While the activities of missionaries and other Christian agents have long been recognized as an important aspect of Western empires, the relationship between religion and the Japanese empire remains understudied. Hitherto, the phenomenon known as ‘State Shinto’ has received the most attention, due to the fact that the Japanese state employed Shinto shrines as sites of state ritual inside Japan proper as well as in Japan’s colonies.Footnote 1 Recent years have seen a broadening of interest in the relationship between religion and the Japanese empire, with major studies being published in English alongside Japanese.Footnote 2 Overall, there still remains much work to be done. This Forum is dedicated to furthering our understanding of the relationship between empire and religion through an examination of the activities of Buddhists within the context of Japan’s aggressively expanding empire in the 1930s and 1940s. This period—often characterized as that of Japan’s ‘wartime empire’Footnote 3—marked a new stage in Japanese empire-making. It is bookended by Japan’s rejection of the existing international order with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and ultimate defeat in 1945. Indeed, there was no year during this period that did not see some level of combat between the Japanese empire and Chinese forces.
This Introduction will first provide an overview of the historical background against which Buddhists operated during the 1930s and 1940s. This is especially necessary as the articles in this Forum feature Buddhists from a range of backgrounds. Laying out the historical canvas at the very beginning will hopefully make it easier for readers not already familiar with Buddhism in modern East Asia to navigate the different locations, organizations, and networks covered in the various contributions. This background includes the interactions between modern Japanese Buddhism and other forms of Buddhism on the Asian mainland and among Japanese diasporas, as well as the relationship between Japanese Buddhism and the Japanese state, especially the expanding Japanese empire. The Introduction then moves on to outline broader discussions informing the articles included in this Forum.
It is the hope of the contributors to this Forum that the discussions found in these articles will throw more light not only on the overseas activities of Japanese Buddhists, but also on the nature of the Japanese empire as well as the interactions between empire and religion more generally.
Buddhism and the modern Japanese empire
Throughout the Edo period (1603–1868), direct contacts between Japanese and Chinese Buddhists were largely made impossible due to the Tokugawa shogunate’s travel restrictions. One notable exception to this was the port city of Nagasaki with its Chinese community, through which Chinese monks founded the Ōbaku sect of Zen Buddhism in Japan. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 fundamentally altered this situation and made close contacts with the outside world possible once more. Following the Meiji Restoration, Japanese Buddhists began to venture forth in order to re-establish ties with their co-religionists across Asia. The first Japanese Buddhist we know of who travelled to China to re-establish contact with Chinese Buddhists and visit important Buddhist sites was Ogurusu Kōchō (1831–1905), a priest in the Japanese True Pure Land sect (J. Jōdo Shinshū). This sect follows a lineage of Buddhism that sought salvation by devotion through Buddha Amitabha (Ch. Amituofo, J. Amida). I will provide a detailed account of Ogurusu and his successors below, as their cases contain many elements that characterize Japanese Buddhist missionary efforts between the Meiji Restoration and the end of the Pacific War in 1945. The True Pure Land sect is also the largest Buddhist denomination in Japan and was the most active internationally during the time period under investigation.
With the support of Gen’nyo (1817–1894), the head of the Ōtani branch of the True Pure Land sect, Ogurusu travelled to China in 1873. He arrived in Shanghai and then travelled on to Beijing, where he found lodging at a Buddhist temple and stayed there for the best part of a year. Ogurusu’s journey to China had an important political dimension. Searching for a way to counter the encroachment of Christianity, Ogurusu envisioned an alliance of Buddhist nations consisting of Japan, China, and India. However, during his stay in China, he concluded that Chinese Buddhism was in a state of decline and that the only way of realizing an effective alliance was for Ogurusu’s own sect to enter China and assist in the revival of Buddhism in the country.Footnote 4 After his return to Japan, he gained the support of Ishikawa Shuntai (1842–1931) at the head temple of the Ōtani branch and began mission work in China in 1876. However, due to financial difficulties at the time, there were many in the sect who opposed diverting funds to this project. When Ishikawa lost power within the sect, this also spelt the end for Ogurusu’s efforts in China. His activities were scaled back to a single temple in Shanghai.
