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Buddhism, Socialism, and Protest in Prewar Japan: The Career of Seno'o Girō

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Stephen S. Large
Stephen S. Large
Affiliation:
University of Adelaide
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Extract

The interplay of religion and political protest is a familiar theme in Western studies of Japanese Christians who contributed significantly to the socialist movement in their country from the late Meiji period to World War II. Less well known is the fact that a minority of Japanese Buddhists likewise applied the ideals of their faith to political dissent in the movement. Their defiance of the State and the predominantly conservative Buddhist sects which generally supported Emperor, nation, and Empire in Asia constitutes in effect a modern Japanese Buddhist tradition of protest comparable in kind if not in scale to that found in Japanese Christianity. The purpose of the article in hand is to explore this tradition through a study of the Nichiren priest and Buddhist socialist, Seno'o Girō (1889–1961) whose career provides a striking illustration of the Buddhist dimensions of socialism in prewar Japan.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , February 1987 , pp. 153 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

1 For example, see Powles, Cyril, ‘Abe Isoo and the Role of Christians in the Founding of the Japanese Socialist Movement’, Papers on Japan, 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1961)Google Scholar; Kublin, Hyman, Asian Revolutionary: The Life of Sen Katayama (Princeton, 1964)Google Scholar; Crump, John, The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Bamba, Nobuya and Howes, John (eds), Pacifism in Japan: The Christian and Socialist Tradition (Kyoto, 1979)Google Scholar; and Bikle, George, The New Jerusalem: Aspects of Utopianism in the Thought of Kagawa Toyohiko (Tucson, Arizona, 1976).Google Scholar

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28 An excellent study of this movement is Yui'ichi, Honma, ‘Hanshūkyō undō’, in Saburō, Lenaga (ed.), Nihon shūkyōshi kōza, 4 (Tokyo, 1971), pp. 63–103Google Scholar. 1931 also saw the formation of other movements to revitalize Buddhism, such as Takakasu Junjirō's Zen Nihon Bukkyō Seinen Renmei, with which the SBSD was affiliated until 1933 when Seno'o dissociated the SBSD from the Renmei after the latter rejected his call to oppose fascism. Cf. SGN, 4 (1974), 31 May 1933, p. 160Google Scholar. A broader perspective on ferment in the Japanese religious world in these years is found in Murakami, Shigeyoshi, Japanese Religion in the Modem Century (Tokyo, 1980), pp. 92–4Google Scholar. Matsune, Seno'o Girō and Inagaki, Butsuda o seoite give good accounts of the SBSD's organizational development.

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66 Cf. Ibid., 29 March 1936, pp. 337–41 regarding his detention.

67 Kitagawa, , ‘Jinmin sensen’, pp. 102–3.Google Scholar

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76 The text of Seno'o's statement is found in Matsune, , Seno'o Girō, p. 108Google Scholar. Matsune disputes Inagaki's claim that Sōrai was used as a policy spy to trap Seno'o in an elaborate frame-up. Cf. pp. 15–23Google Scholar and Inagaki, , Butsuda, pp. 180–97.Google Scholar

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94 Inagaki, , Butsuda, p. 228Google Scholar. On aspects of Seno'o's postwar career, see Kyōtoku, Nakano, Kindai nihon no shūkyō to seiji (Tokyo, 1968), pp. 216–26Google Scholar. My paper, ‘For Self and Society: Seno'o Girō and Buddhist Socialism in the Postwar Japanese Peace Movement’, presented to the Fourth National Conference of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia at La Trobe University in May, 1985, also deals with his career after 1945.

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