Editing Kohashi Shoichi (section)

== Ideas ==

Kōhashi's foundational contribution to social work theory, developed across 『社会事業の基本問題』(1954/1962) and restated in later works, defines ''shakai jigyō'' dialectically against Ōkōchi Kazuo's concept of ''shakai seisaku''. Where Ōkōchi treated social policy as the state's management of labor power as such, and treated its beneficiaries as persons standing outside the economic order proper, Kōhashi instead distinguished "social problems" in the strict sense (''shakai mondai'', 社会問題), meaning the wage-and-labor conditions addressed by social policy, from "social problems" in a second, derivative sense (''shakaiteki mondai'', 社会的問題), meaning the relational and derivative hardships of the unemployed, the sick, the disabled, and others excluded from the labor market, which he assigned to ''shakai jigyō''. On this view, social work is not a separate object addressed to a separate class of persons but a complementary and, where the state fails to act, a substitutive function addressed to the same national population, differentiated only by the kind of task at hand. This reformulation, and Kōhashi's insistence that ''shakai jigyō'''s structure is objectively determined by the requirements of capitalist relations of production rather than by the subjective intentions of caseworkers, is what later critics labeled his theory's tendency toward economic determinism, and what set it in lasting opposition to Okamura Shigeo's more subject-centered, casework-oriented theory of social work as an autonomous professional technology.

Kōhashi's most sustained engagement with religion, 『社会科学と現代仏教：仏教の社会化をめざして』 (1968), opens not with Buddhism but with an account of Christianity's historical accommodations to capitalism, tracing the shift from feudal Catholicism through the Reformation to Calvinism's sanctification of "worldly asceticism," and then surveying Christian and utopian socialism, with particular attention to Saint-Simon's ''Nouveau Christianisme'' and to Tolstoy's Christian anarchism, both of which Kōhashi credits with real social insight while faulting them, in the end, for subordinating an objective, scientific grasp of social and economic law to a subjective transformation of the individual heart.

Turning to Japan, Kōhashi gives a frankly self-critical account of Japanese Buddhism's historical entanglement with state power, from its use by the ancient and Tokugawa states to enforce social hierarchy and, via the ''danka'' (parishioner) system (檀家制度), population registration, through Meiji State Shinto's marginalization of Buddhism, to the wartime state's censorship of politically inconvenient lines in the writings of Shinran (親鸞) and Nichiren (日蓮) and its demand that Buddhist institutions serve as spiritual auxiliaries of the war effort. Unlike some currents of Christianity, in his account, organized Japanese Buddhism largely failed to resist this instrumentalization, a failure he attributes partly to Buddhist doctrine's traditionally otherworldly orientation and partly to its institutional dependence on state protection.

Against this background, Kōhashi treats the [[Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism|''Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei'']] (新興仏教青年同盟, Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism), the Buddhist socialist movement led by [[Senoo Giro|Seno'o Girō]] from 1931 to its suppression in 1940, as the first serious attempt to derive a socialist politics from Buddhist principle itself, rather than borrowing socialism from without. He summarizes and largely endorses Seno'o's central claims: that Buddhism's foundational rejection of a creator god and of a metaphysical self (its position of ''engi'', dependent origination, 縁起, and ''kū'', emptiness, 空) makes Marxist critiques of religion as theistic false consciousness inapplicable to Buddhism in the same way they apply to Christianity; that Buddhist compassion demands material, not merely spiritual, deliverance from suffering, so that a Buddhist socialism is not the importation of an alien doctrine but the realization of Buddhism's own logic; and that Buddhism's relational, dependent-origination worldview grounds an internationalism opposed to the nationalism then engulfing Japan.

Kōhashi then develops a threefold typology of relationships between Buddhism and Marxism among Japanese thinkers who confronted this question, largely from their own experience of imprisonment as leftists. The first type dissolves Buddhism into "religion" in general and rejects it outright as incompatible with materialism; Kōhashi's example is the philosopher Yanagida Kenjūrō (柳田謙十郎), who abandoned both Nishida-school philosophy and Buddhism for an avowed Marxism, arguing that Buddhist "enlightenment" merely substitutes one metaphysical consolation for another rather than confronting the real, historical causes of poverty and war. The second type consists of wartime "converts" (''tenkōsha'', 転向者) who renounced Marxism for Buddhism under state pressure and torture; Kōhashi treats this conversion as ideologically spurious rather than as evidence of any deeper compatibility between the two systems. It is the third type that most interests him: Marxists such as the economist Kawakami Hajime (河上肇), the writer Hayashida Shigeo (林田茂雄), and the journalist and Soviet spy Ozaki Hotsumi (尾崎秀実), who, without renouncing their materialism, discovered or rediscovered Buddhism during their imprisonment and came away with their Marxist convictions deepened rather than shaken. Kōhashi reads Kawakami's prison writings, which distinguish an inward "religious truth" from outward "scientific truth" as two non-competing domains of a single materialist worldview, as an unstable but genuine anticipation of his own position; he reads Hayashida's affective identification with Shinran's ''tariki'' (other-power, 他力) faith, on the basis of its shared structure of unconditional, self-abnegating commitment with revolutionary practice, as coming still closer to it.

In the book's concluding chapters Kōhashi advances his own constructive synthesis. Contemporary Buddhism, he argues, must become a "socialized Buddhism" (''shakaika Bukkyō'', 社会化仏教): not a mechanical graft of Buddhist doctrine onto social questions decided in advance by that doctrine, and not a Buddhist social work that has quietly discarded Buddhist principle in favor of a purely secular social science, but a genuine dialectical fusion (''sōsoku yūgō'', 相即融合; ''funi gōitsu'', 不二合一) in which each term negates and thereby realizes itself in the other. On this view, Buddhist compassion (''jihi'', 慈悲) and bodhisattva practice (''bosatsugyō'', 菩薩行) supply the subjective, practical moment of self-negating commitment to others' liberation, while social science supplies the objective knowledge of social and economic law without which that compassion remains sentimental and ineffective; a truly Buddhist social work (Bukkyō shakai jigyō, 仏教社会事業) is therefore possible only where both moments are present together. As an illustration of this convergence reaching beyond confessional boundaries, Kōhashi points to Rosa Luxemburg, whose prison letters he had earlier translated, as someone who, from within an avowedly atheist Marxism, nonetheless lived out what he calls the substance of compassion and bodhisattva practice.