination. These worlds of rupture frequently combine or
overthrow conventional oppositions between East and West. For
example, the Japanese children in The Night of the Milky Way
Railroad have Italian names, and the Christian survivors of the
Titanic have Japanese names. The ruptures and transformations
within Miyazawas work are also notably characteristic of early
twentieth-century, global literary modernism.
44
That the author

42
Strong, Readers Guide, 93.
43
Sait#, 110.
44
As Harootunian has notes in Overcome by Modernitys
introduction, there are as many definitions and explanations of
modernism as there are people willing to speak about it (xx).
Despite ambiguities, I believe that the concept is necessary and useful
when, for example, discussing global literary trends valorizing the
breakdown of the rationality commonly associated with processes of
modernization. For a historical account of the complexities of
modernism in the European context, see chapter two, Modernity and
Modernism, in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity
(Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 1990). See especially 28-29, where
Harvey discusses post-1848 challenges to the categorical fixity of


155
combined this literary modernist sensibility with Nichirenist
Buddhism was itself a kind of rupture of the boundaries of common
sense in a world where many people continue to conceptually insist
upon clear distinctions between the Oriental and the Occidental.
In this regard, tellingly, Miyazawa also expressed his sense
of sites or times of rupture in the German language in his poem
Koiwai N#j# (Koiwai farm). In the poem Miyazawa calls the time
and place of a rupture with everyday experience at a cooperative farm
in Morioka, Iwate der heilge punkt (the holy point). In the time and
space of rupture with reality as conventionally defined in this poem,
Kenji consorts with children from ancient Buddhist paintings that
modern archeologists had recently unearthed from the sands of
Central Asia. Normal conceptions of time, space, and the difference
between representation and reality are completely torn apart here in
what can additionally be seen as a representation of the notion of
ichinen-sanzen. In this context all imaginable realms or realities
(sanzen) are manifest for the poet in a single holy point.
45


Enlightenment thought. For a disapproving account of a tendency
among modernist writers such as Robert Musil, Joyce, and Kafka
towards flight into psychopathology see Georg Lukacs, The
Ideology of Modernism in Marxist Literary Theory, ed. Terry
Eagleton and Drew Milne (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1996),
especially, 150-51.
45
Cf., Sait#, 128.


156
Besides his concept of a dying act Chigaku also wrote in
the Taikan of another quality of fushaku shinmy!, terming it honji
g!dan (l}a loose translation would be: at the present time all
together in unity). Chigaku explicitly connected the term to the idea
of constructing an ideal world. It would be a this-worldly land of
tranquil light (sekai no jakk!-do). In this world, Chigaku wrote,
Buddhist teachings or Buddhist law (h!, Skt., dharma) and people
will live in harmony with each other. Morality and daily life
(seikatsu) would also be in harmony. In short, religious faith and
peoples way of life would be united as Chigaku believed was
requisite in our present degenerate age of Mapp!. Chigaku moreover
mentions that although he looked for a suitable place for his
religious colonists (sh"ky! shokumin) to settle in the Izu region the
previous year (1901 or 1902) but he could not find one. He also
mentions that Hokkaid#, Taiwan or Korea might offer a place suitable
for his plans.
46

Everything that is material such as ones body itself, in
Chigakus vision of communitarian fushaku shinmy!, is to be offered
or sacrificed to the dharma. That is to say that it is to be given up in
the interest of the community. In this context, Chigaku wrote that
the spirit of not begrudging ones bodily life [fushaku shinmy#] is to

46
Taikan, 2982.


157
have the heart/mind that returns to the original ground of the
absolute original truth.
47
In Chigakus ideal Buddhist community of
the future he seems to have projected a rupture with the ego as
conventionally constituted this is deeply related to the forms of
rupture Miyazawa depicted in his work.
But Chigaku usually excelled at inspiring people to act,
while on the other hand he was relatively weak at acting in
historically decisive ways himself. In other words, Chigakus
concepts remained largely virtual. Others, such as Miyazawa, tried to
put them more concretely into practice. Towards the end of his life
Miyazawa attempted to devote his life to assisting the poor peasants
of his home prefecture. In the spirit of fushaku shinmy! Miyazawa
tried to actualize the this-worldly land of tranquil light that Chigaku
had written about. What follows is a discussion of Nichirenisms
connections to Miyazawas attempts at social reform.
N!min geijutsuron and the Rasu Chijin Ky"kai
When Miyazawa returned to Hanamaki from Tokyo in 1921
he accepted a teaching job at a local two-year agricultural school.
48

Over the ensuing years he continued writing and published Spring
and Asura while teaching. He also published a collection of stories,
The Restaurant of Many Orders (Ch"mon no !i ry!riten, 1924) and a

47
Taikan, 2982-3, emphasis in original.
48
Strong, The Poetry of, 74.


158
few pieces in periodicals, but he met with no commercial success and
little critical acclaim. By 1924 he became very frustrated with his
life. Miyazawa began to imagine the possibility of a new kind of art
that was more connected to the common people of his native region.
He quit his teaching job in 1926 and at about the same time he
penned a short three part work, the N#min geijutsu gainen ron (On
the general concept of peasant art), N#min geijutsu gairon k#y#
(An outline of the elements of peasant art) and N#min geijutsu no
k#ry! (The flourishing of peasant art). N#min geijutsu gainen ron
is a table of contents for and a set of notes. N#min geijutsu gairon
k#y# is the main part of the three. N#min geijutsu gairon k#yr! is
a rather ungrammatical and unclear extrapolation on one section of
N#min geijutsu gairon k#y#.
49

Miyazawas attempt to disseminate his ideas among Iwates
peasants began soon after he resigned his teaching position. During
the first three months of 1926 Miyazawa gave a two part lecture at the
school where he had been working titled N#min no geijutsu ron
(On peasant art) as part of an Iwate Prefecture Citizens Higher
School sponsored adult education program. In April 1926 Miyazawa

49
Hara, N#min geijutsu, 555. I have referred to the versions of the
N#min geijutsu works collected in the Miyazawa Zensh" vol. 10, 15-
32. There is an English translation of the work in the appendix of
Mallory Fromm, Miyazawa no ris! [Miyazawas ideal] (Tokyo:
Sh#bunsha, 1996). My translations differ slightly from Fromms.


159
began to periodically host about twenty students at his newly
independent residence. He saw this as a continuation of the themes
he had addressed with his N#min no geijutsu ron lecture. At the
time Miyazawa had also just moved to a house owned by his family,
a moderate distance from them in Shimoneko, an agricultural area of
Hanamaki. Miyazawas ideal was to realize harmony between an
agriculturally productive life and cultural fulfillment. Thus, in
addition to reclaiming land along the local river, Miyazawas group
listened to records, began practicing as a small musical ensemble,
learned about agricultural science from Miyazawa, and engaged in
various cultural activities.
The group that met at Miyazawas residence formed the
kernel of what he eventually called the Rasu Chijin Ky#kai
()|], Rasu Peasant Cooperative Association
50
) and the set
of documents he previously authored bearing on the question of
peasant art reflects the conceptual basis for Miyazawas activities
with the group. The opening section of N#min geijutsu gairon
k#y# states that [l]iving properly and strongly means having an
awareness of the Milky Way galaxy within oneself . Let us seek

50
It is impossible to translate rasu in the name of the association
Miyazawa formed. Its meaning is ambiguous and this is something I
will address more fully below.


160
the true worlds happiness.
51
The reference to the Milky Way is
clearly a reference to the newly magnificent space time represented
in Night of the Milky Way Railway. The Milky Way within each of us
then also stands for the site of the Lotus S"tras assembly in the
empty sky. In this we can see that once again when Miyazawa
invokes a desire to seek the true happiness of everyone, he is
expressing a desire to actualize the ideal world that Chigaku describes
as a this-worldly land of ever-tranquil light.
The rest of the content of Miyazawas literature on peasant art
centers on the dissolution of the oppositions between work, art, and
religiosity. At one point within N#min geijutsu gairon k#y#
Miyazawa writes for example that
professional artists will one day cease to exist
Let everyone adapt an artist-like sensibility []
We are, each of us, artists at one time or another
Action is concentrated in creation when that creation
wells up spontaneously and ceaselessly []
Myriad of geniuses of differing characteristics should
stand together
Thus the surface of the earth will also become
heaven
52



51
Miyazawa Zensh" vol. 10, 19. Fromm, ii. Translation altered
because Fromm translates Gingakei ()() as galactic system. I
choose to render it Milky Way galaxy. A literal translation would
be silver river galaxy, but Ginga is a proper name and its
standard translation is Milky Way, which is the English proper
name of the same galaxy.
52
Miyazawa Zensh" vol. 10, 23-24. Fromm iv.


161
In sum, Miyazawas plan to convert the world of poor Iwate peasants
into heaven involved peasants themselves rejoicing in making their
own songs, literature, music, dramatic works, movies, sculpture,
photography, and culinary arts. The peasants would also conduct
lectures for each other, make clothes, care for forests and gardens,
manufacture goods, and engage in healthy competitive games.
53

N#min geijutsu gairon k#y# also displays a romantic
longing for an unrealistically idyllic past when it decries that, today
we have only work and existence. This is because, the text
continues, unlike our ancestors who at one time lived joyfully
while being poor we have lost art and religion. Miyazawa
furthermore decried the fact that religion had been replaced by
science and the wretchedly decadent state of contemporary art.
54

At the same time, far from expressing a desire to escape modernity
into a Japanese past, Miyazawa praises the thought of Daniel Dafoe,
Oscar Wilde, William Morris, Tolstoy, Emerson Spengler, Wagner
Cezanne, Manet and Georg Bchner.
Miyazawa officially founded the Rasu Chijin Ky#kai in
August 1926. The upshot of the groups story is that it failed to
improve the lot of those he most intended to help. Miyazawa himself
took up farming after moving to his solitary residence, but this did

53
Hara, N#mingeijutsu, 556.
54
Miyazawa Kenji Zensh", 19. Fromm ii.


162
little to ensure his acceptance among the established farmers in the
region. In short, none of the practical projects that Miyazawa and his
close associates planned in an effort to better the lot of peasants
succeeded and the organization ceased to function in any meaningful
sense by early 1927. By 1928 he began to show signs of a recurrence
of the tuberculosis that he probably first contracted at the age of 18
following surgery to treat a nasal condition.
55

Miyazawas health waxed and waned over the next few
years. In February 1931 he felt healthy enough to take work as a
fertilizer salesman. In September of the same year he fell ill on a
business trip to Tokyo.
56
Miyazawa never fully recovered. He spent
the next couple of years mostly rewriting his earlier work. He died in
September of 1933. His dying wish was for his father to print a
thousand copies of the Lotus S"tra, which he asked to be given to his
friends after his death. He requested his father to dedicate the copies
with an inscription stating that the young writers life work had been
to disseminate the sutra.
Space-Time, History and Spiritual Photography
The space-time of the Milky Way in Miyazawas story, the
experience of space and time as communicated in Miyazawas poetry
when for example he proclaimed I am an asura, and the ideal world

55
Strong, The Poetry, 39.
56
Ibid., 109-110.


163
that Miyazawa attempted to actualize when putting the principles of
peasant art into practice have a common logic. In this logic opposed
or contradictory terms are not resolved in a higher synthetic unity but
are neutralized. For example, Giovanni and Campanella do not
become Italian because of their names. However, they are not simply
Japanese as conventionally defined. That is they are A (Japanese),
B (not Japanese), both A and B (Japanese and not Japanese) and
neither A (Japanese) nor B (not Japanese). The same can be said of
the poet as asura: he is an asura, he is a human, he is both asura and
human, and he is neither asura nor human. This is the kind of state
that Giovanni and Campanella enter when their train begins its
journey across the Milky Way. The story opens with a scene at the
boys school. Their teacher explains precisely what the galaxy is
from the perspective of science, namely stars in outer space. When
the boys are in the train, however, the galaxy is also literally the river
of heaven or the silver river. The universe mapped by science shares
an ontological equality with universes of other modes of
understanding reality, such as ones that perceive the Milky Way as a
river of heaven, a silver river, or a flow of milk.
My presentation of the logic in question is indebted to what
scholars call Nagarjunas tetralemma. Nagarjuna was the second
century Indian philosopher who immensely influenced subsequent


164
Buddhist thought with his philosophy of emptiness, one component
of which was his tetralemma or mode of interrogating reality so as to
see all opposed terms (A versus B for example) as A, B, both A and
B, and neither A nor B.
57
To say that Miyazawas thought was
Buddhist in Nagarjunas sense the sense is to miss the point however.
Saying it is, it is not, it both is and is not, and it neither is nor is not is
more than a linguistic game as well.
It would seem that logic denying the dominant modern
epistemology of the West, which obeys the law of the excluded
middle (where A is A and B is B and it is impossible to be both A and
B), has a long, albeit marginal history in non-Buddhist contexts as
well. Thomas Mores classic early modern work, Utopia, for
example, displays tendencies to neutralize oppositions within the
space of literature rather than resolve them once and for all. This is
Louis Marin on the position of Mores imaginary island:
We know that the blessed isle is located between
Ceylon and America, but that it stands outside the
toponymic circuit and outside the trajectory that runs
from world to antiworld. It will thus combine
beyond all spacecircumference and diameter, time
and space, history and geography, in a place that will
be neither a moment of history or a sector of the map,
a place that will be sheer discontinuitya neuter
where alone the island can become manifest.
Homologous with Portugal and England, belonging to

57
See C.W. Huntington and Ghesh Namgyal Wangchen, The
Emptiness of Emptiness: An Introduction to Early Indian
M#dhyamika (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 38.


165
the same hemisphere as Ceylon and America, but
distinct from all of these, [the island is] neither
antiworld, nor New World, but simply World Other.
58


In other words, the island of Utopia like Miyazawas other spaces
of the Milky Way and "hatovu cannot exist, from the perspective of a
normal logic that cannot abide what Marin calls the neutralization of
conventional oppositions. Miyazawas work is a product and
expression of a globalized modern situation at least as much as it is
Buddhist or Japanese. Nagarjuna, More, and Miyazawa might have
had an affinity on some level. But I believe it is important to look
beyond that affinity and analyze the relationships between these
figures and the historical contexts in which they operated. Modernity
is an extremely heterogeneous milieu. Despite seeming both strange
and quite delightful, there is nothing non-modern or incongruous
about Miyazawas other spaces (the same can be said about
Moores vision of utopia and Nagarjunian thought when deployed in
modern contexts). In other words, I believe, the exception in
modernity is the norm.
59


58
Quoted in Fredric Jameson, Of Islands and Trenches:
Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse, in The
Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1988 (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989), 87.
59
My argument here agrees with Harootunians discussion of
modernism in his preface to Overcome by Modernity, where he
argues that the past, especially the precapitalist past, offered a


166
Another instance of what I am calling Miyazawas logic of
neutralization is the name of the cooperative organization that he
founded, the Rasu Chijin Ky#kai. The fact that Miyazawa once said
that rasu has no meaning has not deterred scholars from
conjecturing about what the word might mean. Sat# Takafusa
believes, for example that rasu is a Japanese pronunciation of the
English word lath, which means a strip of wood or metal that is
nailed in rows as a sub-structural support for plaster shingles or tiles.
The logic here is that Miyazawa meant his organization to be a
support for farmers.
60
Onda Itsuo argues that rasu is a reference to
John Ruskin. This makes sense because the Japanese phonetic
transliteration of Ruskin in katakana is rasukin (`-`).
Miyazawa also approvingly cites William Morris in N#min geijutsu

storehouse of tropes for modernist rearticulation (xxi). However,
I would underline the fact that Miyazawa and other artists, including
Tanizaki Junichir# for example, went beyond a paradoxical
modernism against modernity (ibid.). More multidimensional
paradoxes come into play regarding this question, because, if as
Harootunian later suggests, Japanese modernisms opposition to
modernity has always been part and parcel with the actual nature of
modernity, then in significant ways being either for or against
modernity actually has no meaning at all (cf., xxii-xxiii). Regarding
such questions, see also Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 235-338
and 373-374, where the authors describe capitalism (and implicitly,
modernity) as a system that thrives on its own contradictions in the
form of antiproduction.
60
If this theory is correct to whatever extent then there is an
interesting parallel between the meaning of Miyazawas peasant
support (lath) cooperative organization and the Kokuch!kai, the
meaning of which is pillar of the nation society.


167
gairon k#y# and Ruskin and Morris were the primary proponents of
the arts and crafts movement in Victorian England. The arts and
crafts movement was designed to break down the distinctions
between work or everyday life (craft) and art, something with which
Miyazawa was in definite sympathy. Onda also notes that Rasu
sounds like an inversion of the two syllables of shura (rashu) as in
haru to shura (spring and asura). Matsuura Hajime argues that
rasu is from the English word rustic. Another theory is that
rasu ()) is an allusion to the ra in mandara (Eng./Skt.,
mandala) and the shu in shumidan ()J), a word referring to
a miniature representation of Mt. Sumeru. Sumeru is a mountain
featured at the center of Buddhist symbolic cosmological schemes.
This theory makes particular sense because in N#min geijutsu gairon
k#y# Miyazawa mentions Sumeru as a place embodying the
creativity of religion in heaven and earth.
I think it would be mistaken to reduce the meaning of rasu
to any one of the theories mentioned above or to any other theory that
exists or is yet to be invented. The charm of Miyazawas thought was
its indeterminate quality. His neutralization of the fixed identities and
oppositions of conventional existence invites his readers to creatively
engage his texts, without fixating on any given reading of what
particular things might mean. In fact, for me, interpreting Miyazawa


168
is especially difficult because of the manifold possible explanations
that are logically available, and the persistence of my desire not to
foreclose that field of possibilities.
However, the richness of Miyazawas corpus is also its
weakness, particularly when it came to trying to actualize Chigakus
and Miyazawas ideal world in the material world instead of in the
realm of literature. When epigones of Chigaku such as Ishiwara
Kanji acted the consequences were dreadful in a violent sense. This
is partially attributable to the fact that Ishihara remained faithful to
Chigakus reading of the role of the Japanese nation-states mission
to bring about an ideal world. However, some common reasons help
explain the utter failure of Nichirenism in general and the failings of
Miyazawas activism in particular when it came to actually making
the world a better place in any sense.
As an avid amateur photographer Tanaka Chigaku liked
using the camera as a metaphor. Near the beginning of the third
volume of the Taikan, Sh!y# mon (Essentials of our sect), Chigaku
explains that the whole of the Taikan is like a camera. The complex
and foundational second volume, the Taik# mon (General
principles) corresponds to the real thing that one wishes to
photograph. The last two volumes, the Shingy# mon (Faith and
practice) and the Anshin mon (Heart-mind at ease) are concerned


169
respectively with the regulation of the self and ones relationship with
others. In other words the last two volumes are concerned with
immediate, everyday existence. The Taik# mon is vast and
complex, according to Chigaku, and the Shingy# mon and Anshin
mon are narrower in scope. The first chapter, the Meigi mon
(Righteousness of our sect) is a view of the Taikan as camera from
the outside.
The all-important function of the Sh!y# mon, Chigaku
argues, is to act like a lens that mediates between the Taik# mon in
its vast complexity and the two narrowly concerned latter chapters
which are like the focus glass (pinto garasu). The focus glass is
where the film in an actual camera receives the image from the lens.
The author in theory focuses the lens in a way that is analogical with
a lens taking in a vast scene and focusing it within a camera in a
compact way that can be registered and recorded on film. In terms of
what the Sh!y# mon actually does, this means that the author
makes the complexity of the Taik# mon easier to understand
through the use of various heuristic devices such as, I would note, the
metaphor of the camera itself.
61


61
Sait#, 163-165, based on his reading of the introductory section of
the Sh!y# mon, in the Taikan, 1933-1959. See in particular p.
1958 for diagram of Taikan as camera.


170
Sait# suggests that Miyazawas notion of the mental sketch
modified is based on the idea of the Taikan as a camera and the
Sh!y# mon as its lens. Sait#s interpretation is grounded in the fact
that Chigaku offers in addition to the camera metaphor another way
of understanding the relationship between the parts of the Taikan.
Chigaku also regarded the total work as a body, with the Taik# mon
as flesh and bones, the Sh!y# mon as the spirit (konpaku), the
Shingy# mon as the circulation of blood, and the Anshingy# as
bodily action in daily life.
62
Because of this, Sait# notes, one can call
the Sh!y# mon lens the spirit lens (konpaku renz). Sait# sees a
similarity between the notion of spirit and mental on the one
hand and the idea of a lens and the idea of a sketch on the other.
Sait# thus argues that spirit lens corresponds with Miyazawas
mental sketch modified, noting that Miyazawas self-declared
condition as an asura modified or focused (or intensified) his poetic
works. Sait# thus argues that Miyazawas based his mental sketching
technique in Chigakus theories. This was particularly the case with
regard to Chigakus theories about structural function of the Taikan.
Sait# suggests that Miyazawas work employed heuristic devices in
an effort to guide people to the truth.
63


62
Sait#, 163.
63
Sait#, 164-166.


171
Whether one agrees with Sait#s reasoning, it is extremely
interesting that Chigaku chose the camera as a metaphor for the
pedagogy embodied in the Taikan. His use of the camera also points
out a problematic continuity between himself and Miyazawa.
Chigaku claims to use the lens of the third volume to focus and
register the complex reality of the second volume for us in our
narrowly concerned everydayness. By doing so he refers to an a
method of teaching people the true nature of reality. This true nature
however registers like a photograph. Chigaku wishes to register
reality for us in a static or reified way. From a certain perspective
this is not problematic because what Chigaku wishes to register is
static as well. The eternal original Buddha that is both immanent and
transcendent is completely unchanging. According to the theory this
Buddha is an unchanging essence manifesting itself in all material
forms, which themselves are constantly changing (or locked in a
never ending cycle of birth and death). But the eternal original
Buddha representing ultimate truth does not change. If it is immanent
in all living things, all forms of identity, then despite ephemeral
difference reality is one monistic, unchanging identity. Chigaku
privileged the ahistorical over history and identity over difference.
Miyazawa believed that he could transform this world into
an ideal one because of his faith in the idea that this world always


172
already an embodied an eternally unchanging, sacred essence. This
was why his utopian discourse fell short in his attempt to break down
oppositions between work, art and religiosity. This was why he failed
to sufficiently connect with the actual people he was attempting to
help. To overemphasize the current perfection of the world, as is,
risks willed ignorance of historical reality. For Miyazawa it meant
missing fact that people like the poor farmers of Iwate prefecture in
the late 1920s had to worry about such difficulties as paying their rent
and selling their rice on ever-fluctuating markets in order to do so.
They also had to pay taxes and meet other expenses if only in order to
keep on subsisting. To try to transform reality like one can transform
ones consciousness while making a mental sketch modified risks
escaping into a fantasy realm in a way that gives the continuation of
the status quo ones blessing.
Conclusion
Modern epistemology tends to focus on the static, the known,
or the knowable. We can see a form of this privileging in Chigakus
metaphor of the photograph. A very realistic photograph can last
well beyond any natural lifespan, but it also represents both a freezing
of becoming, of reality in flux, and a reduction of an infinity of depth
and breath to a relatively tiny piece of space. It also means reducing
living breathing things to an inanimate condition. Miyazawa


173
attempted to rebel against this kind of reduction or objectification.
He wanted to show people who were suffering a Milky Way inside
them. He wanted to show them a universe of possibility within us all.
The problem remained that real people, unlike characters in stories or
personas in poems have needs that cannot be addressed in this way.
Real people change over time and they do unexpected things. They
are also forced to confront unexpected and always fluctuating
conditions outside of their control. Despite his glorification of
spontaneity appears that Miyazawa understood these problems
incompletely. Perhaps we can attribute this to a combination of his
relatively privileged upbringing and an imagination that preferred to
fixate on what was eternal.
In his fixation on the eternal original Buddha of the Lotus
S"tra we see that, just as with Chigaku, the liberation that
Miyazawas thought promised remained virtual. Actualizing visions
of a world where conventional oppositions no longer hold sway
would entail breaking down the oppositions that are constituted by
differences in material wealth and power within any real society.
Impoverished people like Miyazawas peasants could not live in the
idyllic way he imagined under the social, economic and political
conditions that existed in northern Japan during the late 1920s and
early 1930s. I would go so far as to say that breaking down the


174
oppositions between work, art, and religiosity the way that Miyazawa
imagined may not be possible under capitalism as it has always
existed. One would be foolish to hold ones breath waiting for any
dramatic change at this juncture in history. However, one can
probably think of better things to do than worship the divinity of
Miyazawa Kenji.
On the other hand, truly honoring Miyazawas memory might
involve pushing his brilliant imagination further. Perhaps one can
embrace what some Marxists might call a dialectic that would not
only dream of a better world, but also try to achieve it through an
engagement with the social, political, economic, and cultural totality
of the present. If Miyazawa had lived longer and been blessed with
better health perhaps he would have been able to do precisely that.
The subject of the next chapter, Senoo Gir# did go further with his
Nichirenism-inspired Buddhism. He did this by using Buddhism to
critique the 1920s and 1930s Japanese status quo. In the process he
championed the weak and chastised the strong, and this meant even
challenging elites who themselves used Buddhismand in some
cases Nichirenismto bolster their own positions.

