Editing Japan (section)

=== The Eastern Socialist Party ===

One of the earliest attempts in modern Japan to articulate a socialist political program through Buddhist and other East Asian concepts was the short-lived Eastern Socialist Party (''Tōyō Shakaitō'' 東洋社会党), founded by Tarui Tōkichi 樽井藤吉 (1850–1922) in May 1882. Established amid the political ferment of the Freedom and People's Rights movement, the party was prohibited by the government the following month. Tarui nevertheless continued his efforts to revive it and circulated revised party regulations in January 1883, activity for which he was sentenced to a year in prison.<ref>Tanaka Sōgorō 田中惣五郎, ''Tōyō Shakaitō kō'' 東洋社会党考 [A Study of the Eastern Socialist Party] (Tokyo: Ichigensha, 1930); Komatsu Yutaka 小松裕, “Tarui Tōkichi to Tōyō Shakaitō” 樽井藤吉と東洋社会党 [Tarui Tōkichi and the Eastern Socialist Party], ''Ōsaka jiken kenkyū'' 大阪事件研究 5 (July 1986): 14–19; Shields, James Mark (2019), “Carrying Buddha into the Streets: Buddhist Socialist Thought in Modern Japan,” in Gereon Kopf, ed., ''The Dao Companion to Japanese Buddhist Philosophy'', 255–85, 256–60.</ref>

Tarui's draft party regulations reveal an eclectic attempt to formulate socialism through concepts drawn from Asian religious and ethical traditions rather than simply reproduce contemporary European socialist theory. Its first three principles made “affection” (''shin'ai'' 親愛) the standard of words and actions, affirmed the “equality of self and other” (''jita byōdō'' 自他平等), and identified the “greatest welfare” (''saidai fukuri'' 最大福利) of society as the party's goal. Subsequent provisions proposed measures intended to overcome divisions between rich and poor, including forms of communal ownership.<ref>Tarui Tōkichi 樽井藤吉, “Tōyō Shakaitō tōsoku sōan” 東洋社会党党則草案 [Draft Regulations of the Eastern Socialist Party], in Nihon shakai undō shisō shi 日本社会運動思想史, ed. Itoya Hisao 絲屋寿雄 and Kishimoto Eitarō 岸本英太郎, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1968), 125–29; Shields (2019), “Carrying Buddha into the Streets,” 256–59.</ref>

Whether the Eastern Socialist Party should be regarded as “socialist” in the same sense as the socialist movements that developed in Japan around the turn of the twentieth century has long been debated. Some later commentators emphasized its distance from European socialist theory and situated it instead within the Freedom and People's Rights movement, agrarian demands for economic justice, and older East Asian ethical traditions.<ref>Kurokawa Teizaburō 黒川貞三郎, “‘Tōyō Shakaitō’ ron” 「東洋社会党」論 [On the Eastern Socialist Party], ''Seikei kenkyū'' 政経研究 28, no. 3 (1991): 39–42.</ref> For the history of radical Buddhism, however, this ambiguity is itself significant. Tarui's experiment illustrates an enduring problem for later Buddhist socialists: whether socialism should be understood as a largely imported body of political and economic theory to which Buddhism might be added, or whether egalitarian and communal elements within Buddhist and other Asian traditions could themselves provide resources for constructing a distinctively local form of socialism.<ref>Shields (2019), “Carrying Buddha into the Streets,” 255–60.</ref>