T U R B U L E N T PRIESTS AND M1LLENARIAN PROTEST: OUTSIDE VOICES OF RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM IN INTERWAR JAPAN by BENJAMIN JOHN F R E E L A N D B.A., University of Alberta. 1998 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL F U L F I L L M E N T OF T H E REQUIREMENTS FOR T H E D E G R E E OF M A S T E R OF ARTS in T H E F A C U L T Y OF G R A D U A T E STUDIES (History) We accept this thesis as conforming lo the required standard T H E UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH C O L U M B I A August 2003 CO Benjamin John Frecland. 2003 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of j-,lVTO*^ The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date DE-6 (2/88) I, ABSTRACT This thesis examines the role played by two popular religious movements -Nichirenism (Nichirenshugi) and Omotokyo - in the promulgation of nationalism in Japan during the years between the two World Wars. While it has long been accepted that religion played a central role in the formation and promulgation of nationalism in twentieth-century Japan, the nature of that role has been much less well understood. Specifically, Western thinking has long assumed that Shinto, in its role as state religion and ideological anchor, was unchallenged as a nationalist vehicle in Japan. This view overlooks the crucial role played by other popular religious organizations outside the framework of Shinto in the inculcation of modern Japanese nationalism. While most religious sects resigned themselves to toeing the official line, two were abnormally active in promoting themselves as champions of Japanese nationalism. These were the so-called "Nichirenists" - a firebrand group of nationalistic Buddhists of the Nichiren denomination that emerged in early-twentieth century Japan - and the enormously popular grassroots millenarian religion of Omotokyo. Both incorporated the pillars of State Shinto into the heart of their doctrines and championed themselves as the truest advocates of the emperor and his polity: Omotokyo in the form of a tightly-organized grassroots movement and Nichirenism as a powerful spiritual fountainhead for militarists and political extremists. In both cases, their adoption of nationalism as a central pillar of their doctrines was a tactical move intended to cultivate more harmonious relations with the state. This was especially true in the case of Omotokyo, an organization that had since its genesis been regarded by the authorities as a pariah. This strategy paradoxically drew Nichirenism and Omotokyo to the extremist fringe of the nationalist wing, with both movements figuring prominently in the Showa Restoration movement in Japan in the early-1930s - a movement dedicated to overthrowing the parliamentary system and creating a bona fide emperor-led dictatorship. Ultimately, their strategy failed, and somewhat ironically both movements were eventually crushed in the mid-to-late thirties by the very authoritarian political culture that they had helped create. Furthermore, in spite of their links to ultranationalist organizations involved in political terrorism, both movements were ii suppressed purely on ideological grounds. In the end, the suppression of Nichirenism and Omotokyo was not brought on by any real contradiction with the official ideology, but rather by the challenge that the mere existence of these independent voices posed to a state aspiring to totalitarianism. iii T A B L E OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT « TABLE OF CONTENTS iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v DEDICATION. vi INTRODUCTION. I BACKGROUND - RELIGIOUS TRANSFORMA TIONS IN THEMEIJI PERIOD 6 Early Meiji State Sponsorship of Shinto 6 Responses to the State's Sponsorship of Shintd by the New Religions and Buddhist Sects 11 NICHIRENBUDDHISM: SHAKUBUKU AND INTERWAR NATIONALISM. 15 Historical Background 15 Tanaka Chigaku and the Birth of "Nichirenism" 19 Ishiwara Kanji and the "Final War" 22 "Kill One, Revive All": The Terrorist Ethos of Inoue Nissho 25 Kita Ikki: Nichirenism and "Japanese Fascism" 29 OMOTOKYO: MILLENARIAN PROTEST AND GRASSROOTS NATIONALISM. 33 Historical Background: The Newly-Arisen Religions and the State 33 The Origins of Omotokyo: Deguchi Nao, Kamigakari, and Millenarian Protest 35 Deguchi Onisaburd and the Formation of Omotokyo 39 Kodo Omoto: Wartime Nationalism and Postwar Suppression 42 Omotokyo Internationalism and Ultranationalism 45 "PRESERVING THE PEACE": RELIGIOUS SUPPRESSION IN PREWAR AND WARTIME JAPAN 48 The Seeds of Suppression: Anti-Communism and the 1925 Peace Preservation Law 48 The "Second Omotokyo Incident" 51 Silencing Popular Religion: From the Second OmotokyS Incident to the Repression of Nichiren Buddhism 53 CONCLUSION. 