ANKEI Yuji

From the late Edo period to the early Meiji era, Shin Buddhist monks such as Shimaji Mokurai (島地黙雷), Ōzu Tetsunen (大洲鉄然), Akamatsu Renjō (赤松連城), and Kagawa Hōkō (香川葆晃) achieved remarkable political prominence. After Gesshō’s (月性) death, they carried on his legacy by participating directly and indirectly in the anti-shogunate movement. After the Meiji Restoration, they promptly moved to Kyoto to initiate reforms in Hongwanji’s (本願寺) religious administration. Furthermore, they opposed the Buddhism abolition movement (廃仏毀釈) and the new Meiji government’s policy of establishing Shinto as the state religion. Throughout this process, they consistently used Shin Buddhism as an example, arguing to new government officials from Chōshū/Yamaguchi like Kido Takayoshi that Buddhism was a religion essential to the new state. The author introduces over forty newly discovered official appointments and certificates received by Hōkō, the least researched of these four Chōshū-affiliated Shin Buddhist priests who played such active roles, and explains the historical context of each document.

The aim of this paper is to examine historical materials that show the political and military roles played by Buddhist priests during the civil war at the end of the Edo era, when the Tokugawa shogunate was opposed by various clans. They overthrew the old regime and ushered in the Meiji era, when the emperor reigned. During the Edo era when today’s Yamaguchi Prefecture was known as the Chōshū clan, Shin Buddhism priests belonging to temples in the clan’s territory set up a new school for monks to learn both liberal arts and French style martial arts to prevent Buddhism and temples, which were linked to the Tokugawa shogunate, from being destroyed. This study focuses on one of the priests involved in this movement, Kagawa Hōkō, and aims to clarify the reality of previously undocumented espionage activities using three historical documents. The third document is a transcript of an interview with the mother of a merchant in Osaka who was a supporter of the Chōshū clan’s espionage activities. It provides specific details about how the spies raised the funds they needed, how they communicated their information, and how they evaded the authorities by moving from one hiding place to another. There was also a monk, a spy mate of Hōkō, who abandoned his espionage duties and instead spent the money on sake and geisha. He ended up abducting a geisha and ran away, which led to Hōkō being imprisoned by both the shogunate’s Shinsengumi and the Chōshū clan on two separate occasions. After this, Hōkō and his comrades became responsible priests at the heart of the administration of the Shin Buddhism Hongwanji sect in the Meiji era, and he became the president of a university established by the sect, but in his twenties, he was involved in military activities like this. This is a new and interesting specific case that has previously been undocumented.