Zen Terror in Prewar Japan: Portrait of an Assassin by Brian Daizen Victoria (review)

With Zen Terror in Prewar Japan: Portrait of an Assassin, Brian Victoria brings to a close his trilogy examining the ways that Japanese Zen Buddhist thought served, over the course of the twentieth century, to variously motivate, enable, legitimate, and excuse state violence. The publisher's description for Zen Terror tells us that this third book "explodes the myth of Zen Buddhism as a peaceful religion." This perhaps does not do justice to the profound impact of the earlier books in the series, Zen at War (Weatherhill, 1997) and Zen War Stories (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), on both Zen institutions and Buddhist studies. As Victoria notes in the preface to Zen Terror, his Zen at War was cited by Rinzai Zen and Sanbō-kyōdan leaders as "one of the catalysts" spurring those institutions to issue "formal apologies for their sect's wartime complicity" (p. xvi); his work has likewise been required reading for students of Japanese religion for the last two decades. Alongside those readers who will come to Zen Terror with a naive understanding of Zen Buddhism as a peaceful religion then, there will be others whose sense of that history, informed directly or indirectly by Victoria's influential earlier work, is already more complex. These latter readers may also have grappled with some of the other studies of Buddhism and violence that have appeared in the years since Zen at War was first published, including, for example, work by Juliane Schober, Jacob Dalton, the many scholars represented in Vladimir Tikhonov and Torkel Brekke's edited volume Buddhism and Violence: Militarism and Buddhism in Modern Asia, and of course the field-defining contributions of Michael K. Jerryson.¹

Zen Terror does not, however, engage these more recent examinations of Buddhism and violence. This observation is intended not as a criticism but as an indication of the kind of book Victoria set out to write: not an academic volume but a book that might find a large popular audience, and in doing so be able to effectively continue the trilogy's work of moral suasion, prompting Zen Buddhists first "to honestly admit" that "elements/teachings that have been used to justify, even encourage, the use of violence" exist within the tradition and then to "address" them (p. 235). This process of self-critique and self-correction is absolutely required, Victoria writes, if we are ever to "save the blood-soaked boat called 'religion'" (p. 232). With such a project in mind, Victoria seeks in Zen Terror to "take readers inside the mind, inside the very 'skin,' of one terrorist leader" (p. 8): Inoue Nisshō (1887–1967), the head of a group dubbed the Blood Oath Corps (Ketsumeidan), which in 1932 carried out a plot resulting in the assassinations of banker and politician Inoue Junnosuke (1869–1932) and business magnate Takuma Dan (1858–1932). This is not, Victoria writes, "an objective history" (p. 8); readers interested in such a thing are directed to "the many academic books and articles describing this period and the role Inoue and his terrorist band played in it" (p. 7) (although Victoria also calls into question "the degree of objectivity or simple accuracy" of such works, insofar as they identify Inoue as influenced primarily by Nichiren Buddhism rather than by Zen). In reviewing Zen Terror in this journal then, I am conscious that I am reading it at cross-purposes, focused on what Victoria's academic readers might discover in a text that is not primarily intended for them.

The core of the book is a "life-history" of Inoue (p. 5), unfolding in ten chapters which take us from Inoue's "troubled youth" through his time as a mercenary, spy, and army interpreter in China, his experiments with religious practice upon his return to Japan, the Ketsumeidan Incident and its aftermath—which saw Inoue first imprisoned and then installed as an advisor to Prince...