politics and religion in japan

© 2009 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Religion Compass 3/4 (2009): 752–769, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00163.x

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKRECOReligion Compass1749-81711749-8171© 2009 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd16310.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00163.xMay 200900752???769???Review ArticlePolitics and Religion in JapanRoy Starrs

Politics and Religion in Japan

Roy Starrs*University of Otago

AbstractThe relation between church and state, or religion and politics, has always beenan uncomfortably close one in Japan, but it is only in recent years that thisrelationship has been seen as problematical, both from a political and a religiousperspective. This article surveys two major areas of contention in particular: thepresent Japanese government’s apparent attempts to revive an Emperor-centeredState Shinto, and the lively recent debates over the role of Buddhism, especiallyof ‘fascist Zen’, in the Asia–Pacific War. I also consider the political implicationsof the new movement of so-called ‘Critical Buddhism’, as well as of the ‘religiousviolence’ practiced by the Aum Shinrikyó ‘doomsday cult’.

Shinto and Politics

In May 2000, the then Prime Minister of Japan, Mori Yoshiró, caused astorm of protest, both domestically and internationally, with his declarationbefore a meeting of lawmakers belonging to the Shintô Seiji Renmei (ShintoPolitical League) that: ‘We [have to make efforts to] make the publicrealize that Japan is a divine nation centering on the Emperor. It’s beenthirty years since we started our activities based on this thought’ ( JapanTimes Online 2000). Although some foreign observers may have beengenuinely shocked by Mori’s reactionary, ‘atavistic’ stance, no one whoknew Japan or Japanese politics well was particularly surprised. Indeed,members of his own party generally did not challenge the validity of hisremark; they merely regretted its indiscretion as a public pronouncement.As the unintentionally revealing excuse offered by the Secretary Generalof the party explained: ‘the comment was probably a platitude for thereligious group’ ( Japan Times Online 2000). In other words, in the circlesin which Mori and his colleagues moved, the belief that ‘Japan is a divinenation centering on the Emperor’ was merely an accepted truism, so thatnothing much should be read into the Prime Minister’s remark – in thecontext in which it was given, it certainly did not represent any revolu-tionary departure from the norm. As Klaus Antoni points out, despite theEmperor Hirohito’s renunciation of his ‘divine status’ in 1946, ‘the Japaneseemperorship receives its whole spiritual and religious authority, now asbefore, from the religious-political ideology of Shintó’ (2002, p. 274).

© 2009 The Author Religion Compass 3/4 (2009): 752–769, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00163.xJournal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Politics and Religion in Japan 753

Some analysts have presented Mori’s ‘gaffe’ as yet another symptom ofJapan’s ‘move to the right’ in the late 20th century – and, more specifi-cally, as yet another challenge to the strict separation of church and statemandated by Japan’s (American-imposed) postwar Constitution (forinstance, McCormack 2002, p. 156). There may be some truth in theircontention that the economic doldrums of the 1990s made the Japanesepublic more receptive to open expressions of nationalistic sentiments andresentments. But, as Mori’s own comment makes clear, throughout thepostwar period such sentiments have never been far from the mainstreamof Japanese political life. Indeed, the ‘thought’ on which Mori had basedhis political actions for 30 years is a good deal older than that: it has beenat the heart of the Japanese polity since Japan first became a nation some16 centuries ago. The tradition of ‘sacralized politics’ may be traced backat least as far as the Asuka period (592–645), when Prince Shotoku wrotehis ‘Seventeen-Article Constitution’ and adopted both Shinto and Buddhismas ‘nation-protecting religions’.

As with the ingrained articles of faith found in all nations or cultures,the people who subscribe to this belief do not usually feel called upon tojustify themselves by scriptural reference. Nonetheless, if they were pressedto do so, there is only one work to which they could point: the Kojiki(Record of Ancient Matters), a collection of diverse mythical and historicalmaterials compiled by the imperial court in 712 (making it the oldestextant Japanese book). In this sense, the Kojiki is sometimes popularlydescribed as the ‘Bible’ of Shinto and of Japanese nationalism in general;it is presented as the ultimate scriptural authority for the two central andrelated principles of Japanese nationalism as enunciated by Mori: thatJapan is a ‘divine nation’ and that it is ‘centered on the Emperor’. Byprewar nationalists these two articles of national-Shinto faith were referredto as the kokutai (national essence), the now rather notorious doctrinewhich, as Shirane Haruo has said, ‘used imperial mythology to legitimizea modern imperial system and to establish the Japanese people as a distinctrace’ (Shirane 2000, p. 20). Even today, it is Mori’s two principles thatgive Japanese nationalism that special ‘religious’ quality which distinguishesit from the modern, secular, state-centered nationalisms of the West. Despitemore than a century of ‘modernization’ and the assurances of the postwarConstitution that sovereignty lies with the people and that politics shouldnot be mixed with religion, Japanese nationalists have not yet broken thehabit of putting the emperor rather than the people at the center of theirnational polity – and they are not likely to do so in the foreseeable future.For them the emperor rather than the people or the land itself is the sinequa non of the Japanese nation; without the emperor the nation wouldlose its unique divine status, the very basis of their national pride. This‘premodern’, theocratic dimension of Japanese nationalism is difficult formodern Westerners to grasp, and easy for us to underestimate. We areaccustomed to thinking of Japan as an ‘advanced’ modern or postmodern

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nation, a ‘first-world’ country at the cutting edge of high-tech globalcapitalism, and thus it is hard for us to believe that its political leaderssubscribe to such a ‘primitive’ way of thought. And, of course, it isentirely possible that Mori, as the comment by the Secretary General ofhis party suggests, was merely paying lip-service to a belief system stillvenerated by a significant portion of his electorate – as an Americanpolitician might nod in the direction of Christian fundamentalists.Nonetheless, even the fact that he would feel the political need to do soshows that this belief system still has widespread currency.