However, following Japan’s victory in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, missionary activities were relaunched, and Japanese Buddhist sects founded language schools in Hangzhou, Suzhou, and several places in Fujian province.Footnote 5 These renewed efforts were made possible by the ‘most favoured nation’ status that Japan obtained due to its victory in the war. The Treaty of Shimonoseki did not explicitly bestow mission rights on Japan as the previous ‘unequal treaties’ between China and Western powers had for Christian missionaries, but this was no problem at this time. When the Japanese minister (J. kōshi, Ch. gongshi) in China requested the Qing viceroy (Ch. zongdu) to grant protection to Japanese Buddhist priests, the viceroy would order local governments to do so.Footnote 6
While the expansion of Japan’s imperial sphere of interest created opportunities for Japanese Buddhists, the relationship between the Japanese state and Japanese Buddhist missionaries overseas was not necessarily harmonious. During the waning years of the Qing dynasty around the turn of the twentieth century, the Qing state confiscated temples and temple property to provide resources for modernization efforts in a policy known as ‘build schools with temple property’ (Ch. miaochan xingxue). Japanese Buddhists such as the Ōtani priest Itō Kendō (1865–1941) were willing to assist their Chinese counterparts by registering Chinese temples as branches of Japanese Buddhist denominations, thus withdrawing them from the purview of the Chinese authorities. Some of this was also conducted for the personal financial benefit of Japanese priests. Although some of the money was used to support missionary activities, against a background of dwindling financial support granted by sect headquarters,Footnote 7 local Japanese consuls requested Itō to leave China.Footnote 8
Japan sought to gain official mission rights after the establishment of the Republic of China as part of the Twenty-One Demands in 1915, but ultimately failed to do so.Footnote 9 The fact that Japan lacked official mission rights limited the activities of Japanese Buddhists in China to observational trips and confined their mission work to Japanese concessions. An important exception to this was, of course, Taiwan, which had become a Japanese colony in 1895 after the First Sino-Japanese War, as well as the Korean peninsula where formal colonization began in 1905.Footnote 10 When a new round of imperial expansion began in the 1930s, Japanese Buddhists gained new opportunities to broaden their mission work, as more and more Chinese territory fell under Japanese domination.
While Japanese Buddhist activities in Asia during this period were not comparable in scale to their Christian counterparts, they were significant in a number of ways. First, they helped in creating transnational Buddhist networks. Even when Ogurusu’s presence was limited to a lonely temple in Shanghai, the presence of Japanese Buddhism there had an impact on local Buddhists. Through Ogurusu, Chinese Buddhists engaged with the Japanese True Pure Land tradition and its doctrinal differences from their own tradition, as represented by the intellectual exchange between Ogurusu and the prominent Chinese layman Yang Wenhui (1837–1911) in Shanghai.Footnote 11 Japanese Buddhists also played an important role in the efforts of Chinese Buddhists to reinvigorate what they considered to have become a moribund tradition. Again, Yang Wenhui played a leading role here when he called on the help of the Japanese Buddhist scholar Nanjō Bun’yū (1849–1927) to retrieve Buddhist texts thought to have been lost in China.Footnote 12 An outgrowth of this intellectual exchange was that Chinese Buddhists ended up understanding their own history through Japanese intellectual models. One result of this was that some Chinese Buddhists attempted to ‘revive’ distinct sectarian organizations derived from Japanese Buddhism but projected back into Chinese history by Japanese Buddhist historians. The most prominent phenomenon in this regard was the attempt to re-import esoteric Buddhism to China from Japan. During the 1920s, the famed Chinese Buddhist reformer Taixu dispatched some of his disciples to the Japanese esoteric centre at Mt Kōya in Japan for training, while Chinese lay Buddhists in Guangdong province invited the Japanese esoteric master Gonda Raifu (1847–1934) to Hong Kong and Chaozhou to bestow esoteric initiations on Chinese Buddhists. This led to the establishment of several esoteric Buddhist organizations that were marked by Japanese esoteric practice and doctrine.Footnote 13
