Japanese imperialism and the Chinese delegation to the Second General Conference of Pan-Pacific Young Buddhists’ Associations (1934)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In July 1934, the Second General Conference of Pan-Pacific Young Buddhists’ Associations was held in Tokyo and Kyoto. Despite the event’s grand scale, with roughly a thousand participants attending from across Asia and North America, and its aspiration to use Buddhist solidarity to promote international goodwill, only a handful of delegates represented the Republic of China. The general absence of Chinese Buddhist leaders was due to widespread anger over the conference organizers’ treating Manchukuo, Japan’s puppet state in Manchuria, as an independent nation in conference materials. Yet conference attendees (including Japanese, Chinese, and others) were not necessarily collaborationists who supported Japan’s imperial expansion, as some used the platform to criticize Japanese imperialism and the conference’s normalization of Manchukuo. This article uses this 1934 conference as a lens through which to examine the complex relations between Buddhists from Japan and China (and elsewhere) and Japan’s early wartime empire. It argues that many occupied a kind of ‘grey zone’ between collaboration and resistance, hoping that Buddhist institutions could promote genuinely peaceful international relations, but also aware that their involvement in Japanese projects could be used to help justify Japanese imperialism. It first provides an overview of the colonial and anti-colonial politics of international Buddhist conferences in the early twentieth century (with particular attention given to the First Pan-Pacific Young Men’s Buddhist Associations Conference held in Honolulu in 1930) before closely examining the organization of the second conference, especially the controversies that developed around the Chinese delegation that led to a near-boycott by Chinese Buddhists.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".