At any rate, this ‘eruption’ of prewar-style State Shinto in recent Japa-nese political discourse is only one example of how that religio-politicalideology continues to survive like hot lava ‘below the surface’ of Japanesepolitical life – and to cause political and diplomatic problems when itoccasionally ‘erupts’. Two other significant recent examples, for instance,are the ongoing debate over the appropriateness and constitutionality ofthe ‘official’ patronage of the famous Shinto shrine, Yasukuni, as a nationalwar memorial (mainly in the form of official visits by Japanese primeministers to commemorate the war dead), and the official use of Shintorites at the enthronement ceremony of the new emperor, Akihito, in 1990.

Because of the historical and symbolic significance of Yasukuni, muchmore is involved here than merely the political or religious repercussionsof Japanese prime ministerial visits to a Shinto shrine. As Phillip Seatonstates: ‘At the beginning of the twenty-first century, no issue has beenmore emblematic of Japan’s struggles with the history of the SecondWorld War than YasUkUni’ (2008, p. 164). The core problem is that, notonly are ‘A-class’ war criminals (as defined by the Tokyo War CrimesTrials) enshrined in its inner sanctum, but also the shrine includes on itsgrounds a war museum, the Yushukan, that proudly and defiantly justifiesthe wartime actions of Imperial Japan in Asia, presenting the JapaneseImperial Army as the glorious liberator of Asia from Western imperialism.Taken together, these two factors seem to make Yasukuni a bastion ofJapanese rightwing ideology and of the ‘whitewashing’ of Japan’s recordof aggression and atrocity in Asia. It is hardly surprising, then, that theprincipal victims of that aggression, Japan’s Asian neighbors, take offensewhen Japanese politicians officially worship at Yasukuni. From a Chineseor Korean perspective, it is almost as if the German Chancellor were topay annual visits to a war memorial – with attached museum glorifyingthe ‘anti-Communist struggle’ of the Third Reich’s Wehrmacht – to prayfor the repose of the souls of the Nazi dead, including Hitler and Goebbels!But, as Franziska Seraphim points out, the ‘nationalist right has alwayscontested Japan’s official acceptance of the Tokyo trial verdict. . . .’ (2006,p. 245).

One proposed solution has been to build a ‘non-religious’ memorial tothe war dead. But, as Seaton discovered from his extensive research intonationalist writings about the Yasukuni issue, they would never accept



this, because of the extraordinary ‘emotional bonds between nationalismand the Yasukuni shrine’ (2008, p. 172). Seaton neatly encapsulates theemotional and ideological nexus of ‘core elements’ that make this‘national Shinto shrine’ so important and irreplaceable to Japanese nation-alists: ‘The nation as family, the emperor as a father to his children thepeople, Yasukuni as a spiritual home, self-sacrifice for the nation as theprotector of one’s family, ancestor worship as integral to Japanese culture:these are the core elements of nationalist and Yasukuni doctrine’ (2008,p. 172). To suggest the depth and intensity of the emotions involved, healso borrows a telling phrase from the Tokyo University philosopher Taka-hashi Tetsuya, author of Yasukuni mondai (The Yasukuni Problem, 2005): the‘nation as a religion’ (2008, pp. 172–3). There can be few modern nationsof which this phrase rings truer than of Japan – and, of course, StateShinto is what makes this so. (Little wonder that even Hitler seemed tobe jealous of Japan’s ‘national religion’!1)

State Shinto in all its prewar glory seemed (for many observers) to havebeen resurrected again in November 1990 in the form of the mysticaldaijôsai rite that was part of the lengthy and elaborate enthronementceremony of the new emperor, Akihito.2 As John Breen points out, theceremony went ahead ‘in the face of fierce opposition from various liberalgroups, who protested that state funding for it breached the constitutionalseparation of state and religion. The Daijosai, after all, is a mystical ritethat celebrates the emperor’s unique relationship with the Sun Goddess’(1998, p. 3). And Breen also points out the possibly serious repercussionsof the victory of the right-wing political establishment in this case; it‘stands as a warning that Japan’s constitutional monarchy is not quite sosecure as it appears; it serves also as a much-needed reminder of anessential continuity between the pre- and post-war imperial institutions’(1998, pp. 3–4). Although the prewar official state doctrine that the emperorwas a ‘living deity’ was supposedly abrogated by Emperor Hirohito in1946 (under pressure from the Allied Occupation authorities, of course),the fact is that ‘Hirohito continued to perform all those rituals which,before the Occupation, defined him as both deity and high priest’ and‘Akihito performs the same rites today’ (1998, p. 4). As Felicia Bockwrites: ‘Today, the postwar constitution purports to separate church andstate, religion and government, but the distinction between the two areas,like other concepts introduced from an alien culture, is far from clear’(1990, p. 37). And Eric Seizelet sees it as symptomatic of ‘les ambigüitiésdu rapport que les Japonais entretiennent avec leur passé’ (1991, p. 41).