56 ANNEX 60 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 62 iv A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. William Wray, for his patience, exceptionally broad knowledge, and steady support throughout my M A program, and my second reader, Dr. Glen Peterson, for his time and valuable input. I would also like to thank Dr. Christopher Friedrichs for his support and sagely guidance as professor and graduate advisor, as well as Gloria Lees and the rest of the staff in the History Department office for their steady reminders of deadlines and bureaucratic procedures. I am also indebted to Goto Tomoko at the Asian Library and the staff at the interlibrary loans office at Koerner Library for their assistance in tracking down sources, to Colin Green for his patient proofreading and invaluable feedback, to Raul Pacheco-Vega for his inestimable editorial assistance, scholarly input, and formatting wizardry, to Namita Yoko, Tsuzuki Masako, and Yanagiya Kiyoko for their patient help with the Japanese texts, and to Takei Naoko for her generous assistance with reading the older materials. And finally I would like to thank my friends and family, without whose love, support, and encouragement this thesis would never have seen the light of day. DEDICATION To my parents, Germaine and Howard, and to my sister Valerie, for their boundless love, support, and encouragement. INTRODUCTION The most enduring cliche about modern Japan holds that the Meiji Restoration of 1868 saw the imposition of secular Western-style governance on a premodern society rooted in an archaic theocratic ideology, whose resurgence in the mid-1930s drove the country into a savage war of conquest. Since the end of the Second World War, the prevalent Western view of Japanese nationalism has been that of a thousand-year-old ideology of emperor-worship that suddenly erupted into an inferno of Z>a«zaz-shouting soldiers and kamikaze pilots. This view has led historians to characterize prewar Japan as a country that while modern on the surface was closer in terms of social development to the civilizations of antiquity.1 Prewar and wartime Japanese nationalism, in stark contrast to Nazism, Maoism, and other forms of twentieth century extremism, tends to be viewed as intrinsically anachronistic, not so much nationalism in the Western sense as a form of tribalism sustained by Japan's ethnic homogeneity and geographical isolation. As Benedict Anderson notes, nation, nationality, and nationalism have all proved notoriously difficult to define, let alone to analyze, with the result that "In contrast to the immense influence that nationalism has exerted on the modern world, plausible theory about it is conspicuously meagre."2 In the case of Japanese nationalism, in spite of a number of groundbreaking works on ideology and social change in modern Japan in recent decades, postwar-era paradigms of the ancient myth of the divine emperor to which every citizen gave their unswerving obedience still prevail in historical writings on Japan.3 At the core of traditional Western views of Japanese nationalism is the emperor system and its religious underpinnings, the importance of which was emphasized by wartime Japan observers such as Robert Ballou. In his 1945 treatise Shinto: The 1 Noted British historian Paul Johnson asserts that "At the beginning of modern times Japan was a very remote country, in some respects closer to the society of ancient Egypt than to that of post-Renaissance Europe." Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (RevisedEdition). New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991, p. 177. 2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (RevisedEdition). London, New York: Verso, 1991, p.3. 3 See Carol Gluck's groundbreaking 1985 treatise Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986) for a thorough and illuminating study of the formation of the institutions and national ideology of the modern Japanese state. 1 Unconquered Enemy, Ballou alleges that "It was not merely men and airplanes, machine guns and bombs, which attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. [T]he bombs on Pearl Harbor, and the later Banzai-shouting infantrymen and kami-kaze suicide pilots - all were individual expressions of the force of Shinto, a religion which has never emerged from primitivism, the ancient emperor-worshipping religion of self-styled "divine" Japan, with its heaven-established mission to conquer the world." 