Haijime Kawakami was an economist and one of Japan’s first Marxist philosophers, born in the late 20th century. He published articles which aimed to educate workers in Marxist theory and provided the introduction for the Japanese translation of Marx’s Das Kapital.[1] His activity with the Japanese Communist Party led to his imprisonment in the 1920s, which was formative in his engagement with the Buddhist philosophy of Pure Land. Kawakami’s engagement with the Pure Land is significant, as he belonged to a new generation of secular Pure Land philosophers who aimed to identify and reconfigure the Pure Land independent of religious tradition. Alongside Miki Kiyoshi and Ienaga Saburo, Kawakami used his Marxist background to discuss the potential of the Pure Land as a tool for the liberation of the masses from the state.[2]
Kawakami’s Prison Ramblings, written in 1937 after his arrest because of his involvement in the Japanese Communist Party, reveal his adoption of Pure Land philosophy.[3] This is synthesised with Marxist ideas to create a new sphere in which to propagate a utopian Japanese vision of the future. Consequently, in this work, Kawakami contributed to the reconfiguration of the Pure Land as something accessible and mouldable in the secular sphere. Primarily, Kawakami speaks of a ‘consciousness of consciousness’. He believed that in order to gain a true understanding of ourselves (which was needed in an age of repressive state techniques and the blanket identity of Japanese modernisation) we must examine our own consciousness in an extraordinary way.[4] This acts as an internal reconsideration which places our thought processes beyond the present and extracts us from accepted contemporary thought. Kawakami’s process of reimagining the Pure Land is based on an internalisation of thought which leads to an expansion of the mind beyond traditional peripheries. As such, it is a process of negation that eliminates all thoughts in order to provide access to a sphere of personal realisation, an ‘estranging image’.[5] This is what gave Kawakami’s Pure Land the power against the state. It removes reality in order to lead to an internalised realisation which, in turn, resituates Kawakami in the here and now. This implies an entirely empty vision which extracts the mind from restrictive structures of the state and the physical possibility of the Pure Land and locates Kawakami’s thought in the abstract. It is a positive discovery of the internalised conscience.
The internalisation of thought can be traced to Kawakami’s experience in prison. tenko, or ideological conversion, was a popular technique for confession or release of a prisoner.[6] Kawakami’s attempts, as a secular man, to draw on Buddhist philosophy are therefore surprising due to this attempted suppression and coercion. However, the internalised nature of his thought suggests a physical and mental withdrawal from any association with the state and their narrative of conversion and suppression. Just as the Pure Land itself gave internalised liberation, the actual process of Kawakami’s philosophy and writing of his Prison Ramblings liberated him from the horror of the present moment. As such, the very process of modern Pure Land thought was just as significant as the Marxist ideology behind it. Kawakami’s thought in prison created a space which the state could not access and therefore gave him the freedom that Pure Land advocated. It allowed him to create a solution to tradition, and from the very entrapment of his prison cell, force liberation and globalisation of philosophy. Kawakami’s Pure Land was a product of his Marxist thought- a rejection of the structures of state which literally surrounded him in prison, and emphasis on the individual. A connection with others philosophical liberation grounded him in the Marxist ideal of a communal victory for the masses, whilst his Pure Land remained abstracted within the self.
Kawakami’s Pure Land was revolutionary. He used Marxist theory to reject the structures of the state and remove the need for a centrally controlled paradise. His Pure Land was accessible only individually, through the internalisation of thought and negation of the constrictions of the present world. This was Kawakami’s way of waging revolution on the Japanese government when he was physically restricted in the present world. It was also a philosophical revolution in the sense that Kawakami had no Buddhist background. He uprooted Pure Land philosophy from its traditional religious sphere and opened it up as a possibility for secular philosophers and ordinary people. Both these revolutionary aspects reveal Kawakami’s desire to create a Pure Land which was accessible to the masses, via their own resource of the inner mind. The internalisation which Kawakami advocated can be seen as a philosophical representation of his tangible experiences in the present world. Imprisonment, coercion, and his end of life in the days after World War Two, where briefly, the possibility of a globalised world had become apparent. Kawakami’s internalised Pure Land was a modernist and globalised vision which sought to project this philosophy into the future.
[1] Melissa Curley, Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists and the Utopian Imagination (Honolulu, 2017), pp.86-87.
[2] Curley, Pure Land, Real World, p.84.
[3] Curley, Pure Land, Real World, p.89.
[4] Curley, Pure Land, Real World, p.97.
[5] Curley, Pure Land, Real World, p.29.
[6] Curley, Pure Land, Real World, p.92.