Japan

Japan provides one of the richest historical settings for the study of radical Buddhism. From its establishment in Japan, Buddhist institutions developed complex and often mutually supportive relationships with political authority, including the imperial court, the powerful temple complexes (kenmon 権門) of the medieval period, and the Tokugawa shogunate. These relationships never eliminated conflict or dissent, however, and Japanese history also supplied later Buddhist radicals with memories and models of religiously inflected resistance, including peasant uprisings and traditions of the self-sacrificing “righteous person” (gimin 義民).

The political and intellectual upheavals accompanying the Meiji Restoration of 1868 transformed this relationship. Following the brief but severe persecution of Buddhism known as haibutsu kishaku 廃仏毀釈, Buddhist clergy and lay intellectuals pursued a variety of projects to reconstruct Buddhism as compatible with a modernizing nation-state, modern science, new forms of scholarship, and changing conceptions of religion and ethics. Within and against this broader field of Buddhist reform there emerged, from the 1880s through the early Shōwa period, a much smaller and internally diverse current in which activists brought Buddhist ideas into constructive engagement with socialism, anarchism, and eventually Marxism. This entry uses “radical Buddhism” primarily for these attempts to connect Buddhist thought and practice with fundamental transformations of existing social, economic, and political relations.

Radical Buddhism in this narrower sense never became a dominant current within modern Japanese Buddhism. Its most explicitly left-wing prewar expressions were repeatedly subjected to state repression, most dramatically in the High Treason Incident of 1910–1911 and the destruction of Seno'o Girō's Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism in 1936–1937. Yet the questions these movements raised—about Buddhism's relationship to social inequality, capitalism, nationalism, war, and political authority—reappeared in different forms after 1945. The postwar critique of Buddhist complicity in Japanese militarism associated especially with Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦, and the later Critical Buddhism (Hihan Bukkyō 批判仏教) movement, are therefore treated here not as straightforward organizational continuations of prewar radical Buddhism but as later forms of Buddhist social and doctrinal criticism that can be situated within a broader genealogy of modern Japanese critical Buddhism.

Buddhism in Japan

Buddhism entered Japan from the Asian mainland in the sixth century CE and over the following centuries became deeply embedded in the country's political, economic, and cultural institutions. By the medieval period, major monasteries and temple networks controlled substantial landholdings and exercised considerable political influence. Kuroda Toshio 黒田俊雄 famously analyzed these institutions as part of the system of powerful elite blocs (kenmon 権門) through which court aristocrats, warriors, and religious institutions together constituted the medieval ruling order. The medieval period also witnessed the development of influential new Buddhist movements associated with figures such as Hōnen 法然, Shinran 親鸞, Dōgen 道元, and Nichiren 日蓮. Although some of these movements came into conflict with established religious and political authorities, Buddhist institutions generally developed through complex relationships of both autonomy and cooperation with political power rather than through sustained opposition to it.

Under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), these relationships acquired a particularly extensive administrative form. Through the temple-registration system (terauke seido 寺請制度) and parish relationships (danka 檀家), Buddhist temples became deeply involved in the registration of households and the regulation of religious affiliation, while also providing funerary and memorial services that became central to ordinary religious life. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 profoundly disrupted this institutional settlement. The separation of Buddhism from Shinto and the anti-Buddhist violence and destruction conventionally known as haibutsu kishaku 廃仏毀釈 stripped Buddhist institutions of much of their former status and property and forced Buddhist leaders to reconsider the tradition's place within the new nation-state.

One early response was the movement for renewed observance of the Buddhist precepts (kairitsu 戒律), associated with figures such as Fukuda Gyōkai 福田行誡 and Shaku Unshō 釈雲照. Other Buddhist reformers participated in government-sponsored projects such as the Great Teaching (Daikyō 大教) campaign, illustrating the complicated mixture of institutional self-preservation, religious reform, and accommodation to the emerging emperor-centered state. A subsequent generation of scholar-priests and lay intellectuals—including Hara Tanzan 原坦山, Shimaji Mokurai 島地黙雷, Murakami Senshō 村上専精, Inoue Enryō 井上圓了, Shaku Sōen 釈宗演, and Kiyozawa Manshi 清沢満之—engaged more directly with modern science, philosophy, historical scholarship, and changing conceptions of religion. Their projects differed considerably, but collectively they contributed to the reconstruction of Buddhism as a modern intellectual and ethical tradition rather than simply an inherited complex of institutions and ritual practices.