4 And in spite of the voluminous amount of scholarship on modern Japanese social and political history, this view continues to pervade writings on Japan. Japanese nationalism, however, is as much a modern phenomenon as its Western counterparts, and its development accords with Anderson's theory that "nation-ness" and nationalism are cultural artefacts which originated from the 'crossing' of discrete historical forces towards the late-eighteenth century. In Japan's case, these discrete historical forces were the development of "nativist" school of thought, the expansion of the country's road networks, the spread of mass literacy and the gradual standardization of spoken Japanese.5 The nineteenth century then presented the Western threat posed by imperialism, the formation of a national army and the implementation of conscription, the adoption of a national system of education, and the creation of State Shinto - and the subsequent politicization of religion - all influenced the foundation of modern Japanese nationalism. Considering that Japanese nationalism has traditionally been viewed as synonymous with the Shinto religion, the amount of scholarly writing on the religious underpinnings of modern Japanese religion is surprisingly limited. Murakami Shigeyoshi and Helen Hardacre have shed considerable light on the manner in which Shinto was within a century transformed from an assortment of shrines and local cults with no semblance of central authority and little in the way of common doctrine into a potent political force and an ideological pillar of the state. And scholars such as Tokoro Shigemoto, Sheldon Garon, and, more recently, Brian Victoria in his 1997 work Zen At War have examined the way in which Buddhist sects and other religions outside the framework of State Shinto assimilated contemporary currents of nationalism and 4 Robert O. Ballou, Shinto: The Unconquered Enemy (Japan's Doctrine of Racial Superiority and World Conquest). New York: The Viking Press, 1945, pp.4-5. 5 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.4. 2 expounded them on their own terms. However, the full extent of the role of popular religious movements in the promulgation of Japanese nationalism is not generally appreciated. As Thomas Nadolski writes in his comprehensive work on the new religion of Omotokyo, "Too often, foreigners have been left with the impression that, from 1868 to 1945, the imperial mythical system was a monolithic religious unit to which the Japanese people gave wholehearted and uniform obedience."6 Similarly, Edwin Lee, in his essay on the influential Nichiren Buddhist leader and nationalist theorist Tanaka Chigaku, emphasizes his relevance, along with other Buddhist leaders, to "developments often regarded as Shinto-imbued."7 The role of non-Shinto religious groups in the advancement of Japanese nationalism is of enormous consequence. However, it is a subject that has received very little scholarly attention. Religious movements, in fact, were uniquely positioned to serve as vehicles for the dissemination of nationalism, as defined by the Meiji-era ideological pillars of chukun (loyalty), aikoku (love of country), and subservience to the kokutai* While the Meiji period did see the emergence of State Shinto, centred around the cult of the emperor, as a guiding ideology, the early Meiji campaign to suppress Buddhism and impose Shinto as a de facto state religion was an abject failure. The government subsequently rejected religion as a pillar of the modern Japanese state and opted instead for an essentially secular nationalist ideology under which religious organizations could operate freely, provided their teachings did not conflict with those of the kokutai, in which the imperial myth was enshrined. On the other hand, the process by which the early Meiji leaders sought to elevate Shinto resulted in the thorough politicization of religion in Japan. While on the surface the traditional symbiosis between Shinto and Buddhism remained the dominant feature of Japanese religions, Shinto shrines, traditionally of secondary status to Buddhist temples, gained unprecedented political significance as local pavilions for the official ideology, and the nation's other religious communities, specifically Buddhist sects and the 6 Thomas P. Nadolski, The Socio-Political Background of the 1921 and 1935 Omoto Suppressions in Japan. Ann Arbor, MI.: Xerox University Microfilms, 1975, p.285. 7 Edwin B. Lee, "Nichiren and Nationalism: The Religious Patriotism of Tanaka Chigaku", in Monumenta Nipponica 30:1-4 (1975), p. 19. 8 The term kokutai translates literally as "national polity", is a Meiji-era term for the political system as founded in the Meiji period, in which the centrality of the emperor was understood. 