How dangerous this particular conflation of state and religion canbecome is shown by Walter Skya in his excellent account of the develop-ment of prewar State Shinto nationalist ideology (2002). He demonstrateshow, during its fascist phase, it aimed at ‘the creation of “mass man” withtotal devotion to the emperor’ (2002, p. 247).3 It tried to accomplish thisthrough teaching a kind of mystical unity between the individual and the

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emperor, thus precluding the possibility of any independent moral will inthe individual – the emperor (meaning, of course, the state) was owedabsolute loyalty and obedience as well as religious veneration. ‘Thus, StateShinto ideology had become ultranationalist and totalitarian’ (2002, p. 247).In his new book (2009), Skya demonstrates how this transmogrifiedreligious ideology convinced many Japanese in the 1940s that they wereengaged in a ‘holy war’ against Western civilization.

A deeper historical background on State Shinto and the YasukuniShrine issue is provided by Helen Hardacre, who traces it back to theMeiji period (1868–1912) and points out that, dating from that time:‘Nowhere else in modern history do we find so pronounced an exampleof state sponsorship of a religion – in some respects the state can be saidto have created Shintó as its official “tradition,” but in the process Shintowas irrevocably changed. . . . In the end, Shintó, as adopted by the modernJapanese state, was largely an invented tradition . . .’ (1989, p. 3). For, asHardacre also points out, suprareligious claims that Shintó expresses ‘theessence of the cultural identity of the Japanese people’ are an obviousmyth: ‘The idea that a nation of 120 million persons has a single spiritualessence uniting them and wiping out all divisions of gender, class, andethnicity is of course a convenient fiction that itself constitutes a politicalappeal or tool’ (1989, p. 5).

Further evidence for this modern, ‘invented’ nature of State Shintoemerges when we survey the religious situation in Japan prior to the MeijiRestoration of 1868: a separate Shinto religion was virtually non-existentat that time; rather it existed inextricably as part of a syncretic mix withBuddhism. And its ties with the state were likewise ill-defined: ‘Shintó’sties with the state before 1868 were obscure and limited for the most partto the rites of the imperial or shogunal courts, always coordinated with,and usually subordinated to, Buddhist ritual. After 1868, Buddhism lostits former state patronage, and Shintó was elevated and patronized by thestate’ (1989, p. 5). But perhaps the most original part of Hardacre’s argumentis that she emphasizes that it was not just the state that exploited Shintófor nation-building purposes – the Shintó priesthood was also eager to‘build, maintain, and strengthen ties to the state as a means of raising itsown prestige’ (1989, p. 7). Thus, the ‘priesthood became involved for thefirst time in the systematic inculcation of state-sponsored values, a role ithas tried to preserve down to the present day’ (1989, p. 8).

Hardacre sees the Meiji government’s patronage of Yasukuni and itsnewly invented ‘Shintó rituals’ as an attempt, largely successful, to control‘the religious life of virtually the entire nation by the early decades of thetwentieth century’ (1989, p. 8). More specifically, the ‘creation of a cultof fallen military combatants – apotheosized as “glorious war dead” – itscenter in the Yasukuni Shrine, has, of all the invented traditions of StateShintó, most profoundly colored the character of popular religious life andremains an issue at the end of the twentieth century’ (1989, p. 8).



Although Hardacre agrees with other political analysts that the statetoday is trying to revive State Shintó as a national unifying force, she isconvinced that contemporary Japan is too ‘pluralistic’ to allow for such apossibility: ‘Contemporary Japanese political culture is now irrevocablypluralistic, and hence the state no longer enjoys hegemony in its manip-ulation of Shintó rites and symbols, though the priesthood may well wishthat it did’ (1989, p. 9). Thus, the ‘Japanese left, spearheaded by an academicintelligentsia, has consistently opposed moves to reinstate state support forthe shrine’ (1989, p. 158). And new religions such as Sóka Gakkai are alsoa powerful part of the opposition. Both groups see ‘state efforts to reviveYasukuni Shrine’ as presaging ‘a resurgence of nationalism and a constric-tion of personal liberties, especially religious freedom . . .’ (1989, p. 158).Since such groups can now freely express their opposition, Hardacre con-cludes that, in the postwar decades, ‘the state has lost its symbolic hegemony’(1989, p. 158). This may well be true but, as she also points out, the stateis very persistent: ‘The state has vigorously sought to regain its formerprerogatives . . . by introducing a bill to give the Yasukuni Shrine statesupport no less than five times’ (1989, p. 158). Indeed, as we have seen,since Hardacre wrote her book several other Prime Ministers – mostconspicuously Koizumi Jun’ichiró between 2001 and 2006 – have bravedinternational opprobrium and domestic discord to pay official visits to theshrine.

An interesting recent ‘counter-view’ on the ‘Yasukuni problem’ is pro-vided by Kevin Doak (2008), who sees the issue primarily from a religiousrather than a political perspective. Noting that the Catholic Church haslong sanctioned visits by Japanese Catholics to Shinto shrines when regardedas a purely civic duty, he concludes, quite controversially, that: ‘From myperspective as a Catholic the visits to Yasukuni Shrine by successive primeministers do not constitute a challenge to the constitutional separation ofchurch and state’ (2008, p. 52). Basically Doak argues that such visits arecivic gestures honoring the war dead rather than expressions of religiousconviction. Obviously this issue is still far from settled (see Breen 2008for the most up-to-date debates both in favor and against the shrine’sstatus as an ‘official memorial’).

