Editing Ichikawa Hakugen (section)

== Ideas ==
Ichikawa's mature social thought crystallized in what he termed "Buddhist-Anarchist-Communism" (仏教者・アナキスト・コミュニズム, B・A・C), also rendered "Śūnya-Anarchist-Communism" (空-無政府-共同体論, S・A・C) to foreground its metaphysical basis in the Prajñāpāramitā concept of emptiness (空, kū).<ref>Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, pp. 160, 175.</ref> On his formulation, emptiness supplies the basic spirit and organizing principle of a good society: politically this yields anarchism, in the sense of a Buddhist rejection of any social order founded on domination; economically it yields communism, in the sense of the negation of exclusive private property; and religio-ethically it demands cultivating the subjective character needed to build and sustain such a community.<ref>Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, p. 160.</ref> Ichikawa traced this synthesis directly to his teacher, Ogasawara Shūjitsu, whose poetic gloss on the Heart Sutra ("般若心経意", Hannya Shingyō-i) and philosophy of "experiential apprehension" (體認論, taininron) read emptiness not as a negation but as unafraid, all-embracing joy, and who preferred to translate "anarchism" as "free association" (自由連合, jiyū rengō) rather than as "the absence of government" (無政府主義, museifu shugi).<ref>Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, pp. 166–170.</ref> Following Ogasawara, Ichikawa also insisted on distinguishing "anarchism" (アナキズム), an ideology, from "the anarchist" (アナキスト), a living person, so that a thinker's professed politics could not simply be equated with, or excused by, their personal conduct.<ref>Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, p. 176.</ref>

A second pillar of his thought was "origin humanism" (原点ヒューマニズム, genten hyūmanizumu), the claim that the individual stands at the tense intersection ("origin," 原点, genten) of two distinct axes of freedom: a "vertical" axis (竪の自由) of transcendent, contemplative Zen freedom, epitomized by the Rinzai (Linji) injunction to "become master of oneself wherever one stands" (随所に主となる, zuisho ni shu to naru), and a "horizontal" axis (横の自由) of social freedom modeled on Marx's account of workers reclaiming subjectivity from commodification.<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', p. 22; Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, pp. 177–179.</ref> Ichikawa argued that Zen enlightenment becomes ethically responsible only when these two freedoms are held in dynamic, if inherently difficult, unity, rather than allowing contemplative freedom to excuse political passivity, or social activism to dispense with inner freedom.<ref>Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, pp. 177–179.</ref>

Ichikawa's diagnostic project, pursued most fully in 『仏教者の戦争責任』 (Bukkyōsha no Sensō Sekinin, Buddhists' Responsibility for the War, 1970), catalogued the specific doctrinal resources of Zen and Japanese Buddhism that had been mobilized to legitimate Imperial-Way Buddhism (皇道仏教, kōdō Bukkyō): karmic (業, gō) explanations of poverty and suffering as deserved; the formula "differences are none other than equality" (差別即平等, shabetsu-soku-byōdō), used to sanctify existing social hierarchy including the emperor's status; the ethic of indebtedness and gratitude (恩, on), directed above all toward the emperor; the valorization of social harmony (和, wa); a soteriology of accommodation to "things as they are" (あるがまま, arugamama); and, especially, a Zen "aloofness" (孤高性, kokōsei) that treated genuine enlightenment as standing above social and political judgment and thereby left institutions silent in the face of militarism.<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', pp. 21–22, and ''passim''.</ref> Crucially, he refused to treat war responsibility (戦争責任, sensō sekinin) as a closed historical question to be settled by ritual apology, insisting on structural self-examination and applying the same standard to his own wartime writings, including the 1942 essay that had called the war "holy."<ref>Ives (2009), ''Imperial-Way Zen'', pp. 20–21.</ref>

In "The Stumbling of Absolute Nothingness: The Case of Nishida Kitarō" (絶対無のつまずき――西田幾多郎の場合, 1959) Ichikawa extended this critique to the Kyoto School's founder, arguing that Nishida's philosophy of "place" (場所, basho) and "absolute contradictory self-identity" (絶対矛盾の自己同一, zettai mujun no jiko dōitsu) was, in principle, capable of grounding a radically egalitarian, even anarchist, social philosophy purged of all external authority, but that under wartime pressure Nishida had instead let this logic underwrite the imperial kokutai; Ichikawa contrasted this outcome with what he considered Suzuki Daisetsu's (鈴木大拙) more genuinely anarchist-compatible postwar reading of Kegon (華厳) philosophy and its vision of a world of "mutual non-obstruction" (事々無礙法界, jiji-muge hokkai).<ref>Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, pp. 196–199.</ref> The same conviction that Buddhist metaphysics carries no single, fixed political valence, but is always realized through the concrete choices of "living" Buddhists rather than abstract doctrine, underlies both his critique of the Kyoto School and his 1952 public dispute with Nishitani Keiji over rearmament, in which Ichikawa argued that Nishitani's case for Japanese "self-defense" ignored how remilitarization served international monopoly capital and Cold War strategy rather than a genuine security "vacuum," and proposed instead a demilitarized, economically democratized solidarity of peoples across national borders.<ref>Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, pp. 188–196.</ref> Later commentators, including Morimura Osamu (森村修), have argued that this vision of borderless, horizontally federated solidarity among "cowards" anticipates aspects of postwar and contemporary anarchist theory, including Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's concept of the multitude.<ref>Morimura (2019), 「市川白弦の「空-無政府-共同体論」」, pp. 191–193.</ref>