Editing Senoo Giro (section)

== Biography ==

Seno'o Girō was born on December 16, 1889, in Tōjō 東城, Nuka district 奴可郡, Hiroshima Prefecture (now part of Shōbara city), the fourth son in a family of ten children.<ref>Inagaki Masami (1974), ''Budda o seoite gaitō e'', p. 30; Inagaki Masami, “Kaidai to kaisetsu,” ''Seno'o Girō nikki'', I:448.</ref> His father Tamejirō, whose family operated a sake brewery, died of a stroke in 1896, when Seno'o was seven; the brewery subsequently declined along with the family's economic circumstances. His mother Haru came from nearby Niimi in Okayama Prefecture, from a family that claimed ancestral ties to the Ashikaga lineage.<ref>Inagaki (1974), ''Budda o seoite gaitō e'', p. 30; ''Seno'o Girō nikki'', VII:487 (May 14, 1961).</ref> Chronic illness repeatedly interrupted Seno'o's education. After becoming seriously ill in 1909, he suspended his studies at Tokyo's elite First Higher School (Ichikō) and, following repeated unsuccessful attempts to return, formally withdrew in September 1911.<ref>''Seno'o Girō nikki'', I:69 (September 25, 1909); Inagaki Masami, “Kaidai to kaisetsu,” ''Seno'o Girō nikki'', I:448–50.</ref> Raised in a Jōdo Shinshū 浄土真宗 (True Pure Land) household, Seno'o began turning seriously toward Nichiren Buddhism during his convalescence in 1911, when Matsuzaki Kyūtarō 松崎久太郎, a local tofu maker and devoted Nichiren layman, introduced him to Nichiren's teachings and the ''Lotus Sutra''.<ref>''Seno'o Girō nikki'', I:165–66 (February 20 and 25, 1911).</ref> Their encounters initiated an increasingly intensive engagement with Nichiren Buddhism that would profoundly shape his subsequent religious development.

After some years of searching for a viable vocation—including an unsuccessful attempt to pursue study in Shanghai and a brief period working at a patent office in Japanese-occupied Taiwan—Seno'o increasingly turned toward religious life. After returning from Taiwan in poor health in March 1915, he embarked that autumn on a pilgrimage to major Nichiren Buddhist temples and sacred sites. His journey brought him to Shakuson Shūyōin in Sōja, Okayama Prefecture, an institution run by the Nichiren priest Shaku Nikken 釈日研 and his wife Myōzenni, where Seno'o remained for several months before entering the Nichiren priesthood at Myōhonji on December 6, 1915, at the age of twenty-five.<ref>''Seno'o Girō nikki'', I:258 (March 23–27, 1915), 263–67 (September–December 1915).</ref> Over the following years his devotional commitment deepened amid a series of personal crises. During his mother's final illness in 1916, Seno'o urged her to embrace the ''Lotus Sutra'' and Nichiren Buddhism; she died on July 7. The near-total blindness of his elder brother Sadatarō 定太郎 the following year further intensified a religious struggle in which Seno'o interpreted family misfortunes through the Nichirenist concept of ''hōbō'' 謗法 (slander of the Dharma) and its karmic consequences, responding with increasingly rigorous fasting and devotional practice.<ref>''Seno'o Girō nikki'', I:272–73 (April–July 1916); Miwa Zehō 三輪是法 (2011), “Seno'o Girō no Nichiren shinkō: Taishō gonen kara shichinen no nikki o tegakari ni,” ''Tōyō bunka kenkyūjo shohō'' 15: 1–17.</ref> After moving to Tokyo in 1918, Seno'o became increasingly drawn to the reformist Nichirenism of Honda Nisshō 本多日生. Following consultations with Honda and his associates, he resolved to serve Buddhism as a lay adherent (''zaike'' 在家) rather than pursue advancement within the priesthood.<ref>Ōtani Eiichi (2001), ''Kindai Nihon no Nichirenshugi undō'', pp. 270–71.</ref> On March 7, 1919, at Honda's recommendation, he began working full-time with the Tōitsudan 統一団 (Unification Group), assisting with meetings, publications, lectures, and the organization's work among younger adherents.<ref>''Seno'o Girō nikki'', II:23 (March 7, 1919); see also Inagaki Masami (1974), ''Budda o seoite gaitō e'', p. 61.</ref> In November 1919, under Honda's guidance, Seno'o founded the Dainippon Nichirenshugi Seinendan 大日本日蓮主義青年団 (Greater Japan Nichirenist Youth Corps), which brought together students and other young people from universities and schools across Tokyo and subsequently developed into a nationwide movement with members in Korea, Taiwan, and Sakhalin.<ref>''Seno'o Girō nikki'', II:82–83 (November 5, 1919); Inagaki (1974), ''Budda o seoite gaitō e'', pp. 62–63.</ref> Seno'o's Nichirenism at this stage remained strongly nationalist and patriotic. In 1920 he married Saitō Fumiyo, a fellow schoolteacher from Tōjō, and their first son, Tetsutarō, was born that December; his name honored the naval admiral, military theorist, and Nichirenist Satō Tetsutarō 佐藤鉄太郎.<ref>Takiguchi Motoichi, “Seno'o Sensei to Saitō Sensei,” ''Seno'o Girō Nikki Geppō'' 2 (July 1974): 3–4; ''Seno'o Girō nikki'', II:179 (December 13, 1920).</ref>

