One might well argue that Tanaka Chigaku’s principal importance lies not so much in what he said but in whom he influenced. Although most of his followers were humble folk, rather far down on the ladder of success, however it might be measured, a fairly large, and surprisingly varied, group of important people counted themselves among his disciples: Takayama Chogyū, who though tragically short-lived is now reckoned to have been one of the Meiji period’s pre-eminent scholars; Anesaki Masaharu, perhaps Japan’s most influential interpreter of Buddhism to Western readers; Miyazawa Kenji, a farmer-poet of sublime genius; Inoue Nisshō, a radical terrorist active in a number of ultranationalist plots in the 1930s; and Ishiwara Kanji, an army officer who regarded the Mukden Incident, which he helped plan, as the first stage in the spreading of the Kingly Way throughout the world.

But what inspired these people and led to the achievements in which Tanaka took pride was Nichirenism, and so we return to the paradoxical fact that what makes Tanaka, basically anti-intellectual, important derives from his scholarship. Like other Buddhists, Tanaka was able to find in the teachings of Nichiren, with their chauvinistic overtones, ample support for the secular government of Japan. But he went beyond this, and it was in his ideas of syncretism, his reinterpretation of Nichiren Buddhism in Shinto terms, that he made his unique contribution to modern Japanese life. He imbued Buddhism with a nationalistic bias that made it possible not only for an individual believer to support his political leaders unswervingly, but for the Buddhist church itself, as a vehicle to facilitate the achievement of political ends, to assert itself positively in the secular world from which it had long been excluded. The impact of Nichirenism upon mainstream Nichiren Buddhism cannot be accurately measured, but it was certainly felt.