The Politics of Japanese Buddhism

It might be expected that Buddhism, as a ‘universal’ religion of ‘foreign’origins, has been far less subservient to the state or complicit with Japanesenationalism than the native religion of Shinto. For a number of historicaland cultural reasons, however, examples of such ‘nation-transcendence’and political ‘independence’ or even ‘opposition’ on the part of Buddhistshave been the exception rather than the rule; on the whole the JapaneseBuddhist establishment, throughout its entire history, has allied itself closelywith political power and has loyally served the interests of conservative

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and nationalist social forces. The perfect symbol of this inseparable unionbetween the Buddhist church and the Japanese state and nation is PrinceShótoku (573–621), the imperial prince regarded as the ‘father’ of Japa-nese Buddhism: it was he who, according to the oldest Japanese nationalhistory, the Nihon shoki (The Chronicles of Japan, 720 ad), authored thefounding document of the Japanese imperial state, the ‘Seventeen-ArticleConstitution’, in which he calls for the official patronage of both Buddhismand Shinto as ‘nation-protecting religions’. This inseparability of Buddhismfrom the state in premodern Japan may seem regrettable both from amodern secular and a modern religious viewpoint – today we tend tobelieve that the ‘separation of church and state’ is a healthier state of affairsfor both parties. And, indeed, there are Buddhist scholars and practitionerswho take a strong moral and political position on this issue. Joseph Kitagawa,for instance, in his classic study, Religion in Japanese History, states thatBuddhism was quickly ‘transformed into the religion of the throne andthe empire’ (1990, p. 26). And he goes on to express regret that ‘theBuddhist community (sangha), as such, had no opportunity to develop itsown integrity and coherence, because from the time of Prince Shotokuonward “the state functioned not as a patron (Schutz-patronat) but as thereligious police (Religions-polizei) of Buddhism” ’ (1990, p. 34).4 Similarregrets have been expressed more recently, as we shall see, both byJapanese scholars of the so-called ‘Critical Buddhism’ school and by someWestern critics of Zen’s role in Japanese fascism and militarism – both ofwhom trace the origins of this ‘uncomfortably close’ church–state collab-oration all the way back to Prince Shótoku.

But, of course, we must also recognize that there is something anachro-nistic and ahistorical in such decidedly ‘modern’ viewpoints. As anumber of other more historically minded scholars have pointed out, nosuch entity as ‘Buddhism’ as a separate, autonomous ‘religion’ in the modernsense ever existed in ancient Japan – or, for that matter, anywhere else inancient Asia.5 Thus, for instance, to imply that ‘Buddhism’ was ‘co-opted’by the state for its own nefarious purposes does not make much sensehistorically. From the very beginning, Buddhism offered itself, and wasadopted, as an arm of the state, and operated as an essential part of thegoverning apparatus. In other words, there was no Buddhism other than‘state Buddhism’ in ancient Japan, and it should be noted that, even muchlater, in the middle ages, an ‘outsider’ sect such as Nichirenism nonethe-less aspired to become the ‘national religion’ and place itself at the centreof state power. As its founder, Nichiren, himself proclaimed in his RisshôAnkoku Ron (On Securing the Peace of the Land through Adopting theCorrect Teaching), it was the duty of Japan’s rulers to officially accept histeachings, based on the Lotus Sutra, as the one true form of Buddhismin order to free the country of wars and natural disasters.

More ‘mainstream’ Buddhist sects also invariably represented theirteachings and religious practices as indispensible for the ‘protection of the



state’, and governing elites shared this conviction. The chingo-kokka (‘pro-tection of the state’) and ôbô-buppô (‘mutual support between the state andBuddhism’) theories adopted as official state ideology during the Nara(710–794) and Heian (793–1135) periods made this explicit (see Grapard1999, pp. 528–31). And the ôbô-buppô ideology, explicitly uniting theinterests of church and state, continued to play a supporting role in whatthe leading medieval historian Kuroda Toshio called the kenmitsu (exoteric-esoteric) system of rule.6 As James C. Dobbins explains:

[Kuroda] asserted that it was not Buddhism’s new schools but the old ones,what he called kenmitsu (exoteric-esoteric) Buddhism, that pervaded themedieval scene and set the standard for religion. Moreover, Shinto did not existas a separate medieval religion, but was submerged in this kenmitsu religiousculture. Furthermore, the entire kenmitsu worldview functioned as an ideologicalfoundation for the social and political order, providing it with a rationale andgiving it cohesion. Thus religion did not stand apart from the world as a realmof pure ideas, but was fully integrated into all levels and dimensions of medievalJapan. (1996, p. 217)

In the later middle ages, too, there was a close ‘working relationship’between some government-sponsored and government-controlled Zenmonasteries – the so-called gozan or ‘Five Mountains’ – and the rulingAshikaga dynasty of military dictators or shoguns. As Martin Collcuttpoints out in his seminal study of the issue, Ashikaga Tadayoshi, theyounger brother of Takauji, the dynasty’s founder, ‘saw most clearly thepolitical advantages to the bakufu [shogunal government] of creating apowerful nationwide system of government-sponsored Zen monasteries’(1981, p. 103). Under his and later Ashikaga patronage, these monasteriesflourished to such an extent that they ‘played a major role in the politicaland economic as well as in the religious and cultural life of medievalJapan’ (1981, p. 103). And Collcutt also points out that, for the Zenmonasteries themselves, this Ashikaga patronage brought ‘unprecedentedprestige, wealth, and influence’ (1981, p. 99).

Although under the Tokugawa shogunate, the next and last of theshogunal dynasties (1603–1868), neo-Confucianism was adopted as theofficial state ideology and Buddhism lost some of the high official statusit had enjoyed since the days of Prince Shótoku; nonetheless, the statecontinued to find important uses for the church. Most notably, Buddhistpriests and temples were used by the regime to enforce its system of‘household registry’ (danka seidô), whereby every family was compelled toregister with their local Buddhist temple. Anyone who could not providean identity paper that showed their temple affiliation was treated as a‘secret’ Christian (which was illegal) or as a ‘non-person’ (hinin) and subjectedto discrimination, and sometimes even arrest and execution. Thus, fromthe viewpoint of the Tokugawa state, the Buddhist temples were an indis-pensable tool for controlling the population. On the other hand, the

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Buddhist clergy themselves seemed to relish, and profit by, the life-and-deathpower this apparently innocuous ‘registry system’ gave them over thosecompelled to become their ‘parishioners’ (see Tamamuro 2001).