175
Chapter Three: Senoo Gir! and Overcoming
Nichirenism

The salvation of modern people does not lie in a postmortem
paradise of serene light (jakk!do). I cannot say enough that it
truthfully lies in this actual worldly life.

Senoo Gir!, The Course of the New Buddhism Movement

Introduction: the Zenren, October 1933, Kyoto

At the third annual meeting of the National Federation of
Japanese Buddhist Youth Groups (Zen Nihon Bukky! Seinenkai
D!mei, henceforth Zenren) in Kyoto in 1933, Senoo Gir!s Shink!
Bukky! Seinen D!mei (New Buddhism Youth Alliance, henceforth
SBSD) put forward seven emergency resolutions. Senoo had been a
charter member of the board of directors of Zenren for the previous
three years and he had participated in each meeting. However,
Senoo had come to believe that the umbrella organization had lost its
relevance, existing simply as an ineffectual club. He proposed the
following as part of the proceedings of the 1933 meeting:
(1) These [following two points] should be Zenrens
guiding principles:
A- All Buddhist groups should be in solidarity.
B- In the spirit of Buddhism capitalism should be
reformed and a communal society should be realized.
(2) Rituals should return to the basic principles of
early Buddhism.
(3) Xenophobic nationalism as a form of thought and a
movement should be prevented.
(4) There should be a public statement promoting the
reform of capitalism.
(5) Alcohol consumption should be combated.
176
(6) There should be a movement to ban prostitution.
(7) There should be a protest of Hitlers anti-human
and anti-cultural movement.

Of these seven resolutions the group passed numbers two,
five, and six, withheld judgment on numbers one, three and four, and
completely rejected number seven. Senoo disenchantment was
exacerbated by Zenrens decision to send a letter of thanks to Siam
because that nation refrained from condemning Japans establishment
of the puppet-state of Manchukuo at a meeting of the League of
Nations.
1
In the estimation of one leader of the SBSD the national
Buddhist group received the SBSD resolutions in this way because
prevailing opinion in Zenren held that there was no relationship
whatsoever between Buddhism and capitalism and that no
relationship whatsoever existed between Buddhism and social
problems in the real world.
2
In the weeks that followed, Senoos
group published a special edition of their organ on the incident in
Kyoto. Other Buddhist groups that participated in the Kyoto meeting
criticized Senoos SBSD. Finally, following a chat with the Zenren

1
Yoshida Shizukuni, Nihon shihonshugi no hatten to Bukky! shis! no
yakuwari [The development of Japanese capitalism and the role of
Buddhist thought] (Tokyo: Wak! Sh"ppan, 1987), 58-9.
2
Hayashi Reih!, Zenren no gimansei to seinen Bukky!to no michi
quoted in Yoshida, 59.
177
president, Shibata Ichin!, Senoo decided to secede from the umbrella
group.
3

By 1931, Senoo Gir! began to see a global linkage
between imperialist war, fascism/Nazism, and the suffering of great
numbers of proletarians (industrial workers and tenant farmers)
within Japan. As Stephen S. Large has put it, it is well to ask
whyin a period when most Buddhists followed the dictates of
nationalism and the statedid Senoo insist on relating his private
quest for the ideal self in Buddhist religious terms to his public quest
for the ideal society in socialist political terms, and what were the
consequences?
4
This is an especially engaging question given the
fact that Senoo led a youth group affiliated with the modern
Nichirenshugi (Nichirenism) movement from 1919 to 1931, and was
originally attracted to Nichirenshugi by the writings of Tanaka
Chigaku in 1915.
The answer, I believe, is religious or spiritual in a sense that
surpasses religion and spirituality as commonly understood. Senoo
rejected a world of things defined as commodities, or in other words
as goods that can be bought and sold without reference to the history

3
Yoshida, Ibid. On the Zenren incident, see also, Inagaki Masami,
Budda o seoite gait! e: Senoo Gir! to Shink! Bukky! Seinen D!mei
(Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1974), 146-49.
4
Stephan S, Large, Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest in Prewar
Japan: The Career of Senoo Gir!, Modern Asian Studies 21: 1
(1987), 154-55.
178
of their production. He also rejected the world of things defined as
the objects of a science which tends to approach the world as made
up of already completed things to be judged only with regard to their
future utility. He saw all things as being in a state of change, as
being in a constant state of production. This led Senoo to believe
that a world dominated by inherently exploitative capitalism could
be otherwise. It also led him to regard nationalism and existing
Buddhism as shams or as opiates. Senoo eventually developed a
profound sense of his own historicity, leading him to understand the
nation and established religion as reified, ahistorical entities
governed by pseudoscientific instrumental rationality par
excellence..
Ultimately Senoo came to thoroughly deny the
substantiality or reality of even his own ego or self. He proclaimed
that the most fundamental teaching of Buddhism was selflessness.
With this belief he entered what Robert Musil called the other
condition, a time-space in which, as David Luft explains, the ego
is actually eliminated, cancelled out in objective relations; the
normal sense of the ego and possessiveness dissolves into a true
object-ivity which is selfless. Luft further describes Musils other
condition as a state in which an observer has a sympathetic
179
relation with the world that is not very useful for practical
purposes. In short, it is the condition of love.
5

In denying the reality of his own existence as a rigid or
stable form Senoo violated a fundamental law of common sense
and the fundamental basis of private property, that if nothing else
one at least owns oneself and ones labor. This transgression was
moreover an actualization of the immanence that Nichirenists
typically conceived of in terms of the eternal original Buddha.
Unlike Chigaku, however, Senoo integrated this experience with
everyday life in the lived present. He did not defer such experience
to a point on an ever-receding horizon. Unlike Ishiwara Kanji,
Senoo did not try to facilitate the once and for all delivery of an
other condition.
Senoo eventually termed his epistemology of an empathy
with things that penetrated beyond static surfaces dialectical
materialist Buddhism. This selfless sympathy with a world of
things in flux was the fountainhead of a compassion that was the
engine of his political transformation during the latter half of the
1920s. The materialism of Senoos epistemology led directly to
what Brian Massumi calls an expanded empiricism, something at
odds with a nave empiricism that limits investigation and

5
David Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880-
1942 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 191-92.
180
observation to the surfaces of things in an immediately given, static
present.
6
Thus, not only was Senoos epistemology bound up with
a compassion that led to a political realignment. It also nourished an
uncommon acuity when it came to his analysis of alarming current
events during the 1930s.
Biographical Sketch of Early Years
Senoo was born in 1889 in T!j! village, Hiroshima
Prefecture to a family in the sake brewing business. Senoo entered
Ichik!, the prestigious First Higher School in Tokyo. However, in
September, 1909, following two years of study at the preparatory
school, Senoo fell ill. Doctors diagnosed him with either anemia of
the brain or a bronchial catarrh. His digestive organs were having
problems with his as well. While his illness worsened everyday, his
familys business in T!j! also began to fail. In the beginning of
December doctors ordered him to leave school in order to rest. He
returned to his hometown to be nursed by his mother and sister-in-
law. His health did not immediately improve and he entered the
prefectural hospital in Okayama City in January. He left the hospital
after three months of treatment with a stomach pump. Senoo then

6
On the idea of an expanded empiricism, see Massumi, Parables for
the Virtual, 235-36.
181
briefly returned to Ichik! but he quickly caught pneumonia from a
friend and had to return to T!j!.
7

In September of 1910 Senoo returned to Ichik! once again,
but within ten days he experienced a severe stomachache and lack of
appetite. Doctors said he had pneumonia again and he was forced to
return home.
8
Conditions in T!j! were depressing due to economic
duress, but Senoo soon found solace in religion. In February, 1911
Senoo met an elderly, wifeless tofu merchant named Matsuzaki
Ky"tar!, a devout believer in the Nichirensh" sects teachings.
Senoos family was traditionally affiliated with the True Pure Land
sect, but following his chance encounter with Matsuzaki, Senoo
converted to Nichiren Buddhism.
9
The death of Senoos sixteen-
year-old sister in June strengthened Senoos devotion to his newly
found religion.
10

For a few months Senoo visited a local Nichiren temple daily
and participated in ritual readings of the Lotus S"tra aloud.
Becoming close to the head priest, he was also able to borrow and
read Nichirens works and writings in the Tendai tradition. He also
spent time wandering around the mountainous countryside. One day
he overexerted himself while removing a heavy cart from the middle

7
Inagaki, 40-41.
8
Ibid., 41-42.
9
Ibid., 43.
10
Ibid., 44.
182
of a mountain road. He soon caught pneumonia again. In September
1911 he decided to formally withdraw from Ichik!. After once again
recovering physically Senoo found a substitute teaching job at his
local alma mater, the T!j! Jinj! K!t! Sh!gakk! (T!j! First Normal
Higher Elementary School). He began in November.
11

During two years of work as a substitute teacher at the school,
Senoo was not very happy. When he was a student at Ichik! he had
run an informal school for local children during his vacations back
home. He taught such subjects as English and composition. He
loved it and so did the students. However, Senoos stint at the
elementary school left him feeling empty and disillusioned, mostly
with what he called the mechanical quality of the other teachers.
He continued to be attached to the Lotus S"tra, but during this period
he developed an interest in Christianity when a fellow teacher gave
him a pocketbook version of the Bible.
12

After two years Senoo left the elementary school in
September of 1913. On a whim and because tuition would be free,
Senoo took the application test for the East Asian Common Writings
Academy (T!-A D!bunshoin). The foreign ministry formed the
academy to promote good relations between Japan and China. He
and three others passed the test but they were unable to study at the

11
Ibid., 44.
12
Ibid., 45-46.
183
academys institute in Shanghai because its buildings were burned
down in the 1911 Chinese Revolution. They ended up in Nagasaki
for training in Chinese language. Before going to Nagasaki Senoo
had ear surgery and this lead to headaches and inner-ear pain. The
fact that he and his fellow students were temporarily and inadequately
housed on the grounds of a Nichiren temple did not help his health.
However, the chants of the Nichiren daimoku (namu My!h!
rengeky!/hail to the Lotus S"tra of the wonderful law) reminded
Senoo of Matsuzaki. Matsuzaki used to chant the daimoku as he
made tofu. Soon Senoo was visiting the head priest at the Nagasaki
temple, asking him questions about Buddhism.
13

According to Inagaki Masami, this was the point at which
Senoo passed beyond a commonsensical interpretation of
Buddhism, and he had an opportunity to deepen his understanding of
Buddhist literature. The head priest of the Nagasaki temple
educated Senoo about such concepts as the innate Buddha-nature of
everyone or everything, the Nichiren and Tendai Buddhist concept
that everything is contained within one thing and even heaven
contains hell and vice-versa (ichinen-sanzen), the four noble truths,
the twelve stages of dependent origination, and the doctrine of the six

13
Ibid., 47.
184
paramitas (perfections).
14
In other words Senoo learned the basics of
both Buddhist philosophy and about the specifics of Nichiren-Tendai
Buddhism.
Despite enjoying his knowledge of Buddhism increasing,
Senoos illness worsened. He decided to quit the academy, staying
behind in late fall when his compatriots left for newly rebuilt facilities
in Shanghai. When Senoo next returned to the family home, the
family suffered financial disaster because the sake they had in stock
spoiled. His elder brother headed the family and its business because
Senoos father had died when Senoo was a young boy. His elder
brother had always been the strength of the family, but at this point,
even he fell ill. During this family crisis Senoo recovered from
illness yet again while devoting himself to the Lotus S"tra and
understanding Buddhist literature more generally.
15

Even as his physical health improved his emotional anguish
remained and Senoo began to think about going abroad as a way to
relieve the pressure on his elder brother and family. In the Spring of
1914 Senoo went to Taiwan. With the recommendation of an
acquaintance he soon found work in the patent office of Chilung, a
city in northern Taiwan. He lived in a dormitory for government
employees and began to save a little money. Before too long,

14
Ibid., 47-48.
15
Ibid., 48.
185
however, he was ill again with chest problems and ear sickness.
Doctors in Taipei ordered Senoo to return home. He reluctantly did
so in March 1915. On arrival in T!j! he was diagnosed with
tuberculosis, an inflamed appendix and pleurisy. His family once
again endured his long convalescence.
16

Senoo slowly recovered and it was during this period that a
hot spring resort manager exposed him to Tanaka Chigakus writing
for the first time. However, an equally significant event occurred in
September of 1915. Senoo decided to go on a pilgrimage to the
1000 significant temples (sen ga ji) of the Nichirensh" sect. The
pilgrimage would end at Mount Minobe, near Mount Fuji. His trip
became difficult immediately because, contrary to what he had
anticipated, Nichirensh" temples in Okayama Prefecture refused him
lodging. In the city of Takahashi a Nichiren believer told him that in
the southern Okayama town of S!ja there was a temple called the
Shakuson Sh"y!in (Reverent #$kyamuni Cultivation Temple), where
a kind priest named Shaku Nikken ran an orphanage.
17
Shaku had
been the head priest of a famous temple, the Honzan My!honji in
Okayamas Yamato Mura. Following the sudden increase of orphans
in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war, Shaku decided to give up that
life. With a Nichirensh" nun with whom he lived as husband and

16
Ibid., 49.
17
Ibid., 50-51.
186
wife, he founded the Sh"y!in as an orphanage. The children called
the couple mom (okaasan) and dad (ot!san).
18

When Shaku saw Senoo for the first time it was clear to him
that Senoo was not going to be able to continue on his pilgrimage.
After staying one night Shaku invited Senoo to stay longer. These
were economically difficult times in general and the temple was
home to around thirty orphans. Senoo wished to repay the priest and
his wife for their kindness. Senoo made use of his experience as a
teacher, helping the children with their studies. He told them Aesops
fables and drew cartoons for them. The children seemed to have
deeply enjoyed being with him and he enjoyed this work. Senoo
also took part in religious practices with Shaku, absorbing himself in
chanting the daimoku. Shaku, as an unorthodox priest, somewhat
disdainfully discussed the character of temples and priests with
Senoo. His experiences in S!ja led Senoo to conclude that
becoming an independent priest like Shaku was appropriate for
himself as well. In December of 1915 Senoo soon took the tonsure
in a ceremony led by Shaku.
19

Soon after his ordainment Senoo felt ill again, so he went to
the Okayama Prefectural hospital where he was diagnosed with
chronic disease of the respiratory and digestive organs. He returned

18
Ibid., 51.
19
Inagaki, Budda o seoite, 52.
187
to the temple however and felt well enough by the first week of 1916
to plan to resume his pilgrimage in the spring. Unfortunately, his
mother soon became terminally ill and he returned to T!j! to nurse
her. She died shortly thereafter. During the ensuing two years
Senoo stayed in the T!j! area where he often visited a local Nichiren
temple and participated in daily activities. He formed a club with
others he met at the temple called the Nichirenshugi Sangy!kai
(Society for Respecting and Revering Nichirenism).
20
This clubs
aims and its name reflect the fact that since his introduction to
Chigakus thought, Senoo read other works espousing the teachings
of a specifically modern Nichirenism. Senoo read Nichirenist
literature even more intensely during the period when he lived in T!j!
after his mothers death.
21
The period between 1915 and 1918 also
corresponds to the better part of what the scholar Tokoro Shigeki has
termed the golden age of Nichirenism (1912-1918). During this
golden age Nichirenism as a movement that centered on the figures
of Tanaka Chigaku and Honda Nissh! was becoming increasingly
popular.
22


20
Ibid., 53.
21
%tani, 269-270, notes the specific dates (1915-1917) on which
Senoo began to read specific works by Chigaku, Anesaki Masaharu,
Sat! Tetsutar!, Honda Nissh! and others connected to Nichirenism.
22
See Ibid., 224.
188
In the summer of 1917 Senoos health began to improve and
he started to make plans to move to the capital. He was dissatisfied in
T!j! because he felt cutoff from the center of the burgeoning
Nichirenism movement. He decided to try forging a relationship with
Chigakus Kokuch"kai before going to the capital.
23
Towards this
end he visited the Osaka branch headquarters of the Kokuch"kai,
obtaining a letter of recommendation to introduce himself to Chigaku.
Arriving in Tokyo in late March, he went to the Kokuch"kai building
near Ueno with his letter in hand, hoping for a meeting with Chigaku.
Kokuch"kai representatives told him that Chigaku was not available
because he was too busy.
24
He returned to the Kokuch"kai building
in early April and participated in a large meeting. He also heard
Chigaku speak. With letter in hand he again sought an interview with
the Kokuch"kai leader, but Kokuch"kai representatives told Senoo
that Chigaku was sick, and that no other official of the group would
meet with him. In his hometown Senoo read the Kokuch"kai organ
and other Kokuch"kai literature. He felt close to the group before he
arrived in Tokyo. However, the way the group rebuffed him
disillusioned him deeply. He concluded that as an enormous
mechanism the Kokuch"kai had a bureaucratic character, which

23
Inagaki, Budda o seoite, 57.
24
Ibid., 58, %tani, 270.
189
meant that it disregarded those with rural backgrounds such as
himself.
25

Senoo dejectedly wandered around Ueno wondering what to
do next. He soon acquired Honda Nissh!s Hokkeky! no shinzui (The
essence of the Lotus S"tra, 1917) and he liked what he read. Because
of this, ten days after his last visit to the Kokuch"kai, Senoo attended
the weekly Sunday lecture in Asakusa at the T!itsukaku (Unification
Tower), the headquarters of Hondas lay and clerical Nichirenist
group, the T!itsudan (Unification Group).
26
Honda was the head
priest of a small Nichiren sect, the Kenpon Hokkesh", one that had a
history going back to medieval times, but he was also the organizer of
several organizations that aimed at addressing the contemporary
social context. The idea of t!itsu, or unification, was one of his key
ideas. This was not exactly Chigakus sekai t!itsu or world
unification, however. Hondas t!itsu primarily meant the unification
of all the various Nichiren sects and all the schools of Buddhism.
Honda was also interested in the unification Japanese society,
meaning chiefly that he was concerned to maintain harmony between
capital and labor.
After Hondas lecture that Sunday, Senoo met with a
T!itsudan representative and he was very frank with his criticisms of

25
Ibid., 58.
26
Ibid., %tani, 270.
190
traditional religion, his disdain for the orthodox priesthood, and his
own unorthodox personal character. In the middle of May Senoo
received a letter from Honda stating that the priest felt the same way
regarding such matters. The two met on the nineteenth at the
T!itsukaku. Honda advised Senoo to work for the ideals of
Nichirenism as a layman.
27

By the beginning of March 1919 Senoo was working full-
time for Hondas T!itsudan. In addition to daily clerical duties
Senoo worked as Hondas proofreader. This was a time when
Honda was publishing several major works. Senoo also participated
in lecture meetings at Hondas T!itsukaku headquarters, assisting in
preparations for both regular meetings and special events. Senoo
accompanied Honda wherever he gave speeches. In this period 500
to 800 people came to Hondas Sunday lectures every week. These
were mostly working class people seeking solace from troubled times
in religion. Following a Nichirenism Youth Meeting sponsored by
the priests of Hondas Kenpon Hokkesh" sect in November 1919,
Senoo formed the Greater Japan Nichirenism Youth League
(Dainihon Nichirenshugi Seinendan, henceforth DNS).
28
The DNS
was originally composed of students in Nichirenism-related clubs at
Waseda, Tokyo, T!y!, Meiji, and Nichirensh" (todays Rissh!)

27
Ibid. %tani, 270.h
28
Ibid., 70-71.h
191
universities. Ichik! students and students from the Tokyo Womens
Vocational Medical College (Tokyo Joshi Isen Gakk!) also
participated.
29

The beginning of the Greater Japan Nichirenism Youth League
Years

Honda Nissh! founded the Tenseikai (Radiant Heaven
Association) in 1909 as a club for societys upper echelon. These
powerful individuals rallied around certain men of knowledge and
sought to engineer social harmony. They were capitalized on the
popularity of the concept of Nichirenism, which as we have seen was
invented by Tanaka Chigaku in the early part of the decade. Their
stated purpose involved manifesting the law of Lotus Buddhism in
this world, and both studying and revering the Nichirens human
qualities.
30
The groups membership included priests, academics,
politicians, military officers, lawyers, bureaucrats, members of the
Public Prosecutor Generals staff, doctors, journalists, industrialists,
artists, and novelists. The Tenseikai formed the basis for what %tani
Eiichi calls Hondas Nichirenism network.
31

Senoo, without fully realizing it at first, became a tool of the
Tenseikai and its Nichirenism network when he founded the DNS.
This role for the DNS was consistent with the role of seinendan or

29
Ibid., 62.
30
%tani, 164, 169-70.
31
Ibid., 170-71.
192
youth groups in Japanese society since the 1910s when state and
military figures attempted to use them to inculcate a patriotic and
martial spirit in the young, discouraging any form of social conflict
within the nation.
32
What was different about the DNS was that its
sponsors sought to offer good guidance (zend!) to the nation in the
name of Nichirenism.
33

When Senoo and other leaders of the DNS published the
inaugural issue of their organ, Wak!do, in September 1920 they
distributed it to every single region in Japan, as well as to Korea,
Taiwan, and Sakhalin. That month Senoo and three other DNS
organizers went on a speaking tour to Miyagi, Iwate, Aomori, Akita,
Yamagata, Fukushima, and Mito prefectures. However, the wide
distribution of the organ had little to do with their efforts. Instead, the
Tenseikais network promoted the DNS and their organ in an attempt
to use the organization to address what the rich and powerful
considered social illnesses.
34
These putative illnessesin the form of
radical political activity among workers, farmers and studentswere
burgeoning in the wake of World War One.
35


32
See, for example, Carol Gluck, Japans Modern Myths: Ideology in
the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985),
198-200.
33
Inagaki, Budda o seoite, 67.
34
Inagaki, Budda o seoite, 67. Matsune Takashi, Senoo Gir! to Shin
Bukky! Seinen D!mei (Tokyo: Sanpin Shob!, 1975), 37.
35
Inagaki, Budda o seoite, 67.
193
Senoo was particularly useful towards these ends as a writer
and orator because he seemed to identify the apparently ubiquitous
illnesses of a conflict-ridden, fully capitalist society with the personal
illnesses that he battled in his own life. Senoo found personal solace
in religion and he argued in 1920 that embracing religion would
likewise enable Japan to overcome spiritual and social problems on a
national level. In Wak!do no sakebi (The shout of youth), an
essay in Wak!dos first issue, Senoo describes the contemporary
world as being in disarray, complaining that one thing is broken by
what next will be broken. He writes of a world in despair, where the
scream of one who wishes for peace is supplanted by a demon that
has cursed the world, a world where no one seems to be in charge.
36

Despite the resemblance between some of Senoos words and
Marxs analysis of a world where all certainties are constantly
undermined, Senoo also emphatically proclaimed that the solution to
the situation he decried did not lie in Socialism, Communism, or
radicalism.
37

In Wak!do no sakebi Senoo intertwines his personal
difficulties and the anxious personal feelings of others with the both
the distress felt by those in Japanese society who had a tendency to

36
Senoo Gir!, Wak!do no sakebi in Senoo Gir! sh"ky! ronsh",
ed. Inagaki Masami (Tokyo: Daiz! Shuppan, 1975), 11.
37
Ibid.
194
rebel against an unjust status quo (radicals), as well as those for
whom rebellion in itself was the cause for distress (the Tenseikai).
He argued that religion offered the key to waking up from delusory
and troubling everyday life. Senoos own experience with faith led
him to decry any trend towards what he considered the hollow appeal
of secularism. According to Senoo at the time, when one separates
oneself from religion, it is like a flower with no root because there is
no life. Even if it is beautiful it soon shrivels.
38

Senoos sought to inspire youth to break out of what he
considered a kind of collective hypnosis, but his words anticipate the
violent language of 1930s Nichirenist terrorists who resorted to literal
violence in their quest for an escape from the problems Senoo
confronted in 1920:
[t]he daring undertaking that was the [Meiji]
Restoration too depended on the young people who
were warriors of the nation. Just who is it that is
going to sweep away the evil cloud that will obstruct
the sunlight in the present Taish! age, when there are
more and more internal and external manifold
hardships? It is the Autumn when everyone must rise
together as one, but then again who do you think it is
who should be the backbone of this? Who is chosen to
be the corps of those who are prepared to die
[kesshitai]? Is it not the young people of the Dainihon
Nichirenshugi Seinendan?
39



38
Ibid., 13.
39
Ibid., 13. Emphasis in the original is in boldface.
195
Senoos ideas for his young constituency most dovetail with the
concerns of a Tenseikai that was following in the footsteps of earlier
sponsors of seinendan. The ideal young person, he argues,
should be a warrior for the laws of Buddhism
[dharma], for the emperor, for the nation, for the
world. He should also shine light upon and lend his
strength to the prefecture, county, town, village,
household, armed forces, schools, hospitals, society
and all of the things in heaven and earth.
40


Senoo then goes on to implore his compatriots to be model
politicians, soldiers, scholars, merchants, doctors, farmers, and
craftsmen.
41

Senoo also specifically connects his discourse on youth to
Nichirenism. After the quote above, Senoo states that chanting
praises to the Lotus S"tra is the necessary accompaniment to serving
the nation. He says that this is the foundation of true world peace,
the health of the nation and social harmony. He then identifies the
mission of Japans youth with that of the Jiyu Bosatsu, (Bodhisattvas
of the Earth).
42
These are figures that the Buddha in the Lotus S"tra
predicts will rise from out of the earth in a future degraded period
(mapp!) in order to lead all living things to salvation. Nichiren
himself personally identified with the leader of these bodhisattvas,
and in the modern period, many Nichirenists identified themselves

40
Ibid., 13-14.
41
Ibid., 14.
42
Ibid., 14.
196
with them as well. Nichirenists tended to identify modern social
problems with the degraded last days of mapp!, despite the fact that
Nichiren thought he was living in that period in the thirteenth-
century. Modern Nichirenists would moreover identify their own
activities that aimed at bringing about a better world with the activity
of the Jiyu Bosatsu. Rising out of the earth signified overcoming the
most degraded or difficult situations and because of his chronic
illness it is not difficult to imagine that Senoo himself identified with
the bodhisattvas.
The Beginning of the Break
Senoo led a by life during the early years of the DNS. He
worked on Wak!do and traveling around the country lecturing. In
Tokyo he constantly visited parishioners of what he called his
temple in motion (ugoku otera), giving advice about religious and
other matters. He ran a Sunday school at Hondas T!itsukaku with
nursing school student volunteers and others.
43
In the midst of all of
this Senoo also married Sait! Fumiyo. She had been a teacher at the
elementary school in Senoos hometown where he had worked, and
they had corresponded during the intervening years.
44
He had found
and married his lifelong companion and one might assume that these
were happy years for him.