Historical-critical Buddhist scholarship posed particularly difficult questions for inherited forms of authority. Murakami Senshō, for example, became associated with the controversial thesis known as Daijō hibussetsuron 大乗非仏説論 (the theory that Mahāyāna was not directly taught by the historical Buddha), challenging traditional assumptions about the origins and authority of Mahāyāna scriptures. At the same time, modern Japanese Buddhist thought increasingly intersected with academic philosophy. Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 and later thinkers associated with the Kyoto School drew extensively upon Buddhist intellectual resources while developing philosophical projects concerned with such concepts as “pure experience” (junsui keiken 純粋経験) and “place” (basho 場所). The relationship of this philosophy to Japanese nationalism and imperialism would later become an important subject of postwar controversy and Buddhist self-criticism, particularly in the work of Ichikawa Hakugen.

By the 1930s and during the Asia-Pacific War, most major Buddhist institutions accommodated themselves in varying degrees to the Japanese imperial state and its war effort. This institutional record subsequently became a major object of postwar Buddhist criticism, although sustained internal reckoning developed only gradually. Ichikawa Hakugen's critique of “Imperial-Way Zen” (kōdō Zen 皇道禅) and Buddhist war responsibility would eventually provide one of the most searching analyses of this history and an important point of reference for later Critical Buddhism. These developments form an important counterpoint to the much smaller traditions of progressive and radical Buddhism discussed below.

Radical Buddhism in Japan

The Radical Buddhism Project uses “radical Buddhism” in modern Japan primarily for attempts to bring Buddhist thought and practice into sustained engagement with projects for fundamental social, economic, or political transformation, particularly socialism, anarchism, and Marxism. In this sense, radical Buddhism was historically distinct from, although deeply indebted to, the broader currents of Buddhist reform and modernism described above. Its emergence cannot be traced to a single continuous tradition. Rather, modern Buddhist radicals drew selectively upon several different resources: inherited narratives of religiously inflected resistance and social protest; early attempts to articulate socialism through Buddhist concepts; and the more immediate intellectual and institutional innovations of Meiji Buddhist reform.

Premodern revolts should therefore not be understood as instances of “radical Buddhism” in the modern political sense. They did, however, provide historical memories and symbolic models through which later activists could imagine Buddhist resistance to established authority. The Ikkō-ikki 一向一揆 of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example, brought together religious communities, peasants, local warriors, and other social groups associated with the Honganji branch of Jōdo Shinshū in episodes of armed resistance and regional self-government. Their aims and social composition varied considerably and cannot simply be assimilated to modern socialism or anarchism.

Of more demonstrable importance to modern radicals were Edo-period narratives of the self-sacrificing “righteous person” (gimin 義民), especially stories of village representatives who suffered or died after petitioning authorities on behalf of oppressed peasants. The semi-legendary Sakura Sōgorō 佐倉惣五郎 (1605–1653) became an especially powerful exemplar of this pattern. Another frequently invoked figure was Ōshio Heihachirō 大塩平八郎 (1793–1837), the Osaka samurai scholar and former official whose 1837 rebellion, shaped by Wang Yangming Confucianism, condemned corrupt government during a period of severe famine and attempted to redistribute confiscated wealth to the poor.

The importance of such figures for modern radical Buddhism lies less in direct institutional or doctrinal continuity than in their later appropriation. Narratives of righteous rebellion supplied what Shields describes as “root paradigms” of principled, self-sacrificing resistance: culturally available models through which modern activists could interpret new conflicts involving poverty, capitalism, state authority, and social injustice. Uchiyama Gudō 内山愚童, for example, explicitly invoked earlier traditions of peasant resistance while articulating a thoroughly modern Buddhist anarchism. Such appropriations did not make the earlier rebels socialists or anarchists retrospectively; rather, they enabled modern radicals to present their own political commitments as having indigenous as well as newly imported intellectual resources.

The Eastern Socialist Party (1882)

One of the earliest attempts in modern Japan to articulate a socialist political program through Buddhist 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 1882. Established amid the political ferment of the Freedom and People's Rights movement, the party was suppressed by the government within weeks of its formation, although Tarui continued his efforts to organize it and issued revised party regulations the following year.

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 “love and trust” (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. Tarui also invoked recognizably Buddhist imagery, including the Lotus Sutra's image of the Dharma raining equally upon all beings and the obligation of “children of the Buddha” (busshi 仏子) to respond compassionately to poverty and suffering.

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. 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.

Meiji Buddhist modernism

➣ Main article: Meiji New Buddhism

A more immediate context for the emergence of radical Buddhism was the Buddhist reform movement of the late Meiji period. These reformers were generally neither socialists nor political radicals, but they challenged established Buddhist institutions and helped develop a this-worldly, rationalized, and socially engaged conception of Buddhism that later radicals could push in more explicitly political directions. Particularly important were the short-lived Keiikai 経緯会 (Warp and Woof Society, 1894–1899), founded by the young Buddhist reformer Furukawa Isamu 古河勇 (also known as Rōsen 老川), and its successor, the Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai 新仏教同志会 (New Buddhist Fellowship, 1899–1915), initially known as the Bukkyō Seito Dōshikai 仏教清徒同志会 (Buddhist Puritan Fellowship).

