ZEN AT WAR: RELIGION AND POLITICS IN MODERN JAPAN
The relation between religion and politics often occupies our attention. Radical Islam and Hindu nationalism are prime objects of our interest and often dismay. But there is what for many people might be a surprising precedent: the involvement of the Zen world in Japanese nationalism and its support for Japan’s war effort. Examinating this conjuncture of religion and politics gives us a more grounded perspective on our contemporary world situation. There are lessons to be learned.
Zen Masters and the Kyoto School
Zen Buddhism has attracted much interest in the West for being a distinctive path to Enlightenment. It is one of the great spiritual traditions, a treasure of our world culture. Although Zen has been studied and practiced in the West, not so many of its enthusiasts are aware of its role in Japanese politics, especially in the World War II era. This matters because understanding the reasons for the involvement of the Zen world in nationalist politics and war sheds much light on contemporary relations between Western and non-Western civilizations It is also a provocative example of how religion and politics can become entangled, even in the case of a religion like Zen that sees itself as transcending the opposites of life and death, good and evil.
It is common to hear that the transcendent awareness of Zen enlightenment does not imply any ethical, social, or political doctrine. Zen leaves the world as it is. Yet, throughout Japanese history Japanese Buddhism has been closely connected with the Japanese state, and Zen gave the samurai a philosophy of life and death. And, despite the non-attached stance toward the world, the Zen world during the Second World War went along with or enthusiastically supported the government side in public, although some tried to influence policy privately through contacts. There were no signs of open and direct resistance. Of course, such resistance would have cost one’s life.
The Zen masters are not the most accessible sources for examining the relation between modern Japanese religion and politics. But the Kyoto School is part of a Zen world that reveals much about the qualities of Japanese modern and wartime consciousness. Most of these philosophers were Zen practitioners, at least for a time, with a profound appreciation for Zen as a philosophy/practice and a great reverence for the Japanese spiritual and aesthetic traditions. Learning about their philosophies and experience can orient us to the Japanese historical reality of the mid-twentieth century. Then we can see some of the striking implications for our time of events that took place three-quarters of a century ago.
The Progressive View of History
In the progressive approach, all cultures are viewed as going on the same fundamental journey. There are stages of historical development such as ancient, premodern, modern, and postmodern. The progressive perspective became prominent at the time of the Enlightenment at a time when the West was beginning to increase its colonial domination of the non-white, non-Christian world. For progressives, Western civilization is the advance guard, the first to experience the higher stages of development. At present, this means there are more Western people at the modern and postmodern stages in comparison to the rest of the world, although the gap has quickly closed in some cases. Nations, as they develop economically, advance culturally in ways that bring them closer to the modern West. Greater individualism, democratic government, liberal freedoms, and a cosmopolitan outlook are all part of the package that distinguishes the rational mode of relating to the world. They are signposts that modernity has been attained.
Not all scholars from other civilizations, though, have found the progressive view tenable. They agree that science and technology are universally valid but see each country following its own course of civilizational development. There is no single road to modernity: modernities are multiple and modernization does not mean westernization. For Tu Weiming, modernity is an integration of one’s own traditions with the modern worldview.
Some non-Western thinkers are also concerned about the division between their part of the world and the West, which is attempting to impose its particular modern institutions and values on them. They aim for a plural world order and are engaged in bringing alternative perspectives to light. This resistance to Western progressivism has been a key aspect of the international context for a long time and the war between the Allied nations and Japan was the first and most terrible example of a flare-up of these tensions. By understanding this catastrophe, we can make sense of more recent conflicts as well, since Japan was the first country to challenge the West in modern times.
From a progressive perspective, one might say that leading Zen teachers supported Japanese nationalism during the World War II era due to the continued strength of hierarchy, role conformity, and ethnocentric attitudes. In other words, they were influenced by the premodern worldview and attitudes that still prevailed. These Zen masters were unable to go beyond a feudal outlook, despite their spiritual practice and awakening. Thus, their experience of common humanity was limited to members of the same ethnic group. The social structure held back their personal maturation, leaving them at an ethnocentric level and preventing universalist thought from taking hold.
