Editing Japan (section)

=== Seno'o Girō and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism ===
{{Main|Senoo Giro}}
{{Main|Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism}}

Seno'o Girō 妹尾義郎 (1889–1961) emerged from the reformist but strongly nationalist Nichirenshugi 日蓮主義 movement before moving increasingly toward socialism during the 1920s. By the end of the decade, his encounters with poverty and social conflict, criticism of established Buddhist institutions, and engagement with socialist and Marxist thought had led him to identify capitalism itself as a major source of suffering. On April 5, 1931, Seno'o and a small group of young activists founded the Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei 新興仏教青年同盟 (Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism, YLRB). Rejecting existing Buddhist sects as corrupt and capitalism as incompatible with the Buddhist spirit, the League sought to create a Buddha land in this world through the conjunction of individual ethical transformation and fundamental social reform.<ref>Shields, James Mark (2012), “A Blueprint for Buddhist Revolution: The Radical Buddhism of Seno'o Girō (1889–1961) and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism,” ''Japanese Journal of Religious Studies'' 39, no. 2: 333–51; Shields, James Mark (2017), ''Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan'' (Oxford University Press), 203–43.</ref>

The YLRB developed into a nationwide movement whose increasingly socialist and internationalist program joined Buddhist reform to labor, tenant, antiwar, and antifascist activism. Seno'o combined structural criticism of capitalism with an insistence upon ethical transformation, arguing that Buddhism must confront the material and institutional causes of suffering without reducing liberation to economic change alone. This combination made the YLRB the most sustained attempt in prewar Japan to construct an organized radical Buddhist movement. It also brought the League under increasing police scrutiny. Seno'o was arrested in December 1936 under the Peace Preservation Law and publicly recanted his former political position in 1937; a nationwide roundup later that year effectively destroyed the organization.<ref>Seno'o Girō 妹尾義郎, “Shakai henkaku tojō no shinkō Bukkyō” 社会変革途上の新興仏教 [Revitalized Buddhism on the Road to Social Transformation] (1933), repr. in ''Seno'o Girō shūkyō ronshū'' 妹尾義郎宗教論集 (1975), 325–88; Shields (2017), ''Against Harmony'', 203–43; [Matsune/state sources for repression].</ref>