The New Buddhists rejected what they regarded as the superstition, ritualism, and institutional privilege of “old Buddhism” while insisting upon the free investigation of Buddhist doctrine and religion more generally. Their reform program emphasized intellectual independence, ethical conduct, and the application of Buddhism to life in the present world. Particularly significant was their advocacy of genseshugi 現世主義 (this-worldliness), associated especially with Sakaino Kōyō 境野黄洋 and Tanaka Jiroku 田中治六. Rather than locating the goal of Buddhism primarily in another world, this orientation sought the significance of Buddhist teaching within the conditions of present human existence and society.

For some members, this this-worldly orientation acquired increasingly explicit social implications. Watanabe Kaikyoku 渡辺海旭 (1872–1933), who studied Sanskrit, Pāli, and Buddhist studies in Germany, became deeply involved in social welfare and brought Buddhist ethics into engagement with the social problems generated by industrialization. Inoue Shūten 井上秀天 (1880–1945), one of the Fellowship's more politically outspoken figures, developed a strong commitment to peace and international Buddhist cooperation and criticized Japanese militarism and imperial expansion. Members of the New Buddhist movement also interacted with contemporary socialists, including Sakai Toshihiko 堺利彦, even while the movement as a whole remained wary of socialism and especially of materialism.

The significance of Meiji New Buddhism for radical Buddhism therefore lies less in a direct political or organizational lineage than in the conceptual space it helped create. By questioning sectarian authority, subjecting Buddhist doctrine to rational and historical criticism, emphasizing this-worldly ethical practice, and insisting that Buddhism respond to contemporary social conditions, the New Buddhists helped loosen the identification of Buddhism with inherited institutions and established forms of authority. Later figures such as Takagi Kenmyō, Uchiyama Gudō, and especially Seno'o Girō would move considerably beyond this reformist position by bringing Buddhist ideas into direct engagement with socialism, anarchism, and Marxism.

Takagi Kenmyō

➣ Main article: Takagi Kenmyō

Takagi Kenmyō 高木顕明 (1864–1914), a priest of the Ōtani branch of Jōdo Shinshū, represents one of the earliest sustained attempts in modern Japan to articulate an explicitly socialist Buddhism. In 1899 Takagi became resident priest of Jōsenji 浄泉寺 in Shingū, Wakayama Prefecture, where his encounters with poverty, discrimination against burakumin 部落民, and the social inequalities of the surrounding community contributed to his growing involvement with the socialist and antiwar movements.

Takagi set out his distinctive understanding of Buddhist socialism most clearly in “Yo ga shakaishugi” 余が社会主義 (My Socialism), written around the time of the Russo-Japanese War. Rather than deriving his socialism primarily from Marxist theory, Takagi grounded it in his understanding of Jōdo Shinshū. The universal working of Amida Buddha's compassion undermined distinctions of status and worth among human beings, while the nenbutsu 念仏 became for Takagi inseparable from a commitment to equality and solidarity in this world. “The Land of Bliss,” he declared, “is the place in which socialism is truly practiced.” Those who recited the nenbutsu belonged to what he called the “people of the Pure Land” (gokuraku no ninju 極楽の人数), a religious community whose faith demanded opposition to the inequalities and violence of existing society. This religious socialism also informed Takagi's opposition to the Russo-Japanese War. He criticized Buddhist clergy who supported the war and rejected attempts to reconcile killing with Buddhist teaching or to console soldiers with promises of postmortem salvation. His socialism was therefore simultaneously egalitarian, antiwar, and explicitly Buddhist: rather than treating Buddhism as a spiritual supplement to an independently derived socialist politics, Takagi understood the implications of Shin Buddhist faith itself as requiring a transformation of social relations.

Takagi's political activities eventually brought him into the orbit of the High Treason Incident (Taigyaku jiken 大逆事件) of 1910–1911, in which the Japanese government prosecuted twenty-six socialists and anarchists for an alleged conspiracy to assassinate Emperor Meiji. Takagi was among those convicted and sentenced to death, although his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The evidence connecting him to the assassination plot was tenuous, and subsequent scholarship has treated his prosecution as part of the state's much broader suppression of the socialist movement rather than as evidence of substantial participation in the conspiracy itself. The Ōtani-ha expelled Takagi from the priesthood following his conviction. He died in prison in 1914, apparently by suicide. In 1996, the sect posthumously restored his clerical status, acknowledging the injustice of its earlier treatment of him.