Second, Japanese Buddhist contacts with other forms of Buddhism contributed to Japanese Buddhists’ sense of being Buddhist leaders. Starting with Ogurusu, Japanese Buddhists who visited other Buddhist regions of Asia tended to experience these local forms of Buddhism as essentially in decline, views that were then widely disseminated in Japan through travel accounts.Footnote 14 This helped create the self-understanding that it was up to Japanese Buddhists to help their co-religionists to revive their traditions as well as a strain of paternalism towards other Asian Buddhists.Footnote 15 It is here that Buddhists began to intersect with the Japanese empire more broadly, as it may be possible to speak of a Buddhist ‘modernization theory’ or a Buddhist ‘mission civilisatrice’ formulated by Japanese Buddhists. Jacqueline Stone has argued that the development of Buddhist studies in Japan was closely related to a project to establish Japan as a global intellectual authority on Buddhism. This, in turn, was related to Japanese efforts to shape Japan’s position vis-à-vis Western countries and its Asian neighbours.Footnote 16
Third, while larger missionary projects were funded and organized by Buddhist sect organizations, the missionary activities themselves often depended on quite idiosyncratic characters. While throughout Japan’s modern history, a substantial number of Buddhist priests were sent abroad to conduct mission work, these efforts did not have the same level of importance for most individuals and denominations that proselytization had for Christian groups. Many more Japanese Buddhists were interested in visiting the Asian mainland and sites connected to the history of their own sects than were willing to dedicate their lives to mission work. The story of Buddhist overseas engagement is thus the story of a fairly small number of unusual and motivated individuals.Footnote 17 These motivations could be quite unrelated to the official ideology used to support Japan’s wars more generally. A good example of such an idiosyncratic figure is Kitakata Shinsen (1850–1905), a priest belonging to the Ōtani branch of the True Pure Land sect. Kitakata spent the years from 1877 to 1883 at his denomination’s temple in Shanghai, where he developed deep contacts with Chinese literati. His activities are as much characterized by his literary interests as his missionary activities.Footnote 18 Also due to the fact that his period of sojourning in China preceded the major modern wars of his country, Kitakata’s activities appear in a strongly non-political light. A contrasting figure in this regard is Mizuno Baigyō (1877–1949), initially a priest of the Zen Buddhist Sōtō sect who later joined the Honganji branch of the True Pure Land sect. Mizuno had studied as a non-regular student at the East Asia Common Culture Academy (J. Tōa dōbun shoin) in Shanghai in the early years of the twentieth century and his life exemplifies the intimate relationship between modern Japanese Buddhism and empire. After his time at the Common Culture Academy, Mizuno moved to Changsha in Hunan province, where he established an educational facility for monks at Kaifu Temple.Footnote 19 While he was conscious of the danger of any nationalist or imperialist inclinations influencing the work of Japanese Buddhists in China, he did see Japanese Buddhism as having a special responsibility for helping China along its path.Footnote 20 For this purpose, he began to advocate among Chinese politicians and officials to grant Japanese Buddhists official mission rights. These initial ideological seeds would later lead Mizuno further into the structures of empire. In 1924, he founded the journal Shina jihō (The China Times), which provided news and analysis of affairs in China. Liaising extensively with Japanese state organs, foremost the Foreign Ministry, he became a central figure in cultural diplomacy between China and Japan. His cooperation with the Japanese empire only grew closer with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the outbreak of full-scale war in 1937.Footnote 21
Buddhism at war
A second major theme that the articles of this Forum deal with is the relationship of Buddhism to war. Recent years have seen a proliferation of studies investigating Buddhism’s relationship to violence and conflict, especially due to its involvement in ethnic strife in a number of South and Southeast Asian nations.Footnote 22 Engagement with the involvement of Japanese Buddhism in Japan’s modern wars goes back to the time during and following the Vietnam War, when figures such as Nakano Kyōtoku (1924–2003), a priest in the Nichiren sect, and Ichikawa Hakugen (1902–1986), a Rinzai Zen priest, began to critically re-examine the wartime histories of their sects.Footnote 23