3 so-called Newly-Arisen Religions (shinko shukyo) soon realized that considerable political capital could be gained through active advocacy of the state and the national ideology and that opposing the official line was to court repression from above. In short, religious organizations could no longer afford to be neutral vis-a-vis the state. However, the degree to which religious organizations became advocates of Japanese nationalism varied considerably. While most simply painted themselves in patriotic colours and quietly went about their regular activities, others were much more vociferous in their espousal of nationalism.9 The Newly-Arisen Religions were among the strongest voices of nationalism among religious groups, both as a product of political inculcation at the grassroots level and as a political move on the part of sect leadership charged with defending their creeds against a government deeply suspicious of their doctrines and activities. While most Buddhist sects sought to maintain a low profile, a new school of Buddhist leaders, influenced by the example of politicized State Shinto and seeking political capital themselves, sought to recast their religion as a nationalist vehicle of equal stature. Out of these two groups, two religious movements emerged as formidable forces in the diffusion of nationalism: the venerable Buddhist sect of Nichiren and the new religion of Omotokyo. Nichiren Buddhism's tradition of fierce exclusivism and forceful proselytization, together with its founder's reputation as an esteemed patriot, converged with State Shinto-influenced imperialist ideology in the late-Meiji period to form a religious ideology known as "Nichirenism" (Nichirenshugi) which was to become synonymous with ultranationalism and imperial expansionism during the interwar years, and serve as a spiritual fountainhead for a motley assortment of political extremists. And the Omotokyo sect, both as a result of the fiery grassroots nationalism of its Meiji-era foundress Deguchi Nao and the political machinations of her ambitious and charismatic successor Deguchi Onisaburo, evolved from a small rural millenarian cult into a expansive, heavily nationalistic religious movement with a veritable media empire, paramilitary 9 Brian (Daizen) A. Victoria's treatise Zen At War (New York: Weatherhill, Inc, 1997) examines the responses by Buddhist sects to early twentieth century discourses of nationalism and militarism in Japan. The majority of sects, he argues, quietly embraced emperor-centred nationalism and produced doctrinal justification for the use of violence within the context of war. 4 branches, and links to a variety of organizations dedicated to expanding Japan's overseas empire and promoting emperor-centred authoritarianism at home. This thesis argues that as a result of the Meiji-era promotion of State Shinto and the subsequent politicization of religion, the desire for political capital and safety from suppression, and the religions' pre-existing nationalistic underpinnings, Nichirenism and Omotokyo successfully established themselves as alternate voices of Japanese nationalism in the interwar period. For its part, the state was generally tolerant of the existence of these alternate voices. While Omotokyo was always regarded as politically suspect (and was briefly suppressed in 1921), the Japanese governments of the 1920s and early-1930s tolerated its eccentric leader's activities due to his advocacy of Pan-Asianism and endorsement of emperor-centred patriotism. And the interwar Nichirenists, in spite of their doctrinal contradictions with the tenets of State Shinto (namely the supremacy of Nichiren and the Lotus Sutra over the will of the deities of Shinto), as well as its well-known following among extremists intent on overthrowing the parliamentary system, were also shown remarkable tolerance by the state until the mid-1930s, with radicals like Ketsumeidan leader Inoue Nissho being treated with remarkable lenience in spite of their known involvement in anti-state terrorist activity. However, by the mid-1930s, spurred by numerous socio-political factors, notably paranoia caused by anti-state radicalism and army factionalism, the increasingly repressive prewar Japanese governments moved to suppress all influential religious movements that operated outside of state control. Omotokyo, with its powerful base and longtime stormy relationship with the state, was the first to fall victim to state repression in 1935, and with the greatest thoroughness and brutality. With the suppression of Omotokyo began the process by which all independent religious groups of significance were silenced by the state, culminating in the purge of the writings of Nichiren and the arrest of numerous Nichiren Buddhist leaders in 1941. In the end, the suppressions of Nichiren Buddhism and Omotokyo were not brought on by any incongruity with the official state ideology: it was the fact that they existed as independent voices of nationalism that brought about their demise. The individuals and organizations discussed in this thesis have all individually received attention from historians. Professor Tokoro Shigemoto's 1966 treatise Kindai 5 Nihon shukyo to nashonarizumu (Modern Japanese Religion and Nationalism) is the most comprehensive work to date on the convergence of Nichiren Buddhism and modern Japanese nationalism, with particular emphasis given to the writings and activities of Tanaka Chigaku and Kita Ikki. And other writings on these and other notable Nichirenists - namely Ishiwara Kanji and Inoue Nissho - give significant weight to the religious