Uchiyama Gudō

➣ Main article: Uchiyama Gudō

Uchiyama Gudō 内山愚童 (1874–1911), a Sōtō Zen priest and abbot of Rinsenji 林泉寺 in Hakone, developed one of the most explicitly anarchist forms of radical Buddhism in Meiji Japan. Like Takagi Kenmyō, Uchiyama understood Buddhist teaching on the fundamental equality of human beings as converging with socialism. In a surviving statement explaining his political commitments, he recalled that as a Buddhist missionary he had encountered teachings that all beings possess buddha-nature, that the Dharma is equal and without high or low, and that all beings are children of the Buddha; discovering these principles to be in accord with socialism, he wrote, led him to become a socialist.

Uchiyama's radicalism soon extended well beyond an affirmation of spiritual equality. Influenced by the emerging socialist and anarchist movements, and associated with figures including Kōtoku Shūsui 幸徳秋水, he came to identify private property, economic inequality, imperial authority, and militarism as interconnected forms of domination. In writings such as Heibon no jikaku 平凡の自覚 (The Awakening of an Ordinary Person) and the clandestinely printed Nyūgoku kinen: Museifu kyōsan—kakumei 入獄紀念・無政府共産・革命 (Commemorating Imprisonment: Anarcho-Communism—Revolution), he called upon ordinary people to free themselves from the political and religious beliefs that sustained the existing social order. Particularly striking was Uchiyama's attack on the ideological foundations of the Meiji state. His clandestine writings criticized emperor worship, conscription, militarism, and the concentration of wealth and land, while envisioning a society organized around economic equality and communal ownership. Buddhism did not disappear from this increasingly anarchist critique. Rather, Uchiyama interpreted Buddhist equality in radically this-worldly terms: if distinctions of high and low possessed no ultimate religious justification, inherited structures of political and economic hierarchy could themselves become objects of Buddhist criticism.

Uchiyama was arrested in 1909 after the authorities discovered his clandestine printing operation and a quantity of dynamite at Rinsenji. He was convicted under the Publication Law and explosives regulations and was already imprisoned when the investigation that became the High Treason Incident (Taigyaku jiken 大逆事件) expanded to include him. Prosecutors treated statements he had made concerning revolutionary violence and the imperial family as evidence of participation in the alleged conspiracy against Emperor Meiji. He was convicted of high treason and executed on January 24, 1911. The Sōtō establishment had already expelled Uchiyama from the priesthood in 1910, before his conviction in the High Treason trial. In 1993, however, the sect rescinded the expulsion and formally restored his clerical status, acknowledging the injustice of its earlier treatment of him. A century after his execution, the head of the Sōtō administration again publicly acknowledged the sect's responsibility and presented Uchiyama's commitment to peace, opposition to discrimination, and concern for suffering as a challenge to contemporary Buddhists.

From the High Treason Incident to the YLRB

The High Treason Incident of 1910–1911 marked a severe rupture in the development of explicitly radical Buddhism in Japan. The execution of Uchiyama Gudō and the imprisonment and subsequent death of Takagi Kenmyō formed part of a much wider state assault on the socialist and anarchist movements. In the political climate that followed, open attempts to combine Buddhism with revolutionary socialism or anarchism became exceptionally difficult. No Buddhist organization comparable to the later Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism emerged during the 1910s, and the explicitly Buddhist radicalism represented by Takagi and Uchiyama largely disappeared from public view.

This interval should not, however, be understood as an intellectual vacuum or as a simple break between two otherwise disconnected generations of Buddhist radicals. During the 1910s and 1920s, Buddhist reformers continued to debate the social responsibilities of Buddhism, while new forms of labor activism, tenant protest, socialist thought, and social-welfare activity transformed the political environment in which Buddhist activists operated. The period also witnessed the rapid circulation of socialist and, increasingly after the Russian Revolution, Marxist ideas. Buddhist responses ranged from hostility and apologetic defense to attempts at dialogue and selective appropriation. The result was not a continuous “radical Buddhist” movement but a changing field in which the relationship between Buddhism and the social question became increasingly difficult to ignore.

