FOREIGN RELATIONS OF BUDDHISM
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tions, he spent the first year on language study in Tokyo, then a year at Otani University, and a final year at the Mampukuji outside Kyoto, which is the most Chinese of Japanese Zen monasteries. He was very politely treated. When I asked (perhaps tactlessly) whether the Japanese Government did not have a policy of trying to use Buddhism to subdue China, he replied with some sharpness: "I was not utilized by them. That was not the way they behaved towards me." He said, however, that other monks who had gone to Japan were looked on as collaborators when they returned, and some had had to change their names. Other informants have stated that after victory in 1945 several high-ranking monks in Shanghai were imprisoned for collaboration with the Japanese and one was executed in Canton.18
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Quaritch Wales in an article written at the height of the war summarized the Japanese use of Buddhism as follows. “Buddhist propaganda has for several years been carried on by the New Asia Bureau of the Dai Nippon Buddhist Association, which is under the joint control of the Japanese Education and War Ministries. It is responsible for all missionary work in East Asia and long before Pearl Harbour was already deeply entrenched in north China. There, the more systematically to further its ends, the New Asia Bureau had established Sino-Japanese Buddhist Associations at Hangchow, Amoy, and Nanking, subsidized by the Special Service Section of the Army, naturally not with purely religious motives.”19
Most of this, sensational though it may sound, is confirmed by the semi-official Japanese source already referred to in the notes, that is, the 1943 Yearbook of the Great Harmony Religious Alliance of Central China. The Great Harmony Alliance had been set up in accordance with a religious work policy formulated by the Japanese Military Intelligence Bureau in October, 1938.20 It was "under the direction and supervision of the military authorities." Throughout a series of bureaucratic changes over the next four years, its purposes remained the same: 1) to coordinate and control Japanese religious groups in central China; and 2) to promote their cooperation with Chinese counter-parts. To this latter end the Alliance set up at least a dozen Japanese-Chinese Buddhist associations, of which those that existed in November 1940 formed the Japanese-Chinese Buddhist
21