Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution

James Ketelaar's Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan is a scholarly study of Buddhism's persecution during Japan's early Meiji era, when the new government's push toward State Shinto and its haibutsu kishaku movement targeted Buddhist institutions, and of how Buddhist leaders responded and repositioned the tradition in the decades that followed. Ketelaar is a recognized historian of Japanese religion and the book is published by Princeton University Press. Its authority rests on close use of period documentary sources and on its influential reframing of Meiji Buddhism as an active respondent to persecution rather than a passive victim. Its limit is period focus, concentrated on the Meiji era's specific crisis and its immediate aftermath, so a claim about Buddhism's earlier Tokugawa era standing or its later twentieth century history needs a source covering that different period.