43
Inagaki, Budda o seoite, 63.
44
Ibid., 63-64
197
However, Senoo started to have misgivings about the DNS
by at least 1922. In the summer of that year Senoo and several
students who were living in the Wak!do ry!, a hostel that the DNS
operated in Tokyo, spent around a month at a villa at the beach in
Kamakura called Paradise (Rakuen). Senoo and the others
enjoyed themselves, for example, staging a dramatization of
Nichirens life (Inagaki calls it a pageant). The owner of the villa
was Ueda Tokishige, the president of a securities company as well as
a member of the DNS. When confronted with the opulence of Uedas
lifestyle, here, in a place called Paradise Senoo got his first inkling
that the financial backers of his youth group were motivated by
something other than religiosity.
45

In 1924 landowners and their allies invited Senoo to
mediate in disputes between tenant farmers and landlords in three
villages in Yamagata Prefecture. Such disputes began in the early
Taish! period (1912-1926), with as many as 1260 incidents in 1924.
According to Inagaki, Yamagata was especially affected by the
disputes, the prefecture was also a traditional stronghold of the
Nichirensh" sect, and there were many youth there who joined the
DNS. Despite the fact that the members of the landowning class

45
Ibid., 66-67.
198
invited him, Senoo gradually came to take the side of the tenants in
the disputes.
46

From this time on we see two parallel tendencies in the
Senoo life and thought. One is concerns his changing conception of
Buddhisma movement away from Nichirenism and towards
something new. Secondly, consistent with his propensity to criticize
existing capitalism and, increasingly, an embrace of Socialism,
Communism, Marxism, and proletarian interests in general he moved
towards the political left. Both tendencies began to reach fruition in
Senoos founding of the Shink! Bukky! D!mei in 1931.
The Change in Senoos Buddhism
From 1925 to 1928 Senoos thinking shifted and this is
reflected in essays he published in Wak!do. Ironically, Senoo took
the first major step towards a new way of conceptualizing Buddhism
when he publicly defended the thought of Honda Nissh!. In 1927
Senoo published a series of articles in six chapters on the honzon,
which literally means object of worship. They were a polemic
directed primarily at the Rissh! University scholar, Kiyomizu
Ry"zan. In Nichiren Buddhism the word honzon in its most basic
sense refers to a mandala, a graphic representation of the cosmos.

46
Inagaki, Budda o seoite, 70-72. For a historical account of the
nationwide disputes between tenant farmers and their landlords
during the interwar period, see Ann Waswo, The Origins of Tenant
Unrest, in Japan in Crisis.
199
Specifically it refers to a mandala created by Nichiren that has the
written phrase namu My!h! Rengeky! (hail to the Lotus S"tra of the
Wonderful Law) at its center. The phrase is also called the daimoku
and Nichiren Buddhists typically chant the phrase as part of their
everyday religious activity. The dispute between Senoo and Honda
on the one hand, and Kiyomizu on the other, was over the precise
relationship between the daimoku and the honzon.
Nichiren can be read to have meant that reverencing the
honzon and chanting the daimoku are means to actualize the Buddha
within oneself and to transform the world into a pure land or paradise
of the Buddha. Nichiren can also be read to have meant that a cosmic
and immanent Buddha pervading everything is one and the same with
the historical Buddha, #$kyamuni who lived as an actual man in
India. However Nichirens thought is ambiguous. Because the
Honbutsu or original Buddha and #$kyamuni

are one and the same, it
is possible to emphasize one or the other as most important.
47

In his interpretation of Nichirens Kanjin honzonsh! (treatise
on the contemplation of the object of worship), Kiyomizu emphasized
the importance of the eternal original Buddha. Kiyomizu recognized
the oneness of this Buddha and both this world and its inhabitants.
But for him the Buddha as a supernatural, cosmic essence took

47
Cf., Inagaki, Budda o seoite, 72-75.
200
precedence over #$kyamuni, and the honzon correlated with the
cosmic, eternal original Buddha (Honbutsu). In the pages of Wak!do,
Senoo articulated Hondas argument, stressing the importance of
#$kyamuni as a man who lived, became awakened and died in India.
According to Senoos articulation of Hondas argument, the honzon
referred to the three treasures of the Buddha, the dharma (law or
teachings), and the sangha (community of Buddhists). For Honda
according to Senoo, the Buddha of the three treasures was
fundamentally the historical #$kyamuni, the dharma referred to the
Lotus S"tra, and the sangha referred to the four Bodhisattvas who are
the leaders of the Jiyu Bosatsu or the Bodhisattvas of the earth.
48

The difference between Honda and Kiyomizu had
ramifications for Senoos political transformation. To claim that
everything is always already the eternal, original and always already
awakened Buddha gives ones blessing to the status quo, conceptually

48
Inagaki, Budda o seoite, 74-75. The text of Honzonron hihan is
included in Senoo Gir! sh"ky! ronsh", pp. 86-196. There is a very
clear exposition of Senoos approving position on Hondas view of
the honzon in Senoos own words in Senoo Gir! nikki [Senoo Gir!
diary], volume 3, ed. Senoo Tetsutar! and Inagaki Masami (Tokyo:
Kokusho Kenk!kai, 1974-75), p. 180 (dated 29 January, 1927). Here
Senoo states that, according to Honda, even though Nichiren stressed
the human nature of the object of worship this does not mean that the
honzon (or Buddha) simply already exists within ones own heart and
mind. Rather, for Honda, the emphasis is on the historical Buddha
who is the this-worldly embodiment of the truth of such Buddhist
teachings as that all things are interrelated and mutually dependent.
According to the argument, the Buddha as a living human being is to
function as a model for human activity.
201
transforming the status quo into a manifestation of the Buddha. If
one adopts this position one would tend not to engage in political
activity that would challenge the way things are. To emphasize the
this-worldly character of the Buddha #$kyamuni, however, as well as
the concept of Jiyu Bosatsu as a metaphor for those who originate
from and act within this world promotes the notion that this-worldly
activity is always consistent with the teachings of Buddhism. In other
words, Kiyomizus line of thought risked apotheosizing the
immanence of the Buddha. This was to the degree that it shifted into
a kind of transcendence due to an implicit inalterability of the world
as is. In contrast, promoting the historical Buddha as a model for
activity in this world leaves room for the conceptual possibility of
human agency.
For Honda, however, this-worldly activity meant more
deeply engaging with politics in the actual modern world in order to
facilitate harmonious social relations ensuring the maintenance of a
status quo under capitalism. For Senoo, as we shall see, the
tendencies inherent in Hondas Buddhism would take on a more
radical character. First, however, Senoo had to engage in a
conceptual dialogue with modern Buddhology (modern studies of
Buddhism initiated by Western Orientalists). Another part of the
202
puzzle that was Senoo Gir! has to do with his movement towards the
political Left, and that is where we now turn our attention.
The Change in Senoos Politics
Between 1925 and 1928, Senoo also began to see the
political, economic and social landscape in new ways. In these years
he continued working on behalf of tenant farmers in their struggles
with the land-owning class. He also took an interest in factory
workers, breaking with Hondas policy of encouraging labor-capital
cooperation. Senoo had already read Kawakami Hajimes Tale of
the Poor (Binb! monogatari), and he found it inspiring. Now Senoo
read works such as Hosoi Wakiz!s Factory Girls Tragedy (Jok!
aishi) and Romain Rollands Mahatma Gandhi. He also read the
various works of Marx and Engels, along with Lenins State and
Revolution, Bukharins The World Economy, Yamakawa Hitoshis
Remarks on Socialism (Shakaishugi no hanashi), and Hoinden
Yoshios Consumer Union Pilgrimage (Sh!hi kumai junrei). As
Senoo completed these works one after the other, Inagaki reports, he
wanted to put them into practice. On a practical level he
recommended that readers of Wak!do read Yamakawa Hitoshis
book.
49


49
Inagaki, Budda o seoite, 78-79.
203
As evidenced by his diary entries, by 1925Senoo began to
more deeply comprehend the contradictions of his own position. He
went to the house of a famous soy sauce brewer in Noda, Chiba
Prefecture as a missionary. When confronted by the grandeur of
the brewers garden Senoo observed the direct link between that
grandeur and the sweat of workers. He wrote that the wondrous
garden was the workers involuntary present to the capitalist class. In
that same year Senoo heard about the abhorrent suffering of farmers
in Shizuoka Prefecture, and responded that societal structures must
immediately improve, that the rich are squeezing blood from the
working class, and that he was beginning to feel revolutionary
sentiments.
50
Senoo started to be more forthcoming with his
opinions by 1928. In that year he was asked to give a lecture as a
missionary at a textile factory in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture.
Confronted with the pale faces of the exhausted women working the
night shift in the factory, he ended his talk by stating that reform of
the capitalist system was absolutely necessary.
51

During the years in question, Senoo began to more fully
comprehend the reasons for radicalism in opposition to capitalist
exploitation. When he went to Okayama Prefecture to engage in
missionary work in 1926, he saw unrest in the region and he noticed

50
Ibid.
51
Ibid., 79.
204
that security was exceedingly tight in anticipation of an imperial
family members passage through the area. Authorities perceived a
frightening tendency towards radicalism and socialism in the area.
Senoos believed that the problem in Okayama was that people there
had not fully reflected upon their attitude towards Burakumin
(outcastes) and Koreans. In other words, Senoo appreciated material
factors precipitating dissatisfaction with the status quo.
52

In the late 1920s Senoo did not limit his concerns to the
plight of farmers and factory workers. For example, in the summer of
1928, Senoo traveled to his hometown in Hiroshima Prefecture
where he joined a local residents campaign to protest the
construction of a dam in the Taishaku canyon scenic region. Existing
laws for the conservation of nature protected the canyon, but a
hydraulic power company engaged in corrupt practices so as to secure
the right to build the dam anyway. They conspired with local
officials and used yakuza to intimidate people.
53
Senoo also became
very concerned with the situation of prostitutes in legal brothels and
he called for the emancipation of women and girls who were virtually
slaves. In a 1928 issue of Wak!do Senoo published the words of an

52
Ibid., 79.
53
Ibid., 80. Inagaki notes that because the Senoo family had gone
bankrupt as sake brewers and gone into the hotel business, Senoo
had a personal interest in maintaining the natural beauty of Hiroshima
Prefecture.
205
elementary school teacher from northeastern Japan who stated that
some of the prostitutes working in Tokyos major red light district
(Yoshiwara) were his former students. In the same issue, Senoo
himself wrote of the incessant abuse of the women and girls who had
been sold into the profession.
54

Importantly, during the late 1920s Senoo did not simply
write about Japans social problems. With the exception of Hokaid!
and Ky"sh" he traveled all over the country as a man of religion
(sh"ky!sha). Inagaki notes that this is especially remarkable
considering the slow speed of modes of transportation at the time. In
each of the regions he visited Senoo went to high schools, junior
high schools, normal schools, womens schools, farming villages,
and factories. He gave lectures and personally interacted with people.
He also engaged in roundtable discussions with students and youth.
His lectures concerned the Lotus S"tra, but he also addressed current
events from the perspective of his changing political consciousness.
55

The End of the Dainihon Nichirenshugi Seinendan
Senoos movement away from Nichirenism orthodoxy
reached a peak in 1930 with the February issue of Wak!do. On the
opening page Senoo criticized the extravagant cost of the wedding of
the Sh!wa emperors brother. He expressed indignation that the

54
Ibid., 80-1.
55
Ibid., 81-82.
206
imperial house spent so much on a wedding when so many people
had so little. In the same issue Senoo called billionaires
(kinmanzoku) and capitalists hungry ghosts in an article titled True
Love is Like This (Shinai wa kaku no gotoku). Hungry ghosts in
Buddhist cosmology have huge bellies and tiny mouths, and they can
never be satisfied. In other words they are pathologically selfish and
materialistic. Senoo moreover stated that leading Nichirenists
performed as mouthpieces for these hungry ghosts. Lastly, he
denounced as an opiate the tendency of these Nichirenists to purvey
an abstract religiosity catering to the interests of the bourgeoisie at the
expense of the proletariat.
56

Senoo published entries from his diary in Wak!dos February
1930 issue. In the entry dated 5 December 1929, Senoo criticized
the March and February mass arrests of Communists in May 1928.
Senoo argued that such measures failed to address the actual
problems of Japanese society.
57
After an invitation to the Kabubiza
(Tokyos famous Kabuki theatre in the expensive Ginza district),
Senoo wrote in an entry dated 10 December 1929 that it was a crime
to enjoy the luxury of such a place with so many who could not even

56
Ibid., 84-5.
57
Ibid. On the opening page of the October, 1928 issue of Wak!do
Senoo had already argued that the root of what the establishment
considered dangerous thought was the tyranny of the ruling class
(cited in Matsune, 41).
207
afford the price of admission to a cheap movie theatre in the working
class amusement area of Asakusa. He charged that since there were
those who can afford no amusement, the Kabukiza should be
demolished.
58

Senoos writings in the February issue led to the fatal blow
for Senoos tenure as editor of Wak!do and the death knell for the
DNS itself. The executive staff of Wak!do included Ueda Tokishige
and Tokitomo Senjir!, two wealthy individuals. They had been
important financiers of the DNS throughout its history. Ueda was
especially infuriated because he was the one who had invited Senoo
to the Kabukiza. Ueda and Tokitomo attempted to wrest editorial
control from Senoo after the February issue and Senoo resigned in
March 1930. Later, because of the popularity of Senoos writings,
Ueda and Tokitomo reconsidered and reconciled with Senoo,
rehiring him in May. Feeling their positions within the DNS
weakened thereafter, Ueda and Tokitomo left the organization
themselves in December. By this time however, Senoo had realized
the limitations of Nichirenism. It was time for something new.
Shink! Bukky! and Senoo Gir!s Renovation
At the January annual meeting of the DNS, Senoo and the
twenty-five assembled leaders of the group agreed to a motion to

58
Inagaki, 84-85.
208
form the Shink! Bukky! Seinen D!mei (New Buddhist youth
alliance, SBSD) and dissolve the DNS. Not everyone in the DNS
went along with the new group however. In particular, the Yamagata
Prefecture branch did not participate.
59
On the whole, of the two
thousand people in the DNS at the time of its dissolution, five to six
hundred went along with the shift to the SBSD. At its peak in 1936,
its national membership would rise to 3000.
60
By April Senoo had
replaced Wak!do with Shink! Bukky! no hata no shita (Under the
banner of New Buddhism).
In June the new organ featured an essay titled Shink!
Bukky! e no tenshin (the change to New Buddhism). Shink!
Bukky! e is written as a long dialogue between A and B and it was
originally serialized in eight chapters. In the text B asks A why he
had changed his allegiances from Nichirenism to New Buddhism. A
is a personification of Senoo and B is his interlocutor. In the
following section we will use Shink! Bukky! e to better understand
Senoos 1931 self-transformation.
From Nichirenism to New Buddhism
Shink! Bukky! e starts with Senoo explaining the three
principles of the SBSD: to display the true value of Buddhism while
denouncing the degenerate character of established Buddhism; to

59
Ibid., 90.
60
Large, 92.
209
overcome the division and ugly bickering between different Buddhist
sects and effect a unification of Buddhism; and to participate in the
movement to transform a capitalism that is in opposition to the spirit
of the Buddha, as a means to actualize an ideal society characterized
by love and equality.
One of the more striking features of Shink! Bukky! e is
Senoo reconciliation of the contradiction between Nichirenism and a
New Buddhism that he grounds in what he calls fundamental
Buddhism (konpon Bukky!). His fundamental Buddhism refers to
the direct teachings of the Buddha as defined for the most part by
modern scholars who study Buddhism (Buddhologists).
61
In Shink!
Bukky! e Senoo cites Japanese Buddhologists, Takakusu Junjir!
and his student Ui Hakuj". Takakusu had first learned his craft
studying with the great German Orientalist Max Mller at Oxford.
He then studied at several German universities and the College du
France, where he developed a relationship with Sylvain Levi, a noted
French scholar of Buddhism.
62
Shink! Bukky! e features a quote
from Takakusu on the atheist character of Buddhism, and an excerpt

61
See Senoo Gir!, Shink! Bukky! e no tenshin, 270-71, for
statement of the veracity of views produced by modern scholarship
on Buddhism.
62
See Jackie Stone, A Vast and Grave Task, 225.
210
regarding the insubstantiality of the self from T.W. Rhys Davids, the
British Orientalist who studied Pali and Sri Lankan Buddhism.
63

Various regions of East, Central and Southeast Asia
respectively developed Buddhisms that over a very long history
incorporated elaborate rituals, fantastic theologies, and what modern
academics until very recently pejoratively called superstition. Japan
was no exception. The Western and eventually the Japanese
academic approaches to Buddhism privileged a pure Buddhism,
unearthed for the most part by archeologists and philologists. The
result of the academic study of Buddhism as a world religion in
modern times was often a version of the religion that had little to do
with what people in Buddhist communities had practiced for much of
history.
64

The new primitive or fundamental Buddhism of Orientalist
scholars tended to privilege what secular Westerners deemed rational.
The rationality of this modern Buddhism often centered on

63
For an excellent study of Rys Davids, see Charles Halleisey,
Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravada Buddhism
in The Curators of the Buddha.
64
See, for example, Richard Kings Orientalism and Religion, where
he notes the nostalgia for origins that drove nineteenth-century
scholars to offer a prescriptive account of Buddhism and to associate
authentic Buddhism (whatever that might be) with the teachings of
the founder (p. 148). King also notes the way that non-Westerners
from countries with a Buddhist tradition have played an important
part in the redefinition of Buddhism. Cf., Jonathan Z. Smith,
Religion, Religions, Religious in Critical Terms for Religious
Studies, 278-79.
211
antinomian and anti-Christian notions in vogue in the nineteenth and
early-twentieth-century West. One such notion hinged on the
insubstantiality of all phenomena, such as the self or God. The point
here is not that someone we call the Buddha did not teach such
things. Nor is it the case that such basically atheist or agnostic
teachings as the eight-fold noble path, and the four noble truths
have not had places in the traditions of various Buddhisms. It is
rather that the history of something we call Buddhism is much more
complex (and rich) than any philosophy commonly attributed to the
historical Buddha.
An example of Senoos appropriation of Buddhology is his
definition of the Buddhisms true nature. Senoo explains in the
text that Buddhism repudiates self and attachment or in other
words the individual self and private ownership. Buddhism teaches,
he argues, selflessness [or non-self] and non-private ownership.
65

The doctrine of selflessness was one of the defining characteristics of
many versions of Buddhism academically defined. Other examples
of Senoos indebtedness to Buddhology include his argument that
Buddhism entails believing that God or gods do not exist.
66
Despite
commonly held ideas in the West about Japanese Buddhism (Zen in

65
Senoo Gir!, Shink! Bukky! e. 262.
66
See for example, Ibid., 272.
212
particular), these ideas contradict the common sense of lay or clerical
Japanese Buddhist communities throughout pre-modern history.
Later, Senoo explains what he calls the M$hayana non-
Buddha theory (Daj! hi-Butsu setsu), which too was indebted to
modern Buddhology. This is the theory that the M$hayana Buddhist
scriptures are not a record of the direct teachings of the Buddha.
Senoo argues that this indicates the historical reality of a
developing Buddhism (hattatsu Bukky!).
67
As Senoo explains,
respective communities of believers have regarded all of the Buddhist
scriptures, both M$hayana and Theravada, as the Buddhas direct
teachings. However, Buddhism and times both change and they
develop as civilization progresses. The M$hayana scriptures were
created by a number of latter day disciples in each historical
period.
68
This seems almost impossible to reconcile with
Nichirenism because Nichiren argued for the absolute primacy of the
Lotus S"tra. He believed that all Buddhist teachings are subsumed
within the Lotus and ultimately suggested that the chanted praise of
the sutras title (the daimoku) somehow contains all of those
teachings.
Senoo managed to reconcile his own Nichirenist past with a
future he wished to construct by using Nichiren to overcome

67
Ibid., 266.
68
Ibid., 265-66.
213
Nichiren. For Nichiren, the Lotus S"tra had never been the object of
absolute devotion before his time because it had never previously
been appropriate to venerate the sutra in such a way. Nichiren
claimed in fact that much of his own significance derived from his
ability to discern what was appropriate for his own age. For
Nichiren, in other words, exclusive devotion to the Lotus S"tra was
most appropriate in the degraded period of Mapp!. Senoo argued
that one should acknowledge that everything in the universe had
changed since Nichirens time, just as Nichiren had recognized the
temporal distance between himself and both #$kyamuni and everyone
else who had lived and died. Senoo therefore argued that it was
completely consistent with the spirit of Nichiren to leave Nichiren
and Nichirenism behind in order to construct a New Buddhism that
was appropriate for modernity.
69

For Senoo the Buddhism appropriate for the time and place
in which he lived needed to engage with actual society (jitsu
shakai). This engagement led to his attempt to synthesize his New
Buddhism with Socialism. As he writes in one section of Shink!
Bukky! e:

