Editing Japan (section)

=== The Legacy of Radical Buddhism in Japan ===

The comparative political scientist George O. Totten, writing in 1960, offered an early and still-instructive explanation for why prewar Japanese radical Buddhism remained comparatively marginal by contrast with, for instance, the avowedly Buddhist socialism of the Burmese Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League: whereas Burmese socialists were, in his formulation, "nationalists first and socialists second," reconciling an already unifying national faith with imported Marxist categories, Japanese socialists had been "socialists first and nationalists second" from the movement's 1890s origins, arriving at their social consciousness through a variety of competing and often mutually hostile paths (Christian, secular-Marxist, and Buddhist) that left the movement chronically fragmented by schism rather than unified around a shared religious idiom.<ref>Totten, George O. (1960). "Buddhism and Socialism in Japan and Burma". ''Comparative Studies in Society and History'' 2.3: 293–304, pp. 295–296.</ref> Totten further notes that early Japanese Marxist theorists such as the Communist theoretician Sano Manabu (佐野学) explicitly regarded religion as a private affair to be dissolved rather than harnessed, while such attempts as were made to bridge Buddhism and Marxism, for instance by the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi's (三木清) circle around the journal ''Shinkō Kagaku no Hata no Moto ni'' (新興科学の旗のもとに, "Under the Banner of the New Science") and by the Youth League itself, remained a minority position within the broader prewar Japanese left.<ref>Totten (1960), "Buddhism and Socialism", pp. 302–303.</ref> Together with Ichikawa Hakugen's later, structurally similar critique, this comparative account underscores a recurring theme of the Radical Buddhism Project's Japan entries: that Japanese radical Buddhism arose less from any inherent affinity between Buddhist doctrine and left-wing politics than from the deliberate, always contested, and frequently short-lived efforts of individual monastics and lay activists to force such an affinity into being against the weight of institutional conservatism and rival, secular currents on the Japanese left.

The broader legacy of prewar radical Buddhism in Japan is, in consequence, more often one of rupture than continuity: the High Treason Incident of 1910–1911 and the suppression of the Youth League in 1936–1937 together account for the near-total absence of any organized Buddhist political dissent in Japan between the early 1910s and 1945. Postwar developments, including Ichikawa's critique of wartime complicity, the participation of some Buddhist clergy in the antiwar Beheiren (ベ平連) movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of Critical Buddhism, and the Marxist social-policy scholar [[Kohashi Shoichi|Kōhashi Shōichi]]'s (孝橋正一) 1968 attempt to rehabilitate the Youth League's Buddhist socialism from outside Buddhist institutions altogether, as an unrealized dialectical synthesis of Buddhist compassion and social-scientific method, are best understood as a delayed reckoning with, rather than a direct organizational continuation of, this earlier radical tradition.