Seno'o Girō's own trajectory illustrates this more complicated continuity particularly well. His radicalism did not originate in the Buddhist socialism of Takagi or Uchiyama, nor is there evidence that he initially understood himself as inheriting their projects. Seno'o emerged instead from the reformist and strongly nationalist world of modern Nichiren Buddhism. During the 1920s, however, encounters with poverty and labor conflict, growing dissatisfaction with established Buddhist institutions, and increasingly extensive reading in socialist, Marxist, and anarchist thought led him toward a fundamentally different conception of Buddhism and social transformation. The Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism, founded in 1931, therefore represented neither a straightforward revival of Meiji Buddhist socialism nor an entirely new departure. It arose from a different Buddhist milieu and under different political conditions while reopening, in a much more organizationally sustained form, the problem that Takagi and Uchiyama had confronted before 1911: what might follow if Buddhist commitments to liberation, equality, and the overcoming of attachment were applied to the structures of modern society?

Seno'o Girō and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism

➣ Main article: Seno'o Girō

➣ Main article: Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism

The most sustained attempt to develop an explicitly radical Buddhist movement in prewar Japan emerged around Seno'o Girō 妹尾義郎 (1889–1961) and the Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei 新興仏教青年同盟 (Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism, YLRB). Seno'o began his Buddhist career within the modern Nichirenist movement associated especially with Honda Nisshō 本多日生 and initially combined Buddhist reform with strong patriotic and nationalist commitments. During the 1920s, however, encounters with poverty and labor conflict, growing dissatisfaction with established Buddhist institutions, and extensive reading in socialist, Marxist, and anarchist thought gradually transformed his understanding of both Buddhism and society.

In April 1931, Seno'o founded the YLRB as an explicitly anti-sectarian Buddhist reform movement committed to the reconstruction of both Buddhism and society. Its declaration and program rejected capitalism and economic exploitation, opposed discrimination and war, and called for a Buddhism capable of responding directly to contemporary social conditions. During the following years Seno'o developed an increasingly materialist interpretation of Buddhism in constructive engagement with Marxist social analysis. He accepted much of the Marxist critique of religion—including the charge that religion could function as an “opiate”—while arguing that “original Buddhism,” properly understood, rejected dependence upon supernatural powers and directed attention toward suffering and its causes within the conditions of human existence.

Central to Seno'o's radical Buddhism was a reinterpretation of the Three Jewels. Buddha referred above all to the historical Śākyamuni, revered as the fullest realization of human possibility rather than a supernatural source of salvation. Dharma was interpreted through interdependence, nonattachment, and no-self, the latter developing into an ethic of “selfless love” (muga-ai 無我愛) realized through practice. Sangha became a model for a communal society (kyōdō shakai 共同社会) organized around equality, cooperation, and freedom from exploitation. Social transformation and personal transformation were therefore mutually necessary: capitalism and other structures of domination had to be overcome, but structural change alone could not eliminate the egoism and attachment that reproduced exploitation. The YLRB attempted to put these ideas into practice through publications, lectures, conferences, and local activism. Surviving records indicate that it established as many as twenty-six branches across twenty prefectures, although contemporary government agencies produced somewhat lower estimates. During the mid-1930s Seno'o and other members became increasingly involved in labor, socialist, antifascist, and Popular Front activities, while Seno'o's writings connected capitalism ever more explicitly with war, fascism, and imperialism.

This experiment was destroyed by state repression. Seno'o was arrested on December 7, 1936, under the Peace Preservation Law. After five months of detention and interrogation, he confessed and in May 1937 underwent tenkō 転向 (political recantation), publicly repudiating his former political commitments and affirming loyalty to the emperor. The League nevertheless attempted to continue without him, reorganizing its leadership and holding a seventh national congress in May 1937. In October, more than two hundred people associated with the YLRB were detained in a nationwide roundup; the organization was effectively destroyed, and twenty-seven members were eventually prosecuted.

Ichikawa Hakugen

➣ Main article: Ichikawa Hakugen

A different form of radical Buddhist critique emerged after Japan's defeat in 1945 in the work of the Rinzai Zen priest and scholar Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦 (1902–1986). Ichikawa had himself participated in the intellectual world of wartime Japanese Zen, and his postwar thought developed through an increasingly searching confrontation with Buddhism's responsibility for Japanese militarism and imperialism. Rather than treating Buddhist support for the war simply as an aberration produced by state coercion or the failures of individual priests, he asked what features of Buddhist doctrine, institutional organization, and historical relations with political authority had made such accommodation possible.