You may ask whether these Zen masters were really enlightened. They were eminent Zen priests, certified by their tradition for having met all the necessary criteria. Yet, they could not transcend the limitations of the consensus reality that prevailed.in Japan. For those with a progressive view of history, this is often the end of the story. But we need to look beyond the progressive outlook to gain clarity and perspective on what occurred. The inclusion of additional factors like the world situation and the relationship between Japan and the West is needed.
Japanese Identity in the Modern World
Japanese thought has tended to be focused more on particular things than on universal matters that require logical modes of discussion. Although there is no question that Japan did not excel at systematic philosophy and abstract ideas for most of its history, a dramatic change occurred in the 20th century. The Kyoto philosophers under the leadership of Kitaro Nishida set out to explain Japanese Buddhist thought in Western philosophical terms as part of their country’s efforts to modernize and find a place within the contemporary world. Their accomplishments put to rest any ideas about Japanese aversion to logic and abstract thought. They proved to be highly proficient in academic philosophy. This is an excellent example of a shift from a mythic to a rational framework, that is, from a premodern to a modern one.
It is vital to understand the historical background that led to such a momentous shift, not only in ways of thinking but in all aspects of life. The vast changes that Japanese culture experienced due to the encounter with Western imperialism resulted in a trauma of great proportions. In Japan’s modern experience, what took Western people centuries to go through was experienced within decades. Dislocation, losing one’s bearings, and entering a world of great uncertainty ruled by others made it urgent to construct a new national identity. The emperor system provided the one rock of stable identity in a world of unceasing change and unprecedented novelty. The emperor took on a political role as he was assigned sovereignty over the people and became divine. Mythologies were then built up around the imperial family as well as the Japanese nation and people.
Japanese rational consciousness became much stronger as modern science and technology were quickly mastered and an industrial economy was built in a short number of years. However, in the area of values, a mythic orientation gained strength, and in the 1930s government and public turned strongly against Western ways, emphasizing the superiority of their own culture. The nationalists rejected the notion that modernization would lead Japan to converge with the West. Their aspiration was for Japan to overcome modernity, to break Western political and cultural dominance, and to offer the imperial system as a model for other nations.
The Kyoto philosophers, despite their mastery of Western philosophy, embraced Japanese nationalism. Can this be attributed to their acceptance of the mythic understanding of religion and politics that characterized much Japanese thinking at the time? In fact, Kitaro Nishida (1870–1945), the leading Kyoto philosopher, was favorable toward the imperial family for being the symbol of Japan’s becoming a unified nation that has taken its place in the modern world. He also found the myth of the imperial family and the founding of the nation to be essential. Yet, he was Japan’s greatest modern philosopher and brought Japanese philosophy into dialogue with the other leading world philosophies.
The Nationalist Cause
To make sense of prewar Japanese nationalism, it is important to see what was at stake for Nishida, the Kyoto philosophers, and the Zen world. Japan’s war had two aspects. On the one hand, it was a war of aggression whose driving force was the army. Japan had become an imperialist power and it imposed unequal treaties on Korea and China at the same time it was pressuring the Western powers to get rid of the unequal treaties they had forced Japan to accept. If imperialism were the full explanation of why the country was at war, then Japanese nationalists were ethnocentric.
But many Japanese nationalists did not defend their cause in military or even economic terms. They appealed to the liberation of Asia and to Japan’s taking its place in a new plural world order. These were the ideas that captured many Japanese people’s hearts and minds, and they were central to the Kyoto school’s support for the war. Nishida’s strategy was to influence the military away from a policy of aggression against East-Asian countries toward one more in line with the spiritual ideals he believed that Japan stood for. Most of the Kyoto philosophers had practiced Zen and thought that Japanese spirituality could renew a world corrupted by Western materialism, where self-interest and competitiveness had long been dominant.