Fascist Zen

That the consequences of this intimate and millennium-long relationshipbetween church and state continue to be felt in Japan today – and incontemporary Japanese studies – may be seen in two disturbing andprovocative recent debates. The first concerns quite a specific issue: therole of Zen Buddhist leaders and thinkers as collaborators with Japanesemilitarism and fascism in the first half of the twentieth century. Thesecond concerns a larger but in some ways related issue: the alleged‘misinterpretation’ of fundamental Buddhist doctrines, for political andnationalistic purposes, by Japanese Buddhist leaders since Prince Shótoku.(These allegations are made by scholars belonging to the so-called ‘CriticalBuddhism’ school already mentioned.) It is interesting to note that thefirst debate was provoked by works written mainly in English, and thesecond by works written mainly in Japanese.

The full dimensions of the modern Zen world’s collaboration withJapanese fascism was first revealed to Western readers in 1995 by anexcellent collection of essays edited by James Heisig and John Maraldo,appropriately entitled, Rude Awakenings. The editors acknowledge that,just as revelations about Heidegger’s affiliations with Nazism have provokeda serious reassessment of his philosophic legacy, so too revelations aboutthe fascist sympathies of the Kyoto School philosophers (who had muchin common with Heidegger) and their Zen associates has come as a ‘rudeawakening’ for Western devotees of Zen and admirers of Kyoto Schoolphilosophy (1995, p. vii). The most famous members of this ‘group’ weretwo close friends: Suzuki Daisetsu (1870–1966) and Nishida Kitaró(1870–1945). Suzuki (or, to use his English penname, D. T. Suzuki) iscommonly credited with being the ‘man who introduced Zen to theWest’, a feat he accomplished in the 1920s and 1930s by writing ineloquent English a series of highly popular books on Zen. Nishida isregarded as the major Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century, andas the ‘patriarch of the Kyoto School’ who profoundly influenced severalgenerations of Japanese philosophers. In essays written during the SecondWorld War, Nishida seems to abjectly surrender his critical intelligence toimperial mythology and to put his sophisticated Zen-inspired philosophyentirely at the service of an atavistic emperor-worshipping State Shinto –in fact, admonishing his readers that ‘we must not forget the thought ofreturning to oneness with the emperor and serving the state’ (quoted inIves 1995, p. 34). As Christopher Ives notes, these essays ‘served to providea philosophical basis for the state, the national polity, and the “holy war,”and in this way helped “dispel the doubts of students bound for the front



and provide a foundation for resignation to death” ’ (1995, p. 27). (Ivesquotes here from Ichikawa Hakugen, the only significant postwar Zenfigure to criticize the wartime role of Nishida and Zen.) Despite theserather shocking intellectual capitulations on Nishida’s part, however, hisattitude towards Japanese imperialism was actually somewhat ambivalent,as Ives also points out (1995, p. 38). This was even more true ofD. T. Suzuki who, while he made nationalistic claims about the superior-ity of Japanese Buddhism and ‘Japanese spirituality’ in general (Sharf 1995,p. 48), also seemed to express, as much as he could safely do so duringwartime, serious reservations about the identification of Zen with thefascist cult of death (Kirita 1995, p. 61). The most vociferous and egregiousexpressions of fascistic thought tended to come from lesser members ofthe School, such as the junior members who participated in the notoriousdiscussions sponsored by the journal Chûôkôron in 1941, in which stridentclaims were made about the superiority of the Japanese race and therightness of imperial Japan’s cause as ‘liberator’ of Asia from Westernimperialism (Maraldo 1995, pp. 351–6). And also, perhaps most shockingly,some of the most fanatic support for fascism and militarism came fromthe Zen (and other Buddhist) clergy themselves.

This latter point has been brought home most forcefully by BrianVictoria in his case studies of a number of leading ‘Zen masters’ andassociates collected together in two volumes, Zen at War (1997, secondedition 2006) and Zen War Stories (2003). Among the prominent Zenleaders whose ‘fascist pasts’ are profiled by Victoria are some of the mostinfluential figures in the postwar transmission of Zen to the West. Forinstance, the Zen teachings of Yasutani Haku’un (1885–1973) featureprominently in probably the most influential book on Zen ever publishedin the West, Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen (1965), the book thatinspired generations of Westerners to practice Zen meditation. In hisbook, Kapleau presents his teacher as a ‘fully enlightened’ Zen master, butof course makes no mention of (and perhaps knew nothing about) thedarker side of Yasutani’s past. Victoria, on the other hand, devotes a wholechapter to exactly that, quoting profusely from Yasutani’s wartime writingsto prove that he was not only a thoroughgoing fascist, emperor-worshippingimperialist, and militant warmonger but also, rather bizarrely, a rabid anti-Semite (2003, pp. 66–91). Apparently he associated Jews (who were virtuallynon-existent in Japan) with leftwing or liberal thought and, as Victoriapoints out, ‘Yasutani and his peers . . . had wholeheartedly embraced therole of “ideological shock troops” for Japanese aggression abroad and thoughtsuppression at home’ (2003, p. 83). Thus, they fervently opposed ‘allforms of thought, left-wing or merely “liberal,” that did not completely andtotally subsume the individual to the needs and purposes of a hierarchically-constituted, patriarchal, totalitarian state’ (2003, p. 83). Coming on theheals of recent revelations about various abuses of power by AmericanZen leaders over the past few decades (see, for instance, Downing 2001),

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these ‘rude awakenings’ have had an effect on the Western Zen worldcomparable, albeit on a smaller scale, to that of the child-abuse scandalson the Catholic Church.

