Editing Ichikawa Hakugen (section)

== Biography ==
Ichikawa was born in 1902, the thirty-fifth year of the Meiji period, in Gifu Prefecture north of Nagoya, the son of the resident priest of a small temple, Kezōji, affiliated with the Myōshinji (妙心寺) branch of Rinzai Zen.<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', p. 14.</ref> His mother came from a declining landlord family in Owari (present-day Aichi Prefecture); he had one younger sister.<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', p. 14.</ref> As a child he witnessed the poverty of his father's tenant parishioners at first hand, and as a middle-school student he watched his father sever ties with a parishioner family who had accused him of profiting from reciting "the dregs of the sutras," an episode that left him permanently uneasy about the economics of temple life.<ref>Morimura Osamu (森村修) (2019). 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論（Śūnya-Anarchist-Communism）」――小笠原秀実の仏教アナキズムと西谷啓治の自衛論批判をめぐって」 [Ichikawa Hakugen's "Śūnya-Anarchist-Communism": On Ogasawara Shūjitsu's Buddhist Anarchism and Ichikawa's Critique of Nishitani Keiji's Argument for Self-Defense]. 『異文化. 論文編』 20: 157–158.</ref> A minor bureaucratic error also shaped his youth: his given name, Toshimizu (利水), was mistranscribed as "Shūsui" (秋水) on his school certificate not long after the 1911 High Treason Incident (大逆事件, also called the Kōtoku Incident, 幸徳事件), and his resulting protracted dispute with school officials coincided with, and reinforced, his growing interest in the executed anarchist Kōtoku Shūsui (幸徳秋水).<ref>Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, p. 159.</ref>

By his own account Ichikawa was constitutionally "a coward" (臆病者, okubyō-mono): he dreaded conscription, military discipline, and death itself, and came to experience the emperor, as commander-in-chief with the power to command death, as bound to soldiery and mortality in what he called a "trinity."<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', p. 15.</ref> He treated this "cowardice" not as an excuse but as the psycho-physiological root of a lifelong antiwar and anti-kokutai (国体) temperament, and later wrote that "a coward's realization of social solidarity" had been the energy source of his youth.<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', p. 19.</ref> Alongside the poetry of Ishikawa Takuboku (石川啄木), the anarchist essays of Ōsugi Sakae (大杉栄), Hugo, Tolstoy, Bakunin, Marx and Engels, Jack London, and Kropotkin, the young Ichikawa also corresponded with the then-unknown writer Miyazawa Kenji (宮沢賢治).<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', p. 16.</ref> Through these readings a "humanistic anger at the evils of society and the state" took hold in him, feeding an early ambition to fuse socialist thought with Buddhism.<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', p. 16.</ref>

In 1920 Ichikawa entered a Myōshinji-branch training monastery in Kyoto, and in 1923 he enrolled at the Rinzai-affiliated university that later became Hanazono University, where he met Nishida Kitarō's (西田幾多郎) senior disciple Hisamatsu Shin'ichi (久松真一) and, more decisively, Ogasawara Shūjitsu (小笠原秀実, 1885–1958), a philosopher-poet and self-described anarchist who became his only acknowledged teacher.<ref>Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, p. 159.</ref> After graduating in 1926 he taught English at Hanazono Middle School while continuing independent study of Western philosophy, and by around 1930 he had begun to formulate what he later named "Buddhist-Anarchist-Communism" (仏教者・アナキスト・コミュニズム, B・A・C), the idea that a genuinely contemporary Buddhist social thought would have to be simultaneously anarchist and communist.<ref>Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, p. 160.</ref> The escalating repression of the early 1930s under the Peace Preservation Law (治安維持法), and in particular the 1933 death under torture of the novelist Kobayashi Takiji (小林多喜二), shook his confidence that such a program could be realized; by his own later admission, his youthful "conviction" in B・A・C began "wobbling from the ground up," and he gradually rationalized political quietism on the grounds that, as a temple priest, he could not commit his parishioners to a movement they had not chosen.<ref>Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, pp. 160–161.</ref>

Ichikawa's wartime record was ambiguous rather than uniformly collaborationist. His first book, 『禅の基本的性格』 (Zen no Kihonteki Seikaku, The Fundamental Character of Zen, 1942), avoided nationalist celebration, unusually for Buddhist writing of the period.<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', p. 18.</ref> Yet in the September 1942 installment of a series on "War, Science, and Zen" serialized in the journal 『大法輪』 (Daihōrin), he described the Pacific War as a holy war (聖戦, seisen) fought to secure lasting peace in Asia, a position scholar Ishii Kōsei (石井公成) has since called opportunistic and which Ichikawa himself, after 1945, judged to reflect a wartime failure of "tenacity and autonomy."<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', pp. 18–19.</ref>

After the war Ichikawa turned this same scrutiny outward and inward at once. He became a professor at Hanazono University in 1949 and began publishing pointed critiques of Zen quietism, most notably "On the Solitary Aloofness of Zen" (禅の孤高性について, 1950) and "Concerning Zen Praxis" (禅の実践について, 1951), which accused institutional Zen of a self-satisfied detachment from social and political responsibility.<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', p. 19.</ref> These essays provoked Myōshinji ecclesiastical officials to attempt his removal from the Hanazono faculty; he refused to resign and was retained after the university president brokered a face-saving internal inquiry, with the backing of faculty committed to academic freedom.<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', p. 19; Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, pp. 162–163.</ref> With Ogasawara he briefly co-founded the journal 『思想紀元』 (Shisō Kigen, The Era of Thought), which folded after three issues, and from October 1952 to September 1957 he served on the Kyoto City Board of Education (京都市教育委員会), where he defended Asahigaoka Middle School (旭丘中学校) in Kyoto against government charges of "biased education" and delivered a public lecture there marking the 1953 Korean War armistice.<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', p. 19; Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, pp. 161–163.</ref>

In 1952, after the postwar purge of Kyoto School philosopher Nishitani Keiji (西谷啓治) was lifted, Ichikawa engaged him in a public exchange over Japanese rearmament, criticizing Nishitani's endorsement of American-aligned unilateral peace and "self-defense" as neglectful of the economic and geopolitical interests actually driving remilitarization.<ref>Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, pp. 188–196.</ref> Ichikawa also joined the 1950 Stockholm Appeal campaign against nuclear weapons (原爆禁止ストックホルム・アピール) and, from 1965 until its 1973 disbanding, took part in demonstrations of the Kyoto chapter of Betheiren (べ平連), the citizens' league opposing the Vietnam War, reportedly its oldest regular participant.<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', p. 20.</ref>

Ichikawa retired from Hanazono University in 1972 and moved to Chiba to live near his son, Ichikawa Hiroshi (市川浩), himself a philosopher. He had his name struck from the Myōshinji monastic registry, returned to lay status, and devoted his remaining years to what he called "Liberation Zen Studies" (解放の禅学, kaihō no Zengaku), memorialized in a 1976 autobiographical essay of that title.<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', p. 20.</ref> He died of pneumonia in 1986; colleagues Furuta Shōkin (古田紹欽) and Hayashi Munehide proposed for him the posthumous Buddhist name "Zetsugaku Hakugen Zenjin" (絶学白弦禅人, Scholarship-Surpassing Zen Man Hakugen).<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', p. 22.</ref>