69
Ibid., 267-68. Cf., a diary entry from late June 1929, in which
Senoo more simply proclaims that in the interest of the true path
(makoto no michi), renewing Nichirens corpus is being Nichirens
true disciple and it is not being disloyal to him at all. Quoted in
Matsune, 42-43.
214
Because everybody in Buddhism up until now has had
a gracious abstract and conservative faith, they have
been blind to the problems of actual society. Because
of this they have not taken Socialism seriously. On
the other hand, they have [in many cases] allowed
themselves to be carried away by reactionary
movements. That they then begin to consider
Socialism a sin without further thought is without a
doubt the [most] extreme mistake of our contemporary
world.
70


Senoo next states that:

On the contrary, Buddhism is itself fundamentally
Socialist. I as well awoke from the opium-induced
sleep, and I feel the power of actual society working
through me, making me feel joy from the bottom of
my heart.
71


As we can see, Shink! Bukky! e evidences Senoos anti-
capitalism and his increasing sympathy with Socialism. Because of
Senoos embrace of fundamental Buddhism this combination of
Buddhism and Socialism was intellectually possible. However
problematically related to Orientalism, this fundamental Buddhism
allowed Senoo to strip away belief in substantial entities such as the
self, God, or Buddhas which could be considered beings external to
oneself that could act on ones behalf, and control or influence human
destiny. According to a phrase Senoo quotes from a serialized
newspaper article by Takakusu: Buddhas that people worship as if
they are divinities such as Amida Buddha and Dainichi Nyorai

70
Ibid., 280.
71
Ibid., 280.
215
express the ideal that is #$kyamuni [the historical] Buddha. Because
[these figures] are to the fullest extent human creations, these
Buddhas are nothing like Creator Gods, Superintendent Gods, or
Judgmental Gods.
72

Seno goes so far as to repudiate all forms of thought that focus
attention away from the material. For example, at one point in
Shink! Bukky! e, Senoo argues that Platonic love is not
satisfying as true love and true love involves the fusion of spirit and
flesh.
73
Later, Senoo responds to his interlocutors suggestion that
religions function is to facilitate a spiritual cultivation that is separate
from material concerns by stating that is the trump card of kept
religion (goy! sh"ky!).
74

Denial of the spiritual and the substantiality of the self also
enabled Senoo to attack both the idea that the current circumstances
of the poor are the result of the sins of past lives, and the bourgeois
ideology of individualism. In criticizing Buddhist clergy in general
Senoo contested an argument that Buddhist priests commonly invoke
as an apology for social inadequacies resulting in the poverty of the
proletarian class. According to this argument, they are poor because
of karma accumulated during past lives. The standard logic

72
Ibid., 284.
73
Ibid., 285.
74
Ibid., 288. Kept religion (goy! sh"ky!) has the derogatory
connotation of religion that serves those who hold power in society.
216
continues: One reaps what one sows [jig! jitoku], and if it is not the
fault of capitalists, society is also not responsible. Therefore all of
you should work even harder without cursing either capitalists or
society.
75

Senoo objected that poverty is the collective responsibility
of society as a whole and that therefore the collective responsibility of
society must reform defects in the capitalist economic system. His
interlocutor asks, however, what are we supposed to think then if
there is no [law of] reaping what one sows, or no karma and so
on? Is there absolutely no such thing as individual responsibility?
Senoos response is that [i]t is not that there is absolutely no such
thing as individual responsibility. The problem is that we limit
responsibility to just the private lives of individuals
76
In his
understanding of the roots of social inequality, Senoo thoroughly
denies the basis for commonsensical understandings of reincarnation
and karma. He demands a reevaluation of what he calls Buddhisms
fundamental doctrine, that of selflessness (mugashugi). The reason
for this is because if one espouses one reaps what one sows then the
fundamental tenet(s) of Buddhism collapse, and if one espouses
selflessness then one reaps what one sows is not valid. Senoo
cites here the opinion of T.W. Rys Davids in order to make the point

75
Ibid., 291.
76
Ibid., 91-92.
217
that notions of purely individual karma are not authentically
Buddhist. A proper understanding of karma, according to Senoo, is
to understand that the one of one reaps what one sows is society
as a collective entity (shakai-teki jiga or daijiga). He argues that the
reasons for poverty can only be understood through social
explanations. He continues moreover, because the proletarian class
does not manage society they are not the ones to blame for their own
poverty. Instead it is the exploitative capitalist class that is primarily
to blame. Senoo rhetorically asks if it is not the case that Buddhist
priests have inverted things when they deploy the doctrine of karma.
He wonders if this blames the victims of a defective social structure
that is concomitant with capitalism.
77

The Manchurian Incident and the Senoo Gir!s Further
Radicalization

Shink! Bukky! e demonstrates how much Senoo had
changed since he wrote Wak!do no sakebi in 1920. His reaction to
the Manchurian incident displays an even further radicalization. The
Manchurian incident occurred in September 1931, only about three
months after he published the last part of Shink! Bukky! e.
Japanese armed forces had maintained the so-called
Kwantung Army, in Manchuria since the Russo-Japanese war. This
was nominally to protect the economically and strategically important

77
Ibid., 292.
218
Liaodong Peninsula and South Manchurian Railway. The Russians
ceded both to Japanese control in 1905. By 1931 however, Japanese
interests in Manchuria were beginning to extend beyond Liaodong
and the railway zone. Japanese industry saw ever greater potential
for the profitable development of and investment in mineral-rich and
agriculturally productive Manchuria, while the military saw the
strategic value of controlling a huge mass of land on the Asian
continent. Both industry and the military desired to maintain a buffer
between themselves and Soviet Communism. Many Japanese leaders
believed something had to be done about what they perceived as the
Manchurian problem.
On the night of 18 September 1931 field grade officers with
at least the tacit approval of their commanders acted decisively,
causing what we now call the Manchurian Incident. Led by
Lieutenant-Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, they blew up a short section of
the South Manchurian Railway on the northern outskirts of the city of
Mukden. They blamed the explosion on the Chinese military. The
Kwantung Army subsequently used this pretext to attack Chinese
forces in Manchuria. By the beginning of 1932 Japanese forces had
conquered most of Manchuria. In March of that year the Kwantung
army established the Nominally independent puppet-state of
Manchukuo. They also crowned Puyi, the former last emperor of
219
China, as the new emperor of a Manchukuo that they totally
controlled.
Senoo criticized the Manchurian Incident in the November
1931 issue of SBSDs newly renamed organ, the Seinen Bukky! (new
Buddhism). He wrote the following sardonic comments in a Ky"d!
nikki column that was subsequently censored:
18 September. Special editions came out. At long
last, both the Japanese and Chinese armies opened fire
in Manchuria. Starting with the occupation of
Mukden, the victories of our army in every region
were bombastically reported. Because the direct
motive for opening hostilities arose from the Chinese
armys destruction of [a part of our] railway, it was
argued from the perspective of justice on a grand scale
that our military activities were in proper self-
defense.
78


Senoo next rhetorically asked if justice is exists for ones own side
only. He then suggested that the Manchurian Incident concerned only
Japans struggle for existence and nothing more. Senoo also
commented that the idea that Japan needed to protect China from a
Russian advance south was fraudulent in that Japanese actions were
meant to serve Japanese interests.
79

Senoo went a step further in his critique of the war when he
argued that many Japanese did not want the war. Instead, he wrote,
[t]he war is only due to one portion of the ruling class calculation of

78
Quoted in Inagaki Budda o seoite, 109.
79
Quoted in Ibid., 109-10
220
what was in their best interests. He even went so far as to suggest
that the need for access to coal had driven ruling interests to
encourage and capitalize on the Manchurian incident. He
furthermore asked rhetorically, [w]ho benefits from war and who is
impoverished by it? Senoo did not believe that the war would
economically benefit the masses. Senoo also presciently noted that
the world seemed to be heading towards a world war, and he warned
that It will not do for us to be swept towards war because of the
agitation of one portion of the zaibatsu [industrial conglomerate] and
military cliques. Senoo summed up his opinions about the
Manchurian Incident, writing that [w]ar is humanitys greatest
misery. Imperialist war is the enemy of the people. Once humanity
has overcome nationalistic feelings, we can be aware of the truth of
class confrontation and with this obstacle removed we can think
about the welfare of all of humanity.
80

Crystallization of Senoos Thought: Dialectical Materialist
Buddhism

In an appendix to a 1933 pamphlet, Shakai henkaku t!jo no
shink! Bukky! (New Buddhism in the midst of social change)
Senoo explained what he called the san kirei (the threefold refuge).
This was Senoos version of the three treasures (Buddha, dharma
or law, and Sangha or the Buddhist community). For Senoo,

80
Quoted in Ibid., 110.
221
jikiebutsu (ones reliance on the Buddha) meant, in a way similar to
Honda Nissh!s thought, reliance on the ideal of #$kyamuni Buddha
as a liberated human being. Senoos jikieh! (ones reliance on the
dharma) meant adopting the interrelated philosophical stances of
fundamental Buddhism: the concepts of emptiness and karma,
selflessness, and dependent origination (the concept that any given
phenomenon is caused by other phenomena and nothing in itself has
an independent essence). His jkies! (ones reliance on the
community of monks) meant the ideal of living in a community
without exploitation.
81

Senoo particularly identified jikeih! (ones reliance on the
dharma) with what he called dialectical materialist Buddhism. By
this he meant a philosophy of the potential for social change. He
identified in fundamental Buddhisms concepts simularities to those
of Marxism. This was insofar as Marxist dialectical thinking is
attuned to an understanding of history as something constantly in flux
and in which chains of mutual cause and effect interdependently link
everything. In other words Senoo saw in both fundamental
Buddhism and Marxist thought a means for politically, socially, and
economically making things otherwise.
82
Yoshida argues that the

81
Senoo Gir!, Shakai henkaku t!jo no shink! Bukky!, in Senoo
Gir! sh"ky! ronsh", 387.
82
Cf., Large, 160-61.
222
concrete manifestations of Senoos dialectical materialist Buddhism
lay in a set of principles that Senoo identified with the SBSDs
mission.
83
As Senoo explained them in the main body of Shakai
henkaku t!jo no shink! Bukky! these principles are:
(1) Modern science teaches us to deny the reality of
supernatural Buddhas and gods. This is the no-god
thesis (mushinron).
(2) Modern science repudiates an other side-ism that
would allow for life after death. This is the no-soul
thesis (mureikonron).
(3) Because modern people are not satisfied by
illusory happiness they want to be completely happy in
this actual life.
(4) The masses in modernity want economic stability,
and they demand a reform of capitalism.
(5) Awakened humanity sublates nationalism and
praises internationalism.
(6) Progressive Buddhists sweep away sectarian
Buddhism and ardently desire unification (of
Buddhism).
84


Senoos dialectic referred in practice to the steadfast repudiation of
any hypothetical entity that could stand outside of this life and this
world and its processes. This repudiation led to Senoos ability to
imagine life with a more adequate economic system and an
overcoming of nationalism.
Senoos Activities with the Shink! Bukky! Seinen D!mei
Senoo and other SBSD members were very active
politically in the years following the Manchurian incident. In 1932,

83
Yoshida, 23-25.
84
Senoo Gir!, Shakai henkaku, 330. Cf., Yoshida, 25-29.
223
Senoo joined the proletarian Social Masses Party (SMP). In that
same year Senoo and other SBSD members helped campaign for the
party in national elections. In 1933 Senoo joined three anti-fascist
organizations: the Han-Nachisu Fassho Funsai D!mei (Anti-Nazi
League to Crush Fascism), the Tokyo K!ts" R!d! Kumiai (Tokyo
Transport Labor Union), and the Kyokut! Heiwa Tomo no Kai (Far
East Friends of Peace Society). He was first arrested in 1934, while
in attendance at an SMP anti-fascist labor strike. He was accused of
exhorting the strike to greater militancy. In 1935, Takano
Minoru, a leader in the Popular Front against Fascism (jinmin seisen)
movement asked Senoo to manage, R!d! zasshi (Labor magazine).
Senoo agreed and the magazine became the organ of the Popular
Front over the next two years.
85

By the mid-1930s it was becoming increasingly difficult for
Senoo and his compatriots to continue their anti-fascist activity. In
1935 Senoo helped finance a trip to America by Kat! Kanj", an SMP
leader, in order to foster international solidarity in the fight against
fascism. In 1936 Senoo and the SBSD played an instrumental role in
getting Kat! elected in national elections. They shouted slogans such
as fassho hantai (oppose fascism) and teikokushugi sens! hantai
(oppose imperialist war). All of this brought police attention to

85
Large, 163.
224
Senoo. The police broke up SBSD meetings as soon as someone
mentioned the words popular front. Senoo was arrested again in
1936 following the February 1936 Incident, in which young army
officers attempted a coup in Tokyo. This time Senoo was released
within a month.
86

In April of 1936, while maintaining his membership in the
SBSD, Senoo joined Kat! Kanj"s R!n! Musan Ky!gikai (Labor-
Farmer Proletarian Conference), and in June ran as a party candidate
the Prefectural Assembly elections. Senoo was defeated, but he had
attempted to use the campaign to publicize the popular front. Finally,
the police arrested Senoo on 7 December of the same year. They
accused him of violating the Peace Preservation Law by plotting to
destroy the imperial institution and capitalism. Senoo denied
breaking any laws. Eventually, in 1937 Senoo signed a confession,
in which he asked for mercy and pledged allegiance to the emperor.
Senoo had been distraught and unhappy for years, at times even
considering suicide. By the time the police took Senoo into custody
in 1937 he was thoroughly exhausted. The final straw came when the
police showed him a sworn statement by a fellow Leftist who had
stated that Senoo was indeed guilty of the crimes with which he was
charged. The police later used Senoos ideological apostasy (tenk!)

86
Large, 163-165.
225
as evidence to round up more than 200 other SBSD members. In
the end twenty-seven SBSD leaders received prison sentences.
Senoo was sentenced to five years, but a court later reduced his
sentence. He was freed in 1942 because of ill health.
87
After the war
Senoo took part in peace movements and joined the Japan
Communist Party in 1949. He died in 1961 at the age of seventy-
one.
88

Conclusion
Although it may not be our place to either forgive or harshly
criticize Senoo for his tenk!, Senoo himself never completely
dismissed the idea of individual responsibility. In 1957 he wrote of
Kawakami Hajime, a Socialist intellectual who successfully resisted
tenk! that:
When I think of his unshakable convictions when he
was in prison I am ashamed of my own tenk!. I
should have died in that prison My cowardice and
meanness were pitiful For that my existence is
wretched.
89


A far more interesting question than Senoos guilt or innocence is
the issue of why and Senoo transformed from a Nichirenist who
could agree with Tanaka Chigaku and become a lieutenant of Honda
Nissh!, to a dialectical materialist Buddhist who vociferously

87
Large, 166-168.
88
Inagaki, 226.
89
Quoted and translated in Large, 171. From Senoo Gir! Nikki, 10
September, 1957, 237.
226
critiqued capitalism, completely denounced imperialism and saw both
nationalism and existing religion as opiates for the masses.
A point of contention in postwar debates about Senoo centers
on the question of whether or not Senoos dialectical materialism
was Marxist and whether or not Marxism, Socialism and/or
Communism were important components of Senoos thought and the
motivations for his actions. One set of scholars including Shimane
Kiyoshi, Komuro Hiromitsu and Ichikawa Hakugen have held that
Marxism was in fact important to Senoos development. They have
argued that Senoo synthesized Buddhism and Marxism, with Marx
providing a basis for addressing political, social, and economic
problems, and Buddhism providing a basis for addressing the totality
of life. Other scholars including Mibu J!jun, Hayashi Reih! (a
former associate of Senoo in the SBSD) and Inagaki Masami have
argued that Senoos dialectical materialist Buddhism was genuinely
grounded in the foundation of primitive Buddhism and had no
relationship to Marxism.
90


90
For this discussion of debates on Senoo see Yoshida, 13-15. The
quote is from p. 14. Notably, for Inagaki, Miyu and Hayashi, the
argument that Senoo was not really Marxist functions as an apology
for his tenk!. He was never a Marxist, they reason, and tenk! was a
process designed by authorities to discipline Marxists. Therefore
Senoo did not really acquiesce to tenk! according to their logic. On
this point, see Yoshida, 17-18.
227
However, not only do we need to be suspicious about the
authenticity of primitive Buddhism because of modern scholars
tendency to distill an essential Buddhism using raw materials derived
from a remote past in a way that ignores the religiosities of living
Buddhists over centuries of history. The discourse on primitive or
fundamental Buddhism has often if not always also been implicated
in the legitimization of imperialism. British Orientalists, for example,
claimed that they were rehabilitating pure Buddhism as a
respectable religion for a population on the Indian subcontinent that
they believed had fallen into depravity and superstition in the
centuries since the decline of Buddhism in South Asia. Restoring the
putatively higher religion of Buddhism to the subcontinent was thus
part of the White mans burden and the civilizing mission of the
British Empire.
91

Japanese Buddhist Studies were far from innocent as well.
Jacqueline Stone noted in her A Vast and Grave Task: Interwar
Buddhist Studies as an expression of Japans Envisioned Global
Role that by the interwar period Japanese Buddhologists saw their
role as a means of defining Japans relationship with the rest of Asia,

91
An investigation of the discourse on so-called Greco-Buddhist art
makes it clear that European scholars of Buddhism tended to be
interested in Buddhist history and culture only insofar as research
would result in at least implicit support for the idea of Western
superiority. See Abe, Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist Art and
the West in The Curators of the Buddha, 83.
228
both linking it to the long tradition of the Asian continent and helping
to qualify it for the leadership of Asian culture, however such a
leadership might be defined.
92
I would argue that Japanese
academic Buddhist Studies dovetailed with the rhetoric of Japanese
imperialism. In other words, Japanese Buddhology underwrote
imperialism by suggesting that Japan was in a privileged position to
bring true Buddhism back to the rest of Asia. Because of the role
of the academic study of Buddhism in defining an implicitly superior
Japanese identity it is furthermore no surprise that Takakusu Junjir!
could write the jingoistic serialized newspaper articles that were
translated into English and published as The New Japanism and the
Buddhist View on Nationality in 1936.
93

However, someone as clearly influenced by Marxism as the
philosopher Miki Kiyoshi could serve Japanese imperialism and
fascism by becoming a member of the Sh!wa Kenky"kai, a
research association designed to promote domestic harmony and a
Japanese dominated New Order in East Asia.
94
Neither Senoos
espousal of fundamental Buddhism nor his adherence to Marxist
categories of thought account for his thought and actions.

92
Stone, A Vast Grave Task, 222.
93
Published as a pamphlet in Tokyo by Hokuseido press.
94
On Miki Kiyoshis apologetics for Japanese aggression in Asia,
see Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture,
and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000), 41-2.
229
In my opinion, Senoos ability to overcome Nichirenism
developed primarily as consequence of the development of his
propensity to perceive the world as palpable and in motion. The
Buddhist teaching that everything is always already the eternal
original Buddha warms the heart perhaps but, the immanence of the
divine in this sense all-too-easily shifts into a debilitating
epistemology of transcendence if one does not maintain an extremely
material relationship with a perpetually becoming world of lived
experience. In modernity, one of the most common traps for
immanence as lived experience, and consequently personal and
collective creativity, autonomy and agency is the image of the nation
as an ahistorical permanence.
Tanaka Chigaku, for example, remained enamoured with an
unchanging image of Japan as imminently and immanently the pure
land of the Buddha. For him Japan possessed an especially integral
relationship with an equally static image of the eternal original
Buddha of the Lotus S"tra.
95
Other Nichirenists broke the spell
Tanaka was under by rushing headlong into a action aimed at
transcendence of lived experience and a once and for all solution to
this worlds inadequacies. As evidenced by his theory of
developmental Buddhism and the way that he was able to see real

95
See for example, %tani, 102-3.
230
social causes for societal conflict, Senoo somehow overcame
Nichirenism. In this perhaps he also overcame fascism as a specter
permanently haunting modernity. As a later thinker would put it,
Senoo acted as if there are no such things as universals, theres
nothing transcendent, no Unity, subject (or object), Reason; there are
only processes, sometimes unifying, subjectifying, rationalizing, but
just processes all the same. In short Senoo realized the immanence
of the Buddha as constructivism, not as something given in
advance.
96



96
Gilles Deleuze in a conversation with Raymond Bellour, On
Philosophy in Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 45-46.
231
Chapter Four: Ishiwara Kanji, History as Contrapuntal
Harmony, and Modernity as the Dawn that Never
Comes

Man must flee this ridiculous web that has been spun around him: so
called present reality with the prospect of a future reality that is
hardly better.

Andre Breton

We all fell into these mistakes, friend and foe alike. . . . We were
always looking for the GAP, and trying to make it, hoping that we
would pour through it in a glorious, exciting rush. . . .

Hubert Gogh, British officer during World War I

New roads lie open to me. I
Shall pierce the veil that hides what we desire.
Break through to realms of abstract energy.

Goethe

Introduction: Toppa (breakthrough): Ishiwara Kanji and
Piercing the Veil

As a resident of the Tokyo region during the years 2001-2003
I noticed many shiny new books on Ishiwara Kanji (1889-1949) in
every major bookstore. Even freshly printed copies of Mark Peatties
Ishiwara Kanji and Japans Confrontation with the West (1975), long
out of print in English, were readily available in translation. This
indicates that Ishiwaras life, thought and deeds represent some as yet
unresolved or irresolvable questions for both contemporary Japanese
and us.
232
Ishiwara is most famous for two things: his involvement in the
Manchurian Incident and his theory of the Final War. As a colonel
stationed with the Kant! Army in Manchuria in 1931, Ishiwara was
one of a few masterminds of the plot to solve the Manchurian
Problem by blowing up a section of the Japanese-owned South
Manchurian Railway on 18 September of that year. The conspirators
blamed the explosion on Chinese terrorists, and used the event as a
pretext to take over a massive region of north-eastern China, setting
up a Japanese-controlled puppet-state. For Ishiwara, taking over
Manchuria was a step on the road towards East Asian and Japanese
victory in what he called the Final War. In his imagination it was
also a step towards making the world a much better place.
Ishiwara developed his theory of the Final War over much of
his adult life, beginning as early as the years he spent studying and
teaching military history at the Army Staff College in Tokyo between
1925 and 1928.
1
He combined a teleological understanding of world
history that he gleaned from his study of mostly European warfare,

1
According to Kobayshi Hideo, Tanaka Chigaku wrote an article in
1921 that functioned as an important early influence on the Final War
Theory. In Kurubeki sekai no ni dai bunya [The coming world
division into two great spheres], Chigaku wrote of the division of the
world into democratic (minshu-teki) America and a Japan ruled by
the emperor (kunshukoku no Nippon). Kobayashi, Sh!wa fuashisuto
no gunz!, 88. However, as we shall see the Final War theory was
overdetermined by a variety of influences, and attempting to trace its
genesis to a single source is probably conceptually inadequate.
233
with certain prophetic writings of Nichiren. Tanaka Chigaku and the
Kokuch"kai deeply influenced Ishiwaras understandings of Nichiren.
He developed his world-historical and Nichirenist ideas into a theory
centering on the idea that in the not too distant future a war that
would truly end all wars would occur, and that in this war Japan had
to be victorious in a contest with the United States. One should
underscore at the outset that during the late 1930s and early 1940s
and into the postwar era, Ishiwara never confused the actual 1941-
1945 conflict between the United States and Japan with the Final War
he prognosticated. The Final war for him was always an event on the
horizon, and in the conflict Japan and the US would represent two
final contradictory forces in world history, leading to a dramatic
synthesis or sublation that would subsequently usher the world into
an era of everlasting peace and perpetual development.
Recent assessments of Ishiwara are not in agreement on many
matters, and this is especially true regarding his relationship with
Nichirenism. For example, after noting the good works of the
Kokuch"kai, including its hospital, disaster relief efforts and attempts
at election reform, Keio University literary critic and neo-Rightist
Fukuda Kazuyos Chi hiraku: Ishiwara Kanji to Sh!wa no yume
(groundbreaker: Ishiwara Kanji and the dream of Sh!wa, 2001)
asserts the following:
234
Ishiwaras argument for eternal world peace is at the
same time both the natural result of his belief in the
Lotus S"tra and his faithful adherence to the teachings
of Tanaka Chigaku. Already by 1919 and in the pages
of the Kokuch"kai shinbun [monthly organ of
Chigakus group], Tanaka Chigaku held the national
principles (kokutai no hongi) of Japan to be the
construction of absolute world peace.