During the modern period until Japan’s defeat in the Second World War in 1945, Japan’s wars received extensive support from mainstream Buddhist denominations. While the Tokugawa period had seen close cooperation between Buddhism and the shogunate,Footnote 24 the early Meiji period was a moment of crisis for Japanese Buddhism. Favouring Shinto over Buddhism, the new state had ordered a strict separation of the two faiths. They had been closely entwined since Buddhism’s induction into Japan in the sixth century in a phenomenon commonly referred to as the ‘amalgamation of kami and buddhas’ (J. shinbutsu shūgō). Indeed, Buddhist priests often served at Shinto shrines and Shinto deities carried Buddhist designations such as bodhisattva or gongen (temporary manifestation of a buddha). The separation decree radically reordered Japan’s religious landscape and also caused a backlash in some regions against what was perceived as unjust Buddhist dominance of Shinto shrines. Temples were destroyed, sutras burnt, and Buddhist statuary smashed in anti-Buddhist actions (J. haibutsu kishaku).Footnote 25 The destruction was large enough to lead some scholars to evaluate Japanese Buddhism as having been in danger of extinction.Footnote 26 While the period of persecution and destruction was relatively short (circa 1868 to 1874), Japanese Buddhists were faced with the need to rebuild their relationship to the Japanese state following these traumatic events. Wars such as the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 provided such opportunities. In a recent study, Kobayashi Atsumichi has shown how both wars saw a proliferation of prayer services for victory and commemorative services for the war dead among Buddhist denominations as a way to demonstrate the benefit of Buddhism to state and society.Footnote 27 Such efforts did not remain limited to the home front. Buddhist denominations dispatched chaplains (J. jūgun fukyōshi) to serve the armed forces, accompanying the troops to overseas battlefields. In this role, Buddhist priests conducted funerals for fallen soldiers, gave consolation to the wounded, and distributed ‘comfort goods’ (J. imonhin) donated by civilians to the troops.Footnote 28
The role of Buddhism in Japan’s military conflicts expanded greatly with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931. With the proliferation of fighting in which the Japanese Army was involved during the 1930s and 1940s, Japanese Buddhist priests began to appear in all theatres of operation. Simultaneously, Japanese conquests opened new areas to Japanese Buddhist missionary activities from which they had been previously excluded due to a lack of mission rights. Besides serving the Japanese troops as chaplains, Japanese Buddhists began to play a role in the pacification of the occupied territories. For example, after the founding of the puppet state of Manchukuo, Japanese Buddhist priests operated Japanese language schools for the local population, Chinese language schools for Japanese residents, and educational facilities for Chinese monks as well as engaging in relief activities for the needy.Footnote 29 With the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Buddhist activities in Japan and the occupied territories came to be directly coordinated by the Japanese government, and Japanese denominations were requested to actively cooperate in the war effort. Following the Manchurian model, Buddhist priests were asked to participate in pacification activities (J. senbu katsudō) and cultural work (J. bunka kōsaku) overseen by the Japanese Army.Footnote 30 Simultaneously, religion and Buddhism were identified as important resources by the Japanese Army. Efforts were made to establish religious umbrella organizations friendly towards Japan in the occupied territories such as the Manzhouguo fojiao zonghui (Manchukuo Buddhist Association) in Manchukuo or the Fojiao tongyuanhui (Buddhist Common Purpose Society) in North China, and local monks across the warzone were invited to visit Japan for further training and study.Footnote 31 Reshaping the local religious landscape formed one pillar of Japan’s strategy of pacification. The cooperation of Japanese Buddhists to organize and oversee these programmes was crucial in this effort.
