Editing Kohashi Shoichi (section)

== Biography ==

Kōhashi Shōichi was born in Kobe, in Hyōgo Prefecture, in 1912.<ref>「孝橋正一」 (Kōhashi Shōichi). [https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/孝橋正一 ''Wikipedia'' (Japanese edition)]. Accessed 6 August 2026. .</ref> He entered the Faculty of Economics of Kyoto Imperial University (京都帝国大学), graduating in 1935.<ref>「孝橋正一」, ''Wikipedia''. See also the author biography printed in Kōhashi Shōichi (1968). 『社会科学と現代仏教：仏教の社会化をめざして』 [Social Science and Contemporary Buddhism: Toward the Socialization of Buddhism]. 創元社 (Sōgensha), p. 293.</ref> His formation as an economist took place under the strong influence of Ōkōchi Kazuo (大河内一男), the labor economist whose theory of social policy (''shakai seisaku'', 社会政策) as the state's management of labor power under capitalism would remain a lifelong point of reference and departure for Kōhashi's own thought.<ref>See the discussion of Ōkōchi's influence on Kōhashi in Yūki Yasuhiro (結城康博) (2022). 「岡村・孝橋理論から考える社会福祉理論～政策論と技術論の検証～」[Social Welfare Theory Based on the Theories of Okamura and Kōhashi: A Verification of Policy Theory and Technological Theory]. 『淑徳大学研究紀要（総合福祉学部・コミュニティ政策学部）』56: 81–98, pp. 89–91.</ref>

In 1938, still in his mid-twenties, Kōhashi was arrested for violation of the Peace Preservation Law, the wartime statute used to suppress communist, socialist, and other dissident organizing in the Japanese empire.<ref>「孝橋正一」, ''Wikipedia''.</ref> The available sources do not specify the organizational context of the arrest, but it places Kōhashi among the generation of Japanese leftists who experienced state suppression directly during the fascist period, an experience that forms the backdrop to his later, sympathetic treatment of Marxists who turned to or rediscovered Buddhism while in prison during the same years.

After the war, Kōhashi built his academic career primarily around the study of social work and poverty relief. He held positions as assistant professor and then professor at Osaka College of Social Work (大阪社会事業短期大学), and in 1954 published 『社会事業の基本問題』 [Basic Problems of Social Work], the first statement of the theory of shakai jigyō for which he would become known.<ref>「孝橋正一」, ''Wikipedia''; see the bibliography given there for full publication data on Kōhashi's works.</ref> A revised edition, 『全訂社会事業の基本問題』 [Basic Problems of Social Work, Revised Edition] (1962), became the standard reference version of this foundational text.<ref>Cited as such in, e.g., Yūki (2022), p. 91, n. 14, and in Kōhashi's own later work; see also Kōhashi (1968), endnotes to chapter 7.</ref> In 1965 he was awarded a doctorate in letters (bungaku hakushi) by Tōyō University (東洋大学) for a dissertation on the history of poor relief policy.<ref>「孝橋正一」, ''Wikipedia''.</ref>

Kōhashi's engagement with religion, and with Buddhism specifically, matured alongside this primary work on social policy rather than displacing it. In the 1960s he translated the prison letters of Rosa Luxemburg into Japanese as 『ローザの手紙』 [Rosa's Letters] (1964) and published a general survey of socialist thought and movements, 『社会主義　思想と運動』 [Socialism: Thought and Movements] (1966).<ref>「孝橋正一」, ''Wikipedia''.</ref> By his own account, a fascination with Buddhism that had "occupied my soul" intermittently over three decades had run alongside, and periodically interrupted, his scholarly labor in the social sciences.<ref>Kōhashi (1968), afterword, pp. 289–290.</ref> This culminated in 1968 in 『社会科学と現代仏教：仏教の社会化をめざして』, published by Sōgensha (創元社), in which Kōhashi set out to reconcile his Marxist social science with his growing sympathy for Buddhist thought and practice. That same year he was appointed professor at Ryūkoku University (龍谷大学), a university under Jōdo Shinshū Honganji-ha (浄土真宗本願寺派) auspices; he moved to a professorship at Tōyō University in 1973, and in 1979 to Bukkyō University (佛教大学), an institution affiliated with Jōdo Shinshū Ōtani-ha (浄土真宗大谷派).<ref>「孝橋正一」, ''Wikipedia''.</ref> In 1971 he published a further, shorter study specifically on Buddhism and society, 『現代仏教論　仏教と社会との関係への探究』 [On Contemporary Buddhism: An Inquiry into the Relationship Between Buddhism and Society], through Nagata Bunshōdō (永田文昌堂), a publisher specializing in Buddhist studies.<ref>孝橋正一, ''Wikipedia''.</ref>

Kōhashi continued to publish on social work theory throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, including a further revised statement of his position, 『続・社会事業の基本問題　社会科学的方法論による批判的研究』 [Basic Problems of Social Work, Continued: A Critical Study by Social-Scientific Methodology] (1973), and a general textbook restating his framework for students, 『新・社会事業概論』 [New Introduction to Social Work] (1977).<ref>「孝橋正一」, ''Wikipedia''.</ref> He retired from Bukkyō University in 1983 and died in 1999.<ref>「孝橋正一」, ''Wikipedia''.</ref> Within the discipline of Japanese social work studies, Kōhashi is remembered chiefly as a founding figure of the Japanese Society for the Study of Social Welfare (日本社会福祉学会) and as the most prominent representative of the Marxist, or "policy theory," current in the postwar theoretical dispute over the proper object and method of social work, a dispute conventionally framed against Okamura Shigeo's rival "technology theory."<ref>Yūki (2022), pp. 81–82, 89–91.</ref>