One of the earliest articulations of postwar Lotus-inspired millennial hopes for peace can be found, astonishingly enough, in the last writings of General Ishiwara Kanji. …

Purged from public life and in failing health, Ishiwara retired in 1946 with a group of disciples to the village of Nishiyama on the Japan Sea, where he devoted his remaining years to pondering how Japan and the world might be regenerated through Nichiren’s teaching.  Before his death, he arrived at a new Lotus-inspired millennial vision, one that broke utterly with the violence he had previously advocated.

Ishiwara’s new vision called for establishment of a modern agrarian society in which the tasks of production would be performed communally by village units of about a dozen families and where men and women would rank equally, a person’s work being decided on the basis of ability rather than gender. In a long tract dictated shortly before his death in 1949, Ishiwara interpreted Nichiren’s prediction of a time when “the wind will not thrash the branches nor the rain fall hard enough to break clods” in terms of a future society in which science, politics, and religion were perfectly harmonized. Science, “having obtained the Buddha wisdom,” would enable control of the weather and eliminate the ravages of storms. Homes, villages, and factories, engineered by the new science, would be pleasantly integrated into a natural environment of forests and streams. For a few hours each day, everyone, even the imperial family, would work wholeheartedly in the fields, factories, or at other tasks. Then, in the ample leisure afforded by rational social management, people would devote themselves to study, art, dance, sport, or other pursuits.  An abundance of commodities would eliminate all inequity of distribution. Acute illness would be conquered by science, and chronic disease would vanish with a way of life that had “returned to nature.” Advances in flight technology would make the world smaller, “like a single town,” and through mixed marriages based on natural affection, “all humanity will gradually become a single race” (Ishiwara 1949, 128—30).

What had not changed in Ishiwara’s thinking was the notion of a unique role for Japan:

Our vows and efforts for risshō ankoku will surely be achieved in a few decades. The time when, throughout the world, all will embrace the Wonderful Dharma is approaching before our eyes. At this time, we who once tasted the wretchedness of defeat have gained the good fortune of receiving the supreme command to lead the world in establishing a nation without armaments. … Cleansing ourselves of the dross, both material and spiritual, of humanity’s prior history, we shall create a new Japan as a literal treasure realm, an actualized Buddha land, setting a correct course for human civilization. This will not only work to atone for the crimes against humanity committed in the Pacific War; it is the one, sole way by which to live. (1949, 126)