Fukuda ends this passage by arguing that Chigaku and Ishiwara were
in the lineage of the Fuju-Fuse sect of Nichiren Buddhists, a group
that resisted state power during the Tokugawa Period.
2

Another recent writer, Irie Tatsuo, argues in his Nichiren
sh!nin no tairei to Ishiwara Kanji no sh!gai (the great spirit of
Nichiren and the life of Ishiwara Kanji, 1996) that Chigaku and
Ishiwara differed fundamentally in their views of Nichiren Buddhism.
Irie tells the same story as Fukuda regarding Ishiwaras first exposure
to Chigaku, relying largely on the Kokuch"kai Hyakunenshi
(hundred-year history of the Kokuch"kai), published by one of
Chigakus grandsons in 1980. According to this account Ishiwara
attended lectures at the Kokuch"kais Tokyo headquarters in April
1920 where the words of Tanaka Chigaku deeply moved him, and he
almost immediately became a member of the organizations
Shingy!in (practitioners of faith), a relatively elite group within the
Kokuch"kai. Irie contests the veracity of this story by calling into

2
Fukuda Kazuyo, Chi hiraku: Ishiwara Kanji to Sh!wa no yume
(Tokyo: Bungei Shunjin, 2001), 147.
235
question the Kokuch"kais own self-serving account and ambiguous
evidence which supposedly attests to Ishiwaras relative lack of
attachment to Chigakus group. Irie thus specifically challenges the
view that Ishiwara was a Rightist,
3
implicitly associating the
Kokuch"kai with a deplorable politics and for this reason
disassociating Ishiwara, whom he apotheosizes, from Chigaku, his
followers and fellow-travelers. For Irie, Ishiwara unlike Chigaku, did
not believe that the Japanese were a chosen people or people of the
Heavenly Task (tengy! minzoku). Accordingly Irie argues that
Ishiwara had a more direct relationship with the true teachings of
Nichiren, teachings Irie identifies with the sixteenth Jury! chapter
of the Lotus S"tra, and the great compassion that he believes arises
when one realizes the truth that the eternal, original Buddha is
master of the universe (uch" no nushi).
4

Jacqueline Stone provides yet another recent account of
Ishiwaras relationship with Tanaka Chigaku and Nichirenism. In an
essay written in 2000 she recounts Ishiwaras theory of the double
advent of the bodhisattva J!gy!.
5
In the Lotus S"tra the Buddha

3
Irie Tatsuo, Nichiren sh!nin no tairei to Ishiwara Kanji no sh!gai
(Tokyo: Kindai Bungeihsa. 1996), 35-37.
4
Ibid., 40-1.
5
J!gy! d (Eminent Conduct) in the Lotus S"tra is the leader of a
group of four bodhisattvas, including J!gy! himself, along with
Muhengy! (Boundless Conduct), J!gy! (Pure Conduct), and
236
predicts that J!gy! will appear during the degraded period of mapp!
(the last days of the law of Buddhism) as the messenger of the
Lotus teachings. According to a theory Ishiwara fully developed by
1940 and professed well into the middle of that decade, Nichiren
appeared as the first this-worldly incarnation of J!gy! at a time in
history that was not yet truly mapp!. Ishiwara suggested that
Nichiren appeared within Japan when he did because people at the
time incorrectly believed that mapp! had arrived. Later, according to
Ishiwara, J!gy! would once again manifest as a wise ruler, and this
wise ruler would then supposedly lead Japan in the Final War. In
agreement with Peatties 1975 assessment Stone argues that
Ishiwaras idiosyncratic vision of a final war that would unite all
humanity motivated him to cause the Manchurian Incident, thus
initiating the fifteen-years of war in the Pacific and Asia, and leading
to Japans defeat in 1945. Stone contrasts Ishiwaras violent
millenarianism with postwar Lotus millennialism which

Anry"gy! (Steadfast Conduct). In the sutra, the Buddha predicts that
these four will arise from the out of the earth during mapp! in order
to preach faith in the sutras teachings. They are collectively known
as the Jiyu | bodhisattvas or the shi bosatsu (four bodhisattvas).
Especially in Nichiren Buddhism, because Nichiren believed he was
an incarnation of J!gy!, believers tend to subsume each of the four
bodhisattvas of the earth into the individual figure of J!gy!, who
embodies the characteristics of each of the four. Translation of the
four bodhisattvas names from Niwano Nikky!, Buddhism for Today:
A Modern Interpretation of the Threefold Lotus S"tra, K!jir!
Miyasaka (Tokyo: Kosei Publishing, 1994), 179-80;
237
envisions a time when, by awakening to the universal Buddha
nature, people everywhere will live in harmony and with mutual
respect.
6
She uses the expression Lotus millenarianism to refer to
such Nichiren-inspired lay Buddhist groups as S!ka Gakkai and
Rissh! Ankokukai, and their postwar activities.
7

Fukuda is a notoriously revisionist right-wing thinker in
contemporary Japan, while Irie himself participated as a young man
and true believer in Ishiwara-inspired organizations designed to
promote racial cooperation in post-1931 Japanese-controlled
Manchuria. It may seem strange to juxtapose these two with Stone, a
well-respected US scholar of Japanese Buddhism. However, each of
these three writers is correct in their assessment of Ishiwara. After
1920 he remained a direct and true disciple of Chigaku, one who had
a humanistic desire for everlasting world peace. He did however
think for himself, developing original theories and concepts, and his
frequently contradictory or ambiguous public remarks generally
expressed ambivalence regarding idea of the Japanese being a
chosen people. Lastly, Ishiwaras actions and words indicate the
violent nature of a man whom we should note was willing to sacrifice
half of the worlds population in and during a Final War. This war
was nevertheless justified from Ishiwaras standpoint because, he

Stone, Japanese Lotus Millenarianism, 273.
7
Ibid., 277-9.
238
argued, it would eventually bring about everlasting peace and the
perpetual development of the world towards an increasingly better,
and humanly constructed future.
Stones essay appears in a volume entitled Millenarianism,
Persecution and Violence, edited by the historian of religions scholar
named Catherine Wessinger. Wessingers introduction defines
millenarianism as extremely ancient and as a phenomenon that will
persist indefinitely into the future.
8
Moreover, she argues that
millenarianism is an expression of human hope for the achievement
of permanent well-being, in other words, salvation. Wessinger also
argues that millenarianism evidences the perennial human desire to
overcome finitude.
9
Lastly and notably Wessingers definition of
millenarianism includes atheistic movements (where she still sees
evidence of belief in a superhuman agent), including Marxism in
general, Mao during the period of the Great Leap Forward, the Khmer
Rouge during their super great leap forward, and the Nazis.
10

The way Wessinger defines millenarianism characterizes
Immanuel Kant as much as it describes apocalyptic traditional
religiosity or the apparent irrationality of such recent figures as David

8
Wessinger, The Interacting of Dynamics of Millennial Beliefs,
Persecution and Violence in Millennialism, Persecution and
Violence: Historical Cases, 3, 6.
9
Ibid., 6.
10
Ibid., 9.
239
Koresh or Asahara Sh!k!. In other words there are few things that
that embody the spirit of a modernity descended in many ways from
eighteenth century-Enlightenment tenets as much as a hope for an
always yet to be realized permanent well-being, coupled with a desire
to overcome all forms of finitude;
11
that such desires were shared by
Maoists and Nazis is testament to the degree to which the
Enlightenment and modernity are ridden with contradictions. Writing
after Kant, Hegel tied the realization of Freedom to processes of
world-historical development in which he linked the vehicle for the
realization of that freedom inextricably to the nation-state as the
subject of History. In the Hegelian scheme each nation or people
with an appropriate state attached to it could be both the embodiment
of a particularity proper to peculiar geographical and historical
conditions. In this theory of history each people also has the potential
to manifest a universality and freedom from all finitude that could
reveal itself in an essential now that is simultaneously both
immanent within the present and something Spirit would only fully
actualize at the end of history.
12


11
See for example Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment? in
Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), especially, 55.
12
See Georg W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sribee
(Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991), especially, 456-7.
240
Ishiwaras attempt to use the Japanese nation-state to facilitate
a national and global arrival at a point beyond what he considered an
inadequate situation was neither unusual nor aberrant. However,
despite never transcending a consciousness of his nationality,
Ishiwara imagined and worked towards the dissolution of the nation-
state in the form in which it had existed up until that time. He did this
in the process of preparing for the Final War. This may or may not
be considered millenarian, but it is without a doubt in harmony
with the general character of modern nationalism on the one hand,
and an all too typically modern will to overcome national divisions
and turn towards a higher universality on the other.
What made Ishiwara modern (and not millenarian) is that he
rebelled against the liberal capitalist, global status quo and in this he
challenged the nation-state and modernity itself. Ishiwara fell into the
all-too-common trap of believing in a myth of progress towards a
socially, politically, and economically better and completely new,
more adequate reality. On the one hand Ishiwara held these beliefs
without questioning constituent elements of the relationship between
an imaginary present, structured by his belief in the unchanging
fundamental principles of Japan, East Asia, and the West. On the
other hand he uncritically longed for an imaginary and utopian future
241
that as a compensatory and legitimizing force had an inextricable
bond with maintaining the present status quo.
What Wessinger and Stone would consider Ishiwaras
millenarianism ancient, nor will it necessarily be with us forever.
Ishiwaras millenarianism, in other words, was not simply an
atavistic holdover from earlier times, nor was it a manifestation of
Japanese or Buddhist tradition, something evidencing the
undeveloped and non-Western, non-modern character of the religious
or Japanese mind. Premodern millenarianisms were not bearers of a
belief in progress towards a new, better future that human agency
would bring about. On the contrary, premodern millenarianisms were
typically doctrines of decay and distance from exemplary and original
times. They were doctrines of the end of the world, and a desire for a
return to original perfection. In direct contradiction to such
conceptualizations of time and history Ishiwaras concept of the Final
War spelled the end of an inadequate modern world, but an end that
was anything but a return to the way things putatively used to be.
Ishiwaras theory of history, in fact, envisioned a post-Final War
world in which unheard of progress (scientific and otherwise) and not
regression towards pristine origins or conditions fully known in
242
advance would be the rule.
13
In sum, Ishiwara longed for a
breakthrough (toppa), beyond the impasses and aporias of actually
existing modernity. We might read this as an attempt to not only
rebel against the hegemony of the imperialist West to overcome
modernity itself. Ironically however, there is nothing more modern
than trying to overcome modernity, just as there is nothing less
millenarian in any traditional sense.
The Final War and History as Contrapuntal Harmony
Ishiwara imagined two basic types of world history, one
secular and one religious. He developed and combined these
perspectives into a single theory by the time he gave his famous
lecture, On the Final War (Saish" sens! ron) in Kyoto in May
1940.
14
Ishiwara was a military historian and he based his history of
human development in general on the history of warfare. In his

13
For a relevant discussion of differences between typical premodern,
millenarian or apocalyptic conceptualizations of time on the one hand
and modern, progressive temporalities of development on the other
see Kosselleck, Modernity and the planes of Historicity in Futures
Past, especially, 5-6 and 14.
14
Ishiwaras originally titled his talk, Jinrui no zenshi owaran to su
[human prehistory is about to end]. Professor Tanaka Naokichi of
Ritsumeikan University edited and published the manuscript as
Sekai saishusen ron [on the final world war] in Fall, 1940. The text
was subsequently republished various times, and in 1943 Ishiwara
decided to eliminate sekai (world) from the essays title. This is why
we commonly know the famous lecture/essay as Saish" sens! ron
today. See Mark Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji and Japans Confrontation
with the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 52-3,
note 11.
243
studies of mostly Western military history he discerned a geometrical
progression over the centuries of the area of battle during warfare. As
early as his student days at the Military Staff College (1915-1918),
Ishiwara began to see a transformation in the area of battle. He
thought that ancient warfare consisted of the deployment of phalanx
formations. With such formations the point of contact between
opposing forces was a simple point (ten); firearms usage led to
musket-bearing soldiers facing each other in one-dimensional lines
(sen); and further industrialization and improvements in
communications, transportation and more sophisticated weaponry
fostered the development of a two-dimensional area (men) of
conflict.
15

Beginning around the same time that he developed his
geometry of warfare Ishiwara also developed a theory of alternating
periods of protracted (jizoku-teki) and decisive (kessen-teki) forms of
warfare throughout history. Premodern warfare, for Ishiwara, was
generally decisive, while the introduction of firearms and early
industrialization led to more protracted wars of exhaustion. Frederick
the Greats military and political maneuvering typified protracted
warfare according to Ishiwaras theory, while Napoleon generally

15
Saish" sens! ron in Ishiwara Kanji sensh", vol. 3, ed. Ishiwara
Rokur! and Tamai Reiichir! (Tokyo: Tamaira-b!, 1986 (1941), 36-7.
Cf., Peattie., 29.
244
fought wars of decisive annihilation. For Ishiwara the era of wars of
sudden and decisive action came to a screeching halt with the First
World War, which was a war protracted par excellence.
16

Ishiwara also argued that with the one-dimensional to two
dimensional-expansion of the battlefield, and the vicissitudes of
protracted and decisive war, the size of units of command diminished
in size. Battalion sized units of command characterized premodern
war. The introduction of firearms armies led to company size units of
command. Following the French Revolution units of command
shifted to the even smaller platoon. Ishiwara observed a shift to squad
level units with the Great War. Interestingly, this process of
diminishment in the size of units of command went hand in hand with
the process leading to total war, when all of a given nation-states
resources, human and otherwise, would come to support the military
endeavors of smaller and smaller groups of combatants.
17
In other
words, according to Ishiwaras logic as total war increased the
destructive capacity of given numbers of individual soldiers, the size
of units concomitantly became smaller.
The pace of historical change was quickening in Ishiwaras
conception. He believed that the European Middle ages saw few
innovations in military technology, but that the Renaissance brought

16
Peattie, 59-60.
17
See Saish" sens! ron, 48.
245
sweeping changes in armaments, particularly with respect to artillery
and firearms, while the French Revolution brought about changes in
the structure of societies that led to new forms of warfare and modes
of combat. Lastly, Ishiwara discerned that new weapons such as the
machine gun and aircraft revolutionized warfare during World War I.
He reasoned, moreover, that the (European) Middle Ages had lasted
about one thousand years, the period between the Renaissance and the
French Revolution about 300 years, and between the French
Revolution and the First World War only about 125 years.
18

Ishiwara read the increasing rapidity of developments in
military technology and tactics as progress towards an even more
revolutionary and unheard of development, the Final War as an event
that would result in world unification and a new and better global
situation. With the Final War the field of battle would develop
beyond an area into a three dimensional cube. This cube-like
battle environment would correlate with the reduction of the unit of
command to one or two operators of a given aircraft, and that aircraft
would deliver weaponry that would break the global impasse
symbolized for Ishiwara (and numerous other observers) by the First
World War. The number of combatants would be dramatically
reduced, but the whole populations of nation-states would be engaged

18
Ibid., 46-7.
246
in making those combatants effective. The civilian population of the
enemy of course would then become a legitimate target, with
Ishiwara specifically mentioning that young and old, male and female
would come to participate in the Final War. He even goes so far as to
state that even mountains, rivers, grass, and trees would be drawn
into the vortex of the conflict.
19

From Ishiwaras perspective the Final War would be positive
because the nation-states involved would develop weapons of
unprecedented destructive power and the victorious party in the
conflict would be the one able to deploy these weapons first.
Ishiwara hoped, of course, that it would be Japan that developed and
utilized such weapons in a future war with the United States.
According to Ishiwaras theory, use of these horrible new weapons
would lead to a general end of warfare because the existence of such
weapons would lead to a moral dtente, in which no nation-state
would be willing to engage in any further warfare whatsoever.
Ishiwara makes this point with reference to Japanese history,
theorizing that the accidental introduction of firearms to Japan at
Tanegashima eventually led to the Tokugawa houses unification of

19
Ibid., 38.
247
the archipelago and more than two and a half centuries of peace
between the various domains within Japan.
20

Ishiwara harmonized this vision of secular and military
history and extreme total war with a Nichirenist view of history
grounded in what he called prophecy. Ishiwaras concept of
prophecy seems like an ironically instrumentalist attempt to
overcome instrumental rationality. In the 1940 text of Saish" sens!
ron, after completing his discussion of military history and history in
general, Ishiwara began his discussion of the religious by noting the
limitations of reason. He then argued that contemporary Japanese of
the time hungered for insight (mitooshi) that exceeded scientific
judgment. Next Ishiwara cited the example of Hitler (whom he
notes was treated at first like a crazy person), pointing out that the
German leader had appropriated the power of insight to seize the
reins of power within his country in the context of German downfall
in the wake of the First World War. Despite Hitlers magnificent
ability to appeal to people on such extra-rational levels, Ishiwara
argued that insight grounded in religion was much more
powerful.
21

By 1940 Ishiwaras analyses led him to the conclusion that an
unprecedented struggle (zendai mimon no t!s!) predicted by Nichiren

20
Ibid., 37-8.
21
Ibid., 52.
248
would occur in about fifty years and that this struggle would result in
the unification of the world. Ishiwara prefaces this claim with a
review of Nichiren Buddhist teachings regarding the triple
periodization of history into shob!, z!h! and mapp!, and the promise
that Nichiren was correctly aware that he was a reincarnation of
J!gy! Bodhisattva (the leader of the four Jiyu Bosatsu, or
Bodhisattvas of the Earth). Ishiwara also claimed that just as Tendai
Daishi (also known as Ziyi, the founder of Tiantai Buddhism) laid the
foundation for Nichiren, Nichiren laid the foundation for Tanaka
Chigaku, who systematized and thus completed Nichirens teachings.
For Ishiwara, Chigakus completed Nichirens teachings because he
identified or equated the Lotus S"tras with the fundamental
principles or national essence (kokutai) of the nation-state of Japan.
Ishiwaras also confronted modern Buddhologys discovery that the
historical Buddha #$kyamuni probably lived in the fifth or sixth
century BCE instead of in 949, as Nichiren and most traditional
M$hayana Buddhists believed. This meant that mapp! would begin
significantly later in world time. According to the traditional doctrine
mapp! would commenced the beginning of the fifth five hundred
year period following the earthly demise of #$kyamuni. If the
modern dating for Buddhas life and death were true, it would mean
that Nichiren was not born at the beginning of mapp! as he himself
249
believed, but rather in the previous age of z!h! (the age of counterfeit
dharma when people were not in direct contact with #$kyamuni)
instead.
22

Ishiwara appealed to the well accepted notion of the Buddhas
expedient and skillful means in order to obviate such contradictions;
then he expediently used Nichirenist thought towards his own
imaginative ends. He argued that because people believed medieval
Japan to have been contemporary with mapp!, the Buddha in his
wisdom dispatched Nichiren at that time, as an incarnation of J!gy!,
to preach the Lotus S"tra. Ishiwara drew from a passage in the
Kanjin honzonsh! that implies that when especially aggressive
righteous activities are called for J!gy! will incarnate as a wise
ruler who will admonish foolish rulers and when less aggressive
proselytizing is required J!gy! will manifest as a monk. Ishiwara
theorized that Nichiren was a preliminary manifestation of J!gy! as a
monk, but that during the actual period of mapp! a further appearance
of J!gy! as a wise ruler was due.
23
This wise ruler would lead
Japan, he suggests, and Japan would lead the righteous forces of the

22
Ibid., 56-6. For the 949 BCE date and Ishiwaras confrontation
with modern studies of Buddhism see Stone, Japanese Lotus, 272-
3.
23
Saish" sens! ron, especially, 57-58. See also Nishiyama Shigeru,
J!gy! no adoventisto: Ishiwara Kanji [J!gy!s adventist: Ishiwara
Kanji], in Ishiwara Kanji Sensh", Vol. 8 (Tokyo: Tamaira-b!, 1986),
324-5.
250
world in the coming cataclysmic conflict that Ishiwara identified both
with his understanding of Nichiren and Nichirenism, and the direction
world history as revealed by his study of military development and
European history. Ishiwara reckoned that mapp! had actually begun
approximately at the time when Westerners both discovered America
and first came to India.
24
In other words he drew a connection
between worldly decline and the expansion of the imperialist West.
Ishiwaras supported his argument with two sources of
authority. First he underscored the proximity of the unification of the
world by appealing to a lecture given by Chigaku in 1918, in which
the Kokuch"kais leader suggested that the whole world would
convert to the teachings of Nichiren and the Lotus in about forty-eight
years.
25
At the end of the section on Buddhist prophecy in Saish"
sens!ron Ishiwara further referenced what Chigaku had emphatically
proclaimed to the Ceylonese Buddhist leader and reformer

24
Saish" sens! ron., 57.
25
Ibid., 58. Ishiwara cited Chigakus Honge sh"gaku yori mitaru
Nihon Kokutai [Japans Body Politic from the Perspective of Our
Sects Doctrine], compiled in Shishi! zensh" (Tokyo: Shishi! Zensh"
Kank!kai, 1931), 367. In the lecture Chigaku used the phrase itten
shikai kaiki my!h! ,)(, which literally means
everyone in the world, across the four seas, being led to union with
the wondrous law. In Nichiren Buddhism the phrase is shorthand
for the whole world being converted to the teachings of the Lotus
S"tra and/or singing the praises of those teachings. See entry in
Ishida Mizumaro, Reibun Bukky!go daijiten (Tokyo: Sh!gakkan,
1997), 52.
251
Dh$rmapala Anagarika at the beginning of the twentieth century
namely, that Nichiren prophesied that in the age of Buddhisms
decline on the Asian continent (mapp!) Buddhism would return to the
rest of Asia from Japan. At the end of the section of Saish" sens! ron
on Buddhism, Ishiwara relates a story from Fujii Gy!sh!, a monk and
founder of the modern Nichiren Buddhist Nipponzan My!h!ji sect
who had just returned from the Asian continent. According to
Ishiwara, Fujii reported that Ceylonese Buddhists believed that the
ruler of a Buddhist country would save them 2,500 years after the
Buddhas demise. Ishiwara clearly implies that this country is Japan
and that it is from British imperialism and the West in general that
Ceylon would be saved.
26
In 1940 Ishiwara did not connect the
earthly incarnation of J!gy! to any particularly person, although it is
clear that this person would be the leader of Japan. Later, however,
in 1946-1947, he would write that perhaps this incarnation of J!gy!
was Japans then crown prince (todays emperor). Ishiwara even
suggested that because the crown prince was born around the same
time that Dh$rmapala died he was also somehow a reincarnation of
Dh$rmapala.
27


26
Saish" sens! ron, 58-59.
27
Ishiwara Kanji, Nichiren Sh!nin oboegaki [Saint Nichiren
memorandum], in Ishiwara Kanji Sensh", Vol. 8, 92-4. Note: In both
Saish" sens! ron and the Oboegaki Ishiwara referred to Fujii Gy!sh!
252
Writing in 1908 in his seminal Reflections on Violence,
Georges Sorel discussed the entry of human beings into extra-rational
states that are congruent with the way that Ishiwara conceptualized
the power of insight. Sorel too was dissatisfied with a world overly
governed by something like the mechanical law of scientific
rationality; he believed in the soteriological power of what he termed
myth. As an ostensible syndicalist or socialist Sorel promoted the
myth of the general strike, but he cared very little about the
attainment of the traditional goals of strikes and the arrival of
socialism. Instead he valued the propensity of general strikes to
propel participants into antinomian violence that he contrasted with
the order-imposing force of the state, and for Sorel true freedom or
justice could be achieved in the realization of this violence and not on
a horizon of expectation temporally separated from that violence. In
other words the myth of the general strike functioned for Sorel as
only a useful, motivating fiction, a performative image, or what
M$hayana Buddhism terms upaya or expedient means (Jpn.,

