(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Nichirenism (Nichirenshugi ...), a current of lay Buddhist movements in early twentieth century Japan, has a reputation of being the bete noire of modern Japanese Buddhism. Its main proponent, Tanaka Chigaku ???? (1861-1931), merged a belief in the Lotus Sutra with the Japanese national polity (kokutai ??), the Japanese imperial line, and endorsed expansionism abroad. Not surprisingly, it has most often been described in terms of a nationalist distortion of religion, and as a Buddhist legitimation of the emperor system in support of the ruling class, and a form militant nationalism or Japanese fascism.1 Over the years, this characterization has come to be somewhat modified, and the phenomenon of Nichirenism has been gaining more attention from specialists in Buddhism, the sociology of religion, as well as literature, who take the religious aspects more seriously and approach Nichirenism more in the context of the modernization of Buddhism from the Meiji period.2 In this article, I will investigate the history of Ishiwara Kanji's ???? (1889-1949) East Asia League Movement (Toa renmei undo ?????? or Toa renmei kyokai ??????, hereafter abbreviated as eal), active during the AsiaPacific and immediate postwar era, and rethink how this movement should be understood as one important variant in the history of modern Nichirenism.Ishiwara, as a major architect of the Manchurian incident of 1931, for his Pan-Asianist ideology, and for his prediction of a final war between Asia (led by Japan) and the West (led by the United States), has in the traditional postwar interpretations fitted the image of the militarist or Nichirenist.3 While Ishiwara is a well-known figure whose seeming iconoclasm as a military thinker is a never-ending object of fascination, illustrated by the large number of biographies of him that have appeared over the years, his religious and philosophical ideas have remained less examined. Meanwhile, his movement, the eal, has received even less attention, and has usually been characterized in terms of Pan-Asianist support for the state, and has been taken much less seriously as a religious organization.4 One problem has been that in understanding the eal's program and world view, the focus has been largely on Ishiwara himself. In understanding the eal, Ishiwara's life and ideas are essential, since he was undoubtedly the leading figure, but scholars have not examined the various motivations of why other figures joined the eal and what impact they had on the movement. As I will show, there were many other important members of the eal, including women, farmers, and Koreans, who also played formative roles, often with their own and differing agendas. Also, amid a general tendency to treat Nichirenism as predominantly a prewar phenomenon, Ishiwara and the eal's post-1945 thought and activities received much less attention despite the movement's growth in the postwar period. And while a nationalist dimension is undeniable, in understanding the eal, the challenge is to balance this with the fact that several key aspects of its vision do not fit the characterization of nationalist ideology or a fascist legitimation of the state, and that in practice, the eal was heavily criticized by many ideologues, and suppressed by the wartime as well as the postwar Japanese state.In this article, I will focus less on Buddhist doctrinal aspects, but more on how the eal attempted to put Buddhist Nichirenist ideals into practice. Ishiwara and the eal were, I believe, much less concerned with doctrinal subtleties than the actual practical realization of Buddhism in this world, the creation of a Buddhist utopia in response to the wider crisis of modernity in the 1930s and 1940s. I will identify and analyze what I believe are some of the most salient characteristics of the eal's Buddhist program, focusing on the movement's religious engagement with questions of modernization, such as the nation-state, war, science and technology, and the role of women and minorities. …