by Brian Vic­to­ria
2003, Rout­ledge­Cur­zon
ISBN 0700715819
272 pages.

From dust jacket
Fol­low­ing the crit­i­cally acclaimed Zen at War (Weath­er­hill Pub­lish­ers, 1997), Vic­to­ria now explores the inti­mate and sup­port­ive rela­tion­ship between Japan­ese insti­tu­tional Bud­dhism and mil­i­tarism dur­ing the Sec­ond World War. He reveals for the first time, based on the wartime writ­ings of the Japan­ese mil­i­tary itself, that the Zen school’s view of life and death was delib­er­ately incor­po­rated into the military’s pro­gramme of ‘spir­i­tual edu­ca­tion’ so as to develop a fanat­i­cal mil­i­tary spirit in both sol­diers and civil­ians. Fur­ther­more, it is revealed that D.T. Suzuki, the most famous expo­nent of Zen in the West, was a wartime expo­nent of this Zen-inspired view­point which enabled Japan­ese sol­diers to leave for the bat­tle­field already resigned to death. Vic­to­ria demon­strates how even cham­pi­ons of Japan’s new reli­gions strove to incul­cate ser­vice to the state and loy­alty to the emperor in gen­er­a­tions of pre-war Japan­ese school chil­dren. The book also exam­ines the rela­tion­ship to Bud­dhism of Japan’s seven class-A war crim­i­nals, hung by the Tokyo War Crimes Tri­bunal. A highly con­tro­ver­sial study, this book will be of inter­est not only to those study­ing the his­tory of the period, but also to any­one con­cerned with the peren­nial ques­tion of the ‘proper’ rela­tion­ship between reli­gion and state.

Brian Daizen Vic­to­ria is a senior Lec­turer at the Cen­ter for Asian Stud­ies, the Uni­ver­sity of Adelaide.

“Zen Holy War?” review by Josh Baran

THIS BOOK IS IN PRINT.
Avail­able com­mer­cially. Learn more about Brian Vic­to­ria.