Indeed, Victoria’s books have had an historical importance in their ownright, since, translated into Japanese, they have induced various branchesof the Zen establishment to issue formal apologies for their past political‘misdeeds’. Nonetheless, it is unfortunate, in my view, that Victoria, eventhough himself a Soto-sect Zen priest, fails in these books to grab the realZen bull by the horns – that is, to ponder the larger significance of hisrevelations for our understanding of the very heart of Zen: satori or‘spiritual awakening’. Given the fact that he documents the ideological‘misdeeds’ of officially recognized roshi or Zen masters rather than merelyintellectuals or philosophers influenced by Zen, one is naturally led to askquestions, such as what is the moral value of satori? The traditional Zenanswer, in brief, is that, because satori reveals the oneness of all creation,the ‘enlightened’ person naturally feels compassionate towards fellowsuffering beings and naturally develops ‘non-discriminative’ wisdom.Looking at the rather hateful and discriminatory writings of wartime Zenmasters, however, one feels compelled to choose between two possibilities:either they were not really ‘enlightened’, or Zen enlightenment lacks themoral value traditionally attributed to it.

Such difficult questions are, in fact, confronted by some of the contrib-utors to Rude Awakenings, and their answers tend towards either of theabove-mentioned poles: those such as Hirata Seikó, who argue basicallythat Zen is amoral, concerned – as Confucians have always alleged – notwith society but only with the nature of the self (Hirata 1995); and thosesuch as the leftwing Zen activist Ichikawa Hakugen, who take a strongmoral position and argue that ‘enlightenment’ is worthless without a socialconscience (see Ives 1995). Ichikawa’s position is perhaps far more popularamong Western Zennists than among their Japanese counterparts7; forbetter or for worse, Hirata, a Zen Abbot himself, represents the mainstreamJapanese Zen view. Certainly he follows in the famous footsteps of D. T.Suzuki, who stated quite categorically:

Zen has no special doctrine or philosophy, no set of concepts or intellectualformulas, except that it tries to release one from the bondage of birth anddeath, by means of certain intuitive modes of understanding peculiar to itself.It is, therefore, extremely flexible in adapting itself to almost any philosophyand moral doctrine as long as its intuitive teaching is not interfered with. Itmay be found wedded to anarchism or fascism, communism or democracy,atheism or idealism, or any political or economic dogmatism. (1970, p. 63)

Although Suzuki’s language and logic here are rather loose or inaccu-rate, perhaps even careless or irresponsible (as was often the case) – obviouslyZen does have some sort of guiding doctrine and philosophy, for instance– nonetheless one can understand what he is driving at. Obviously Zen



is extremely ‘adaptable’ in both moral and philosophic terms – as withany deep poetic or mystical insight, its very ‘ineffability’ leaves it open toa great range of interpretations. This makes it morally ambiguous, sometimeseven dangerous. In the wake of Japan’s disastrous defeat in the Pacific War,even Suzuki was at pains to point this out: he argued that, if satori wasnot supplemented with a good secular education and critical intelligence,it was morally worthless (see Victoria 2006, pp. 148–9).

At any rate, this question about the moral value of satori has itselfbecome a kind of Zen kôan or meditation problem, and perhaps ultimatelyit is as logically irresolvable as any of the traditional kôan such as: What isthe sound of one hand clapping? Or perhaps we should resort to traditionalZen sokuhi logic and say: the correct answer to the question, ‘Does satorihave a moral value’, is both yes and no, and neither yes nor no. No doubtthe issue will be debated both within and without the Zen world formany years to come. Because the fact is too that Zen Buddhism cannotsimply be dismissed as if it were just another ‘evil religious cult’. First ofall, it has inspired some of the greatest creative achievements of East Asianculture; secondly, the spiritual or psychological value of meditation prac-tices such as those central to Zen is widely recognized now even in theWest – and, indeed, many who have known Zen masters (the presentwriter included) will testify that they can be extraordinarily impressivepeople, deeply grounded in themselves as few people are. But of coursethis does not mean that they know everything or are right about every-thing; in worldly terms, they may actually be quite naïve, wrong-headed,even ignorant. So what is enlightenment?

Critical Buddhism

Of course, the dubious or problematical relation of Japanese Buddhistswith the political establishment is by no means confined to the Zen sects.It must be said that, throughout most of their history, Japanese Buddhistsin general have seen little problem in the close relation of their religionto state power, or to the nationalist ideologies and even militarism asso-ciated with state power. The tradition of ‘nationalist Buddhism’ is as old,at least, as the middle ages, when the prophet Nichiren (1222–1282)claimed that Japanese Buddhism was superior to all others, and wouldprotect the nation from foreign invasion. The general Buddhist ideologicalsupport of the militarist state in the 1930s and 1940s, and the excesses of‘Imperial Way Buddhism’, were only the latest episodes in a long historyof such collaborations with the regime in power. Indeed, as already men-tioned, the origins of this uncomfortably close relation between churchand state in Japan can be traced right back to the ‘father of JapaneseBuddhism’, Prince Shótoku. The third injunction of the Prince’sConstitution of 604 calls for absolute obedience to imperial commands,equating the emperor with ‘heaven’ and consequently claiming for him a

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divine right to rule. Thus, a good Buddhist must also be a good imperialsubject. As Brian Victoria also points out: ‘this emphasis on the supremacyof the ruler . . . set the stage for the historical subservience of Buddhismto the Japanese state’ (2006, p. 212).