])] (Fujii the practitioner of victory) of the My!h! Nipponzan
sect; this is almost certainly a reference to Fujii Nichidatsu ])|,
the sects founder, who is today honorifically referred to as Sonshi
Gy!sh!in Nichidatsu Sh!nin |]| (Reverend
Practitioner of Victory Saint Nichidatsu). For an account of Fujii and
My!h! Nipponzans activities on the Asian continent concomitant
with pre-1945 Japanese pan-Asianist imperialism see Robert Kisala,
Prophets of Peace: Pacifism and Cultural Identity in Japans New
Religions (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 50-51.
253
h!ben).
28
In this sense one wonders to what extent we might
correctly consider Ishiwaras Nichirenism and his concept of the
Final War as useful fictions or forms of upaya in this sense.
Ishiwara the Nichirenist
Ishiwara was stationed with Japans Central Chinese Army in
Hankou, China between 1920 and 1921. The letters he wrote to his
wife Teiko from Hankou constitute a kind of diary reflecting his
views as a recent convert to Nichirenism, as well as his experiences
as a resident of the treaty port on the Yangzi River. He wrote a
remarkable number of letters to her from Hankou, and he mentions
Tanaka Chigaku, the Kokuch"kai and Nichirenism very frequently.
Perusing these letters can help us trace the development of Ishiwaras
understandings of Nichirenist doctrine with reference to specific
publications, including both periodicals and full-length books that
were written by Chigaku and other people associated with the
Nichirenism movement.
For example, in early June 1920 Ishiwara expressed his
excitement to Teiko upon receiving his honzon (the Nichiren
mandala) in the mail from his father, noting that it was a photocopy

28
Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. Jeremy Jennings
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially 24-29 and
114-119. On violence versus force see 17-18. See translators
Introduction xiii-xix for overview of Sorels key concepts and the
uses he proposed for them.
254
of one Chigaku personally made.
29
In the middle of the same month
Ishiwara mentioned receiving a volume of the Kokuch"kais lexicon,
the Honge seiten daijirin (Great Dictionary of the Holy Texts of Our
Sect),
30
a work published in three volumes under Chigakus direction
in that year. Near the end of the month Ishiwara mentioned the
arrival of a special issue of one of the Kokuch"kais journals, Dokku
(Poison/Medicine Drum), dedicated to the topic of martyrdom.
31
In
July 1920 Ishiwara mentioned that he was reading Chigakus Honge
sh!shaku ron (On the Passive and Aggressive Proselytizing Methods
of Our Sect, 1902) and at this point we can detect a deepening of
Ishiwaras understanding of the relationship between Nichirens
teachings according to Chigaku and concepts such as mapp! and the
bodhisattva J!gy!, along with the Tendai Buddhist doctrine that was
the formative matrix of Nichirens thought. Towards the end of July
Ishiwara told Teiko that he had just received the Kokuch" shinbun
(newspaper of the Kokuch"kai), noting that while there was much of
interest to read in the issue, the first article he planned to read was by
Chigaku on the Nikolaevsk Incident because Ishiwara, as usual,

29
Ishiwara Kanji, Ishiwara Kanji Sensh", Vol. 1, Hankou kara tsuma
e (shokan), 16-7.
30
Ibid., 23.
31
Ibid., 30. Dokku was published monthly between October 1919
and June 1920. See %tani, 55, note 28.
255
held Chigakus opinions on such matters in the highest regard.
32
In
the middle of August 1920 Ishiwara asked Teiko to send him a copy
of Satomi Kishios Nichirenshugi no shinkenky" (New Research on
Nichirenism); Satomi was Chigakus son and he would later become
Ishiwaras companion during much of his 1922-1924 stay in
Germany.
33

In mid-September 1920, Ishiwara reported to Teiko his
ambivalence about the arrival of the first issue of the Kokuch"kais
new daily organ, Tengy! minp! (Heavenly Task Peoples News).
34

Ishiwara thought the new, green-colored publication was humble
looking and thin, but that for people who were already Nichirenists,
Ishiwara suggested, the daily would be ideal for their spiritual
cultivation.
35
Later, in early October Ishiwara commented in a letter
to his wife that Tengy! minp! is a short newspaper, but because [in
it] one can easily learn about the great struggles [dai funt!] of Tanaka

32
Hankou kara tsuma e, 74. The nearly forgotten Nikolaevsk
Incident occurred in May, 1920, during Japans Siberian intervention
in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, when Soviet partisans
slaughtered about 700 Japanese soldiers, Japanese civilians, and
White Russians they had taken prisoner at the city of Nikolaevsk at
the mouth of the Amur River. Japan demanded compensation, which
Moscow never offered, but those responsible were executed by the
Soviet state. See entry in Janet Hunter, Concise Dictionary of
Japanese History (University of California Press, 1984), 146.
33
Hankou kara tsuma e, 99. On Satomi and Ishiwara in Germany see
Peattie, 47-8.
34
Tengy! Minp! was published daily between September 1920 and
December 1931. %tani, 55, note 28.
35
Hankou kara tsuma e, 157.
256
Sensei I am quite thankful to [be able to] read it.
36
In January 1921
Ishiwara mentioned the accomplishments of the great teacher
Tanaka (Tanaka dai sensei) on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday,
noting that one accomplishment was completion of the Honge
my!sh" shikimoku no k!en oyobi sono k!en no k!enroku no kank!
(lectures on the regulations of our wondrous sect and the publishing
of the record of those lectures). Ishiwara noted that the published
volume would cost twenty-five yen, and told his wife there was no
pressing need to buy it, but that she should purchase a copy if she
happened to have the chance.
37
Lastly, in a late-January 1921 letter,
Ishiwara related to his wife how he enjoyed reading about the end of
the year lectures and other proceedings at the Kokuch"kais Miho
headquarters. In particular, he described how moving it was that
participants at Miho informally performed Sado, Chigakus
dramatic work about Nichirens exile.
38

Ishiwara read and reread the Nichirenist documents he
acquired while in Hankou, and he vicariously participated in
Kokuch"kai activities from a distance through his constant reading of
Kokuch"kai organs. In this regard we can discern three interrelated
processes: his technical knowledge of Nichirenist thought became

36
Ibid., 180.
37
Ibid., 267.
38
Ibid., 279.
257
increasingly complete, his veneration of Chigaku became more
pronounced, and he came to apply Chigakus Nichirenist thought to
the real-world situations he personally experienced and confronted as
an officer in the Japanese army. A March 1920 Hankou letter, for
instance, expresses Ishiwaras desire to lead a significant (igi ga aru)
life, continuing to explain to Teiko that he wanted to be guided by
the reverend heart of the Original Buddha [Honbutsu]. He
furthermore wrote that he possessed the holy imperial institution of
Japan as his center. He added lastly that he did not yet understand the
deep logic of Nichirenism, but that on an instinctual level he was
in profound sympathy with it, especially with reference to its
propensity to unify the world spiritually.
In the same letter Ishiwara suggests to his wife that if he were
able to revere the Honbutsu day and night with proper and abundant
faith it would be possible to turn the city of Hankou, which he
characterized as dirty, intensely hot and drunkenly frenzied, into the
Land of Eternally Tranquil Light (Jakk!do, a paradisiacal pure land in
the Nichiren/Tendai tradition).
39
This letter makes it clear that
Ishiwara, following his recent conversion to Nichirenism, was still
unsure of his knowledge of the movements teachings. But we at
this point we can perceive several indications of Ishiwaras

39
Ibid., 212-3.
258
burgeoning Nichirenist transformation. First, he was becoming
approvingly aware of the fundamental, innovative connections that
Chigaku made between the Honbutsu and Japans imperial institution.
Secondly, Ishiwara was beginning to identify his own lifes work or
mission with sekai t!itsu or world unification, seeing himself as an
instrument of a Nichirenism that he understood as a force
synthesizing a universal, immanent Buddha and the Japanese nation-
state. Finally and most importantly, Ishiwara was coming to believe
that faith in an Original Buddha, which was intimately connected to
Japan and its imperial institution, was a force capable of transforming
the mundane world into a kind of paradise. We should particularly
note the following: Ishiwara communicated to Teiko his conviction
that even a treaty port crowded with the concessions of Western
imperialist nations on a river in the center of East Asia could be
transformed into a paradise of eternally tranquil light through the
power of faith in the Buddha of the Lotus S"tra, a Buddha combined
inextricably with the nation-state of Japan and the Japanese emperor.
Through reading Chigakus technical discourses on
Nichirenist ideas Ishiwara learned to employ the vocabulary and
concepts embodied in works such as Honge sh!shaku ron, and he
consequently gained increasing confidence in his basic
comprehension of Chigakus and Nichirens ideas. Ishiwaras letters
259
make it clear that he understood the teachings of Nichiren through the
lens (or filter) of Chigakus thought. For example, in late July of
1920 Ishiwara told his wife how difficult he found it to understand
Nichirens writings and he let her know that Chigakus works served
him as an indispensable guide.
40
Ishiwaras growing respect for
Chigaku is evident from the way that he increasingly referred to the
Kokuch"kai leader as the great teacher (dai-sensei) Tanaka.
Conversely, over time his discussions of doctrine became more
infrequent. Instead Ishiwara expressed a reductively simpler faith in
Buddhism according to Chigaku. These developments are mirrored
by an increase in Ishiwaras use of the daimoku (namu My!h!
Rengeky!/hail the Lotus S"tra of the Wondrous Law) as a salutation
at the end of as well as in the middle of his letters. Towards the end
of Ishiwaras Hankou period his letters also express the belief that
Nichiren himself did not completely clarify his own view of the
Japanese kokutai (national principles). Ishiwara believed, however,
that during the Meiji period Chigaku had clearly revealed the secret
meaning of Nichirens teachings, namely that Japans destiny was to
become the seat of a universal paradise (literally a dharma-land) in
this world. In clarifying the meaning of kokutai in this way,

40
Ibid., 67-9.
260
according to Ishiwara, Chigaku completed the teachings of Nichiren
and by extension Buddhism.
41

The Hankou letters also demonstrate that Ishiwara linked his
erotic or romantic love for his wife with Nichirenist doctrine. He
clearly linked his feelings for her with reliance on the immanence of
the Honbutsu, and faith in both the Lotus S"tra and the act of
chanting that sutras praise with the daimoku. Perhaps the greatest
example of this appears in a letter Ishiwara wrote in early August,
1920. In it he expressed his inspiration in life
was completely thanks to nothing other than the
Great Saint [Nichiren]. Namu My!h! Rengeky!.
Moreover [my inspiration] is truly nothing other than
the Tei with whom I share the highest love. Namu
My!h! Rengeky!. I first of all united with the
Honbutsu. Then it became possible for me to know I
have completely achieved immersion in Teis infinite
love. [O]ur becoming one body furthermore
depended upon being absolutely united with the
Honbutsu. I have seen up to now what people in
general call divine transformation or love, and so on.
It harbors an underlying selfishness, and because of
this there are many dangers. But with two people
whose connection is strictly dependent upon namu
My!h! Rengeky!, whatever might occur in the midst
of the Dharma World of the universe, there is no
reason to fear anything in the least. In this place of
greatest happiness, from this place true inspiration is
born. Namu My!h! Rengeky!. Namu My!h!
Rengeky!. Tei, wont you please say it together with
me? Namu My!h! Rengeky!.
42



41
Ibid., 224-5.
42
Ibid., 83-4.
261
Later in the same letter Ishiwara wrote that his wifes love sometimes
made him feel an electrical charge run through his body, as if he was
intoxicated with the highest happiness that a human being can feel.
Elsewhere in the letter he wrote that at times he was suddenly moved
to shout the daimoku because of her love, that receiving one letter
from her was like 100 years of religious practice, and that hearing
from her made him feel more power than he could feel after reading
100 volumes.
43

While in China Ishiwara clearly linked his love for Teiko with
his burgeoning faith. More generally one of the more interesting
aspects of the Hankou letters is the way that they evidence a
thoroughly human and even emotionally touching side of Ishiwara in
his affection and longing for his wife, and one is even tempted to
speculate that his thorough embrace of Nichirenist religiosity over the
period was in some way related to her absence from his everyday life.
Nevertheless in the Hankou letters we also observe the development
of a relationship between Nichirenism and an ethical sense that would
characterize the rest of Ishiwaras life. His proclamation that the
great truth of the universe is the Buddhas my!h! (wondrous law) ,

43
Ibid., 147. It is not clear to what reading material Ishiwara was
referring, but it would be safe to conjecture that he meant Buddhist
and/or Nichirenist texts.
262
for example in a September 1920 letter,
44
has significant
ramifications for the way that he viewed history, international
relations, and Japans proper world-historical role.
In terms of a basic ethical stance, Nichirenism encouraged
Ishiwara to view the things of this world that people commonly
regard as mundane or even profane as actually or potentially divine.
For instance, in a December 1920 letter Ishiwara noted that in the
Kokuch"kai there is no discrimination between male and female.
45
In
the same letter Ishiwara connected the example of Chigaku, who
himself was close to Nichirens own example, to our own ability to
understand and actualize the idea that ordinary people can become
Buddhas.
46
He implied that Chigaku had managed to actualize the
Buddha within himself and through his activities and teachings, and
that furthermore we ordinary and defiled beings could all do likewise.
Nevertheless, for Ishiwara the vehicle through which the
Buddha could be actualized in this world was not the individual. It
was the nation. In a letter written early in his stay in China Ishiwara
discussed political realities on the continent, writing that Chinese
were without question not innately inferior. He blamed Chinas

44
Ibid., 126.
45
On Chigakus remarkably egalitarian stance on the equality of
women see Richard M. Jaffe, Neither Monk nor Layman: Clerical
Marriage in Modern Japanese Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001), 180-1.
46
Hankou kara tsuma e., 229.
263
problems on the countrys lack of national unity and the meddling of
Western Powers, but he blamed even more Japanese petty interests
that prevented Japanese from assisting China. Here he argued that
Japan as a whole could be strong enough to confront the West and
save China, but only through faith in the Lotus S"tra. In other words,
Japan as a collective embodiment of the Buddha in this world could
and would compassionately save China (and the rest of Asia) from
the evils of Western imperialism. In the same letter, Ishiwara also
blamed to some extent Japans inability to act morally vis--vis
China on Japans infatuation with the individualistic values of the
West. That is to say, for Ishiwara, Western influences on Japan
prevented the countrys potential realization of Buddhahood.
Ishiwara ends the letter by urging the Japanese to chant the daimoku,
not only in unison with each other, but also with the sun and the
moon. Ishiwara thus implied a profound connection between the
Japanese nation-as-Buddha and the fundamental and most important
forces of nature.
47

Ishiwaras conception of the relationship between
Nichirenism and Japans world-historical role developed over time.
In September 1920 Ishiwara stated that at long last all over Japan
there is a foundation [of people] chanting namu My!h! Rengeky!.

47
Ibid., 24-5.
264
This, he believed, was an early step in the processes of Japans
becoming Buddha. He then told his wife that following Japans
transformation into a Buddha-Land, the whole world would become
unified with the Buddha. Ishiwara was beginning to express these
concepts in the technical terminology of Nichirenist thought, with
Japan as the honmon kaidan (ordination platform of the origin
teaching) and the worlds transformation as itten shikai kaiki my!h!
(everyone in the world, across the four seas, being led to union with
the wondrous law).
48
Later in the month and in another letter,
Ishiwara implored Teiko to remember the importance of their being a
Lotus S"tra husband and wife (Hokkeky!-teki f"fu), singling out
especially the importance of her role as a Lotus S"tra wife. Such

48
Ibid., 128. For a discussion of the meaning of the honmon (no)
kaidan, which literally means ordination platform of the origin
teaching, see Stones By Imperial Edict and Shogunal Decree,
193-219. She explains that Chigaku hoped the modern Japanese state
would decree the establishment of an ordination platform for Nichiren
Buddhism, as he believed Nichiren would have advocated. However,
in Original Enlightenment, 288-90, Stone notes the way that in the
Nichiren tradition the honmon no kaidan took on a much broader
significance. Believers came to conceptualize the platform as ri no
kaidan (ordination platform in principle), which could be anywhere
one embraces the Lotus S"tra. That place, wherever it maybe would
then be the site of awakening, and this means that the idea of the
honmon no kaidan is deeply linked to ideas such as that this world,
just the way it is, is the Buddhas pure land. In other words the
construction of the kaidan can be synonymous with actualizing the
immanence of the Buddha in this world. Importantly, Chigaku
wanted the modern Japanese state to sponsor the construction of the
ordination platform, but this had almost nothing to do with the
ordination of monks and everything to do with the marriage of the
Japanese state and Lotus Buddhism.
265
matters were important, Ishiwara stated in this particular letter,
because they were instrumental in fulfilling Japans mission.
49
In
yet another letter written in the same month he also stressed the
exemplary nature of Japans culture, which he held was deeply rooted
in the countrys becoming-Lotus S"tra (Hokkeky!-ka).
50

The ethical or moral sense that Ishiwara developed together
with his Nichirenism directly addressed not only Japans mission.
With increasing frequency he also addressed the real relations
between Japanese and other East Asians in the present. For example,
in early December 1920, Ishiwara discussed the Korea problem,
castigating petty Japanese officials who oppressed the Korean people.
He claimed that before Japan annexed Korea, local officials also
oppressed people with heavy taxes and inhumane treatment, but
contemporary Koreans had forgotten this. Nonetheless, Ishiwara
adamantly scolded his countrymen for not treating Koreans better. At
this point Ishiwara stopped short of arguing for the necessity of
outright Korean independence, but his words were vague. He wrote
that whether or not [Japanese] realize the great ideal of itten shikai
kaiki my!h! depended on how [Japanese] govern Korea. The
stakes involved exceeded concerns with Korea alone, he added,
noting that what hung in the balance was the foundation of Sino-

49
Hankou kara tsuma e., 138.
50
Ibid., 147.
266
Japanese amity, social problems, everything (Nisshin-shinzen
demo, shakai mondai demo, subete demo). Ishiwara ends this letter,
Ahh, will we unite with the my!h!? ahh, will we unite with the
my!h!? (aa, my!h! naru kana, aa, my!h! naru kana).
51

During his Hankou period Ishiwara developed connections
between his growing Nichirenist faith and a moral imperative to
confront injustices that he connected not only with Western
imperialism, but also to the failings of Japanese themselves in their
treatment of other Asians. He put his thought into the language of
such concepts as honmon no kaidan (the ordination platform of the
origin teaching as an ideal Japan) and the achievement of itten shikai
kaiki my!h!. Such concepts spelled out the implications of
Ishiwaras incipient moral imperative, amounting to the conviction
that by whatever means necessary Japan had to become a truly
righteous nation-state and use this righteousness to transform the
world into a new and better place. As we shall see, in Ishiwaras later
thought this new and better place became one where anything is
possible, but only through human activity in this world, in other
words, through unheard of developments in science and technology.
However, before discussing such matters more fully I will detail the
way that Ishiwaras later thought depended upon terminologies and

51
Ibid., 232-3.
267
concepts that connected it to broader regional concerns and pan-Asian
sentiments
!d"/Had"
The binary opposition of !d! and had! \ is an
enigmatic presence in the work that Ishiwara crafted, delivered, and
published into the 1930s and early 1940s, which culminated in but
did not end with his 1940 lecture and subsequently published
extended essay on the Final War. It came to form an essential basis
for his grander soteriological, world-historical vision. #d! literally
means the way of the king, but it is often more figuratively and I
would argue accurately translated as the way of righteousness or
the way of benevolence. Had! means something like the way of
the despot or the way of the hegemon. #d! and had! originated
with Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism in China. Mencius in
particular used the terms in his efforts to transform Confucianism
from a philosophical discourse that primarily concerned interpersonal
relationships at the local, mostly familial level into a discourse
involving proper political behavior with respect to centralized state
authority.
52
When we read Ishiwara deploying these concepts in the

52
On Mencius and !d!/had! (transliterated from Chinese as wang-
tao/ "ba-tao) see Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese
Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 49-51;
268
context of modern East Asia or the modern world it would be easy to
mistakenly believe that in advocating !d! Ishiwara was calling for
universal reverence towards Japans emperor. The way that Ishiwara
disparagingly characterizes the West as fundamentally imbued with
had!shugi (had!ism) only exacerbates the appearance of his apparent
jingoism. However, Ishiwara intended something strikingly different.
In order to understand this we must delve into a genealogy of the
concepts in question that begins with something much closer to
Ishiwara (and us) than Confucius, Mencius or even the Tokugawa
Period Japanese who sometimes employed the vocabulary of !d!.
53

According to Peattie, Ishiwara first encountered the concepts
of !d! and had! when he was a cadet at the Tokyo Military Academy
(1905-1907), and the person responsible for introducing him to the
conceptual pair was Nanbu Jir!, a classmates father. Nanbu was a
pro-revolution, Japanese activist in China during the Meiji Period.
However, as Peattie notes, a discourse on !d! versus had! had much
broader currency.
54
Tachibana Shiraki, a Sinologist, journalist and
employee of the South Manchurian Railway Research Department,

Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, Vol. 1: The Period of
Philosophers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 118-20.
53
For information on the various uses of the !d! concept in
Tokugawa Japan see H. D. Harootunian, Toward Restoration: The
Growth of Political Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1970).
54
Peattie, 33-4.
269
influenced many Japanese with an interest in affairs in continental
Asia, and he unceasingly advocated the promotion of !d! over
had!.
55
During the pre-Manchurian Incident period when Ishiwara
was Operations Officer with the Kant! Army Staff (1928-1932),
Tachibana participated in the affairs of the Daiy"kai (Great Hero
Summit Association), which largely consisted of petty bourgeois
Japanese in Manchuria.
During this period Ishiwara became closely acquainted with
individuals, including Tachibana, who were collectively articulating a
vision of Manchuria as a racial paradise.
56
In fact although
Tachibana denied connection with radicals in the Kant! Army
before the Japanese took over Manchuria, Ishiwara recorded a
meeting with Tachibana in March 1931.
57
In early October 1931, less
than a month after the Manchurian Incident, Tachibana met yet again
with Ishiwara, this time along with Ishiwaras co-conspirator in the
previous months momentous events, Itagaki Seishir!. Subsequently

55
Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the
East Asian Modern, (Oxford, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 63.
56
Peattie, 160.
57
Lincoln Li, The China Factor in Modern Japanese Thought: The
Case of Tachibana Shiraki, 1881-1945 (Albany: State University of
New York, 1996), 51. Li takes it for granted that Tachibana
considered Ishiwara a radical. I am not so sure this was the case.
At the time and thereafter Ishiwara had an extremely ambiguous
image, one that tends to challenge often facilely conceptualized and
applied terminology such as radical, rightist, nationalist,
fascist, and imperialist.
270
Tachibana became actively involved in the political affairs within the
puppet-state.
58

Tachibana based his utopian vision in Manchuria upon
principles concomitant with a concept of !d! that we can directly link
to the thought of Sun Yat-sen, who inspired Tachibana from the time
of the Japanese intellectuals youth to challenge the idea of Western
superiority. Sun encouraged Tachibana to begin to think of the
!d!/had! confrontation in terms of a struggle between an East Asia
led by Japan and the West.
59
Sun affected the thought of a whole
generation of Japanese regarding the China problem, with a speech
that he gave in Kobe, Japan in 1924, at least indirectly influencing
both Tachibana and Ishiwara (who was studying in Europe at the
time). The Speech, Da Yaxiyazhuyi (Greater Asianism) first of all
praised Japans modernization, focusing on Japans 1899 overcoming
of the extraterritoriality that had been imposed by the West, and more
importantly, Japans victory over Russia in 1905. Sun recalled for his
Japanese listeners that when crossing the Suez Canal just after the

58
Li, 53.
59
Duara, Sovereignty, 63; Saji Yoshihiko, Ishiwara Kanji: tensai
gunryakusha no sh!z! [Ishiwara Kanji: Image of a brilliant military
strategist], (Tokyo: Keizaikai, 2001), 502. On the topic of the
relationship between !d!, Tachibana, Sun Yat-sen, the idea of racial
harmony, and the management of the Manchurian puppet-state see
Louise Young, Japans Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of
Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999), especially, 285-7.
271
war, local people had mistaken him for Japanese. Even after they
learned his actual nationality they rejoiced with him over the
Japanese demonstration that the White imperialist nations were not
invincible. Sun derided the Western response to the Russo-Japanese
war, characterizing it as an attitude of blood being thicker than
water, noting that the British, while technically politically allied with
the Japanese, became unhappy upon hearing news of Japanese
victory. In the face of this racist solidarity among White imperialist
powers Sun called for the unity of all Asians. A common Asian
culture, Sun hoped, would be the basis of an adequate resistance to
imperialist oppression.
60