underpinnings of their nationalist worldviews. Omotokyo has received considerably more scholarly attention than Nichirenism, notably by Thomas P. Nadolski in his sweeping 1975 work The Socio-Political Background of the 1921 and 1935 Omoto Suppressions in Japan, Emily Groszos Ooms' in her 1993 treatise Women andMillenarian Protest in Meiji Japan: Deguchi Nao and Omotokyo, and Matsugu Miho in her excellent 1993 article "Omoto ni okeru shinko to soshiki no tenkai" ("The Development of Omoto Belief and Organizational Structure"). Nadolski and Matsugu in particular reveal the degree to which the religion enthusiastically adopted nationalism and sought to establish broad nationalist ties. However, in spite of the remarkable similarities between the trajectories of these two religious movements, and the well-known ties between representatives of the two, they have yet to be examined together within the broader context of popular religious nationalism. This thesis contributes to the literature on modern Japanese religion and nationalism through an in-depth examination of their convergence as a powerful extra-state nationalist force. B A C K G R O U N D - RELIGIOUS TRANSFORMATIONS PN THE MEIJI PERIOD Early Meiji State Sponsorship of Shinto In January 1936, in the midst of the Japanese government's suppression of Omotokyo that had begun the previous month, the noted New Buddhist scholar Professor Takashima Beiho offered his opinion on the conditions that permitted the explosion of sects such as Omotokyo in an article entitled "Why Have Evil Religions Flourished?" ("Jashukyo wa naze hanjo sum ka"). Among the reasons he cited were "the mercurial nature of [national] ideology, [. . . ] the anti-religious character of the Meiji educational system, and the 6 'laziness' of the established religions."10 To one unacquainted with the educational policies of the Meiji Period, the second explanation is perhaps the most surprising, given that the Meiji era saw the adoption and promotion of State Shinto as a national religion and guiding ideological beacon. However, as recent scholarship has shown11, the attempts by the Meiji leaders to reshape radically the religious fabric of Japan and create a genuine national religion and ideological foundation out of Shinto was a failure, and one that led the leaders of Japan to relegate State Shinto to a supporting role, leaving religious life in Japan as diverse as it had been for centuries. The religiously heterogeneous society that emerged in the late-Meiji period -protected by the 1889 guarantee of freedom of religion in the Meiji Constitution - differed sharply from what the early Meiji leaders had originally envisioned, which was a Japanese state in which Shinto would supplant Buddhism as the country's dominant religion and form the backbone of Japanese society. Their primary reasons for endorsing Shinto were threefold. Firstly, the rhetoric of kokugaku (national learning) which dominated Bakumatsu and early Meiji political discourse was distinctively anti-Buddhist; advocates of Shinto derided Buddhism as a foreign import and chastized the leading Buddhist sects as bloated, corrupt instruments of Tokugawa feudalism.12 Secondly, the dizzying array of Buddhist sects in Japan - as well as the considerable political influence wielded by the larger sects such as Shinshu and Jodo-shu (Pure-Land) - prevented the unification of Japanese Buddhism for employment as a political instrument. And thirdly - and most significantly - while it otherwise lacked a single comprehensive doctrine prior to the Meiji period, Shinto's enshrinement of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu Omikami, the mythical progenitress of imperial line, and its assertion of the divinity of the emperor made the creed an obvious choice for a founding ideology for the Meiji leaders who sought to forge 1 0 Takashima Beiho, "Jashukyo wa naze hanjo sum ka" ("Why Have Evil Religions Flourished?") in Child koron 51 (January 1936), p.419. 1 1 English language sources of note on the subject are Murakami Shigeyoshi's work Japanese Religion in the Modern Century (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1980) and Helen Hardacre's Shinto and the State, 1868-1988 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 1 2 See Martin Collcutt's essay "Buddhism: The Threat of Eradication" for an overview of the anti-Buddhist campaigns of the late-Tokugawa and early-Meiji periods, in Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman, eds., Japan In Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. 