Editing Japan (section)

=== Ichikawa Hakugen ===
{{Main|Ichikawa Hakugen}}

Writing in the postwar period, the Rinzai Zen priest and philosopher Ichikawa Hakugen (市川白弦, 1902–1986) became the foremost internal critic of what he termed "Imperial-Way Zen" (皇道禅 ''kōdō Zen''), the wartime alignment of Japanese Zen institutions, and of Nishida-school philosophy, with state militarism and emperor-centered ideology. A professor at Hanazono University in Kyoto, Ichikawa devoted much of his postwar career to documenting Buddhist institutional complicity in Japanese imperialism, including his own wartime compromises, while developing a systematic "Buddhist-Anarchist-Communism" that grounded anarchist politics and communist economics in the Prajñāpāramitā concept of emptiness (空 ''kū''). In his major study ''Bukkyōsha no sensō sekinin'' (『仏教徒の戦争責任』, ''The War Responsibility of Buddhists'', 1970), Ichikawa isolated twelve specific doctrinal and cultural factors that he held responsible for hindering the emergence of a fully developed Japanese Buddhist socialism, including the traditionally close, mutually supportive relations between Buddhism and the state, the doctrine of karma as a rationalization of social inequality, Confucian-derived ethics of hierarchy and harmony, the doctrine of no-self as an obstacle to reflection on rights and justice, the Buddhist self-identification as the "Middle Way," which he held had fostered a conformist, compromising disposition ill-suited to political dissent, and the Zen and Pure Land privileging of "peace of mind" (安心 ''anshin'') over justice.<ref>Ichikawa Hakugen (市川白弦) (1970). 『仏教徒の戦争責任』 [The War Responsibility of Buddhists]. Shunjūsha, pp. 150–154; see also Shields (2014), "Zen and the Art of Treason", pp. 209–210; Shields (2023), "A Century of Critical Buddhism", p. 284; Brons, Lajos (2022). ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism''. punctum books, p. 155.</ref> Shields groups these twelve factors into two broad categories, deeply embedded features of Japanese and East Asian culture more generally (such as institutional conservatism and ancestor worship), and specifically Mahāyāna doctrines subject to a wide range of interpretation, and argues, against a purely doctrinal reading of Buddhist wartime complicity, that the former category bears the greater share of responsibility, since doctrine always remains open to reinterpretation in a way that deeply ingrained cultural practice does not.<ref>Shields (2014), "Zen and the Art of Treason", p. 210.</ref> Ichikawa's work remains the central reference point for postwar Japanese Buddhist self-criticism and directly prefigures, both in method and in target, the "Critical Buddhism" movement discussed below.