They wanted Japan to fulfill its vocation as a nation by taking advantage of this opportunity to create an East-Asian sphere where higher spiritual values could be realized. Many Japanese were outraged at the Western colonization of East Asia, and believed that Japan’s growing military might required it to stand up to Western colonialism. Japanese people appeared to embody the rise of Asia. After all, the first great event of the twentieth century for Asians was Japan’s victory over Russia in 1904. During the Pacific War, Japan’s efforts to throw out the Western colonizers from Asia gave the independence movements momentum which led to their eventual success.
A large portion of the Japanese spiritual elites took a nationalistic stance against the Western powers. However, many did not see themselves as ethnocentric; their desire was for justice. From a Western liberal perspective, though, the tragedy of the Pacific War is due to Japan’s embrace of militarism and the failure to adopt liberal democracy.
Nationalism East and West
We should not downplay the similarities between modern Japanese and Western societies of the time: they all treated the nation state with an almost religious reverence. These nations were, and still are, fully committed to a world system in which the nation state is the vehicle of their aspirations, to further their national interest is their supreme goal, and power is the dominant currency. This is the modern consciousness whose institutional formation can be traced back to the Westphalia Treaty of 1648 that ended the religious wars and brought the nation-state system into being in the West. It was in this era that morality and politics were also decisively separated in Western liberalism.
My claim is not that modern nation states have never chosen a moral path over one that served the interest of the national ego. There may be such instances but they have been few. A moral distinction is often made between fascist and ethnocentric Japan and the democratic and universalist West but this distinction doesn’t hold up when we examine actual relations between them.
US-Japan wartime actions as expressed through popular culture as well as academic writing are thoroughly and skillfully analyzed by John Dower in War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986). Dower calls the Pacific War a “race war” and demonstrates how stereotypes and overt racism led to less effective military planning and intelligence, atrocities, and willingness to destroy the opponent. The dehumanization of the Other made it much easier to perpetrate not only the well-known Japanese atrocities on the battlefield but also for the US government to make Japanese civilian populations deliberate targets of conventional and nuclear attacks. Dower also shows that the images of the Other were archetypes that characterize unequal human relations in general and go back several centuries in both cases.
The Western Allies pictured Japanese as subhuman, as apes and vermin, or as childish, primitive, and mentally and emotionally defective. These images remind us of the Yellow Peril sentiment around the turn of the twentieth century, which itself suggests stereotypes of nonwhite peoples during the era of empire and colonization that extend even to ancient times. On the other hand, the Japanese imagination viewed Americans and Europeans as monsters, devils, and demons, and relied on the notion of “proper place” to justify their conception of hierarchy in which they were the leading race. The idea of “proper place” goes back to the Confucian classics originally from China. There were also appeals to ideals of purity, which come out of the Shinto purification rituals. And the idea of the outsider as devil is a traditional one; however, it is a two-sided image in which the outsider may either bring good fortune or evil.
Although it is understandable why the Japanese spiritual elites supported the anti-imperialist cause, their naivete about Japanese government policy is striking, since Japan’s record of colonization over the previous decades was unambiguous. John Maraldo, the co-editor of Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (1994), gives us needed perspective by comparing Japan’s prewar mission to bring freedom and prosperity to East Asia with that of the postwar United States.
The US mission was to create a new world order to bring all people together to achieve humanity’s universal aspirations. It would do this by bringing peace and prosperity to the “underdeveloped world.” Maraldo expresses this popular sentiment in the following terms that echo prewar Japan: “America is a superior nation incorporating various ethnic groups, that, by virtue of its moral sense of justice and economic and military strength, has a duty to advance and protect its values globally.” You only have to substitute “Japan” for “America,” “spiritual development” for “economic development,” and “race for ethnicity.”
Yet there is much Western resistance to seeing imperial Japan and its level of consciousness as similar to that of its wartime opponents and of America today. The Second World War is viewed as having been fought in the name of freedom and democracy against a totalitarian foe known for its brutality and ruthlessness. But as I have shown, much more was going on, which is part of a broader issue: what Western filters have made it difficult to perceive the peoples of Asia and Islam,?
