Kōhashi Shōichi

⚠  Awaiting Peer Review  ⚠ This encyclopedia entry is complete but has not yet undergone review by an area specialist.

Kōhashi Shōichi (孝橋正一, 1912–1999) was a Japanese Marxist scholar of social work (shakai jigyō, 社会事業) and social welfare policy who, over the course of a long academic career, produced one of the two rival foundational theories of postwar Japanese social work, standing opposite Okamura Shigeo's (岡村重夫) "technology theory" (gijutsuron, 技術論) as the leading exponent of "policy theory" (seisakuron, 政策論). Trained as an economist, Kōhashi was arrested in 1938 under the Peace Preservation Law (Chian Iji Hō, 治安維持法) and later spent his career at institutions including two universities affiliated with Jōdo Shinshū (浄土真宗) Buddhism. Although not himself a Buddhist cleric or practitioner, he devoted a significant body of work, most importantly 『社会科学と現代仏教：仏教の社会化をめざして』 [Social Science and Contemporary Buddhism: Toward the Socialization of Buddhism] (1968), to arguing that Buddhism and Marxist social science are not merely compatible but require one another dialectically, and to rehabilitating the interwar Japanese Buddhist socialist movement against both Marxist anti-religionists and religious anti-Marxists. This engagement, together with his sympathetic treatment of Buddhist socialists such as Seno'o Girō (妹尾義郎) and of Marxists who rediscovered Buddhism from within their own materialism, gives Kōhashi's work a secondary but genuine significance for the study of radical Buddhism in twentieth-century Japan.

Biography

Kōhashi Shōichi was born in Kobe, in Hyōgo Prefecture, in 1912. He entered the Faculty of Economics of Kyoto Imperial University (京都帝国大学), graduating in 1935. His formation as an economist took place under the strong influence of Ōkōchi Kazuo (大河内一男), the labor economist whose theory of social policy (shakai seisaku, 社会政策) as the state's management of labor power under capitalism would remain a lifelong point of reference and departure for Kōhashi's own thought.

In 1938, still in his mid-twenties, Kōhashi was arrested for violation of the Peace Preservation Law, the wartime statute used to suppress communist, socialist, and other dissident organizing in the Japanese empire. The available sources do not specify the organizational context of the arrest, but it places Kōhashi among the generation of Japanese leftists who experienced state suppression directly during the fascist period, an experience that forms the backdrop to his later, sympathetic treatment of Marxists who turned to or rediscovered Buddhism while in prison during the same years.

After the war, Kōhashi built his academic career primarily around the study of social work and poverty relief. He held positions as assistant professor and then professor at Osaka College of Social Work (大阪社会事業短期大学), and in 1954 published 『社会事業の基本問題』 [Basic Problems of Social Work], the first statement of the theory of shakai jigyō for which he would become known. A revised edition, 『全訂社会事業の基本問題』 [Basic Problems of Social Work, Revised Edition] (1962), became the standard reference version of this foundational text. In 1965 he was awarded a doctorate in letters (bungaku hakushi) by Tōyō University (東洋大学) for a dissertation on the history of poor relief policy.

Kōhashi's engagement with religion, and with Buddhism specifically, matured alongside this primary work on social policy rather than displacing it. In the 1960s he translated the prison letters of Rosa Luxemburg into Japanese as 『ローザの手紙』 [Rosa's Letters] (1964) and published a general survey of socialist thought and movements, 『社会主義　思想と運動』 [Socialism: Thought and Movements] (1966). By his own account, a fascination with Buddhism that had "occupied my soul" intermittently over three decades had run alongside, and periodically interrupted, his scholarly labor in the social sciences. This culminated in 1968 in 『社会科学と現代仏教：仏教の社会化をめざして』, published by Sōgensha (創元社), in which Kōhashi set out to reconcile his Marxist social science with his growing sympathy for Buddhist thought and practice. That same year he was appointed professor at Ryūkoku University (龍谷大学), a university under Jōdo Shinshū Honganji-ha (浄土真宗本願寺派) auspices; he moved to a professorship at Tōyō University in 1973, and in 1979 to Bukkyō University (佛教大学), an institution affiliated with Jōdo Shinshū Ōtani-ha (浄土真宗大谷派). In 1971 he published a further, shorter study specifically on Buddhism and society, 『現代仏教論　仏教と社会との関係への探究』 [On Contemporary Buddhism: An Inquiry into the Relationship Between Buddhism and Society], through Nagata Bunshōdō (永田文昌堂), a publisher specializing in Buddhist studies.

Kōhashi continued to publish on social work theory throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, including a further revised statement of his position, 『続・社会事業の基本問題　社会科学的方法論による批判的研究』 [Basic Problems of Social Work, Continued: A Critical Study by Social-Scientific Methodology] (1973), and a general textbook restating his framework for students, 『新・社会事業概論』 [New Introduction to Social Work] (1977). He retired from Bukkyō University in 1983 and died in 1999. Within the discipline of Japanese social work studies, Kōhashi is remembered chiefly as a founding figure of the Japanese Society for the Study of Social Welfare (日本社会福祉学会) and as the most prominent representative of the Marxist, or "policy theory," current in the postwar theoretical dispute over the proper object and method of social work, a dispute conventionally framed against Okamura Shigeo's rival "technology theory."

