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.