Keiji Nishitani on Japanese Religion and Politics
Why do many Western people, including those with a spiritual outlook, have difficulties understanding “Eastern” histories and cultures? Since conditioning, education, and media on the Eastern civilizations tends to be rather uniform and quite pervasive, it often takes unfamiliar sources of information for people to question their perceptions. Here I will bring us closer to prewar Japanese spiritual perspectives by describing what Keiji Nishitani (1900–1990), a very accomplished and influential Kyoto philosopher, wrote about nationalism and said about the war. His example brings out many sides of the Japanese religious and political experience from the overall perspective of the Zen world. Then, I will compare Nishitani’s Zen outlook in the most general terms with that of the Enlightenment.
Nishitani was a prominent political thinker in the prewar era who largely stopped writing about politics after the war. His postwar work Religion and Nothingness (1961), translated into English in 1982, was very positively received in the West. The gravity and relevance of his message that modern civilization was engulfed in nihilism which could only be overcome by the salvational Eastern concept of absolute nothingness struck a chord.
Nishitani’s prewar writings on political philosophy when coupled with his wartime statements are a puzzle. During the postwar period, he said his motive for writing a notable early work on political philosophy was to “open up a path within thought that might overcome from within the ideas of ultranationalism that were taking control at the time.” Nishitani equates globality with spirituality and asserts that the nation’s relation to globality is through negating itself, transcending itself, that is, as a non-ego, which is its true subjectivity. This conception of the nation as non-ego supersedes the Western worldview based on reason, making a place for the Eastern outlook in the world, especially found in Japan, that is based on practice.
Western thought views the world as an object and perceives reality from the outside, whereas the Eastern orientation takes us further. It brings together at the surface through practice what lies at the depths of all thought, while not losing its interpretive power. “Such practices can be performed by anyone but exhausted by no one. They can be understood to perfection by anyone in an instant, yet contain within themselves unlimited potential for further insight.” Nishitani makes extraordinary claims for the Japanese worldview that has arisen from such religious practice. It surpasses the scholarship and arts of all other countries and belongs to a culture that Japan can hold up proudly to the world and to human culture.
For Nishitani, modernity resulted in the decline of Japan’s spiritual tradition and the weakening of its moral energy, leaving a spiritual void. His hope is not to return to the past but to make use of tradition to create new possibilities. Modernity’s worldview has become fragmented so that religion, science, and culture are in conflict with each other. This modern dilemma is not just that of the West but of Japan as well; since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan, too, has become modern, driven by external imperatives but also by powerful inner motives. Modernity’s key challenge is for religion to find a ground for culture, history, and ethics on the one hand and science on the other so that an integrated worldview comes into being.
From late 1941 until late 1942, a well-known Japanese journal published three discussions among four Kyoto philosophers that centered on the theme: “Japan and the Standpoint of World History.” In the postwar era, their comments were denounced for glorifying war and justifying Japanese fascism. In the case of Nishitani, critics have singled out his particular assertions that only the Allied Western powers were imperialists and not the Axis powers including Japan. Nishitani said Japan’s role as a world-historical race was to raise up the peoples of East Asia, overthrow Western imperialism, and bring into existence a new world order. In addition, Japan deserved to be designated the leading or superior race by virtue of the achievements of its people.
Nishitani’s political writings, especially when viewed in light of his wartime utterances, were taken as undemocractic by the Allied Occupation Forces, and he was purged. Yet, it is very difficult to connect many of the things Nishitani wrote against nationalism with his wartime statements. How could he have believed that the Japanese government might actually carry out its “world-historical” role by means of war?
It is not easy to put the pieces together. Nishitani was part of a group that had been in consultation with the navy during the war in an attempt to control the ultranationalist army. The hard-right supporters of the Imperial Way saw Nishitani and the Kyoto philosophers as too cosmopolitan and not sufficiently nationalist. In contrast, after the war Nishitani was excoriated by the dominant left for providing intellectual respectability to Japanese imperialism and fascism. But his attempts to revision Christianity and Buddhism have resonated among scholars.
