Editing Senoo Giro (section)

== Biography ==

Seno'o Girō was born on December 16, 1889, in the village of Tōjō (東城), Nuka district (奴可郡), Hiroshima prefecture (now part of Shōbara city), the fourth son in a family of nine children.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2017). ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan''. Oxford University Press, p. 209.</ref> His father Tamejirō, a sake brewer, died while Seno'o was still young, and the family business later collapsed; his mother Haru, who claimed descent from the Ashikaga samurai lineage, raised the family in increasingly straitened circumstances.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', pp. 209–210.</ref> Chronic illness—diagnosed variously as bronchial catarrh, anemia, and later pulmonary tuberculosis—repeatedly interrupted Seno'o's education, forcing him to withdraw from the elite First Higher School (Ichikō) in Tokyo in 1911.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', pp. 209–210; Shields, James Mark (2014). "Seno'o Giro: Life and Thought of a Radical Buddhist". In: Lewis, Todd (Ed.), ''Buddhists: Understanding Buddhism Through the Lives of Practitioners'': 280–288. Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 282–283.</ref> He was raised in a ''Jōdo Shinshū'' (浄土真宗, True Pure Land) household, but during his convalescence, a local tofu maker, Matsuzaki Kyūtarō (松崎久太郎), introduced him to the Lotus Sutra, initiating a lifelong devotion to Nichiren Buddhism that displaced his native Shin Buddhist upbringing.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', pp. 209–210.</ref>

After some years of drifting—including an aborted attempt to study in Shanghai, disrupted by the aftermath of China's 1911 Revolution, and a stint at a patent office in Japanese-occupied Taiwan—Seno'o embarked in 1915 on a pilgrimage to the principal temples of the Nichiren sect. Taken in by the maverick priest Shaku Nikken (釈日研) at a small temple-orphanage in Sōja, Okayama prefecture, he was ordained as a Nichiren priest at Myōhonji in December 1915, at the age of twenty-six.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', pp. 210–212; Shields (2014), "Seno'o Giro", pp. 283–284.</ref> Over the following years he grew increasingly involved in the Nichirenshugi lay movement founded by Tanaka Chigaku. Seno'o's diary from this period records a sustained personal crisis that deepened his devotional intensity: the death of his mother in July 1916, whom he had nursed and converted to Lotus Sutra practice on her deathbed, and the near-total blindness of his elder brother Sadatarō (定太郎) in June 1917, both of which he interpreted through the Nichirenist doctrine of retributive slander of the Dharma (''hōbō'', 謗法) and answered with escalating fasting and devotional practice.<ref>Miwa Zehō (三輪是法) (2011). 「妹尾義郎の日蓮信仰―大正五年から七年の日記を手がかりに―」 [Seno'o Girō's Nichiren Faith: Based on His Diary from Taishō 5 to 7]. In: 『インド仏教史仏教学論叢：仲澤浩祐博士古稀記念論文集』 [Essays on Indian Buddhist History and Buddhology: Festschrift for Dr. Nakazawa Kōyū's Seventieth Birthday]: 315–341. 山喜房佛書林, pp. 1–9.</ref> In April and May 1918, following consultations first with Honda Nisshō's associate Takagi Honjun (高木本順) and then with Honda himself, Seno'o resolved to remain a lay adherent (''zaike'', 在家) rather than continue toward advancement within the ordained priesthood, and, from 1918, worked under the mentorship of the more moderate Nichiren reformer Honda Nisshō at the latter's Tōitsudan (統一団, Unification Group) in Tokyo.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', pp. 212–213; Miwa (2011), 「妹尾義郎の日蓮信仰」, pp. 12–14.</ref> In November 1919, with Honda's encouragement, Seno'o founded the Dainippon Nichirenshugi Seinendan (大日本日蓮主義青年団, Greater Japan Nichirenist Youth Corps), editing its journal 『若人』 (Wakōdo, Youth) and building a nationwide network of student and lay chapters, including branches in colonial Korea and Taiwan.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', p. 213; Large, Stephen S. (1987). "Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest in Prewar Japan: The Career of Seno'o Girō". ''Modern Asian Studies'' 21.1: 153–171, pp. 155–156.</ref> At this stage of his career Seno'o's Nichirenism remained deeply patriotic; in September 1920 he married Saitō Fumiyo, a fellow schoolteacher, and named their first son after the militarist theorist and admiral Satō Tetsutarō (佐藤鉄太郎).<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', p. 213.</ref>