7 a modern nation state with the imperial house as its central pillar. In 1868, one of the first actions of the fledgling Meiji government was to drop the Tokugawa rulers' endorsement of Buddhism and issue the shimbutsu bunri edict,13 which ordered the total separation of Shinto from Buddhism. In the same year, the Shinto-dominated Department of Divinity (Jingikan) was created as the highest organ of the state, surpassing even the Council of State (Dajokan)14. And in January 1870, the government issued the Declaration of "Daikyo" 1 5 ("Great Teaching"), a declaration which announced the government's intention to create and promote a state religion. An excerpt from an 1871 paper makes clear the campaign's intention of employing religion as a foundation of the state: "The spirit of Daikyo is on the basis of worshipping the gods to clarify the moral principles, to make the people's minds right, and to make them perform their duties. So education and politics must go in hand."16 The Declaration of Daikyo set in motion the so-called Great Promulgation Campaign (Daikyo sempu undo), a government-sponsored Shint5-led campaign which sought to systematically homogenize the religious fabric of Japan and forge an all-encompassing state religion, which began in 1870 and lasted until 1884. While the Great Promulgation Campaign was overwhelmingly dominated by adherents to Shinto deities and institutions, neither the campaign nor the creed it sought to produce was ever explicitly identified as "Shinto". Indeed, the so-called National Evangelists, the foot soldiers of the Promulgation Campaign, included representatives of Buddhist sects and newly-arisen religions such as Kurozumikyo and Konkokyo. Moreover, while the campaign emphasized the cult of Amaterasu Omikami and the Three Deities of Creation enshrined in the mythological texts Kojiki and Nihonshoki11', equal emphasis was given to the Three Great Teachings (taikyo, sanjo no kyosaku - respect for the gods and love of country, making clear the principles of Heaven and the Way of Man, 1 3 The term shinbutsu bunri, which literally translates to "the separation of Shinto deities and Buddhas", was adopted as a slogan by anti-Buddhist advocates in the late-Tokugawa period, together with haibutsu kishaku (Eradication of Buddhism). Collcutt, "Buddhism: The Threat of Eradication", p.143. 1 4 Hardacre, Shinto and the State, p. 29. 1 5 Alternately romanized as "Taikyo" in many sources. 1 6 Marukawa Hit5, "Religious Circumstances in the Late Tokugawa and the Early Meiji Periods," in the Oyasato Research Institute, Term University, ed., The Theological Perspectives ofTenrikyo: In Commemoration of the Centennial Anniversary of Gyasama. Tenri City: Tenri University Press, 1986, p.296. 1 7 Takamimusubi no kami, Amenominakanushi no kami, and Kamimusubi no kami. 8 and reverence for the emperor and obedience to the will of the court), a tactic believed to have been adopted, in part, to draw Buddhists into the campaign.18 However, Buddhist support for the essentially Shinto campaign was minimal. Buddhist leaders in the 1870s were wary of Shinto designs against their religion, and still smarting from the nationwide backlash against their religion following the shimbutsu bunri edict and the 1871 injunction which brought temple and shrine estates under government control, thus stripping Buddhist sects of their traditional property rights. Meanwhile, the lifting of the Meiji-era ban on Christianity in 1873 - primarily in response to diplomatic pressure from the West -allowed Christian missionaries to play a role in the reshaping of the religious landscape of Japan. However, the political climate in Japan remained deeply hostile towards the religion, and thus it was denied an official role in the religious affairs of Meiji Japan. With Buddhism nursing its wounds incurred by the early-Meiji anti-Buddhist backlash, and Christianity, while legal, still a national pariah, Shinto came to be the unquestionably dominant creed in the Great Promulgation Campaign. However, creating a workable national religion out of Shinto proved to be a formidable, and ultimately unsuccessful, task. While Buddhism, the traditional rock on which pre-Meiji Japanese society stood, had been in decline during the late-Tokugawa period, during which time the emergence of "nativist" thought and popularization of national pilgrimage sites, notably the Ise shrines, had given Shinto a considerable boost, the traditional symbiosis between Shinto and Buddhism had existed for so long that the two had ceased to function as separate religions, and as Helen Hardacre notes, prior to the Meiji period the term "Shinto" itself was not widely understood.19 At the grassroots level, attempts by the National Evangelists to promote Shinto-style funerals and other such unfamiliar practices were met with resistance from both local clergy and the populace. Meanwhile, satirists ridiculed the campaign, denouncing its teachings as unbelievable, its rituals as unpopular, and its leaders as unfit to serve the nation.20 Moreover, the lack of cohesion within the ranks of the Shinto evangelists plagued the campaign from the start, and these internal divisions sharpened as the campaign progressed. Prior to Meiji, Shinto had known no all-1 8 Hardacre, Shinto and the State, p.43. 