Alongside the question of Buddhist contributions to the war effort looms the question of ideology. That is, the intellectual foundations that made possible close collaboration in activities were counter to core Buddhist ideals such as ‘non-harm’ (Skt. ahimsa). Brian Victoria has shown the doctrinal resources mobilized in order to normalize killing and aggression in the Zen sects, such as the notion that Japan’s wars constituted acts of Buddhist compassion (J. jihi) or that killing could be justified if it saved the lives of many others (J. issatsu tashō).Footnote 32 Christopher Ives stresses continuity with earlier forms of Japanese Buddhist ‘political theology’, in which Buddhism served to protect the state and imperial family (J. gokoku bukkyō). Concepts such as ‘the sovereign’s law is fundamental’ (J. ōbō ihon) or the doctrine of two truths (J. shinzoku nitai), which holds that different rules apply to the absolute and the mundane realms, formed a ready part of Buddhist efforts to justify war-making in the modern period.Footnote 33 In his critique of wartime Buddhist rhetoric, Niino Kazunobu goes further, arguing that many Japanese Buddhists had essentially abandoned any truly Buddhist framework and were operating completely within the confines of state ideology.Footnote 34
Entering the grey zone
With such close involvement of Japanese Buddhists in Japanese imperialism and war-making, it is not surprising that much of the literature has focused on the issue of the war responsibility of Japanese Buddhists. The works of Ichikawa Hakugen, Nakano Kyōtoku, or, more recently, Brian Victoria have done much to draw attention to the deep involvement of Buddhist organizations and individuals in Japan’s war efforts and imperial expansion. The fact that this body of work is preoccupied with the issue of responsibility is not surprising, as there are critiques coming from inside Buddhism that aim to cause a moral reckoning for past misdeeds within their traditions. Recently, authors such as Daitō Satoshi or Ōtani Ei’ichi have enriched the discussion by drawing attention to cases of Japanese Buddhist priests opposing and resisting war.Footnote 35 There was indeed a range of positions taken by Japanese Buddhists vis-à-vis the wars waged by the Japanese state, although it is safe to assume that the vast majority went along with state policies. And while it is possible to find resistance on an individual level, there is no record of opposition to Japanese military action by any of the major Buddhist denominations.
While the overall integration of Buddhist institutions into state efforts is in no doubt, questions of what motivated such collaboration offer a rich field for investigating the Japanese empire and state-religion relations in modern Japan. In order to understand these dynamics and motivations, it is necessary to go beyond the question of moral culpability, that is, a simple division into ‘collaborators’ and ‘resisters’. In this, the study of the participation of Japanese Buddhists in Japan’s wars bears some resemblance to discussions currently going on about pro-Japanese collaboration in the areas under Japanese occupation. Timothy Brook raised the issue in his landmark 2005 volume on pro-Japanese collaboration in the lower Yangtze Valley, arguing that what was needed was a deeper investigation of what motivated collaborators rather than simply pointing to pre-existing ties to Japan.Footnote 36 Others have taken up this challenge, which has led to the publication of more studies that seek to understand collaborators as political agents in their own right.Footnote 37 This does not mean that ‘resistance’ and ‘collaboration’ completely lose their worth as categories for analysis and evaluation. However, it does mean that a lot more attention needs to be given to the spaces ‘in between’ in order to avoid one’s characterization becoming too cartoonish.
