The Japanese philologist Tomobayashi Mitsuhira (1813-1864) was a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist priest originally with the name "Shuei." Mitsuhira experienced "Genzoku," which is a return to secular life, twice in his lifetime. Therefore from reading his works, his ideological transformation process leading to his secularization can be traced. In his work Nageki no omoni (1858), Mitsuhira was expecting Buddhism to play a role as a barrier against the invasion of the Western powers behind the propagation of Christianity. This was a claim within Buddhist apologetics that was common in this time period. After writing Sono no ikemizu (1859), and finishing his second time of secularization, he wrote Omoidegusa (1862). In this work, he claimed that even the social role of Buddhism as a barrier to Christianity is unchanged, and the social conditions for Buddhism to exist have become severely limited. As the result, as long as there is no damage to the Kokutai or Japanese Constitution, Buddhism came to be positioned lower than Shinto. This change in his evaluation of Buddhism came from functionalism, where Buddhism is evaluated on whether it is useless or useful to Japanese society. At the same time, this new idea is remarkable in terms of predicting the history of Japanese modern religion that would continue after this period.