During the 1920s, Seno’o’s religious and political outlook underwent a gradual but profound transformation. The Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1923 did not immediately dislodge his Nichirenist understanding of society. In diary entries written shortly after the disaster, he interpreted the conflagration through familiar Buddhist and Nichirenist categories of karma, impermanence, the Lotus Sutra, and Risshō Ankoku. At the same time, the catastrophe—and especially the violence against Koreans that accompanied it—confronted him with forms of social suffering that would contribute to what he later described as his gradual “awakening to society.”<ref>''Seno’o Girō nikki'', II:352–55 (September 1923; entries written September 17); Kimura Noriaki, “Seno’o Girō ni kansuru ichi kōsatsu: Shakai e no mezame,” ''Nichiren Kyōgaku Kenkyūjo kiyō'' 28 (2002): 40–54. See also Seno’o Girō, “Mujō kara shin’ai made” 無常から信愛へ [From Impermanence to Devotion], later revised as “Mujō yori shin’ai e,” in ''Seno’o Girō shūkyō ronshū'', 197–220.</ref> During 1924 these concerns acquired a more explicitly economic dimension. While mediating tenant-farmer disputes in Yamanashi, Seno'o encountered rural poverty and conflict between landlords and cultivators at close range; elsewhere that year he condemned capitalism as a form of egoism and concluded that meaningful change required the transformation of institutions as well as individuals.<ref>Naitō Masayuki, “Seno'o sensei to Kosaku Sōgi,” ''Seno'o Girō Nikki Geppō'' 2 (July 1974): 7–8; ''Seno'o Girō nikki'', II:389–90 (August 2, 1924).</ref> Similar encounters with industrial labor sharpened this criticism. By March 1928, after visiting women workers at the Kurashiki Spinning Company's Masu factory, he was asking whether genuine human well-being was possible unless the capitalist system itself were “reformed or abolished.”<ref>''Seno'o Girō nikki'', III:269 (March 31, 1928).</ref> At the same time, Seno'o was reading widely across socialist, anarchist, and Marxist thought, including Bebel, Kropotkin, Bernstein, Kautsky, Bukharin, Kawakami Hajime 河上肇, and Sano Manabu. His engagement was eclectic rather than doctrinaire: he remained wary of reducing human suffering to economics alone even as materialist analysis increasingly persuaded him that moral exhortation could not adequately address structural inequality. By September 1928 he could write that “the more I study, the more I feel the truth of Marxism.”<ref>''Seno'o Girō nikki'', III:186, 190 (March 1927), 253 (January 19, 1928), 280, 286–87 (May 1928), 317 (September 24, 1928), 321 (October 23, 1928).</ref> His growing critique of capitalism was accompanied by mounting dissatisfaction with established Buddhism and with the nationalist Nichirenism in which he had been formed. By 1930 he was moving decisively away from the religious and political framework of Honda Nisshō and the Tōitsudan, toward the nonsectarian and explicitly anti-capitalist “Revitalized Buddhism” that would provide the basis for his new movement.<ref>Inagaki Masami (1974), ''Budda o seoite gaitō e'', pp. 76–77; Seno'o Girō, “Shinkō Bukkyō e no tenshin” 新興仏教への転身 [Conversion to Revitalized Buddhism] (1931), in ''Seno'o Girō shūkyō ronshū'', 260–301.</ref>

On April 5, 1931, Seno’o and roughly two dozen associates founded the Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei ([[Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism]]) at a meeting held at Tokyo Imperial University, with uniformed police observing the proceedings.<ref>Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism, “Sengen” 宣言 [Declaration] and “Kōryō” 綱領 [Program] (1931), reprinted in Inagaki Masami, ''Budda o seoite gaitō e'', 3–6; [founding-meeting source].</ref> As chairman and principal intellectual and organizational leader, Seno’o oversaw the League’s rapid expansion over the following five years. Surviving records indicate that it established as many as twenty-six branches across twenty prefectures, although contemporary government agencies produced somewhat lower estimates.<ref>Ōtani Eiichi, “Nakajima Shige,” 6.</ref> The League published journals, pamphlets, and manifestos, held annual national conferences, and increasingly collaborated with labor, tenant, anti-discrimination, antiwar, and antifascist movements. Seno’o’s own political activities likewise extended beyond Buddhist circles. From April 1935 he served as editor and publisher of ''Rōdō zasshi'' 労働雑誌, a labor journal established with Katō Kanjū and Takano Minoru, and by 1936 he and the YLRB were actively promoting the Popular Front (''jinmin sensen'' 人民戦線) as a means of bringing progressive Buddhists into broader cooperation with workers, farmers, socialists, and other antifascist forces.<ref>Matsune Takashi (1975), ''Seno’o Girō to “Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei”'', 76–77, 86–89; Seno’o Girō, “Jinmin sensen to Bukkyōto” 人民戦線と仏教徒 [The Popular Front and Buddhists], ''Kyōgaku Shinbun'', July 7, 1936.</ref>