Ichikawa's critique was particularly directed toward Zen. He argued that Japanese Zen had developed within a long history of accommodation to political authority and social hierarchy and had frequently interpreted concepts such as no-self, nonduality, and the transcendence of discrimination in ways that weakened resistance to concrete forms of domination. In modern Japan these tendencies had converged with nationalism and emperor-centered ideology in what Ichikawa characterized as “Imperial-Way Zen” (kōdō Zen 皇道禅). His analysis thus turned familiar Buddhist virtues into objects of critical examination: harmony could suppress conflict, nonattachment could become political passivity, and the overcoming of distinctions could obscure actual inequalities. This self-criticism was inseparable from Ichikawa's postwar political commitments. His engagement with socialism, Marxism, peace activism, and opposition to the Vietnam War led him to seek what he sometimes described as a Buddhism capable of resisting rather than sanctifying established power. Yet his project differed from a simple attempt to subordinate Buddhism to Marxism. Marxist social analysis could expose class domination, exploitation, and ideology, but Buddhism itself also required reconstruction if it was to contribute to human liberation. Ichikawa therefore subjected both inherited Buddhism and modern Buddhist philosophy—including the thought of Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎—to sustained criticism.

Ichikawa also explicitly recovered the suppressed history of Japanese Buddhist socialism, including figures such as Takagi Kenmyō and Uchiyama Gudō, and reflected on the possibilities and limitations of Buddhist socialism itself. His importance to the history of radical Buddhism therefore lies partly in this act of historical recovery, but still more in his insistence that a genuinely critical Buddhism must direct its critique inward as well as outward. Social structures of domination had to be confronted, but so too did Buddhist doctrines, habits, and institutions when they helped reproduce those structures.

In this respect, Ichikawa forms an important bridge between the socialist and anarchist Buddhist movements of the prewar period and the later movement known as Critical Buddhism (Hihan Bukkyō 批判仏教). Hakamaya Noriaki 袴谷憲昭 and Matsumoto Shirō 松本史朗 did not simply inherit Ichikawa's political program, and Critical Buddhism arose from different institutional and doctrinal controversies. Nevertheless, Ichikawa's demand that Buddhism submit its own doctrines and historical formations to critical scrutiny anticipates an important feature of their project. The relationship is therefore better understood as one of critical affinity and genealogy than of direct intellectual succession.

Critical Buddhism

➣ Main article: Critical Buddhism

A later development in Japanese Buddhist criticism emerged in the 1980s around the Sōtō scholars Hakamaya Noriaki 袴谷憲昭 and Matsumoto Shirō 松本史朗. The movement known as Critical Buddhism (Hihan Bukkyō 批判仏教) subjected influential strands of East Asian Buddhist thought—particularly tathāgatagarbha (buddha-nature) and hongaku 本覚 (original enlightenment) thought—to sustained criticism. Hakamaya and Matsumoto argued that doctrines emphasizing an underlying, universal ground of enlightenment risked obscuring the critical, relational, and non-substantialist dimensions of Buddhist teaching. Hakamaya captured the movement's provocative stance in the proposition that “Buddhism is criticism” (Bukkyō wa hihan de aru 仏教は批判である). Critical Buddhism was not a continuation of the socialist and anarchist Buddhist movements of the prewar period, nor did it reproduce Ichikawa Hakugen's political program. Its primary interventions were doctrinal and institutional. Nevertheless, its insistence that Buddhist doctrines themselves be subjected to critical scrutiny—and its concern that appeals to harmony, nonduality, or original enlightenment could obscure discrimination and social injustice—places it within a broader genealogy of modern Japanese Buddhist self-criticism. In this limited but important sense, it extended the question posed especially forcefully by Ichikawa: whether Buddhism could criticize structures of domination without also critically examining its own inherited concepts and institutions.

The Legacy of Radical Buddhism in Japan

Radical Buddhism never constituted a continuous movement or a major current within modern Japanese Buddhism. The Eastern Socialist Party was quickly suppressed; Takagi Kenmyō and Uchiyama Gudō fell victim to the repression surrounding the High Treason Incident; and Seno'o Girō's Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism was destroyed by the state in 1937. Nor did these figures form a single intellectual lineage: their various forms of Buddhist socialism, anarchism, and Marxism emerged from different religious and political contexts. What connects them instead is a recurring attempt to apply Buddhist ideas of suffering, equality, compassion, non-attachment, and liberation to structures of poverty, exploitation, discrimination, war, and political domination—and, increasingly, to subject Buddhism's own institutions and doctrines to the same critical scrutiny.

One explanation for the historical marginality of these experiments was offered by the comparative political scientist George O. Totten. Writing in 1960, Totten contrasted Japanese socialism with the avowedly Buddhist socialism of Burma's Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League. Whereas Burmese socialists were, in his formulation, “nationalists first and socialists second,” and could therefore draw upon a widely shared Buddhist idiom, Japanese socialists had been “socialists first and nationalists second,” emerging from competing Christian, secular, Marxist, and Buddhist currents. Influential Japanese Marxists such as Sano Manabu 佐野学 regarded religion largely as a private matter destined to disappear, while attempts to bring Buddhism and Marxism into constructive engagement—including discussions associated with Miki Kiyoshi 三木清 and Shinkō Kagaku no Hata no Moto ni 新興科学の旗のもとに (Under the Banner of the New Science), as well as Seno'o's YLRB—remained minority currents within the prewar left. Totten's comparison thus highlights an important feature of Japanese radical Buddhism: the relationship between Buddhism and socialism was neither assumed nor uncontested, but repeatedly had to be constructed.

