Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I explore Suzuki's merciless assault on Shinto, the great evil, in 1945. I locate the origins of his Shinto understanding to an early essay he penned in America in 1897. I trace its maturation through to a bruising encounter with the Shinto scholar, Ono Sokyō, in Kamakura in 1946.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation explores Suzuki Daisetsu’s evolving “take” on Shinto, a subject that has received next to no critical attention. I begin by laying bare the structure of his merciless assault on Shinto in 1945, with the outcome of the Pacific War plain for all to see. Shinto, for Suzuki, lacked any vestige of "compassionate and merciful" "spirituality." Shinto was rather the great evil, responsible for bringing about the ruin not only of Japan but of Asia, too. Shinto was "a religion of power" defined by "an infantile nationalism, steeped in politics and rigid with exclusivism." Japan’s postwar redemption, according to Suzuki, depended on nothing so much as ridding Japan of Shinto. I locate the origins of Suzuki’s arguments on Shinto – and the emperor – in an early Japanese essay which he penned while studying in America in 1897, and in an English essay he wrote in 1923 while a professor at Otani University. I trace the maturation of Suzuki’s Shinto critique through his 1945 writings on Japanese spirituality to a bruising encounter with the Shinto scholar, Ono Sokyō, that took place in Kamakura in 1946.