19 ibid., p.34. 20 ibid., p.44. 9 inclusive doctrinal tradition or comprehensive organizational structure, and apart from Amaterasu Omikami, none of the central deities of the campaign had a widespread following. In 1875, a pantheon dispute (saijin ronso) emerged between Shinto's most influential centres, the Grand Shrines of Ise and Izumo Shrine, over the demand that the central deity of Izumo be included in the national pantheon as lord of the underworld.21 The government had sought to bring all Shinto shrines under the control of Ise; however, the challenge posed by Izumo thoroughly divided the Shinto world and had a permanently crippling effect on the credibility of the campaign. In his influential 1875 treatise Bunreimon no gairyaku (Outline of Civilization), Meiji statesman Fukuzawa Yukichi dismissed Shinto as "an insignificant movement trying to make headway by taking advantage of the imperial house at a time of political change."22 Even before 1875, the Meiji government's support for Shinto as a national religion had begun to decline. As Professor Sakamoto Koremaru of Kokugakuin University points out, by 1871 the government began to perceive the need for a united Shinto-Buddhist front against the spread of Christianity, which led to the 1871 demotion of the Department of Divinity to below the Council of State and creation of the broader-based Ministry of Religious Affairs (Kyobusho) the following year.23 And the 1875 Pantheon Dispute, and the Shinto world's inability to settle it, led the government to question the suitability of religion as an ideological pillar of the state. While the state refrained from interfering in the deities issue, it took steps to downgrade Shinto as a national teaching. In 1877, the Ministry of Religious Affairs was reconstituted as the Bureau of Shrines and Temples, thus bringing Shrine Shinto onto equal footing with Buddhism. And in the early 1880s, the government created legislation which distinguished "rites" (saishi) from "religion" (shukyo) and banned priests of national shrines from performing duties previously conducted by ordinary Shinto priests such as funerals.24 In this way, the government drew 21 ibid.,pA9. 2 2 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Bunreimon no gairyaku (Outline of Civilization), 18th Edition. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1983, cited in Hardacre, Shinto and the State, p.50. 2 3 Sakamoto Koremaru, "Religion and State in the Early Meiji Period", in Acta Asiatica 51 (1987), pp.49-50. 2 4 Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 138-139. 10 a sharp distinction between "State" and "Shrine" Shinto, and as such elevated the former to the level of "supra-religion". While Shinto rites would continue to dominate imperial ritual, and State Shinto would continue to permeate society as a quasi-religious vessel of imperial authority and as a locus of civic duty through the Three Great Teachings, Shrine Shinto would no longer enjoy special state privileges, and on the surface it appeared that after a decade-long hiatus, the traditional spiritual dynamic of Japan had been restored. Meanwhile, the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyoiku Chokuko), much to the dismay of Shinto leaders, limited the role of religion in public education to state-sanctioned shrine visits, and in 1889, in response to pressure from both Western powers and some Buddhist leaders, an article guaranteeing freedom of religion was included in the Meiji Constitution.25 Responses to the State's Sponsorship of Shinto by the New Religions and Buddhist Sects While the early-Meiji campaign to create an exclusive state religion out of Shinto ultimately failed, it did produce three significant effects: the politicization of Shrine Shinto, the wholesale conversion of the three Bakumatsu-era New Religions to the nationalist cause, and the creation of New Buddhism {Shinko Bukkyo) in response to the Shinto challenge. Shinto, as many scholars have noted, can in no way be said to have existed as a single cohesive religious group prior to the Meiji Restoration. However, the politicization of Shinto in the early Meiji years had a profound impact on the religious fabric of Japan. As Sheldon Garon points out, "[I]n the 1870s, officials gradually transformed local Shinto shrines into political instruments for inculcating emperor-centred patriotism and values of social harmony."26 The impact of the Great Promulgation Campaign also went well beyond the boundaries of established Shinto organizations. It has been frequently noted that the leaders of the so-called "Newly-Arisen Religions" {shinko shukyo) were among the campaign's most enthusiastic participants. The new religions saw the campaign as an 2 5 Sheldon Garon, "State and Religion in Imperial Japan, 1912-1945" in the Journal of Japanese Studies 12:2 (1986), p.277. 