After 1945, many of the same questions reappeared in different forms. Ichikawa Hakugen recovered the suppressed history of Buddhist socialism while turning radical criticism back upon Buddhism itself through his analysis of Buddhist war responsibility and accommodation to political authority. Critical Buddhism (Hihan Bukkyō 批判仏教) later extended this reflexive tendency into doctrinal criticism, although it was neither socialist nor a direct continuation of prewar radical Buddhism. The significance of radical Buddhism in Japan therefore lies less in an unbroken succession of movements than in repeated attempts to reconstruct Buddhism as a resource for—and sometimes an object of—fundamental social, political, and ethical critique.

Selected Literature in English

• Brons, Lajos (2022). A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism. punctum books. [A wide-ranging philosophical history of Buddhist utopianism, with substantial treatment of Meiji and Taishō Buddhist reform and radicalism, including several figures and currents less prominent in the existing English-language literature.]

• Ives, Christopher (2009). Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen's Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics. University of Hawai'i Press. [The principal English-language study of Ichikawa Hakugen and his critique of Zen's accommodation to Japanese nationalism and militarism.]

• Ketelaar, James Edward (1990). Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution. Princeton University Press. [A major study of the early Meiji persecution of Buddhism and the subsequent reconstruction of Buddhist identity and institutions.]

• Large, Stephen S. (1987). “Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest in Prewar Japan: The Career of Seno'o Girō”. Modern Asian Studies 21.1: 153–171. [An important early English-language political biography of Seno'o Girō, based substantially on his published diary.]

• Shields, James Mark (2011). Critical Buddhism: Engaging with Modern Japanese Buddhist Thought. Ashgate. [A book-length study of Critical Buddhism, particularly the thought of Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shirō and its relationship to modern Japanese Buddhist philosophy.]

• Shields, James Mark (2014). “From Topos to Utopia: Critical Buddhism, Globalization, and Ideology Criticism”. In: Kalmanson, Leah, & Shields, James Mark (Eds.), Buddhist Responses to Globalization: 51–77. Lexington Books. [Examines Critical Buddhism through ideology criticism and explores its relationship to materialist and utopian forms of Buddhist praxis.]

• Shields, James Mark (2014). “Zen and the Art of Treason: Radical Buddhism in Meiji Era (1868–1912) Japan”. Politics, Religion & Ideology 15.2: 205–223. [Examines Tarui Tōkichi, Takagi Kenmyō, and Uchiyama Gudō as distinct experiments in Meiji radical Buddhism.]

• Shields, James Mark (2016). “Opium Eaters: Buddhism as Revolutionary Politics”. In: Kawanami, Hiroko (Ed.), Buddhism and the Political Process: 213–232. Palgrave Macmillan. [Places modern Japanese radical Buddhism in a broader history of Buddhist relations with political authority and compares Seno'o Girō with B. R. Ambedkar.]

• Shields, James Mark (2016). “Peasant Revolts as Anti-Authoritarian Archetypes for Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan”. Journal of Religion in Japan 5: 3–21. [Examines the later appropriation of peasant revolts and gimin narratives as historical models of Buddhist and religiously inflected resistance.]

• Shields, James Mark (2017). Against Harmony: Progressive and Radical Buddhism in Modern Japan. Oxford University Press. [A synthetic history of progressive and radical Buddhism in modern Japan, with extensive treatment of Meiji Buddhist reform, Tarui Tōkichi, Takagi Kenmyō, Uchiyama Gudō, Seno'o Girō, and Ichikawa Hakugen.]

• Shields, James Mark (2017). “Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism, Pantheism, and the ‘Religious Secular’”. Japan Review 30: 79–96. [Examines the New Buddhist Fellowship's genseshugi (this-worldliness) and the philosophical and religious background to later progressive and radical Buddhism.]

• Shields, James Mark (2023). “A Century of Critical Buddhism in Japan”. In: Scott, Robert H., & McRae, James (Eds.), Introduction to Buddhist East Asia: 281–304. State University of New York Press. [Places contemporary Critical Buddhism within a longer genealogy of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhist criticism.]

• Totten, George O. (1960). “Buddhism and Socialism in Japan and Burma”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 2.3: 293–304. [An early comparative analysis of the differing relationships among Buddhism, socialism, and nationalism in Japan and Burma.]