The articles brought together in this Forum do not seek to absolve anyone of their responsibility or culpability in the conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s. However, beyond the fairly straightforward collaboration of institutionalized Buddhism, a vast ‘grey zone’Footnote 38 defying a simplistic dichotomy of collaboration and resistance existed across the wartime empire. This grey zone was inhabited by precisely the type of idiosyncratic Buddhist figure that had been the pillar of transnational Buddhist contacts since the beginning of the Meiji period. Japanese expansionism not only enabled institutional Buddhism, but also gave such idiosyncratic individuals space to engage in their own projects. While these projects frequently intersected with the aims of the Japanese state, they were not necessarily identical with them and need to be treated in their own right. This Forum conceives of this grey zone as a space in which fixed identities could become unsettled, friendships formed across political divides, and ambiguous character arcs played out. Focusing on this grey zone opens up space to investigate the complexities and contradictions present in efforts to foster fraternal Buddhist ties against the background of escalating geopolitics.
Lastly, contacts established in the pre-war and wartime periods did not simply disappear with the war’s end in 1945, but frequently carried on into the post-war and Cold War eras. Wartime Buddhist interactions are thus also important to understand what came afterwards.
Overview of the articles
Where do the articles included in this Forum fall within this framework? While the articles all focus on separate issues and figures in the context of the wartime empire, many share common themes and actors.
Justin B. Stein’s and Cheng-Tsung Kan’s contributions fall into the earliest period covered in this collection. Stein discusses the Second General Conference of Pan-Pacific Young Buddhists’ Associations that was held in Tokyo in 1934, which sought to foster ties and understanding among the world’s Buddhists. The fact that the meeting was held only a few years after the invasion of Manchuria and the founding of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932 turned the event into a political issue. This political aspect was even further emphasized by the fact that the Japanese Foreign Ministry provided funding. Chinese Buddhists, in particular, feared that the conference would function as an occasion to normalize the existence of Manchukuo. The conference was thus not only part of the developing bonds among Buddhists in the modern period, but also had deep geopolitical ramifications. For the Japanese government, it was an opportunity to generate soft power, while for many Chinese Buddhists it was an opportunity to resist Japanese encroachment on their country. Other participants did not fall so easily into one of these camps and Stein suggests that a number of Chinese Buddhists who did participate might have also been motivated by the idea of using the conference as their own form of soft power to leverage against the Japanese empire.
Kan’s contribution focuses on Venerable Shanhui (1881–1945), one of the most prominent monks of colonial-era Taiwan. Shanhui’s activities spanned different parts of Chinese-speaking Asia while also being embedded within the institutional structures of a Japanese Buddhist denomination. As a Japanese colonial subject, Shanhui walked a fine line. What makes his case so fascinating is the fact that he was so closely integrated into multiple networks: Taiwanese, mainland Chinese, overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, and Japanese. While relations between these different constituencies were relatively peaceful, this did not pose a major issue, but as conflict between China and Japan increased in intensity, Shanhui himself was drawn closer into Japanese efforts to dominate the occupied territories in occupied China. He eventually became head of a Hangzhou-based Buddhist association that formed part of Japan’s pacification efforts. While Shanhui was thus clearly complicit in Japan’s war effort, he also used his leverage to help others who had come into conflict with the Japanese authorities. For instance, he was a central figure in helping Venerable Yuanying (1878–1953), who had been arrested by Japanese military police for anti-Japanese activities, be released from detention. The fact that Shanhui had multiple cultural and organizational affiliations meant that he also had multiple and conflicting loyalties.
Yukiko Sakaida’s article looks at three Buddhist figures—two Japanese and one Chinese. She investigates the friendship between the Chinese monk Daxing (1900–1952) and his relationship with two Japanese Buddhist priests—Fujii Sōsen (1896–1971) and Kanda Eun (1901–1948)—who were active in mainland China throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Fujii Sōsen also appears in Stein’s contribution as the man tasked with recruiting a Chinese delegation to the 1934 Pan-Buddhist conference. The story of Daxing—a prominent disciple of the famed Chinese Buddhist reformer Taixu (1889–1947)—is of interest as he decided to remain in the territories occupied by Japan after 1937. While he penned articles criticizing Japan, on the one hand, Daxing eventually also took on at least one position in a pro-Japanese context in Xiamen at the behest of his Japanese friends. Sakaida uses Daxing’s case to investigate how Chinese Buddhists could navigate the difficult terrain of occupation, both on a political and an interpersonal level. She shows how Daxing escapes easy labelling, ultimately arguing for the existence of an in-between space under occupation which refuses to follow post-war categories of collaborator and resister. The article also shows how friendship and mutual respect could survive such cataclysms as the Second Sino-Japanese War, with contacts between Daxing and Fujii continuing into the post-war period.
