Japanese imperialism and the Chinese delegation to the Second General Conference of Pan-Pacific Young Buddhists’ Associations (1934)

Abstract In July 1934, the Second General Conference of Pan-Pacific Young Buddhists’ Associations was held in Tokyo and Kyoto. Despite the event’s grand scale, with roughly a thousand participants attending from across Asia and North America, and its aspiration to use Buddhist solidarity to promote international goodwill, only a handful of delegates represented the Republic of China. The general absence of Chinese Buddhist leaders was due to widespread anger over the conference organizers’ treating Manchukuo, Japan’s puppet state in Manchuria, as an independent nation in conference materials. Yet conference attendees (including Japanese, Chinese, and others) were not necessarily collaborationists who supported Japan’s imperial expansion, as some used the platform to criticize Japanese imperialism and the conference’s normalization of Manchukuo. This article uses this 1934 conference as a lens through which to examine the complex relations between Buddhists from Japan and China (and elsewhere) and Japan’s early wartime empire. It argues that many occupied a kind of ‘grey zone’ between collaboration and resistance, hoping that Buddhist institutions could promote genuinely peaceful international relations, but also aware that their involvement in Japanese projects could be used to help justify Japanese imperialism. It first provides an overview of the colonial and anti-colonial politics of international Buddhist conferences in the early twentieth century (with particular attention given to the First Pan-Pacific Young Men’s Buddhist Associations Conference held in Honolulu in 1930) before closely examining the organization of the second conference, especially the controversies that developed around the Chinese delegation that led to a near-boycott by Chinese Buddhists.