Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution
by: James Edward Ketelaar

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with mild fading, 285 pages. How did Buddhism, so prominent in Japanese life for over a thousand years, become the target of severe persecution in the social and political turmoil of the early Meiji era? How did it survive attacks against it and reconstitute itself as an increasingly articulate and coherent belief system and a bastion of the Japanese national heritage? Here James Ketelaar elucidates not only the development of Buddhism in the late nineteenth century but also the strategies of the Meiji state. Clean copy.