In my own article, I examine the activities of a young Japanese Buddhist priest, Yoshii Hōjun (1899–1993), who created a successful Buddhist organization in northern China in the early 1930s. This organization—the Sino-Japanese Society for the Study of Esoteric Buddhism—attracted a substantial number of Chinese members, among them figures also belonging to the political establishment of the Beiyang era (1916–1927). As some of these politicians ended up collaborating with the Japanese after 1937, discussions of this organization have tended to regard its efforts to penetrate the North China region as a mere tool of Japanese military intelligence. The article argues that this view is far too facile and that a closer look at the different constituencies that supported the Study Society allows for a better understanding of what kind of forces were pitted against each other in the years leading up to the outbreak of full-scale war. This could indeed include different Japanese factions opposed to each other. The article also shows how Yoshii was increasingly drawn into the structures of the Japanese wartime empire from what I see as relatively idealistic and religious initial motivations. In this sense, Yoshii and the Study Society evidence how empire expands by appealing to the dreams and aspirations of imperial citizens.
Finally, Takahiro Kojima’s contribution looks at another priest belonging to the Shingon sect. Compared to the relatively practically oriented Buddhists discussed in the other contributions, the central figure of Kojima’s article—Ueda Tenzui (1899–1974)—represents an elite scholarly figure. Ueda finished a doctoral degree at Tōkyō Imperial University and then took up a lecturership at Kōyasan University, the educational hub of his denomination. Ueda focused on the Buddhist precepts in his research, which led him to become interested in Theravada Buddhism. During the war, Ueda saw the opportunity to engage with his subject of study in a more direct way, first travelling to Thailand in order to get first-hand experience of Theravada precepts. After the Japanese Army invaded Burma in 1942, Ueda joined a pacification team attached to the Japanese military. While engaged in local pacification activities, he maintained contact with local Burmese monks. This eventually gave him the opportunity to ordain as a Theravada monk for a period of time. Ueda’s relationship to Burmese Buddhism was also characterized by his wish to mobilize Burmese Buddhists for the war effort and the notion that Theravada Buddhists would eventually see the error of their ways and become good Mahayana Buddhists such as himself. Like Yoshii, Ueda’s case thus showcases the complex relationship between personal ambitions and entanglements with Japan’s wartime empire. However, the encounter did not leave him unchanged, and in the post-war period Ueda continued his exchange with Burmese Buddhism, which he had now come to see in a much more positive light.
These articles show how contact with Buddhist ‘others’ could unsettle imperial Buddhist identities, with Japanese Buddhists identifying and sympathizing closely with their local interlocutors. This could at times even lead to friction with their own Japanese organizations. Several articles also demonstrate how wartime contacts between Japanese Buddhists and their Buddhist ‘others’ laid the groundwork for post-war engagement. These post-war engagements, in turn, took place within the context of an overarching conflict: the Cold War. This new war created grey zones of its own, and it is the hope of the contributors to this Forum that we have succeeded in introducing some of the patterns and issues inherent in such spaces that will be helpful for thinking through such cases.
A note concerning terminology
The articles use both ‘priest’ and ‘monk’ to refer to Buddhist monastics. This is because in the modern Japanese context, many Buddhist clerics married, ate meat, and drank alcohol, making the moniker ‘monk’ inappropriate for the majority of Japanese Buddhist clergy after the Meiji Restoration of 1868.Footnote 39
Competing interests
The author declares none.