The Zen World and the Enlightenment
My treatment of Nishitani’s philosophy enables us to see just where the Kyoto school’s interpretation of history diverges from the Enlightenment in general. Nishitani’s approach, like that of the Kyoto School, is not progressive. For him, the modern world is experiencing a disintegration of the very foundations that make a worldview possible. A worldview is people’s understanding of their place in the world and with the world, and modern people don’t know how to conceive of themselves.
Here we are at the heart of Nishitani’s argument against the progressive outlook: religion expresses our core need to transcend our humanity by surrendering it to what is Absolute. In other words, religion underlies a worldview in which the good, beautiful, and true which affirm our humanity coexist and interact with science which is neutral toward value.
Since progressives tend to equate premodern societies with mythic consciousness, they see the religion of the spiritual elites as having little impact on the society as a whole. Therefore, they would reject Nishitani’s characterization of premodern Japanese culture in terms of the highest ideals of the Buddhist tradition, that of absolute nothingness as well as his attempts to place the aesthetic attainment associated with Zen spiritual awakening square in the midst of Japanese tradition.
Let’s be clear. Nishitani is not opposed to science and does not recommend a return to medieval times. His aim is to recover the spiritual traditions so they can serve as a catalyst for building a new religious worldview. But Nishitani does not share progressives’ optimism. The modern world was not meeting the challenge to overcome nihilism during his lifetime. Nishitani saw the need for an existential reckoning with the obstacles to the realization of absolute nothingness in the modern age. Humanism and science were unable to guide us in the overcoming of nihilism. A great danger was that the widespread technological manipulation and control of things was turning the world into an object, the expression of an extreme dualistic consciousness.
Progressives do not question modernity at such a basic level, since they view the advance of science and technology in overall positive terms. They are not sympathetic to existential philosophers like Heidegger (with whom Nishitani studied) who see our times as especially perilous, the question of technology looming over us. However, this does not mean that important Western spiritual thinkers and Nishitani do not have striking points of agreement, notably with regard to nihilism which they agree has led to a crisis of meaning. There is no question that the modern world has lost its central source of meaning and value.
Spiritual progressives want science and spirituality to be given equal value, whereas Nishitani makes spiritual traditions central. For progressives such a standpoint appears antimodern, a going back in time to premodern religion when myth and irrationality were rampant. In the West, for example, it was when the Catholic Church was politically powerful and a reactionary force that prevented the growth of modern science and kept a vastly unequal social order in place. So the Reformation and then the Enlightenment were needed to cleanse a corrupt social order and make way for social progress. But religion did not have a powerful role in Japan’s prewar society, since it was securely under state control in the case of Shinto or else a marginal political force as with Buddhism. A different predicament confronted sensitive and aware Japanese.
Japanese idealists could not surmount a basic contradiction. They wanted to usher in a spiritually oriented society yet the Japanese government’s enthusiastic acceptance of modern science and technology as well as many political, economic, and educational institutions ensured that Japan would take on many of the negative features of the West. In this regard, I would single out the nation-state system geared to economic growth in the service of augmenting national power. Despite the desire to preserve Japanese distinctiveness and a spiritually and aesthetically rich country and people, it was a lost cause. Instead, the result was Japanese imperialism in imitation of the West and a disastrous war. They did not realize that you could not have a religious society that aimed at securing maximum national power. And the overwhelming priority of the Japanese government was clearly the latter.
It is instructive that in the postwar era, the Kyoto philosopher Masao Abe, mentored by D.T. Suzuki completely renounced any association between Zen and the nation. Actively engaged in interfaith dialogue and continuing Suzuki’s work of explaining Zen to the West, Abe took a resolutely universalist stance that emphasized the role of the world’s religions in the realization of a single human identity. Humanity is sovereign, not the state nor its people, and the nation state is a historical evil. Since he saw religion as a catalyst for attaining human unity, Zen had to avoid the trap of not-thinking and ethical and social passivity. Only action from the space of no-mind is truly free, and this is the starting point for creating humane social and political philosophies. In this way, Abe brought together the traditional and the modern, enlisting spiritual traditions in service of the Enlightenment ideal of one humanity.