Only very recently have some strong dissenting voices been heard fromJapanese Buddhists – in particular, from the left-leaning scholars whopresently advocate a so-called ‘critical Buddhism’. The most influentialfigures in this movement are Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shiró,who consciously oppose the mainstream of modern Japanese Buddhistscholarship, much of which has been right-wing nationalist – the above-mentioned ‘Kyoto school’ being the leading example. Critical Buddhism,according to Hakamaya, ‘discusses how some ideas traditionally thoughtto be at the core of Mahayana Buddhism in fact eviscerate Buddhism’(1997, p. 60). Among these ‘anti-Buddhist’ ideas, in his view, is noneother than that old staple of Japanese cultural discourse, reputably firstenunciated by Prince Shótoku in his Constitution: the idea of the socialvalue of wa or ‘harmony,’ which the great scholar of Asian thought,Nakamura Hajime, called the ‘spirit that made possible the emergence ofJapan as a unified cultural state’ (1964, p. 387). Of course, every age hastended to interpret this wa ideal according to its own ideological predi-lections, but almost always with a positive connotation within the contextof its particular value-system (see Itó 1998). Now, however innocent asthe simple idea of ‘harmony’ might seem, Hakamaya severely indicts it as‘anti-Buddhist and nothing more than political ideology pure and simple’(1997, p. 60). As Stewart McFarlane (n.d.) says: ‘[Hakamaya] is particularlycritical of Prince Shotoku’s Constitution. . . . He sees Shotoku’s embracingof the value of harmony and Ekayana Buddhism, as a strategy for main-taining bureaucratic control and conformity’.8

Hakamaya is also severely critical of those present-day Japanese scholarswho try to make use of ‘Prince Shotoku’s Buddhism’ for nihonjinron-styleassertions of Japanese uniqueness and superiority.9 As a typical example,he points to Umehara Takeshi’s claim that Prince Shótoku’s Ekayana‘philosophy of equality and unity’, which extends equality even to ‘moun-tains, rivers, grasses, and trees’ is ‘unique to Japanese Buddhism’ and ‘is trulyimportant, for it can stave off the destruction of nature resulting from theanthropocentric ideas so strong in European thought’. Thus, Umeharaclaims further: ‘Ours is a doctrine essential to the future of humanity’(quoted in Hakamaya 1997, pp. 339–40). Hakamaya’s response to this isquite caustic:

If we follow his line of argument, we may well end up in the deluded notionthat the Japanese alone, thanks to the [Ekayana Buddhist] doctrine of originalenlightenment, have enjoyed a history of peace and equality, free of war andslaughter. This kind of blithely authoritative attitude, completely indifferent tothe facts of the matter, combined with a loose logic that mixes indigenousreligiosity with Ekayana Buddhism . . . are all typical of the abuse perpetrated



by a group of influential intellectuals who conceive of everything in terms ofthe doctrine of original enlightenment (1997, p. 340).

Religious Terrorism: The Politics of Aum ShinrikyôBut the most deadly mix of religion and politics in recent Japanese historyhas not come from traditional Shinto or Buddhism but from one of themultitude of ‘new religions’ that have sprung up in the postwar era, thenotorious ‘doomsday cult’ that called itself ‘Aum Shinrikyó’ (Om Religionof Truth). Finding that it was unable to acquire sufficient political powerby ‘legitimate’ democratic means, the group became increasingly hermetic,paranoid, and violent until finally, on March 20, 1995, it staged one ofthe most horrific terrorist attacks of recent times, releasing lethal quantitiesof sarin gas simultaneously on five trains of the Tokyo subway system,killing twelve commuters and injuring many hundreds more.10

As might be expected, this shocking incident has provoked intense debateas to its ultimate ‘meaning’ for contemporary Japan. Was it a terrible ‘one-off or an augury of things to come? Was it a symptom of a widespreadmalaise among a well-educated younger generation disenchanted withmodern-day Japan’s materialistic ‘economic animal’ lifestyle? (Some of theAum members were products of the country’s most elite universities.)What would be its long-term impact on the Japanese people’s (alreadyrather lukewarm) attitude to religion?

The most thoughtful treatment of the subject in English has been byIan Reader, who rejects attempts to sensationalize or to dismiss the groupas an ‘evil cult’ unrelated to ‘genuine religion’. On the contrary, Readershows that this ‘new religion’ drew much of its ideology and practicesfrom traditional, established religions, but carried certain aspects of these– especially the sense of its own righteousness and consequent alienationfrom an irreligious, materialistic society – to such an extreme that it finallyresorted to a ‘holy war’ against that society. Thus, ‘Aum Shinrikyóprovides us with a salient example of the violence-producing dimensionsof religion and reminds us of how religious movements can, through aconfluence of circumstances, engender, legitimate and commit acts ofviolence in the name of their faith’ (Reader 2000, p. 249). Needless tosay, all that we have learned in recent years about the ‘violence-producingdimensions’ of even ‘orthodox’ religions – in the Japanese as in othercontexts – makes Reader’s argument quite easy to accept. Indeed, somesocial analysts even claim that Japan is now living in a ‘post-Aum age’ inwhich all religion has become seriously suspect in the eyes of the Japanesepeople. The famous novelist Haruki Murakami, for instance, in hiscollection of profoundly moving interviews with victims of the Tokyosubway gas attack (and a few Aum members), relates the attack to anothertragic event that occurred just 2 months earlier – the Kobe earthquake –and claims that these two events created a mid-1990s double trauma

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for the Japanese national psyche, a trauma from which it will not soonrecover:

The Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo gas attack of January and March 1995are two of the greatest tragedies in Japan’s postwar history. It is no exaggerationto say that there was a marked change in the Japanese consciousness ‘before’and ‘after’ these events. (p. 237)

But Murakami, appropriately enough in view of all that has been discussedhere, believes that the long-term repercussions of these two events will beas much political as religious, since he also claims that, coming in thewake of the bursting of Japan’s ‘bubble economy’, they have ‘ushered ina period of critical inquiry into the very roots of the Japanese state’ (2000,p. 237).

