Editing Japan (section)

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

Radical Buddhism never constituted a continuous movement or a major current within modern Japanese Buddhism. The Eastern Socialist Party disappeared almost immediately; Takagi Kenmyō and Uchiyama Gudō fell victim to state repression; and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism was dismantled in 1937. Nor did these movements establish an enduring institutional lineage after 1945. Their historical significance lies instead in recurrent attempts to ask whether Buddhist teachings could provide resources not merely for individual ethical reform or social welfare but for fundamental criticism and transformation of existing political and economic structures.

One explanation for the historical marginality of these experiments was offered by the comparative political scientist George O. Totten. Writing in 1960, Totten contrasted Japanese socialism with the avowedly Buddhist socialism of Burma, arguing that Japanese socialism emerged from competing Christian, secular, Marxist, and Buddhist currents rather than from a widely shared Buddhist social idiom. Influential Japanese Marxists such as Sano Manabu 佐野学 regarded religion largely as a private matter destined to disappear, while attempts to bring Buddhism and Marxism into constructive engagement remained minority currents within the prewar left. Totten's comparison highlights an important feature of Japanese radical Buddhism: the relationship between Buddhism and socialism was neither assumed nor uncontested, but repeatedly had to be constructed.<ref>Totten, George O. (1960), “Buddhism and Socialism in Japan and Burma,” ''Comparative Studies in Society and History'' 2, no. 3: 293–304, 295–96, 302–3.</ref>

The forms that relationship took varied considerably. Tarui Tōkichi drew upon Buddhist and other Asian ethical concepts in formulating an indigenous socialism; Takagi derived socialism from Jōdo Shinshū faith; Uchiyama brought Buddhist equality into conversation with anarchist communism; and Seno'o combined Buddhist ethical transformation with increasingly Marxist social analysis. Ichikawa Hakugen subsequently turned radical criticism back upon Buddhism itself, while Critical Buddhism extended this self-critical impulse in a different, primarily doctrinal direction. These projects constitute neither a single tradition nor variations on a common political ideology. Rather, they represent historically distinct efforts to rethink the relationship between Buddhism, power, equality, and social transformation.<ref>Brons, Lajos (2022), ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism'' (punctum books); Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press); Shields, James Mark (2023), “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan,” in Robert H. Scott and James McRae, eds., ''Introduction to Buddhist East Asia'' (State University of New York Press), 281–304.</ref>