Nichirenism, Utopianism, and Modernity Rethinking Ishiwara Kanji’S East Asia League Movement

Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/2: 235–274 © 2015 Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture G. Clinton Godart Nichirenism, Utopianism, and Modernity Rethinking Ishiwara Kanji’s East Asia League Movement The East Asia League Association (Tōarenmei kyōkai, or East Asia League Movement, Tōarenmei undō), a Pan-Asianist organization formed in 1939 and active throughout the war and well into the 1950s, can also be seen as one important variant of the modern lay Nichiren Buddhist organizations that sprung up in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. This article explores the character, history, world view, and practical goals of this movement, and argues that it was committed to an alternative course of modernization that can be characterized as a Nichiren Buddhist utopianism. While the theory of the final war propagated by its leader, Ishiwara Kanji, is relatively well known, this article analyzes several less known—though central and dis- tinct—elements of the East Asia League: its emphasis on the harmony of religion, science, and technology, as well as the roles of Koreans and women in the movement. This analysis shows how the East Asia League Movement engaged with particular elements of modernity: the nation-state, national identity and minorities, urbanization and the countryside, gender inequality, and religion and science, and hoped to replace the differentiations of the modern era with the unity of the Lotus Sutra. keywords: Ishiwara Kanji—Nichirenism—Nichiren Buddhism—East Asia League Movement—utopianism—science and religion—women in Buddhism—Lotus Sutra G. Clinton Godart is Lecturer in the Modern Japanese Studies Program at Hokkaido University. 235 ichirenism (Nichirenshugi 日蓮主義), a current of lay Buddhist move- ments in early twentieth century Japan, has a reputation of being the bête noire of modern Japanese Buddhism. Its main proponent, Tanaka NChigaku 田中智学 (1861–1931), merged a belief in the Lotus Sutra with the Japa- nese “national polity” (kokutai 国体), the Japanese imperial line, and endorsed expansionism abroad. Not surprisingly, it has most often been described in terms of a nationalist “distortion” of religion, and as a Buddhist legitimation of the emperor system in support of the ruling class, and a form “militant nationalism” or Japanese “fascism.”1 Over the years, this characterization has come to be somewhat modified, and the phenomenon of Nichirenism has been gaining more attention from specialists in Buddhism, the sociology of religion, as well as literature, who take the religious aspects more seriously and approach Nichi- renism more in the context of the modernization of Buddhism from the Meiji period.2 In this article, I will investigate the history of Ishiwara Kanji’s 石原莞爾 (1889–1949) East Asia League Movement (Tōa renmei undō 東亜連盟運動 or Tōa renmei kyōkai 東亜連盟協会, hereafter abbreviated as eal), active during the Asia- Pacific war and immediate postwar era, and rethink how this movement should be understood as one important variant in the history of modern Nichirenism. Ishiwara, as a major architect of the Manchurian incident of 1931, for his Pan-Asianist ideology, and for his prediction of a “final war” between Asia (led by Japan) and the West (led by the United States), has in the traditional postwar interpretations fitted the image of the militarist or “fascist” Nichirenist.3 1. See for example Tokoro (1972), and in English, Lee (1975). Helen Hardacre (1984, 12) wrote that “The sympathies of those who subscribed to Nichirenshugi were with the ruling class. Their main concern with respect to the rest of society was that it be orderly, obedient, and loyal. They were not interested in its problems,” and that the right wing of this movement was a fascist notion of unconditional subordination to the emperor. 2. See especially the work of Ōtani (2001), and in English, among others, Jacqueline Stone (2000 and 2009). Several dissertations have also appeared, most notably the historian Gerald Scott Iguchi’s exploration of Nichirenism in terms of forms of modernity (2006), and Yulia Burenina (2013) has written a dissertation (in Japanese) on Tanaka Chigaku and Honda Nisshō from the perspective of religious studies. Also notable is that the writer and poet Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933) has been treated less sui generis and more in terms of his position within Nichiren- ism; see Iguchi (2006), Burenina (2013), and among others Holt (2014). The life and thought of the socialist Nichirenist Seno’o Girō (1889–1961) has also received attention, in English by Shields (2012), and in Japan by Ōtani (2001). 3. See for example Hata Ikuo (1962), who treats Ishiwara and the eal in terms of “military fascism.” 