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 Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei (新興仏教青年同盟, Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism), the Buddhist socialist movement led by 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.

Writings

• Kōhashi Shōichi (1954). 『社会事業の基本問題』 [Basic Problems of Social Work]. ミネルヴァ書房 (Minerva Shobō). [Kōhashi's first full statement of shakai jigyō as the structural, capitalism-determined complement to Ōkōchi Kazuo's shakai seisaku; the founding text of what became known as the Kōhashi theory (Kōhashi riron) in Japanese social work studies.]
• Kōhashi Shōichi (1962). 『全訂社会事業の基本問題』 [Basic Problems of Social Work, Revised Edition]. ミネルヴァ書房 (Minerva Shobō). [The revised and expanded edition of the 1954 work, and the version most frequently cited by later scholars as the canonical statement of Kōhashi's policy theory.]
• Kōhashi Shōichi (1966). 『社会主義　思想と運動』 [Socialism: Thought and Movements]. ミネルヴァ書房 (Minerva Shobō). [A general survey of socialist thought and organizing, published shortly before Kōhashi's major work on Buddhism and reflecting his long-standing engagement with the history of the international left.]
• Rosa Luxemburg (1964). 『ローザの手紙』 [Rosa's Letters]. Translated by Kōhashi Shōichi. 婦人民主クラブ (Fujin Minshu Kurabu). [Kōhashi's translation of Luxemburg's prison correspondence, later cited by him in 『社会科学と現代仏教』as an example of compassion and bodhisattva-like practice realized outside any Buddhist or theistic framework.]
• Kōhashi Shōichi (1968). 『社会科学と現代仏教：仏教の社会化をめざして』 [Social Science and Contemporary Buddhism: Toward the Socialization of Buddhism]. 創元社 (Sōgensha). [Kōhashi's principal work on Buddhism and radical politics, arguing for a dialectical unification of Buddhist compassion and bodhisattva practice with Marxist social science; discusses at length the Buddhist socialism of Senoo Girō and the Buddhist-Marxist syntheses of Kawakami Hajime, Hayashida Shigeo, and others. The single most important text by Kōhashi for the study of radical Buddhism.]
• Kōhashi Shōichi (1969). 『社会科学と社会事業』 [Social Science and Social Work]. ミネルヴァ書房 (Minerva Shobō). [Restates Kōhashi's social work theory in explicitly social-scientific, rather than Buddhist, terms; referenced within 『社会科学と現代仏教』 as its companion volume on method.]
• Kōhashi Shōichi (1971). 『現代仏教論　仏教と社会との関係への探究』 [On Contemporary Buddhism: An Inquiry into the Relationship Between Buddhism and Society]. 永田文昌堂 (Nagata Bunshōdō). [A shorter, further development of the argument of the 1968 book, published through a press specializing in Buddhist studies rather than Kōhashi's usual social-science publishers.]
• Kōhashi Shōichi (1973). 『続・社会事業の基本問題　社会科学的方法論による批判的研究』 [Basic Problems of Social Work, Continued: A Critical Study by Social-Scientific Methodology]. ミネルヴァ書房 (Minerva Shobō). [A further, critical restatement of Kōhashi's core theory responding to intervening debate in the field.]
• Kōhashi Shōichi (1977). 『新・社会事業概論』 [New Introduction to Social Work]. ミネルヴァ書房 (Minerva Shobō). [A textbook-style restatement, for students, of Kōhashi's overall framework for social work theory, history, law, and institutions; the more practical and pedagogical of Kōhashi's two major book-length statements of his general position, and largely secular in orientation.]
• Kōhashi Shōichi, ed. (1982). 『現代「社会福祉」政策論　「日本型福祉社会」論批判』 [Contemporary "Social Welfare" Policy Theory: A Critique of the Theory of a "Japanese-Style Welfare Society"]. ミネルヴァ書房 (Minerva Shobō). [A late work applying Kōhashi's structural approach to critique the conservative "Japanese-style welfare society" policy agenda of the 1980s.]

Secondary Literature in English

No English-language scholarship specifically addressing Kōhashi's writing on Buddhism has been identified at the time of writing. English-language treatments of Kōhashi's (non-Buddhist) social work theory exist but fall outside the present scope.

Secondary Literature in Japanese

• Yūki Yasuhiro (結城康博) (2022). 「岡村・孝橋理論から考える社会福祉理論～政策論と技術論の検証～」[Social Welfare Theory Based on the Theories of Okamura and Kōhashi: A Verification of Policy Theory and Technological Theory]. 『淑徳大学研究紀要（総合福祉学部・コミュニティ政策学部）』56: 81–98. [A comparison of Kōhashi's "policy theory" with Okamura Shigeo's rival "technology theory". The paper is concerned with Kōhashi's mainstream social work theory and does not discuss his writings on Buddhism. Source of most of the secondary biographical and bibliographic detail used above.]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos. (2026). "Kohashi Shoichi". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 6 August 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Kohashi_Shoichi.