Next Sun began his discussion of !d! (wangdao) and had!
(badao). He used the example of Nepal to make his claims, pointing
out that the Himalayan country continued to pay tribute to China in
the nineteenth century, despite a decline in Qing coercive power by
that time. Later, Sun continued, the British had to provide Nepal with
cash subsidies in order to ensure the flow of Gurkhas into the British
military. According to Suns logic, imperial China did not garner the
respect or reverence of the Nepalese through the employment of
threats or violence, nor through monetary incentives, but the British

60
Prasenjit Duara, Transnationalism and the Predicament of
Sovereignty, The American Historical Review 102, No. 4 (Oct.,
1997), 1038-9.
272
could only ensure their hegemony over Nepal by what was in essence
bribery. For Sun imperial China therefore exemplified !d! as rule
through benevolence while the British were an example of had! as
despotism, or rule through coercive, extra-moral force. Lastly, Sun
ended his speech with the prediction of an apocalyptic culture war
between the forces representing the aggressive militarism of the West
and the moral pacifism of the East, and he urged his listeners to
strengthen the forces of peace in their nation.
61

As Prasenjit Duara indicates, Suns discourse on !d!/had!
was irreducibly modern in a particularly twentieth-century sense.
Duara rightly locates the matrix of Western imperialist ideology in a
social Darwinism that justified the Wests domination over the non-
West with reference to the Wests supposed possession of a superior,
enlightened civilization or History, whereas the non-West
supposedly had no History or national territory, making the people
and territories of the non-West legitimate objects of Western
domination. When non-Western elites began to construct their own
nationalisms they formulated the present of the desired territorial
nation as the subject or agent of History to which belonged the entire
past that had occurred on this delimited but maximized surface. In
other words they conceptually formed nations where there previously

61
Ibid., 1039. The quotation is Duaras paraphrase.
273
were none, mirroring the territorial nation-states of what Duara calls
Europes high nationalism.
However, by the time Sun made his 1924 speech in Japan he
had begun to develop a nationalism that arose from the same social
Darwinist matrix, but one that also corresponded more directly with
discursive conditions that produced nationalism [in the non-West]:
transnational imperialism. In other words Suns pan-Asianism
manifested relationally and coevally with an imperialism that was
equally transnational in its aspirations. Sun accordingly employed
the !d!/had! dichotomy to posit the superiority of East Asia at the
level of civilization defined not just in terms of a geographically
delimited transnational zone, but also as an embodiment of a
developmental process. From Suns perspective then, especially
within the post-World War I historical milieu, an !d!-based Asian
civilization could, and had to develop global, transnational
civilization in ways that the West could and would not. This
development would overcome the imperialism plaguing East Asia,
but it would also defeat once and for all the coercion, violence,
exploitation, and despotic social, political and economic relationships
signified by the word had!/badao.
62


62
Ibid., 1039-40. On the connection between what he calls forms of
redemptive transnationalism such as Suns pan-Asianism, see Ibid.,
1033.
274
That Sun and his pan-Asianism would speak to Japanese in
this way is highly ironic from the perspective of the present,
considering that one of the few things the Peoples Republic of China
and Taiwan officially agree upon is Suns greatness,
63
while few East
Asian governments would disagree about the evils of Japanese
imperialism. It is not as if Sun constructed a singular pan-
Asianismas opposed to plural pan-Asianisms with multiple sites of
emergencethat Japanese such as Tachibana, Ishiwara and others
either faithfully promulgated or perverted into the ideological bases
of Japanese imperialism. Lineages of historical determination are
never so simple nor from historians perspectives so decidable.
Nevertheless, Sun did profoundly affect the way that Tachibana and
Ishiwara thought about the China problem. In a 1940 work
Ishiwara in fact directly referenced the text of Greater Asianism. In
this context, Ishiwara defended the ideal that Japan could and should
remain the force for the liberation of Asia and the independence of
Asian nations.
64
Considering the way that Sun ended Greater
Asianism we cannot escape the impression that Ishiwara was
answering Suns call to action when he caused the outbreak of the

63
See Marie-Claire Bergre, Sun Yat-sen, trans. Janet Lloyd
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1-8.
64
Ishiwara, T!a Renmei kensetsu y!k! [general plan for the
construction of an East Asian League] in Ishiwara Kanji Sensh", vol.
6, 117-8.
275
Manchurian Incident, as well as with his lifes work of fostering the
Final War as the war that would establish the possibility of progress
beyond the impasses of actually existing modernity. It is therefore
not surprising that Ishiwara adopted the !d!/had! vocabulary in his
articulation of that wars rationale.
Ishiwara used the concept of had! in a constellation with
other concepts to illustrate the hypocrisy of the imperialist West,
along with the Wests inability to move history forward beyond the
overdetermined impasse represented by World War I. He conversely
used the concept of !d! to characterize an Asia free of the Wests
manifold problems and it was here that Ishiwara undeniably entered
the grey zone between fantastic, modernist utopianism and the
legitimization of Japanese imperialism. Thus in Ishiwaras
deployment of the !d!/had! discourse we can clearly see both sides
of the various fundamental contradictions that characterized
Ishiwaras own thought: for example he excelled when it came to
pointing out the failings of the West but was sometimes although not
always unable to discern the same sorts of shortcomings which
existed at the foundations of his own belief in the essential goodness
of Japan and East Asia.
At one point in Saish" sens! ron Ishiwara reduced what was
at stake in the Final War to the wars role in determining whether
276
Japans emperor would become the worlds emperor or whether the
American president would be able to exercise hegemony over the
world. Deciding this question, he added, would determine human
destiny thereafter. What the choice between emperor and president
boiled down to, Ishiwara argued, was the choice between had! and
!d!, and which of these oppositional guiding principles would unify
the globe.
65
In isolation such statements suggest simple-minded
chauvinism coupled with extreme conservatism. Ishiwara seemed to
be baldly stating the superiority of monarchial sovereignty over the
United States sovereignty of the people, and no matter what
shortcomings democracy may characteristically have in practice his
opinions may seem difficult for many of us to swallow. One
moreover wonders how Ishiwara could have believed that US
political forms were somehow more despotic and thereby more unjust
than Japans way of the king. However, if we examine other texts
Ishiwara wrote regarding the question of the !d!/had! dichotomy
during the late 1930s and early 1940s, we begin to understand that
what he meant was significantly more sophisticated than one might
initially imagine.
To supplement Saish" sens! rons discourse on the Final War
Ishiwara completed a work titled Saish" sens! ni kansuru shitsugi

65
Saish" sens! ron in Ishiwara Kanji Sensh", vol. 3, 46.
277
!t! (questions and answers regarding the Final War) in the early Fall
of 1941. Here he restated his conviction that the Final War was a
contest between the two fundamental principles of had! and !d!, and
he identified these with on the one hand the US and its president as
the potential despotic leader of the world, and on the other hand an
East Asia coupled with the Japanese emperor as a prospective
worlds emperor.
66
In the 1942 text Ishiwara also explicitly
claimed that such ideas accorded with the teachings of Nichiren.
67

We get a clearer picture of what Ishiwara meant when at the end of
the questions and answers text he unequivocally associated had!
with the illegitimate deployment of violence. Citing Nietzsche either
consciously or otherwise, Ishiwara first notes that Europe is nothing
more than a peninsula of Asia. In contrast with the European
conceit that the West alone was the bearer of human progress,
68

Ishiwara next argued that within the confined space of Europe too
many contentious ethnic groups had gathered and that overabundance
of nation-states had formed. Ishiwara claimed that the had!ist

66
Saish" sens! ni kansuru shitsugi !t! in Ishiwara Kanji Sensh",
vol. 3, 73.
67
Ibid., 74.
68
Cf., this passage from Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil:
A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(Vintage: New York, 1966), 65, If we stand with fear and reverence
before these tremendous remnants of what human beings once were,
we will in the process suffer melancholy thoughts about old Asia and
its protruding peninsula of Europe, which, in contrast to Asia, wants
to represent the progress of man.
278
spirit that is the hallmark of so-called Western civilization was the
natural outcome of a history of intense ethnic competition within
the European peninsula. This history of violent struggle, Ishiwara
argued, along with an accompanying unparalleled development of
military technologies and strategies within Europe over the centuries,
led to the Wests domination of the world.
69

Ishiwara became involved in the T!a Renmei Ky!kai (East
Asian League Association) soon after its 1939 founding in Tokyo by
Kimura Takeo, an old civilian associate of his from the early days of
the Manchurian experiment,. The aims of the association mainly
derived from ideas Ishiwara had publicized over the previous decade,
centering on notions of racial harmony and cooperation within
East Asia, and for this reason, however counterfactually, Ishiwara
was the associations founder in the collective mind of the Japanese
public.
70
In subsequent years Ishiwara frequently published various
works in support of T!a Renmei Ky!kai, and the ideal of an East
Asian League more generally. Several of these writings elaborated
on the !d!/had! discourse and the past and present historical
significance of !d!s supremacy over had! in East Asia. Ishiwaras
discourse on !d! and had! in this regard was somewhere between

69
Saish" sens! ni kansuru, 80-1. Cf., Saish" sens! ron in Sensh"
vol. 3, 11.
70
Peattie, 322-3.
279
description and prescription, representation and performance in its
intent.
In a long work composed in 1939, T!a Renmei kensetsu y!k!
(General Plan for the Construction of an East Asian League),
Ishiwara illustrated the hope he and others who pined for East Asian
union invested in Manchuria as the paradise of racial cooperation.
In this context called Manchuria the country of !d!. Later Ishiwara
admitted that by that time and in the context of what Japanese were
calling the China Incidentthe Japanese military attempt to
consolidate control of all of China beginning in 1937, what many
historians now call the Second Sino-Japanese WarChinese people
had some basis for calling Japanese had!iosts, or in other words
characterizing them as despotic hegemons. Ishiwara defended an
idealized Japan by arguing that all of its seemingly questionable
behavior was, or should be, in the interest of Asia in general. Japan,
Ishiwara argued, had to imitate Western had!ism in order to
maintain !d! civilization. However, Ishiwara criticized the
Japanese, suggesting that they confused the civilization that they had
been forced to imitate with their more basic !d!ist identity. He wrote
that Japanese needed to keep the two layers of reality in question
separate; Japanese needed to resort to what amounted to activities
280
very much resembling Western imperialism, but only in order to
defeat the had! civilization that was at the root of that imperialism.
71

In a 1940 work, Shintaisei to T!a Renmei [the New Order and
the East Asian League], Ishiwara further characterized the differences
between !d! and had!, stating in this connection that the West had
forms of morality, but that they differed significantly from those of
Asia. Westerners, according to him, struggled valiantly in matters of
scientific progress, while at the same time they were utilitarian in
the moral sphere. For them, he wrote, power, force and coercion
always come first. In the brutal world of the West, as Ishiwara
characterized it, the ultimately utilitarian laws or rules had only to do
with the relative preservation of peace in a context where selfish
maximization of power on the part of individuals was regarded as
wholly legitimate. In this connection Ishiwara stated that
mercantilist ethics (sh!gy! d!toku) characterized the West. In
general he noted that in general Japanese and Asians idealized moral
government (tokuch ij]), while in the West government was much
more a matter of impersonal laws enforced for their own sake (h!chi
]).
72


71
T!a Renmei kensetsu y!k!, 104-5.
72
Shintaisei to T!a Renmei, 207-8.
281
In Shintaisei to T!a Renmei Ishiwara further argued that
Chinese could even provide a kind of moral corrective to the Japanese
propensity to adopt at least outwardly the had!ist civilization of the
West. Noting that Japan had accepted foreign influences to the point
of frivolity, Ishiwara contended that this was the source of modern
Japans power and all around success, but he expressed alarm
regarding the way that the adaptation of had! in Japan had estranged
Japanese from proper morality. In this situation, argued Ishiwara,
Chinese, who had been more reluctant to adopt the foreign, and
Japanese, who had been overly eager at times to adopt foreign ways,
could each fill in for the others shortcomings. Doing so, according
to Ishiwara, would form a basis for greater racial cooperation
thereafter. Ishiwara continued his discussion of !d!/had! by further
lamenting Japans flirtation with had!ism in its imitation of the West,
and expressing even more admiration for Chinese conservatism. In
particular he lamented the way that Japans unfortunate embrace of
had!ism had caused the resentment of fellow East Asians, and he
called for deep self reflection on the part of his countrymen.
73

Next in the same work, Ishiwara made the point that the East
Asian League is the !d! league, and by this he expressed a vision of
!d! that seemed to exceed nationalism narrowly defined. He wrote

73
Ibid., 209.
282
that despite the tutelage of the West in the ways of had!, recently
Japanese have awakened from their dependence on the Anglo-
Americans. Clearly, what Ishiwara meant by had! in this case
implies imperialism foremost. But, as his discourse on the utilitarian,
amoral legal systems of the West indicates, Ishiwara included forms
of instrumental and impersonal rationality in his definition of had!.
In the 1940 context of what he regarded as Japans decreasing need to
learn from the West, moreover, Ishiwara quite explicitly detached !d!
as a Japanese and Asian political ideal from the bedrock of orthodox
Japanese nationalism at the time, the imperial institution.
Specifically, Ishiwara made a distinction between the term k!d!,
literally the imperial way, and !d!, arguing that k!d! smacks
thoroughly of a deplorably self-righteous Japanism that was
contrary to the true national principles (kokutai) of Japan.
Nevertheless, Ishiwara believed it would be natural to revere the
Japanese emperor as the leader of an East Asian confederation, so
long as the emperor himself upholds the principles of !d!.
74

In this context Ishiwara rhetorically cited the emperors
miraculous spirit (reimy!) and his ageless propensity to assist in the
establishment of eternal peace in heaven and earth. It is perhaps wise
to remember that Ishiwara was writing and speaking in the context of

74
Ibid., 210.
283
Japan in 1940. The military police or the Special Higher Police
would have been monitoring every one of his utterances, so it is
reasonable to consider that he felt pressure to give lip service to
orthodoxy. At any rate however, by 1940 Ishiwara was not giving
primacy to the emperor nor Japan in his political discourse. Instead
the most !d! was far more important.
75
By 1940 Ishiwara also
unhesitatingly castigated the violence of Japanese imperialism, while
at the same time pragmatically viewing Japan as the only nation with
the ability to lead an East Asian confederacy of nations; for better or
worse, Ishiwara believed that Japans industrially and militarily
advanced status necessitated Japanese leadership in the struggle
against White imperialism. For this very reason, he argued that from
a moral perspective Japanese had to express love and respect for the
various peoples of East Asia, or in other words Japanese had to win
them over by means of !d!.
76
It may seem incredible that Ishiwara
contradicted contemporary Japanese commons sense regarding the
superiority of Japanese vis--vis other Asians to such a great extent.
But Ishiwara tended to back up seeming platitudes with advocacy of
more concrete measures, as when he often warned against such deeds
as Japanese indiscriminately grabbing land in Manchuria.
77


75
See Ibid., 210, 211.
76
Ibid, 211-2.
77
See for example, T!a Renmei kensetsu y!k!, 104-5.
284
Liberalism/Controlism
Ishiwara also employed another binary, that of liberalism
(jiy"shugi) and controlism (t!seishugi), ultimately conflating
controlism with totalitarianism (zentaishugi). He used this binary to
register what he read as global trends during the interwar period, as
well as to chart Japans prospective course through development
towards the end of victory in the Final War. Saish" sens! ron reveals
that by supplanting liberalism with controlism Ishiwara meant to shift
away from an ideology of laissez-faire, market-driven capitalism. He
associated this ideology for the most part with Great Britain and
imitators of the British model in Japan. Instead Ishiwara advocated a
shift to state controlled economies on the part of nation-states, and he
noted the examples of nation-states that he deemed to be at the
cutting edge in a march towards the future.
Along these lines, Ishiwara criticized the British in the current
European conflict for recognizing the inanity of the Versailles
system, while still wishing to return to the principle of liberalism
after Hitlers defeat.
78
Ishiwara also approvingly cited the Nazi will
to construct a cooperative community (renmei ky!d!tai) in Europe,
indicating the relationship between controlism and forms of extra-
national, regional unification that Ishiwara obviously advocated for

78
Saish"sens! ron, 40.
285
East Asia as well.
79
But more to the point, Ishiwara praised both the
Soviets for their breakthrough in shifting from liberalism to
controlism,
80
and the Germans for their ability to harness national
will through a state managed industrial policy, to the extent that they
were in his estimation able to engineer a second industrial
revolution.
81

In Shintaisei to T!a Renmei, a 1940 lecture that Ishiwara
gave on the occasion of the anniversary of the founding of the
Manchurian puppet-state, he again noted that liberalism is in
retreat. He also explained that the Germans had been pushed into
their rejection of liberalism by the Versailles Treaty, the regime of
Chiang Kai-shek had been pushed towards controlism/totalitarianism
by oppression from Japan, and the Soviets had been pushed into
totalitarianismsomething contrary to the teachings of Marx,
Ishiwara notedbecause of the intervention of capitalist nation-states
following the Bolshevik Revolution. Adversity that forced these
three conversions to controlism/totalitarianism was for Ishiwara
similar to the Hegelian ruse of history. In other words, however it

79
Ibid., 41.
80
Ibid., 45.
81
Ibid, 49-50. According to Ishiwara he borrowed the second
industrial revolution concept from a book titled Nachisu kokub!
keizai ron (On the National Defense of the Nazis) by Kamei
Shinichir!.
286
happened and wherever it happened, the retreat of liberalism was a
very good thing as far as Ishiwara was concerned.
82

In Shintaisei to T!a Renmei Ishiwara also yet again
recounted a history of warfare, this time explicitly connecting it to a
history of political ideology and practice and with respect to
questions of liberalism versus controlism/totalitarianism. He argued
that in the age of absolutism (senseishugi) preceding the French
Revolution armies in Europe consisted of professional soldiers or
mercenaries. He noted that the French revolution led to conscription,
but inexperienced peasant conscripts were not suited for the older
style of warfare in which lines of musketeers faced each other in
firing lines, so they became something like armies of skirmishers
(sanpei), meaning that soldiers were freer to act independently.
According to Ishiwara, this freedom corresponded with the age of
liberalism. The situation changed, he argued, because of the
unprecedented firepower of weapons used during the First World
War. For example, soldiers were pinned down during that conflict by
machine gun tactics, and they were no longer able to move freely and
independently. At the same time, Ishiwara argued, commanding
armies became exceedingly difficult and greater coordination of a
wider variety of military units became necessary. He suggests more

82
Shintaisei, 191-2.
287
generally that the more massive scale of warfare exacerbated such
difficulties in the maintenance of martial liberalism in the age of
industrialized nation-states. For Ishiwara the most salient
characteristic of such developments was that a shift towards the need
for and practice of controlism in the military sphere correlated with
the broader, non-military world as well. In short, he argued that
World War I was the point at which the global-historical tide shifted
from liberalism to controlism, and it was precisely at this point in his
argument that he made the point of noting that controlism is the same
thing as totalitarianism.
83

In the same work Ishiwara emphasized that totalitarianism
was not a retrogression. The military analogy he had just given
made this point clear: modern militaries had learned that liberalism
on the battlefield did not work and that with controlism commanders
could express their goals more clearly, while masses of soldiers could
work together more efficiently. Thus for Ishiwara
totalitarianism/controlism represented a progressive development
towards a higher rationality. Controlism/totalitarianism was for
Ishiwara a synthesis between liberalism and absolutism
(senseishugi) and it amounted to the means to mobilize national
energies in order to decisively win the Final War. Lastly, in order to

83
Ibid., 195-6.
288
prove the necessity of controlism/totalitarianism Ishiwara once
again turned to the example of the Nazis, whose blitzkrieg tactics, he
argued, were only possible due to German totalitarianism. This, he
concluded, opened the eyes of remaining proponents of liberalism in
Europe.
84

However and despite his advocacy of
totalitarianism/controlism, Ishiwara had the following caveat: the
totalitarianism that the competing parties in the worlds coming final
conflict had turned to in the interest of efficiency would lead to a
process of the global military encampment (gasshukushugi) of human
societies in general. Ishiwara contended in the conclusion of Saish"
sens! ron that this kind of militarization of the world was only
necessitated by what he called a super state of emergency
(ch!hij!ji). In other words, temporary, totalitarian measures were
only necessitated by the singularly exceptional period or juncture in
world history in or at which he believed himself to be living. For
Ishiwara, such measures were only legitimate until a Japanese led
East Asia could lead the world beyond the had!ist impasses of
actually existing modernity, and into the post-Final War epoch.
85

Ishiwaras Horizons of Expectation and his Map to the Future

84
Ibid, 196-7.
85
Ibid., 197, and Saish" sens! ron, 59-60.
289
As evidenced by his writings and lectures circa 1940, Ishiwara
believed that he was living through the most momentous crisis of
human history. In this context of exceptionality, he incessantly called
for East Asian unity as a means to prepare for humanitys last war, a
conflict that would involve not just all able bodied men as with World
War I, but also women and children, grass and trees, mountains, pigs
and even chickens.
86
All of these elements of national productive
capacities would be involved in devising and constructing what we
would now call a weapon of mass destruction. This weapon would
be delivered, according to Ishiwara, by aircraft that could circle the
earth forever without landing, because they would be powered using
hydrogen present in the stratosphere as an ever-renewable fuel. His
envisioned WMD and its delivery via hydrogen-powered aircraft
were only the destructive part of the course he charted for humanitys
not too distant future, but he also wrote and spoke of constructive
elements of the Final War. For Ishiwara, these constructive aspects
more than made up for the fact that in his estimation the war might
cut the worlds population in half.
87

Part of the benificial nature of Ishiwaras Final War would
result from preparation for the war. The war and the harnessing of all
East Asian resources toward the creation of a super weapon and a

86
Saish" sens! ron, 39.
87
Ibid., 50.
290
super aircraft to deliver it would occasion a new industrial revolution
in East Asia, which would be centered in Japan. He proposed that
this industrial revolution would surpass the German second
industrial revolution that he admired so much.
88
Another causal
factor in the constructive quality of the Final War would arise in that
wars aftermath, when an East Asia led by Japan would unify the
world. Ishiwara frequently referred to world unification, along with
everlasting peace as the long held yearning (akogare) of all
humanity.
89
Despite his sincere desire that this yearning would be
fulfilled without violence and bloodshed, Ishiwara believed that its
fulfillment was worth great sacrifice.
90
For him, any sacrifice was
justified because after the Final war humanitys competitive spirit
would no longer be consumed by war. He imagined that war would
become impossible because of the invention of massively destructive
weapons, and that humanitys competitive spirit would as a result be
sublimated. Humanity would then focus all available resources on
constructing a new comprehensive civilization, one that strove for
the ideal of hakk! ichi".
91

Ishiwara borrowed from the thought of a brilliant Japanese
named Mr. Shimizu Yoshitar! to illustrate some of the possibilities

88
Ibid.
89
Ibid., 51.
90
Ibid., 60.
91
Ibid., 77.
291
for scientific/technological development that would rapidly become
reality after the Final War. Ishiwara wrote of advances in agriculture
leading to the production of 1,500 times the present yields per any
given piece of land. He imagined breeding bacteria that would taste
like beef, pork or chicken, as a much easier alternative to raising
actual livestock and poultry for sources of protein. Ishiwara claimed
that this was no fantasy, as the Germans had already begun to
produce bacteria as a consumable source of protein during the First
World War. Ishiwara anticipated something similar to nuclear power
when he suggested that radium and plutonium, as sources of
subterranean heat could replace coal. He also imagined harnessing
the unlimited electricity of the atmosphere, resulting in an endless
source of electricity for human use on the planets surface. In this
connection Ishiwara reiterated the possibility of utilizing hydrogen in
the stratosphere as a source of energy.
92

In a reference to one of Nichirens predictions, Ishiwara went
on to describe the post-Final War era as one in which humanity
would realize the wondrous law of overcoming sickness and death
(fur! fushi) through extraction of the impurities (rohaibutsu) that

92
Ibid., 77-8. Ishiwara made direct reference to Shimizus Nihon
shintaisei ron (on Japans true structure).
292
accumulate within peoples bodies as they age.
93
In response to the
possible criticism that this would lead to unmanageable population
growth, Ishiwara suggested that people would not be motivated to
procreate as in the pre-Final War era because they would not have
impending death hanging over their heads. They would, he wrote,
live like gods.
94
Ishiwara went on to argue that because time is
temperature, and according to him killing human beings leads to
increases in temperature, the drop in global temperature following the
Final War would lead to the realization of the dream of
Urashimatar!.
95
Urashimatar! is a folkloric character that visits the
palace of a dragon king under the sea and marries the kings daughter.
Unbeknownst to Urashimatar! what seems like years under the sea
are actually several decades on the worlds surface, and in fact while
under the sea his aging process is arrested. What Ishiwara meant by
the relationship between temperature and time is not entirely clear,
but it seems to be based on the idea that cold temperatures tend to
slow down such processes as running water. Despite the oddity of

93
In a 1273 text titled Nyosetsu shugy!sh! (compendium of
austerities) Nichiren predicted that at a time when everyone (banmin)
chants/reveres (tonae-tatematsuru) namu My!h! rengeky! in
unison, there would be no calamities and people would learn how to
ensure longevity, not dying and not growing old (fur! fushi). See
entry on Nyosetsu shugy!sh! in Miyazaki Eish", Nichiren Jiten
(Tokyo: T!ky!d! Shuppan, 1978), 213-14.