• Victoria, Brian (1997). Zen at War. Weatherhill. [An influential and controversial study of Japanese Zen and militarism that also helped draw English-language attention to Uchiyama Gudō.]

Selected Literature in Japanese

• Daitō Jin 大東仁. Taigyaku no sō Takagi Kenmyō no shinjitsu: Shinshū sōryo to Taigyaku jiken 大逆の僧高木顕明の真実――真宗僧侶と大逆事件 [The Truth about Takagi Kenmyō, the High-Treason Priest: Shin Buddhist Priests and the High Treason Incident]. [original edition details to verify; new edition 2024]. [A substantial study of Takagi Kenmyō and his involvement in the High Treason Incident.]

• Hishiki Masaharu 菱木政晴. Gokuraku no ninju: Takagi Kenmyō “Yo ga shakaishugi” o yomu 極楽の人数――高木顕明『余が社会主義』を読む [The People of the Pure Land: Reading Takagi Kenmyō's “My Socialism”]. Tokyo: Hakutakusha, 2012. [A sustained interpretation of Takagi's Buddhist socialism centered on “My Socialism,” the key primary text for his thought.]

• Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦. Bukkyōsha no sensō sekinin 仏教者の戦争責任 [The War Responsibility of Buddhists]. Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1970. [Ichikawa's foundational postwar critique of Buddhist complicity in Japanese militarism and the structural conditions that made it possible.]

• Inagaki Masami 稲垣真美. Budda o seoite gaitō e: Seno'o Girō to Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei 仏陀を背負いて街頭へ――妹尾義郎と新興仏教青年同盟 [Carrying the Buddha on His Back into the Streets: Seno'o Girō and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1974. [The foundational Japanese-language biography of Seno'o and history of the YLRB, based extensively on Seno'o's diary and papers.]

• Izumi Keiki 泉惠機. “Takagi Kenmyō ni kansuru kenkyū: Shiryō oyobi ryakunenpu ni tsuite” 高木顕明に関する研究――資料及び略年譜について [Research on Takagi Kenmyō: Sources and a Brief Chronology]. Shinshū Sōgō Kenkyūjo kenkyū kiyō 真宗総合研究所研究紀要 14 (1997): [pages to verify]. [An important archival and chronological study of Takagi incorporating previously neglected Ōtani-ha materials.]

• Kashiwahara Yūsen 柏原祐泉. Nihon Bukkyōshi: Kindai 日本仏教史――近代 [A History of Japanese Buddhism: The Modern Period]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1990. [A standard scholarly history of Japanese Buddhism from the Meiji Restoration through the modern period.]

• 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 (1986): 14–19. [A focused study of Tarui Tōkichi and the Eastern Socialist Party.]

• Kunba Hiroshi 訓覇浩. “Takagi Kenmyō o fukken, kenshō suru to wa” 高木顕明を復権、顕彰するとは [What Does It Mean to Rehabilitate and Commemorate Takagi Kenmyō?]. Shoki shakaishugi kenkyū 初期社会主義研究 22 (2010): 126–37. [Examines Takagi's postwar rehabilitation and the contemporary significance of his commemoration.]

• 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 28.3 (1991): [pages to verify]. [Reconsiders the political and ideological character of Tarui Tōkichi's Eastern Socialist Party and its relationship to early Japanese socialism.]

• Matsune Takashi 松根鷹. Seno'o Girō to “Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei” 妹尾義郎と「新興仏教青年同盟」 [Seno'o Girō and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism]. [1975 publication details to verify]. [An important early reconstruction of Seno'o and the YLRB, especially valuable for the League's organization, repression, and final years.]

• Sanada Yoshiaki 眞田芳憲. “Taigyaku jiken to zensō Uchiyama Gudō no ‘Bukkyō shakaishugi’ to sono kōdō no kiseki” 大逆事件と禅僧内山愚童の「仏教社会主義」とその行動の軌跡 [The High Treason Incident and the Zen Priest Uchiyama Gudō's “Buddhist Socialism” and the Course of His Activities]. Chūō Gakujutsu Kenkyūjo kiyō 中央学術研究所紀要 45 (2016): 2–68. [A detailed study of Uchiyama's Buddhist socialism, political activity, and prosecution in the High Treason Incident.]

• 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. [The foundational study of Tarui Tōkichi and the Eastern Socialist Party.]

• Yoshida Kyūichi 吉田久一. Nihon kindai Bukkyōshi kenkyū 日本近代仏教史研究 [Studies in the History of Modern Japanese Buddhism]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1992. [A major synthetic study of modern Japanese Buddhism, including Buddhist reform and socially engaged currents.]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos, and James Mark Shields (2026). "Japan". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 25 September 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Japan.