Tanaka, on the one hand, inherited the totalizing vision of his medieval Nichiren Buddhist forebears, in which temporal government, and indeed, all worldly activities, would someday be based on the Lotus Sūtra. On the other hand, Tanaka’s reinterpretation was innovative, in being indissolubly linked to the modern imperial state. In the latter part of his career, he increasingly identified “the Lotus Sūtra” with the Japanese national essence, an interpretive move that raised the Japanese kokutai to the status of universal truth and served to legitimate the armed extension of Japanese empire.

[Following the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905)] Tanaka consciously shifted his efforts from internal reform of the Nichiren sect to “study of the national essence” (kokutaigaku), by which name he termed his attempt to interpret the Japanese kokutai from the standpoint of Nichirenshugi. The notion of Japan’s unique national essence formed the ideological pillar of the modern state; its key elements included the myth of an unbroken imperial line, descended directly from the Sun Goddess and her grandson, Emperor Jinmu, and the concept of the emperor as benevolent father to the “family” of his subjects. …

Tanaka first seriously addressed this issue in a lecture delivered in Nara in 1904, shortly before the war’s outbreak, to some two hundred participants in a study training session whom he had taken on a visit to Emperor Jinmu’s tomb. It was published as a pamphlet titled Seikai tōitsu no tengyō (The divine task of world unification), and several thousand copies distributed to soldiers departing for the front. Its central argument, in Buddhist terms, was that the kokutai is the truth to be interpreted (shoshaku), and Nichirenshugi, that which interprets it (nōshaku). Tanaka’s hermeneutical strategy, here and in later writings, was to homologize the Lotus Sūtra, or, more specifically, Nichirenshugi, with the Japanese national essence through a logic of analogy and numerical correspondence. From the legendary account of Emperor Jinmu’s founding of the Yamato kingdom, as related in the eighth-century chronicle Nihon Shoki, Tanaka drew three phrases describing Jinmu’s achievements—”fostering righteousness, accumulating happiness, and increasing glory”—which he identified as the three original acts that had established the Japanese kokutai. These he in turn equated with the three imperial regalia—the sword, mirror and jewel—and with Nichiren’s three great secret Dharmas: the daimoku, the object of worship, and the ordination platform. The mission of Japan was the divine task of world unification inherited from Emperor Jinmu, to extend the blessings of the kokutai to all people. It would be spearheaded by the emperor, who was at once both Jinmu’s lineal heir and also the “wheel-turning monarch” of Buddhist tradition, who supports and protects the Dharma. At the same time, its fulfillment required the spiritual basis provided by Nichirenshugi; incomplete religions, such as Christianity or other forms of Buddhism, could never supply it. “Nichirenism is precisely Japanism,” Tanaka wrote. “Nichiren Shōnin appeared in order to interpret Japan’s spiritual essence as Buddhist doctrine, providing all humanity throughout the ten thousands years of the Final Dharma age with the ultimate refuge. The great teaching of Nichiren is the religion for Japan, and the religion for Japan is the religion for the world.”

From this point, Tanaka’s writings increasingly suggest that the underlying purpose of the Lotus Sūtra and Nichiren’s teaching was to explicate the Japanese national essence.

The appeal of [Tanaka’s] vision to followers and sympathizers … lay not merely in its immediacy but in the central role it assigned to Japan and its resonance with both official ideology and the popular patriotic sentiments of the day, which had been fanned by Japanese victories in the wars with China (1894-1895) and Russia (1904-1905), the annexation of Korea (1910) and later imperial expansion on the Asian continent. The “Buddhahood of the land,” in the sense of peace, just rule, and the manifestation of the Lotus Sūtra’s blessings in all spheres of human activity, was something Nichiren himself had envisioned. But neither Nichiren nor his medieval followers had understood this goal as necessarily allied to any specific regime or form of government; whether court or Bakufu, any government that upheld the Lotus Sūtra would serve to help realize this ideal. For Tanaka, however, “the Buddhahood of the land” was to be exemplified, mediated, and extended to all humanity by the imperial Japanese state. Already in Shūmon no ishin, he had written:

At that time [when the kaidan is established]—being exhaustively interpreted in connection with our holy founder Nichiren, who in his own person manifested the original Buddha Śākyamuni and the original Dharma of the Lotus Sūtra—the sacred plan of the divine ancestors of great Japan, her wondrous and unsurpassed national essence [kokutai], and her imperial house, divinely descended in a direct line, will manifest their true worth. Thus the authority of our teaching and the light of our country will fill the universe and instruct the people of all nations. This will accomplish the spiritual unification of the world, without need of a single soldier or sword.

Nichiren Buddhism and Japan, in Tanaka’s view, shared a divine mission to unite the world.

Tanaka’s vision underwent elaboration in his lectures and writings over the … years. He divided the mappō era, the Final Dharma age for which the Lotus Sūtra was intended, into three periods: the founding period, when Nichiren had lived and declared his teaching; the era of dissemination, when faith in the Lotus Sūtra was destined to spread; and the era of unification, when all people would embrace it. For Tanaka, this era of unification would be the “golden age” of ōbutsu myōgō—the merging of the ruler’s dharma with the Buddha Dharma—another phrase he derived from the Sandai hihō shō. At this time, a majority of the nation having been converted, the Diet would pass an amendment revising the constitutional article allowing for freedom of religion and make Nichiren Buddhism the state creed, and an imperial edict would be issued to build the kaidan, thus formalizing the merger of Buddhism and government. Politics, society, ethics, thought—all would all be unified on the basis of the Lotus Sūtra, a goal that Tanaka referred to as the “realization of Buddhahood by the land” (kokudo jōbutsu). This goal was “not like heaven or the Pure Land, which are never actually expected to appear before our eyes. We predict, envision, and aim for it as a reality that we will definitely witness.”