94
Saish" sens! ron., 78-9.
95
Ibid., 79.
293
some of Ishiwaras scientific prognostications, what is salient about
his vision of the post-Final War world was that humans at that time
would live in perfect freedom, a freedom that Ishiwara emphasizes
would be brought about through a great leap into a
comprehensive global civilization. This was to be, he underscored,
a humanly facilitated mutation in humanity.
96

In his visions of the post-Final War future, Ishiwara combined
the language of premodern millenarian discourse with a modern or
modernist temporality. For example, on the one hand he wrote that
the post-Final War world would be what in Buddhism is called the
age of Miroku, the Buddha that according to M$hayana doctrine
would be born in this world in the distant future. On the other hand,
he wrote that the realization of this age is not something that
necessarily would occur all at once, but that it would instead be the
fruit of human civilizations ceaseless progress. In sum, for Ishiwara,
the present as the greatest crisis in human history was also a time in
which humanity could realize the most fantastic dreams of
development and unprecedented prosperity in a sudden progressive
leap that he signified with his concept of the Final War.
97

Conclusion: Breakthroughs, Dreams, and the Same Old Things

96
Ibid. Cf., Kokub! ron (on national defense, originally published in
1941) in Ishiwara Kanji Sensh", vol. 8, 140-4, where Ishiwara once
again recounted his fantastic vision of post-Final War civilization.
97
Saish" sens! ron, 79.
294
In conclusion I wish to discuss two of Ishiwaras favorite words,
words one finds again and again in his writings, toppa |
(breakthrough) and akogare | (long cherished dream, yearning).
Toppa signified a leap through a manmade GAP that humanity
could pour through in an exciting rush.
98
In other words,
metaphorically it was like the longed for charge out of the trenches
and triumphantly into enemy lines that characterized the usually
unmet expectations of combatants during World War I.
99
Ishiwaras
akogarewhich he posited all of humanity sharedconsisted of the
desire to escape an actually existing modernity that Ishiwara
commonly characterized as had!ist in his mature work.
Ishiwara conflated Western imperialism and what he
considered to be the sorry state of China and East Asia with had!ism.
He also acknowledged the had!ist activities and attitudes of Japanese
in their relations with other Asians, including Japans imperial
subjects in Korea and Chinese nationals during the Second Sino-
Japanese War. We can in this connection read had!ism as not just a
reference to Western imperialism, but also as code for both Japanese
imperialism an all of the pettiness and selfishness that Ishiwara

98

98
This is a reference to the second epigraph at the beginning of this
chapter. Quoted in Theodore Ropp, War in the Modern World,
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 247.
99
See note 2 and the second epigraph at the beginning of this chapter.
295
claimed Japanese had fallen into in imitation of the modern West.
Ishiwaras indictment of the West in these terms agrees strikingly
with classically liberal ideas such as those of Thomas Hobbes, who
first posited a brutish state of nature and then argued for the
necessity of a utilitarian social contract between a people and their
state or sovereign in order to preserve a modicum of social
stability.
100
From Ishiwaras standpoint however, it is hardly
surprising that the Wests resultant sense of justice on a global level
did not appear just, because nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Western elites often enough regarded non-Western people (as well as
lower classes and women within the metropolitan West) as too close
to the primitive state of nature to participate in any thing like a social
contract whatsoever.
In his ideas if not terminology Ishiwaras thought had
consistencies, from his days as a recent convert to Nichirenism to his
more mature writings on the Final War. Ishiwaras letters from
Hankou testify to the immense joy he felt in his realization of
communion with the universe, and he related this to his wife in the
language of Nichirenism. He came to feel the immanence of the
divine, Original Buddha in his life. His experience of immanent

100
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Barnes and Nobel, 2004),
89-93 (on state of nature), 94-104 and 124-128 (on the contract and
the commonwealth).
296
divinity in this way inspired him to wish to actualize the doctrines of
Nichiren Buddhism as interpreted by Chigaku. Through the use of
the Japanese nation-state, which for him was always already united
with the Honbutsu and the Lotus S"tra, he wished to transform the
mundane world into a paradise.
Nichirenism had awakened Ishiwaras akogare (yearning) for
a toppa (breakthrough) to a universally better world. In other words,
Ishiwara wanted to obliterate the gap between the had!ist realities of
everyday experience and an expectation of a more adequate situation
that he came to imagine in terms of the !d!ist way of
righteousness. For Ishiwara his present was simultaneously the
greatest juncture and the ultimate crisis in human history because
despite the inadequacies of his present, the obliteration of that gap
was just over the horizon in his estimation, a conjecture he came to
through his study of military history and Nichirenist doctrine.
We can certainly entertain serious doubts about Ishiwaras
belief in Nichirenism. His Final War theory was undeniably
performative. One can legitimately wonder about the degree to which
he believed what he was writing was true and to what degree he either
wanted it to be true or actively and consciously understood himself to
be making the truth. The interwar period was undoubtedly the age of
taking a cue from Sorel and engaging in modern, socially constructed
297
mythmaking. Ishiwaras admiration of Hitler and his insight
suggests that he was at least somewhat aware of the performative
utility of consciously constructed modern mythology. Moreover, the
way that Ishiwara conveniently discerned a correspondence between
the death of Dh$rmapala and the birth of the Japanese crown prince
suggests creative use of information to symbolize a coming union of
Asian and Buddhist countries.
101
Sorel and Ishiwara differed in that
Sorel believed that his aims could be realized in violence itself. For
Ishiwara, violence and mythmaking were merely the means to an
even more quintessentially modern end. He sought the realization of
the latent promises of liberal democracy, namely universal justice,
along with a genuine universalism. This universalism consistent with
Enlightenment discourse, but Ishiwara put it in the Nichirenist
language of world unification (sekai t!itsu).

101
Donald Lopezs excellent essay, Belief, in Critical Terms for
Religious Studies (21-35), critically examines the category of belief in
premodern and modern religiosity. He suggests that the prominence
of the concept of belief was imposed on or superimposed over non-
modern or non-Western forms of religious activity. I agree, but
would like to add the caveat that while post-Protestant, modern
religiosity tends to demand belief in the truth of doctrine, texts or
tenets, even this kind of belief can be purely formal, instrumental, or
mere superficial adherence to orthodoxy in order to avoid
persecution. I would argue that there is always a fine line between
belief and wanting to believe, for whatever reasons. Catherine Bells
essay on Performance in the same volume (205-24) also does a fine
job of touching on issues involving the performative value of
religiosities that may or may not involve belief to whatever degree.
298
However, modern temporalities tend to couple desire for
collapsing the difference between experience and expectation with
the propensity to suspend, at the level of the law, liberal democracy
itself. Giorgio Agamben has argued that the propensity to declare
such states of exception in the face of real or imagined crises goes
back to the very inception of political modernity represented by the
French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. Agambens work
furthermore demonstrates how the right to declare states of exception
is built into the constitutions of modern, liberal-democratic nation-
states such as France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and the
United States. The most famous cases of states exercising the right to
suspend civil liberties under supposedly exceptional conditions are of
course Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. However, Agamben suggests
that the Nazi and Fascist cases were not in themselves aberrant, or
indeed, exceptional.
102

Agamben largely refers to the state of exception as a legal-
juridical phenomenon. He notes in this connection that the German
and eventually Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt claimed that the propensity
and ability to decree legal states of exception is the very foundation
of the political sovereignty of the modern state in general.
103
The

102
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attel Trans.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), especially, 1-23.
103
Ibid., 35.
299
concept of the state of exception has broader implications, and
Ishiwaras discourse on the Final War is a case in point. Ishiwaras
believed himself to be living during crisis or state of exception, but he
also thought his historical moment was a time of unprecedented
opportunity. For him, it was a time during which humanity could
shatter the difference between had!ist experience and !d!ist
expectation. He described the demands of this exceptional state in
terms of the suspension of liberalism, the embrace of controlism or
totalitarianism, and even the military encampment of all of society.
However, the supposed exceptionality of the present typically
leads to questionable activities only justified with reference to that
exceptionality, and as Agambens work suggests, the state of
exception has tended to increasingly become the normal modern
condition. In other words, we are still pining for a promised, more
adequate world that never comes, and the leaders of modern nation-
states increasingly posit the exceptionality of the present. This
exceptionality corresponds with supposedly necessary wars on
various isms that are reminiscent of had!ism the way Ishiwara
defined it. Success in such wars is supposed to lead to utopian
conditions that are likewise like !d!ism in Ishiwaras discourse. A
true state of exception, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, would consist
of an altered and less imaginary relationship with the now of our
300
experience, along with an altered and perhaps in many ways severed
relationship with an abstract and even more imaginary horizon of
expectation.
In the end an irony of Ishiwaras theory of the Final War is
that, despite his opinions to the contrary, the Second World War
ended war in many ways. There have been no declared wars between
major powers during the sixty years since 1945. The world has also
gradually unified following World War II. At first the so-called free
world unified under the hegemony of the United States. Following
1989 the US and the forces of global capital have unified almost the
whole world. However, instead of an era of everlasting peace, the
post-World War II world became one of nuclear dtente (until circa
1989), and perpetual lukewarm and sometimes very hot war. During
the long postwar period the US and the Soviets along with their
satellites and client states constantly prepared for war, despite the fact
that the two superpowers only fought wars (between each other and
otherwise) in limited ways. Following the Cold War of course
societies globally (but especially in the US) organize themselves
around the always imminent and sometimes actualized possibility of
warfare. This has been in terms of preparation and spending, as well
as in terms of the constant threat and actual deployment of violence.
In other words, the Final War has come, but it has never ended.
301
Contrary to Ishiwaras hopes and for better or worse, the American
president and his circle have come to prevailingly exercise hegemony
over the globe, and this world is generally unified, but in ways that
are far from harmonious, peaceful, and characterized by justice.

302
Conclusion: Nichirenism and the Dialectics of
Heterology

I Pray that we will see the day as soon as possible when we welcome
a world in which we do not have to kill enemies whom we cannot
hate. For this end I would not mind my body being ripped
innumerable times.

Miyazawa Kenji, The Crow and the Great Dipper

It is little exaggeration to say that ultranationalistic Lotus
millennialism died in August 1945 in the flames of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. But even before these ruined cities had been rebuilt, a new
Lotus Millennialism had risen to take its place. Postwar Lotus
millennialism envisions a time when, by awakening to the universal
Buddha nature, people everywhere will live in harmony and with
mutual respect.

Jacqueline Stone, Japanese Lotus Millennialism


In 1929 or 1930 Georges Bataille proposed a science of what
is completely other, which he termed heterology.
1
According to
William E. Deal and Timothy K. Beal, Batailles heterology attends
to that which is other and therefore cannot be assimilated . It deals
with that which is useless in a world driven by use-value and that
which is wasteful in a world driven by production; it is pronounced

1
Georges Bataille, The Use Value of D. A. F. De Sade (An Open
Letter to My Comrades), in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings,
1927-1936, ed. and trans. Allen Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989), 102, note 2.
303
evil in a world that reduces the sacred to moral goodness.
2
By
focusing on Nichirenism as a movement excreted (as Bataille
would say) from the homogeneity of overly simplified historythe
standard narrative of how Japan came to be more-or-less like usthis
dissertation has attempted to practice a form of heterology, and it
should not be surprising that Bataille was one of my first intellectual
heroes. But Batailles heterology is a difficult tool to use with the
requisite nuance.
Andrew Wernick calls throwing pies into the faces of people
like Bill Gates and the massacre-suicide at Columbine High School in
1999 heterological activism, writing that such actions are
absolutely unassailable to the ruling order.
3
To my mind the what
he calls the ruling order has no problem assimilating what
seemingly contradicts it and, yet, we who think about such things
seem to have difficulty understanding how the ruling order and the
heterological imbricate each other. Nichirenism is a good example of
this imbrication, and its relationship with the heterological and the
normal ruling order is complex. At a practical level the ruling order
easily assimilated it in Japan, but at the ideological leveland

2
William E. Deal and Timothy K. Beal, Theory for Religious Studies
(New York: Routledge, 2004), 46.
3
Andrew Wernick, Batailles Columbine: The Sacred Space of
Hate (1999), http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=119.
304
especially with regard to the postwar historiography of post-1945
JapanNichirenism remains difficult to assimilate
Nichirenism was not exceptional. It was a product of the
modern world in which it appeared. In that context it represented
evidence of the radical difference between what we generally suppose
modernity to be, and what our experience tells us it is. When
Chigaku called for world unification he was calling attention to the
inadequacy of the way the world actually was. I read Chigakus
desire for unification as a desire for a completely conflict free world.
This was not aberrant in itself, but Chigaku and his Nichirenism
stimulated the desire to overcome the waiting game of liberal-
capitalist temporality, and Nichirenists violently attempted to erase
the difference between expectation and experience. Chigaku in short
was both heterological and completely assimilated within the ruling
order. Nichirenisms productsfor example, the Manchurian
Incident and the literature of Miyazawawere easily assimilated by
the ruling order as well.
Ishiwara engineered the Manchurian Incident contra the
dictates and wishes of the upper-echelon of the Japanese army in
Tokyo. He also had neither the consent nor approval of Japans
civilian leadership. But Manchuria became a model for everything
that was supposed to be good about Japanese imperialism.
305
Manchuria tellingly also became a showcase for everything that was
supposed to be good about the modern. For example, as Louise
Young notes, the South Manchurian Railway represented itself as an
engine of civilization and progress, and when the railroad company
unveiled a new high-speed train in 1934 called the Asian Express,
the train became the symbol of an ultramodern empire where
technological feats opened up new vistas of possibility in Japan.
4

Clearly, the ruling order in Japan thoroughly assimilated the effects of
Ishiwaras heterological intervention. One might even say that his
actions were assimilated by the project of modernity itself.
Sasaki Hachir! was a brilliant and extremely well read young
man who majored in economics at Tokyo Imperial University before
being drafted in 1943.
5
He was patriotic, but no supporter of the
emperor and Japanese elites. He was deeply influenced by Marxism
(reading Capital in German), and he hoped for the eventual end of
Japanese capitalism. Sasaki referenced the first passage quoted at the
head of this conclusion in an essay he wrote for a 1943 class reunion
of his alma mater, the prestigious secondary institution, the First

4
Young, Japans Total Empire, 246-7.
5
Emiko Ohkuni-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and
Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 193-4. In her
discussion, Ohkuni-Tierney inventories what Sasaki read. In short,
he read the work of just about every major figure one can think of in
German, English, Russian, and ancient Greek philosophy, literature,
and science.
306
Higher School. The essay was titled Love, War, and Death: On
Miyazawa Kenjis The Crow and the Great Dipper, and the words
quoted above are those of a crow speaking to his guardian deity, the
Great Dipper, just before going to war with another set of crows. In
1945 Sasaki volunteered to be a suicide pilot (kamikaze) and he
died as one later that year at the age of 22. In Love, War, and
Death, Sasaki expresses his admiration for Miyazawa, and notes the
way that he identified with the words of the crow in the story.
Through a strained logic Sasaki hoped that his death as a suicide
pilot, ripping his body apart, would somehow help to end exploitative
capitalism and facilitate the birth of a new, improved Japan.
6

Miyazawas Nichirenism-inspired literature seems to counter
the ruling order or at least its governing logic, which is grounded in
hierarchical binary oppositions. Miyazawas work tears apart that
commonsense and even suggests the possibility of a utopia
unencumbered by the social inadequacies that he sought to combat as

6
Ohkuni-Tierney gives basic details about Sasaki as a kamikaze on
(193) and addresses his admiration for Miyazawa on 199 and 202.
Regarding Sasakis strained logic, it is difficult for me to understand
how he could have believed in the value of his death as a suicide
pilot. Ohkuni-Tierneys account suggests, however that his
volunteering for that mission was not so voluntary after all, and he
was attempting to make the best of the situation by convincing
himself that his death would be worthwhile. I hypothesize that
Miyazawas literature and the ideal of self-sacrifice it expressed
helped enable Sasakis self-deception. Cf., especially Ohkuni-
Tierney 194.
307
the leader of the Rasu Chijin Ky!kai. Miyazawas utopian literature
inspired people like Sasaki. But the heterological tendencies in
Miyazawas work were easily assimilated by Japans ruling order. In
fact the notion that Japan was itself ushering in a better world by
defeating Western imperialism already encompassed aspects of the
heterological through its challenge of the Orientalist dichotomy that
generally posits the West as superior to Asia. Nonetheless Japanese
capitalists used anti-imperialist imperialism to enrich themselves, and
Japanese political leaders used the state of emergency occasioned by
imperialist war to impose social discipline that buttressed their power.
Moreover, as fascism from below set stage for that from
above, even the more radically antinomian or heterological actions of
Nichirenist terrorists during the 1930s dovetailed with the ruling
order. For example, Inoue Nissh! indirectly killed an industrialist
and a politician. The events of the Sh!wa Restoration of which the
Ketsumeidan Incident was a part set the stage for Japans
transformation into a total police state, and this managed to channel
national energies into an aggressive expansionism that served the
immediate interests of political and economic elites more than ever
before. The radical heterology of Nichirenists like Inoue was fully
assimilated by the ruling order.
308
It does not seem that there is anything that cannot be
assimilated by the ruling order. The ruling order is a ruling disorder
from another perspective, one that perhaps Benjamin indicated when
he wrote of the tradition of the oppressed.
7
In other words, and as I
stated in my introduction, I believe that capitalism/modernity thrives
on its own contradictionssetting it in opposition to previous social
formations perhaps and thus confounding Marxist-Hegelian
prognostication. However, it also seems that we need to pretend that
the world and history are simpler than they actually are. In short, we
seem to need to live in a normal, yet artificial, condition that
disconnects us from our experience, and one of the most important
tools for constructing such illusions is historiography.
In artificially constructing a normal condition that is relatively
free of contradiction, we tend to make two interrelated moves. First,
we consign general inadequacies to the past. Thus in the postwar
historiography of Japan, Nichirenismand fascism or militarism
have come to signify what we citizens of the free world have left
behind. Secondly, we explain away the inadequacies of the present
by positing that the present is in a transitional state of exception. The
message is that whatever violence, societal strife, and economic
difficulties we may be experiencing, these problems will be overcome

7
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Harry
Zohn trans. Illuminations (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), 257,
309
on the horizon, one which in actuality steadily becomes increasingly
distant as we seemingly approach it.
Rather than figuring Nichirenism as a sign of what we have
supposedly left behind in a narrative of progressive development, I
prefer to imagine Nichirenism as signifying that contemporary forms
of violence in our present that seem to appear as suddenly as the
Japanese planes that destroyed paradise in the film Pearl Harbor
are nothing new. Perhaps Japanese have a charmed existence when it
comes to historiography. Article nine of the constitution imposed by
MacArthurs occupation forbade military aggression, enabling the
illusion that postwar Japan has a special relationship with the ideal of
peace. What really happened was that Japan became integral to the
both the ideological and military strategies of the United States in the
context of the Cold War. Japans postwar economic miracle might
have been impossible were it not for preferential arrangements the US
made with Japan because of its model minority position in the US
order of things. Japans role in servicing US armed forces during the
two post-1945, US-led police actions in East and Southeast Asia
greatly facilitated the miracle as well.
One ramification of these considerations is that the actual
difference between postwar Nichiren-based, lay organizations such as
Rissh! K!seikai and S!ka Gakkai on the one hand, and prewar
310
Nichirenism on the other, is not a difference in ideals or ideology.
Both the postwar groups and the earlier organizations wanted peace
in a world more-or-less led by Japan. They differ because of the fact
that prewar Nichirenists were indirectly or directly connected to the
military apparatus of a major imperialist power, whereas the
analogous postwar groups are not. In other words, what makes Japan
unique with respect to questions of peace is not due to the countrys
firsthand experience of the horrors of nuclear war, nor is it because of
article nine. Rather, the reason for Japans uniqueness has instead
been largely because of the countrys special postwar relationship
with the United States.
8

More broadly, I think it is important to confront the ways in
which Nichirenistsand fascists or militaristswere not so different
from us after all. In other words, Nichirenism was not an atavistic
throwback to the premodern and evidence of pre-1945 Japanese
insufficient development. Confronting even the possibility that what
I am stating is true constitutes a form of heterology that is not so
easily assimilated by the intellectual hegemony that dominates us.
Contemplating ways that we are not so different from Nichirenists

8
Cf., Stone, Japanese Lotus Millennialism, 279. On the status of
Japan before and during its subsumption under US hegemony see
Bruce Cummings, Archeology, Descent, Emergence: Japan in
British/American Hegemony, 1900-1950, in Harootunian and
Miyoshi eds., Japan in the World, (Durham: Duke University
Press,1993), 79-114.
311
means on one level, ironically, a consideration of our sameness
(homology) with what we have excreted from the purity of our self-
representations. In doing this, however, we focus on the difference
between those representations and more fundamental actualities,
actualities that experience or the tradition of the oppressed may
confirm.
If we do not consider ways that our modernity, here and now,
is connected to that abjected or excreted modernity represented by
pre-1945 militarist or fascist Japan, then we, again, would not be
acting and thinking so differently from the ways Nichirenists acted
and thought. They too worked within the framework of liberal-
capitalist and modern temporality, consigning responsibility for the
inadequacies of the present to someone else and someplace else,
while positing the present as a transitional state of exception to be
overcome on the ever-receding horizon. They also engaged in both
illicit and legitimate (state) violence, which is certainly not foreign to
our current situation. However, some of that violence was merely
conceptual.
Miyazawas literature is a good example of the conceptual
violence of Nichirenism, and his conceptual violence links his work
to literary modernism in general. However, I think that an even more
significant example of conceptual violence arising from Nichirenism
312
can be found in Senoos dialectical materialist Buddhism. Senoo
refused to defer piercing the veil of modern life. In other words he
practiced a critical form of Buddhism for which nothing was too
sacred to question and to historicize, including the nation and
Buddhism itself. Senoos conceptual violence went beyond
transgressing commonsense. He did not just oppose a new form to
old ones, the way that Chigaku and Ishiwara posited Buddhism as
superior to Christianity and Japan as superior to the United States.
Instead Senoo questioned the system of hierarchical binaries,
suggesting the possibility of overcoming delusory pseudo-belief in
ghostly forms such as the nation or in our inherent goodness. In
other words, Senoos heterologyor heterodoxyinvolved not just
the replacement of the normal with its other. It involved
conceptualizing both terms as contingent and in flux. Senoo would
have made a good historian.
The main point of these musings on the heterological is that,
first of all, there was nothing exceptional about Nichirenism. It was a
product of the modern, and when it appeared to constitute a violence
that threatened the ruling order, or the status quo, or liberal-capitalist
normality, it was all too easily assimilated by the dominant forces it
appeared to contest. Secondly, however, refusing to regard
Nichirenism and all that it represents as wholly different from
313
elements characterizing our own, current milieu entails the possibility
of understanding how and why we differ from our self-
representations. This in turn would entail the possibility of not so
easily falling into conceptualizations of history supporting the idea
that inadequacies in the present are somehow exceptional, and that
they will be overcome more-or-less automatically if we continue to
follow the natural, logical, or commonsensical course. It would be
mistaken to assume that I am denigrating the notion of progress when
I claim that we have not escaped the sort of problems that plagued
pre-1945 Japan. On the contrary, I hope that through recognizing our
own circumstances more clearly we may bring about a real state of
emergency,
9
which I imagine as the emergence of a better world.


9
Benjamin, 257.
314
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