The Dynamics of History
Both Japan and the West must be seen as modern if we are to understand the Second World War and the perspective of the leading practitioners and philosophers within Zen. The progressive assumption that Japanese people, including the Zen world, were trapped in a premodern feudal outlook does not get us very far. But we have not answered Nishitani’s challenge as to whether premodern Japanese society was actually more conducive to people’s wellbeing than its modern successor due to its spiritual worldview. Unhesitatingly, Nishitani is casting doubt on the key assumption of the progressive view of history that individual and social development takes place over time because it builds on what came before and then advances further.
But how can this issue be resolved? The first difficulty is assessing to what degree premodern Japanese culture, for example, in the Muromachi (1336–1568) and Edo (1603–1868) periods, was influenced by higher spiritual ideals such as those of Zen. In his classic Zen and Japanese Culture (1938), D.T. Suzuki made the claim that in contrast to other Buddhist sects whose impact was mostly in spiritual life, “Zen has entered internally into every phase of the cultural life of the Japanese people.” This influence occurred largely in the Muromachi period, and Suzuki is referring, in particular, to the traditional arts of Japan which have indeed gained a high reputation not only in Japan but around the world. These arts include tea ceremony, ink painting, calligraphy, haiku, and swordsmanship. Zen also promoted a way of life where wabi (simplicity) and sabi (archaic unpretentiousness) were appreciated, while nature was given a kind of religious reverence.
The second difficulty is determining the overall cultural richness and the quality of community life. These were times of military rule with long periods of warfare among rival feudal clans. Poverty was rife. The caste system was rigid. Yet, especially during times of war, it was difficult to enforce the strict rules of the social order. There were public spaces where people could temporarily cast off their ascribed status in order to relate as equals.
Three prominent examples of such horizontal relations are the ikki that became politically active, consisted of peasants, priests, small landowners, and merchants, and were often connected with the Pure Land Buddhist sect; gatherings at places connected with the sacred including frenzied dancing viewed as expressions of holy madness; and the numerous poetry groups such as those practicing linked verse frequented by all levels of the social order, even the nobility. These were strong publics whose impact diminished once the Tokugawa family in 1603 centralized military rule, bringing peace to the country, and took up repressive policies that suppressed independent networks outside its control. In the Edo period, the public realms took on a more purely aesthetic character, unlike those in the West that had a more deliberative orientation. Art became totally non-political, a departure from earlier times when the boundary between art and politics was more fluid.
What are the implications of this brief excursion into the premodern Japanese social and cultural world for understanding historical dynamics? Is Nishitant justified in seeing traditional life despite the material deprivation as preferable to the spiritual poverty of modern Japan. Was there a richness of life for those who cultivated the inner world in alignment with the spiritual traditions that most modern Japanese lack? If this is the case, then the passage from a more traditional world to modernity cannot be viewed as progress. Advances were made in some areas but not in others; the blossoming of the inner life is at least as valuable as comfort and convenience; military rule was repressive and the social order was tightly regulated but governments and the nobility could not always enforce their wishes. They did not have the modern technology that enables less overt but more insidious forms of control in our time.
There has also been a shift in perspective in the West as its confidence in the inevitably of progress through technological advance has waned. The lack of moral development corresponding to accelerating technical prowess has placed humanity in danger as nuclear war is an ever-present threat. The pursuit of unlimited economic growth is leading to ecological breakdown. Increasing inequality is accompanied by greater social divisions and political polarization. Community life evaporates as people struggle to find belonging. The lack of a spiritual anchor has led to more and more people finding less and less meaning in their lives. Fewer significant social connections and the loss of contact with the higher realms have resulted in the decline of mental and physical health. It is no longer evident as it once was that the modern world is a significant advance over what came before.
In other words, history over the past thousand years at least is the record of advances and retreats, gains and losses. The Japanese example, and the record of Islamic civilization as well, support this sober appraisal of historical development and this questioning of the idea of progress.
