BD. Edmund Blunden

33. ‘The Japanese Pilgrimage’. Review of History of Japanese Religion, by Masaharu Anesaki. Nation & Athenaeum 47 (July 1930): 502.

Opens with a striking prose description of Japanese in religious settings, Christian, Buddhist, and Shintô, before turning to ‘the noble singleness of purpose, and extraordinary intellectual accomplishments’ of Anesaki (1873-1949), the foremost scholar of Japanese religion in the first half of the century, who would have been at Tokyo Imperial University during Blunden’s tenure there, and later was an acquaintance of Empson (see BF21b3). What follows is a knowledgeable summary of Anesaki’s work, which finds Blunden again offering English readers comparisons with their own traditions (see also 5 and 100). Nichiren ‘was a kind of Wesley’, and the ‘age of Bushido . . . correspond[s] to our Restoration’. Includes reference to Tokugawa Ieyasu and Iemitsu (Ap), and to the persecution of Christians during the years of the Tokugawa reign.