Seno'o's public activism ended abruptly when he was arrested on December 7, 1936, at the offices of ''Rōdō zasshi''. Under the Peace Preservation Law 治安維持法, police and prosecutors built a case alleging that Seno'o and the Youth League were working toward the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the emperor system, portraying him, in the language of the prosecution, as a communist “cloaked in the mantle of Buddhism.”<ref>Ogata Hiroshi, ''Bukkyō to shakai undō'', [page for characterization to verify]; Matsune Takashi (1975), ''Seno'o Girō to “Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei”'', 91–100.</ref> After five months of detention and interrogation, Seno'o confessed and, in May 1937, underwent ''tenkō'' 転向 (political recantation), publicly repudiating his former political commitments and affirming loyalty to the emperor.<ref>Matsune (1975), ''Seno'o Girō to “Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei”'', 93–104.</ref> The League nevertheless attempted to continue without him, reorganizing its leadership and holding its seventh national congress on May 9, 1937, at which Hayashi Reihō became chairman and Aoki Sōei secretary-general.<ref>Matsune (1975), ''Seno'o Girō to “Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei”'', 96.</ref> Meanwhile, the investigation widened as police assembled evidence from interrogation records, member statements, League publications, and other documents, which they interpreted as demonstrating the organization's revolutionary aims. In October 1937, more than two hundred people associated with the YLRB were detained in a nationwide roundup; the organization was effectively destroyed, and twenty-seven members were eventually prosecuted.<ref>''Tokkō gaiji geppō'', October 1937; Ogata Hiroshi, ''Bukkyō to shakai undō'', 380–86; Matsune (1975), ''Seno'o Girō to “Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei”'', 103–8.</ref> Seno'o himself was sentenced in 1939 to five years' imprisonment, reduced to three years on appeal in 1940, and was released early because of illness in 1942.<ref>Matsune (1975), ''Seno'o Girō to “Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei”'', 111–17.</ref>

Following his release from prison in 1942, Seno'o largely withdrew from public political activity for the remainder of the war but gradually returned to Buddhist reform and left-wing activism after Japan's surrender. On July 7, 1946, he joined former YLRB colleagues, including Hayashi Reihō and Mibu Shōjun, in establishing the Bukkyō Shakaishugi Dōmei 仏教社会主義同盟 (Buddhist Socialist League), and the following year supported the locally based Shinano Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei 信濃仏教青年同盟 (Shinano Buddhist Youth League).<ref>Mibu Shōjun, “Kaisetsu,” ''Seno'o Girō nikki'', VI:533–35; ''Seno'o Girō nikki'', VI:97 (March 16, 1947).</ref> In 1948 the Buddhist Socialist League was reorganized as the Bukkyō Shakai Dōmei 仏教社会同盟 (Buddhist Social League), with Seno'o as chairman, and in April 1949 twenty-three progressive Buddhist organizations established the Zenkoku Bukkyō Kakushin Renmei 全国仏教革新連盟 (National Buddhist Reform Federation), again with Seno'o as chairman.<ref>''Seno'o Girō nikki'', VI:171 (April 29, 1948); Mibu Shōjun, “Kaisetsu,” ''Seno'o Girō nikki'', VI:533–45; Yoshida Kyūichi (1966), “Seno'o Girō to Bukkyō shakaishugi,” pp. 141–42.</ref> In December 1949 he joined the Japan Socialist Party 日本社会党, while peace activism became an increasingly important part of his work during the 1950s.<ref>''Seno'o Girō nikki'', VI:282 (December 27–28, 1949), 287 (January 3, 1950), 289 (January 8, 1950).</ref> By 1958, however, he was criticizing what he regarded as the Socialist Party's political “ambiguity” and finding greater decisiveness in the Communists, even while retaining reservations about Communist political practice.<ref>''Seno'o Girō nikki'', VII:276 (April 21, 1958).</ref> On January 1, 1960, he recorded that he had joined the Japan Communist Party 日本共産党 late the previous year, fulfilling what he called a “long-cherished desire.”<ref>''Seno'o Girō nikki'', VII:391 (January 1, 1960).</ref> He also remained deeply troubled by his 1937 ''tenkō'' 転向, writing in 1957 of having “given in and converted” and condemning his own “weakness and compromise.”<ref>''Seno'o Girō nikki'', VII:231 (August 15, 1957).</ref> Seno'o died in 1961, at the age of seventy-one.