236 godart: nichirenism, utopianism, and modernity | 237 While Ishiwara is a well-known figure whose seeming iconoclasm as a military thinker is a never-ending object of fascination, illustrated by the large num- ber of biographies of him that have appeared over the years, his religious and philosophical ideas have remained less examined. Meanwhile, his movement, the eal, has received even less attention, and has usually been characterized in terms of Pan-Asianist support for the state, and has been taken much less seriously as a religious organization.4 One problem has been that in understanding the eal’s program and world view, the focus has been largely on Ishiwara himself. In understanding the eal, Ishiwara’s life and ideas are essential, since he was undoubtedly the leading figure, but scholars have not examined the vari- ous motivations of why other figures joined the eal and what impact they had on the movement. As I will show, there were many other important members of the eal, including women, farmers, and Koreans, who also played formative roles, often with their own and differing agendas. Also, amid a general tendency to treat Nichirenism as predominantly a prewar phenomenon, Ishiwara and the eal’s post–1945 thought and activities received much less attention despite the movement’s growth in the postwar period. And while a nationalist dimension is undeniable, in understanding the eal, the challenge is to balance this with the fact that several key aspects of its vision do not fit the characterization of nationalist ideology or a fascist legitimation of the state, and that in practice, the eal was heavily criticized by many ideologues, and suppressed by the wartime as well as the postwar Japanese state. In this article, I will focus less on Buddhist doctrinal aspects, but more on how the eal attempted to put Buddhist Nichirenist ideals into practice. Ishiwara and the eal were, I believe, much less concerned with doctrinal subtleties than the actual practical realization of Buddhism in this world, the creation of a Bud- dhist utopia in response to the wider crisis of modernity in the 1930s and 1940s. I will identify and analyze what I believe are some of the most salient characteristics of the eal’s Buddhist program, focusing on the movement’s religious engagement with questions of modernization, such as the nation-state, war, science and technology, and the role of women and minorities. While I will discuss 4. Mark Peattie, in his biography on Ishiwara (1975), discusses the East Asia League in terms of Pan-Asianism and Ishiwara’s theory of the final war, but not its more religious aspects; see. Peattie (1975, chapter 9, 311–37). Kobayashi (1998), a historian of the Second Sino-Japanese War, has characterized the eal primarily as a tool that, when faced with an unwinnable war in China, was used to deflect the energy of Chinese nationalism towards a pan-Asian ideal and thus in support for Japanese rule over Asia. Mori and Ōkado (1996) discuss the eal as a “spe- cial kind of fascism” and discuss this movement purely in terms of agricultural reform. For an interpretation of Ishiwara’s application of Nichiren’s ideas, see Ōtani (2002, 147–67). Matsuda’s excellent study (2015) discusses in detail the role of Koreans in the eal, but pays scant attention to the role of religion. 238 | Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42/2 (2015) the eal’s postwar role in detail elsewhere, the elements of this movement I bring up here were largely consistent from the prewar to postwar periods, and allow the formulation of some hypotheses concerning the characteristics of this movement. I will argue that, in contrast to much of the earlier research and references to Ishiwara, categories such as “nationalism” or Pan-Asianist “expansionism” understood as an ideological support of the program of the state, have limited usefulness for understanding this movement, since it was committed to a radi- cally Buddhist utopian vision that was very different from both that of the wartime and postwar Japanese state. The eal, I believe, is better understood through investigating its engagement with particular elements of modernity: the nation- state, national identity and minorities, gender inequality, and science and technology. The eal, I will argue, in so far as it was a religious movement, should be understood as committed to the realization of a specific Buddhist utopian vision that promised the overcoming of the ills of modernity. This study thus hope- fully contributes to the growing body of research on modern Buddhism, and in particular Nichirenism, and the larger field of study on the relation between Buddhism and modernity. Ishiwara Kanji The East Asia League is intrinsically connected with its key figure, Ishiwara Kanji, so it is suitable to begin this article with him. Born in Tsuruoka in Yamagata prefecture in 1889, Ishiwara went to one of the cadet schools of the Imperial Japanese Army, and later the elite Army Academy (Rikugun daigakkō 陸軍大学校). His intellectual capabilities recognized, he was groomed for the top positions.

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