26 ibid, p.279. 11 opportunity to both proselytize within government-sanctioned parameters and to lobby for official recognition as nominal Shinto sects. The religion of Kurozumikyo, founded in 1814 by a Shinto priest and faith-healer named Kurozumi Munetada, was one such sect. Having spread rapidly through the Bakumatsu and early Meiji periods, it was the most active of the new religions in the Great Promulgation Campaign, with a total of 1,744 active National Evangelists in 1883.27 Although it considered itself an independent religion, Kurozumikyo's strong ties to Shinto (notably its veneration of Amaterasu Omikami) made its acceptance of official Shinto designation unproblematic, and its status as one of the thirteen Shinto sects, which was accorded to it in 1846, allowed it the freedom to proselytize along its own lines during the campaign.28 For the religion of Konkokyo (The Religion of the Golden Brightness), the road to official recognition would prove more challenging. Founded in 1859 by a farmer named Kawate Bunjiro (who would later adopt the title Konko Daijin), the religion lacked Kurozumikyo's ties to organized Shinto and as such its members were forced to affiliate with established shrines in order to participate in the promulgation campaign. However, the sect's participants proved to be among the campaign's most zealous, speaking of the campaign as a "holy war", attacking Buddhism, and championing Shinto as the best "protector of the state."29 This aggressive pro-Shinto stance paid off handsomely for the sect, as its membership swelled into the hundreds of thousands, and in 1900 Konkokyo was granted official Sect Shinto status. The third, and most controversial, of the new religions of the early Meiji era was Tenrikyo (The Religion of Heavenly Wisdom). Founded in 1837 by a rural woman named Nakayama Miki , the foundress' apocalyptic and anti-authoritarian teachings drew the ire of the Bakumatsu and early Meiji authorities and was twice attacked by the government, once in the mid-1860s and again in the mid-1870s. While the sect was denied a role in the Great Promulgation Campaign, the foundress and her associates, determined to achieve official recognition, made considerable efforts to conform its rites and rhetoric to State Shinto designations. Tenrikyo was accorded official Sect Shinto Hardacre, Shinto and the State, p.55. Harry Thomsen, The New Religions of Japan. Tokyo: Charles E. Turtle Co., 1963, pp.62-63. Hardacre, Shinto and the State, p.57. 12 status in 1908, due largely to the sect's enthusiastic support for the state during the Russo-Japanese War. 3 0 The early Meiji government's thorough embrace of Shinto also had a profound effect on Japan's Buddhist sects. While the government soon saw the futility of attempting to suppress a religion practiced by the majority of Japanese, Buddhist leaders were equally quick to realize that their best hope for defending and revitalizing their religion was to align themselves with the same brand of nationalism being promoted by their Shinto counterparts. Anti-Christianity was a strong characteristic of Meiji-era Buddhist rhetoric, and Buddhist leaders were anxious to promote their religion's usefulness to the state through their staunch opposition to foreign creeds and their promotion of Japanese values in the form of the acceptably inter-doctrinary Great Teachings. As early as 1868, Buddhist sects, led by the powerful Higashi Honganji and Nishi Honganji branches of the Shin sect, sought strength through intersectarian patriotic alliances, and in that year the two Honganji branches spearheaded the Alliance of United [Buddhists] Sects for Ethical Standards (Shoshu Dotoku Kaimei), an organization that called for unity under the Law of Sovereign and the Law of Buddha, as well as the expulsion of Christianity from Japan.31 By the 1880s, a new and vigourous school of Buddhist thought known as New Buddhism (Shin Bukkyo) had begun to promote Buddhism as the religious vehicle most suitable to represent Japan as a modern nation. As Brian Victoria notes, "New Buddhism was designed to answer the anti-Buddhist critique of the early and middle years of the Meiji period. [. . . ] It insisted that although "foreign-born," Buddhism could still effectively promote loyalty to the throne, patriotism, and national unity," and it "made the case that its basic doctrines were fully compatible with the Western science and technology then being so rapidly introduced into the country."32 By the mid-1890s, with the Sino-Japanese War as a backdrop, some Buddhist leaders began invoking the term kodo ("Imperial Way") in conjunction with their religion, arguing that faith in Buddhas and serving the emperor were one and the same. Meiji-era Buddhist leaders such as Inoue Enryo, the noted Shin-sect priest and scholar, argued that 3 0 Garon, "State and Religion", p.282. 3 1 Victoria, Zen At War, p.6. 32/7>/