Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the knowledge of India in the works of Meiji to Taishō Buddhist priests and lay intellectuals, shifting the focus from ancient Buddhism to aspects of Indian religions and civilization whose reinterpretation intersected with debates on Japanese modern identity and society.

Paper long abstract:

Recent research on modern Japanese Buddhism has shed significant light on the role played by inter-Asian intellectual networks and cultural exchange in the formation of ideas and projects of modernity alternative to the dominant Western-centered model. While this research has shown the importance of India for modern Japanese Buddhist priests and lay intellectuals looking for the sources of Buddhism, less attention has been dedicated to what India meant for them beyond being the birthplace of Shakyamuni. This paper will analyze how new forms of knowledge of Indian religions, and more broadly Indian civilization, produced in Japan in the Meiji to Taishō periods intersected with debates on modernity, national identity, confrontation with the West, but also on moral and social issues.

The knowledge of India has been a central field in the development of modern European intellectual history, where the Romantic search for origins met the Enlightenment demands of scientific inquiry, providing the colonial basis for the establishment of comparative linguistics and the study of religion. When the first Japanese Buddhist priests and lay Buddhist intellectuals visited Europe in the Meiji period they also confronted with this knowledge, and new concerns added to the indigenous East-Asian imagination of India. In my paper, I will particularly focus on the scholarship and explorations of two under-studied priest-scholars, Fujii Sensho and Izumi Hōkei, and one historian of religion, Anesaki Masaharu, and what India meant to them.

While at first a major concern for Japanese Buddhists interested in India was to respond to both internal and external criticism of Mahāyāna Buddhism by retrieving a direct contact with Indic sources, the knowledge they produced was not limited to ancient Indian Buddhism, but also encompassed the broader history of Indian religions and civilization. This knowledge provided these Buddhist priests and lay intellectuals with an ancient and non-European model for a civilization with refined scientific knowledge unified in a spiritual purpose. While this interpretation was subsumed into nationalist and pan-Asianist ideology, I will also show how other elements became critical tools and sparked debate on issues such as sexuality, the family, and social equality.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation examines how Japanese authorities thought about Islam in the interwar and wartime periods, by examining the intelligence categorization of the Muslim Tatar refugees that arrived in Japan in the early 1920s, after fleeing the conflicts in the wake of the Russian Revolution.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation focuses on how Japanese authorities thought about Islam and Muslims in the 1920s through the early 1940s. Specifically, it examines how Japanese authorities thought about Muslim Tatar refugees and their religion as they fled the conflicts in the wake of the Russian Revolution and arrived in Japan in the early 1920s. While Islam and Muslims played significant roles in the interwar and wartime Japan, as well as elsewhere in the world, Japanese historians have neglected to pay attention to them. Most studies on Islam in Japan are conducted by historians interested in Middle Eastern and Central Asian history and they focus on the history of the Tatar Muslims themselves, not so much on the Japanese political and religious context in which they were received. This presentation investigates the political process in which Japanese authorities created official categories to identify these refugees and their religious identity, Islam. What forms of activities, particularly those deemed religious, did the authorities consider dangerous or acceptable to Japanese society and why? In asking this question, the presentation also addresses how the refugees' arrival and the global affairs surrounding them affected Japanese policies and laws towards religion, refugees, and ideology. In doing so, it will also show how politicians and intellectuals understood and created Japanese national characteristics, that centered around the state -endorsed form of Shinto. Through the analysis of journals and relevant documents written by intelligence offices and officials who created surveillance policies for religious and ideological activities, the presentation will shed light on the role of religion and ideology both in Japanese politics and in global affairs in the interwar and wartime periods.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the role of ideological competition with Christianity and liberal thought in the formation of national identity in the mid-Meiji period and its lasting impact through the thought of an understudied religious nationalist group, 'The Society of the Great Way.'

Paper long abstract:

Research on the social ideology of prominent interwar reform bureaucrats and military ideologues has often failed to fully recognize the seminal impact of pre-WWI debates on religion and social ethics which, in important instances, animated the thought of the Meiji-era thinkers who influenced interwar ideologues in their youths. This social ideology was underpinned not only by evolving attitudes to "Eastern Civilization," but also to a range of concepts highlighted in contradistinction to Western Christianity and liberalism. These included attempts at redefining 'rationality' and 'faith,' as well as the question of what system of values was most conducive to full human development. This contest occurred as a part of a globally entangled resistance to the perceived hegemony of Western cultural standards. The process in Japan resulted in new understandings of state-society relations and the role of the individual citizen/subject in national politics.

I argue that important strands of nationalist thought in Japan which emerged from the backlash against the Westernizing reforms and had an influence on East Asian developmentalist thought, was more than mere ideology. Ethnic nationalist conceptions of religion and politics were at the heart of concerted efforts to construct an alternative to Western liberal conceptions of self-cultivation within moral community, socio-political ethical ideals and capitalism. In order to clarify this argument, I will introduce the thought and political action of 'The Society of the Great Way' led by Buddhist nationalist Torio Koyata and this protégé, the Shinto nationalist Kawai Kiyomaru. I will then describe the continuity and discontinuity of these views after the WWI divide through the career of army general Hayashi Senjūrō, an ardent disciple of the 'The Society of the Great Way' before joining the military. Although his religious influences have gone unnoticed, Hayashi impacted Japanese history through his assistance of Ishiwara Kanji in the Manchurian Incident and sought to present the 'Kokutai no Hongi' as national orthodoxy as prime minister in 1937. I ultimately aim to show that even in the interwar period, leading nationalist ideologues were driven by the fundamental concern of carving out a space for personal development within national development.