The Way of the Sword: Japanese Buddhist Justifications During World War II

This paper traces the development of certain aspects of Japanese Buddhist ethics in the period immediately leading to, during, and following the Second World War, with specific focus on the justifications of warfare on the part of several prominent Buddhist scholars during this period. I will look, particularly, at some of the prewar and wartime writings D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966), Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945), and Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960). Suzuki, of course, is the man responsible for bringing Zen to the West in the early to mid-twentieth century; Nishida was the founder and long-time doyen of the important Japanese religio-philosophical movement called the Kyoto School; while Watsuji, less known in the West, wrote a highly influential work called Rinrigaku (Ethics) during the War. All three of these authors, in various ways, used Buddhism to justify and explain the Japanese war effort. In the past decade, with the birth of a movement in Japan called Critical Buddhism and the publication of a number of books in the West like Rude Awakenings: Zen, Nationalism, and the Kyoto School and Brian Victoria’s Zen at War, the issue of specifically Buddhist motivations, guilt and collaboration with wartime militarism and ‘fascism’ has become a prominent issue. I would like to use some of the insights of the Critical Buddhist in order to move the discussion beyond the largely descriptive analysis of works like Zen at War and Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking. In the final section of my paper, I will examine the contentious claim of certain scholars that the development of Imperial Way Zen was less an aberration than an inevitability—that is, that Japanese Zen, by the early twentieth century, has already been ‘infected’ with the seeds of militarism and fascism. The history of Buddhism, especially of Mahayana, is no less rich and profound than that of Western philosophy and religion... Yet, this ‘history of heresy’ that Buddhism manifests has evolved without serious bloody inquisitions, religious wars or crusades... I would like to suggest that it was the application of kyōsō-hanjaku, backed up by the notions of anātman and śūnyata, that may have made the decisive difference. – Masao Abe, Zen and Comparative Studies, p. 18 Speaking from the point of view of the ideal outcome, this [the North China Incident of 1937] is a righteous and moral war of self-sacrifice in which we will rescue China from the dangers of Communist takeover and economic slavery. We will help the Chinese live as true Orientals. It would therefore, I dare say, not be unreasonable to call this a sacred war incorporating the great practice of a bodhisattva. – Hitane Jōzan, “The Current Incident and the Vow and Practice of a Bodhisattva,” cited in Victoria, Zen at War, p. 134 It is a sad but irrefutable fact that the connection between religion, violence and warfare has a long history. Whether the ancient Israelites battling the Canaanites in God’s name, the medieval Christian crusaders waging righteous battle against the infidel, or the modern Algerian Muslim plotting jihad against the military government, religion and warfare seem inextricably interlinked. For every Gandhi, Mother Teresa or Dalai Lama, there seem to be dozens of lesser-known but formidable figures ready and willing to stoke the flames of conflict with the torch of religious truth. And pace those such as Abe Masao who wish to make Buddhism the sole exception to this sad litany, Buddhism, as well, has a chapter in this story. To cite a recent and still controversial case, the question of Buddhist involvement—or collaboration, to use the more loaded term—in twentieth-century Japanese militarism has been re-opened in the West of late by a number of books, including the compilation Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (1994) and Brian Victoria’s Zen at War (1997). Another book, Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997), tells the grim story of the carnage levied upon the Chinese city of Nanking by marauding Japanese troops over a several month period in 1937—an event still downplayed by Japanese authorities, textbooks and even some mainstream politicians. Though Chang speaks little, if at all, about the role or effect of Buddhism on the events at Nanking, she does allow herself to ask some searching questions about the incident, which has been, until recently, virtually “forgotten” by the world. “What broke down on the scene,” she asks, “to allow the behaviour of Japanese soldiers to escape so totally the restraints that govern most human conduct,” and “Why did the Japanese officers permit and even encourage such a breakdown?” (1997, 19). Of course, to assume that these soldiers were acting as “Buddhists” would be irresponsible and impossible to defend. However, Chang does allude to the tradition of bushidō, and the trickle-down effect of the “code of the samurai”: The twentieth century Japanese identity was forged in a thousand-year-old system in which social hierarchy was established and sustained through martial competition... In time the code of the samurai, initially followed by only a small percentage of the population, penetrated deep into the Japanese culture and [by the eighteenth-century] became the model of honorable behavior among all young men (Chang 1997, 20). Brian Victoria, in his 1997 book Zen at War, asks a question that is more to the point of this paper: what was specifically “Buddhist” about prewar and wartime militarism in Japan, including not only the actions and