At the very least, the Aum incident induced many in Japan to take acolder and harder look at the political activities of other religious groups,especially the so-called ‘new religions’. Among these the most politicallyactive and successful by far over the past few decades has been the SokaGakkai (Value-Creation Society), which began as an independent layorganization of the Buddhist Nichiren sect. In 1964, the Sóka Gakkaiactually founded its own political party, the Kómeitó (Clean GovernmentParty), which was disbanded in 1994 but then resurrected in 1998 as the‘New Kómeitó’ and remains a major player in Japanese politics – it is thethird largest party and its support has recently kept the ruling LiberalDemocratic Party in power. After the Aum incident most of the othermajor political parties advocated a proposal to revise the Religious Cor-porations Law, with its absolute guarantees of religious freedom (and taxreductions), in order to ‘give the authorities greater leeway in monitoringpotentially dangerous religious organizations’ (Mullins 2001, p. 77). TheSóka Gakkai and other religious groups strongly opposed any such revi-sion, and Einosuke Akiya, the Sóka Gakkai President, vigorously defendedthe ‘right of religious organizations to be actively involved in the politicalprocess’ (Mullins 2001, p. 85). His opponents, however, pointed out thatthe tax reductions granted to religious organizations amounted to a publicsubsidy for their political activities (Mullins 2001, p. 86). Thus, the questionof the proper relation between religion and politics continues to be athorny and divisive issue even in twenty-first-century Japan.

Acknowledgment

I would like to express my thanks to the anonymous reviewer of this essayfor a number of insightful and helpful suggestions towards its improvement.

Short Biography

Roy Starrs teaches Japanese literature and culture and Asian Studies at theUniversity of Otago in New Zealand. His major works include Deadly



Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima; AnArtless Art: The Zen Aesthetic of Shiga Naoya; and Soundings in Time: TheFictive Art of Kawabata Yasunari (all RoutledgeCurzon/University of Hawai’iPress). He has also edited Asian Nationalism in an Age of Globalization(RoutledgeCurzon, 2001), Nations Under Siege: Globalization and Nationalismin Asia (Palgrave, 2002), and Japanese Cultural Nationalism: At Home and inthe Asia Pacific (Global Oriental, 2004). At present he is working on abook for Palgrave on modernism and Japanese culture.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Dr. Roy Starrs, University of Otago, Dunedin 9001, New Zealand.E-mail: [email protected] Hitler is reported to have asked: ‘Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regardsacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good?’ (Quoted in Victoria 2003, p. viii, from AlbertSpeer, Inside the Third Reich).2 For an excellent description of this ancient and mysterious rite, see Ellwood (2008, pp. 23–5).3 Many authors in the past have argued against the notion of a ‘Japanese fascism’, urging theparticularity or uniqueness of Japanese history and political culture. But a number of recent in-depth studies of the issue (e.g., Heisig & Maraldo 1995; Reynolds 2004; Tansman 2009) haveshown that the totalitarian ultranationalism of 1930s and 1940s Japan was different enough fromearlier forms of Japanese nationalism, and close enough to the totalitarian ultranationalism ofits allies, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy – including in its political use of religion and myth –to be properly regarded as part of the ‘international fascist movement’ that was somehow aproduct of the early 20th century Zeitgeist.4 In the last sentence, Kitagawa is quoting Nakamura (1964, p. 455).5 For a discussion of the issue in a larger Asian context, see Borchert (2007).6 See the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, special issue on Kuroda Toshio (Teenuwen andScheid 2002).7 But even in the West there were some significant exceptions. American Zen teacher BernieGlassman, for instance, argues that, since Yasutani Róshi was an anti-Semite and a rabidJapanese ethnic nationalist, then obviously such prejudices are, in fact, compatible with enlight-enment (see Victoria 2006, p. XI).8 The implications of the term ‘Ekayana’ are both sectarian, implying that ‘Mahayana Buddhism’is the ‘one true vehicle’ superior to all earlier forms of Buddhism, and philosophic, implyingthat in this ‘one, final version of Buddhism,’ as Bielefeldt writes, ‘all beings were metaphysicallygrounded in the cosmic body of the Buddha. . . .’ (1990, p. 12).9 ‘Nihonjinron’ (literally, ‘theories or theoretical writings about the Japanese’) are popular essayisticworks that purport to reveal the secrets of Japanese psychology or national character and arenotorious for ill-founded essentialist and nationalistic claims about the superiority and absoluteuniqueness of a monolithically conceived ‘Japanese culture’.10 For an efficient and dramatic journalistic account of the incident, see Brackett (1996), whichalso provides some analysis of the group’s background and ideology.

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Bielefeldt, Carl, 1990, ‘The One Vehicle and the Three Jewels: On Japanese Sectarianism andSome Ecumenical Alternatives’, Buddhist-Christian Studies, vol. 10, pp. 5–16.

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