This chapter presents two contrasting examples of Buddhist activists whose on-the-ground activities and institution-building efforts have been defined by concerns about divisions between religion and state stipulated by Japan’s 1947 Constitution. The first case introduces Buddhist clergy who mobilized following the March 11, 2011 disasters in northeast Japan. The second investigates the lay Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai and its affiliated political party Komeito.

… how Japanese Buddhist practitioners’ mimesis of the constitutional form, the legal structures that gird it, and practices of commemorating and promoting the national constitution produces forms of “constitutional Buddhism.”