Seno'o's political trajectory shifted decisively over the following decade. The Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1923, and the mass violence against ethnic Koreans that it provoked among panicked Japanese civilians in its aftermath, shook his confidence in the innate goodness of humanity and in the sufficiency of contemplative or purely "spiritual" religious ideals.<ref>Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', p. 214; Large (1987), "Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest", p. 157.</ref> His involvement in mediating tenant-farmer disputes in 1924, which collapsed when local landlords refused to reduce rents, further radicalized him, and through the later 1920s he read widely in Japanese and European Marxist and socialist literature, including the work of Kawakami Hajime (河上肇), Yamakawa Hitoshi (山川均), Hosoi Wakizō (細井和喜蔵), Kautsky, Bukharin, Lenin, Marx, and Engels.<ref>Large (1987), "Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest", p. 157; Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', pp. 214–215.</ref> Seno'o's growing dissatisfaction with the nationalist and capital-friendly drift of mainstream Nichirenshugi culminated in a formal break with Honda and Tanaka around 1930.

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, under the observation of uniformed police, at Tokyo Imperial University (see below). Over the following five years Seno'o directed the League's press and national conferences, joined the Shakai Taishūtō (社会大衆党, Social Masses' Party) and several anti-fascist organizations, and, from April 1935, edited the labor journal 『労働雑誌』 (Rōdō Zasshi) in support of the emerging popular front (''jinmin sensen'', 人民戦線) movement against fascism.<ref>Large (1987), "Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest", pp. 163–166; Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', p. 208.</ref> He ran unsuccessfully as a popular-front candidate in the June 1936 Tokyo Prefectural Assembly elections.<ref>Large (1987), "Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest", pp. 165–166.</ref>

Seno'o's public activism ended abruptly when he was arrested on December 7, 1936, at the offices of 『労働雑誌』 and charged, under the Peace Preservation Law (治安維持法), with plotting the revolutionary overthrow of Japanese capitalism and the emperor system while operating, in the words of the indictment, as a communist "cloaked in the mantle of Buddhism."<ref>Large (1987), "Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest", p. 166; Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', p. 208.</ref> After five months of interrogation, Seno'o confessed and, in May 1937, committed ''tenkō'', publicly recanting his politics and pledging loyalty to the emperor.<ref>Large (1987), "Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest", p. 167.</ref> The police nonetheless used his confession as grounds for a mass roundup, in October 1937, of over two hundred League members; the organization was dissolved, and twenty-seven of its leaders were subsequently tried and imprisoned.<ref>Large (1987), "Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest", p. 167.</ref> Seno'o himself was sentenced in 1939 to five years' imprisonment (reduced to three on appeal in 1940) and was released early, owing to illness, in 1942.<ref>Large (1987), "Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest", p. 167.</ref>

Seno'o spent the remainder of the war in seclusion but resumed left-wing and pacifist activity soon after Japan's surrender. He helped found the Bukkyō Shakaishugi Dōmei (仏教社会主義同盟, Buddhist Socialist League) in 1946 and the Shinano Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei (信濃仏教青年同盟) in 1947, and served as chairman of the Zenkoku Bukkyō Kakushin Remmei (全国仏教革新連盟, All Japan Buddhist Reform Alliance) from 1949; he joined the Japan Socialist Party (日本社会党) the same year and remained active in several secular pacifist organizations through the early 1950s before joining the Japan Communist Party (日本共産党) in 1959.<ref>Large (1987), "Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest", pp. 168, 171.</ref> He remained troubled by his 1937 ''tenkō'' for the rest of his life, describing his own conduct as late as 1957 as an "inexcusable act" born of cowardice.<ref>Large (1987), "Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest", pp. 170–171.</ref> Seno'o died in 1961, at the age of seventy-one.