A Strong Case Against the Soka Gakkai
Dr. Hirotatsu Fujiwara, although he does not completely approve of the appellation, is the Marshall McLuhan of Japan. One of his many published works, “A Critique of Mass Media From Personal Experience,” is a sort of Confucian counterpart of McLuhan’s “Understanding Media” and draws largely from Dr. Fujiwara’s background as one of Japan’s best-known radio and television commentators. His other books were a bit more scholarly, dealing mainly with that bewildering blend of confusion and consensus that is politics, Japan-style. He holds a doctorate in political science from Tokyo’s Meiji University – where he has also served as a faculty member – and is the author of the definitive biography of former Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida.
In his own evaluation, Dr. Fujiwara is a man “with a political conscience, and a political consciousness.”
He is also a man with more than his share of courage.
Because with every bit as much conviction as one encounters In the pontifications of Professor McLuhan (and, thankfully, without the horrendous puns) Dr. Fujiwara has single-handedly taken on Soka Gakkai, the largest – and to many observers by the most sinister – of the more than one hundred new religions that have sprung up in Japan since the war.
Dr. Fujiwara sees the militant Soka Gakkai’s Nichiren Shoshu religious sect and its populist political arm, Komeito, as a peril to all of Japan’s civil and personal freedoms. He has publicly compared Soka Gakkai’s ten million-plus followers to the “plaything” dupes of the old Japanese militarists and the Nazis. He vehemently disapproves of the Buddhist organization’s cell-structured proselytizing (shakubuku) as little more than aggressive Gantryesque brainwashing. Soka Gakkai’s announced goal of obutsu myogo (the fusion of government and Buddhism) is simply, Dr. Fujiwara feels, another ploy for making fools of the public.
In his crusade, Dr. Fujiwara often uses the terms “Machia – vellian” and “Hitlerian.” He does not subscribe to the Japanese proverb, “Fukeba tobu yo na sonzai” (A puff and it is gone.) Fujiwara-sensei recognizes Soka Gakkai, with its seven million Japanese households and its thousands of foreign converts, as far more than a passing religio-political fad.
Cognizant of the possibility that Komeito (“That sinful, bastard child of Soka Gakkai,” he once labeled it) could well become the ruling political party of the nation – and thus elevate Nichiren Shoshu to the status of a state religion – Dr. Fujiwara rates Soka Gakkai as the greatest threat to Japan and her people since the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima a quarter of a century ago.
The title of his latest and most explosive volume, “Soka Gakkai O Kiru” (I Denounce Soka Gakkai), sets the tone of his 287-page attack. The book has sold more than a million copies in the original Japanese edition and has now been translated into English. Its demand remains high; it is usually out of stock in bookstores throughout Tokyo, “I Denounce Soka Gakkai” may not emerge as the best thing ever written about the New Japan. But it does have the distinction of being the only book widely discussed by Tokyo taxi drivers, a breed more given to symposia on sex and the Yomiuri Giants than politics and religion – when they condescend to talk at all.
Over cups of steaming green tea in his book-lined study, Dr. Fujiwara seems the most unlikely of persons to assault frontally a mass movement as huge, and tough, as Soka Gakkai-Komeito. His greying hair is thick and rebelliously curly. His face, while not weak, suggests the countenance of a samurai who secretly prefers sumi painting to swordsmanship. He wears horn-rimmed glasses and affects bright silk ties. His eyebrows, so arched and bushy that they might well be the work of a kabuki makeup artist, are mobile and intimidating. One attempts to describe his eyes, only to decide finally that there is no such thing as laughing almonds.
“Why,” his visitor asks, “did you go on with the book in the face of all the pressure – some of it in the form of physical threats – that was directed against you from the beginning?”
Dr. Fujiwara’s reply, not surprisingly, had a definite McLuhanish ring to it.
“The reason why I published a book with the bold title, ‘I Denounce Soka Gakkai,'” he said, “is that I felt I would be exceptionally happy if the publication of this book came to have some meaning as a little experiment of resistance to the trend in the mass media toward what E. H. Fromm calls ‘escape from freedom,’ which was beginning to take place. Soka Gakkai-Komeito had repeatedly committed crimes against the freedom of speech and publication. In each case there were striking similarities – slander, threats, pressure from political bosses. It was the same in my case.
“The reason for my use of the word ‘Denounce’ is that I tried to warn of the crises of freedom and democracy which are multiplying in this economic animal Japan; that is, the violation of political and economic freedom by Soka Gakkai-Komeito.
“I thought that I could give actual proof that Soka Gakkai is a dangerous organizations and that if I did not expose the true character of the enemy of the freedom of speech before the people and expel their poisonous matter completely, Japan would meet with a terrible misfortune.”
Dr. Fujiwara is a modest as well as a learned man. Although his book contains a complete chronology of Soka Gakkai’s numerous attempts to suppress his best seller, he is reluctant in private conversation to talk about it.
But “I Denounce Soka Gakkai” is a triumph of perseverance. While writing it, Dr. Fujiwara received scores of threatening phone calls, warning him not to go out alone at night and to “be careful of traffic accidents.” The late-hour calls became so frequent that the professor finally had his phone disconnected. Fearing that his children might be kidnapped, he gave them careful instructions on how to travel to and from class: never take the same route twice in succession.
Then the tactics became less subtle. The enemy now made direct contact. A Komeito (Clean Government Party) assemblyman named Fujiwara – but no relation to Fujiwara-sensei – paid a call to the author’s homes He o-offered a four-way deal:
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- That, since the general elections were nearing, the date of publication be postponed. Then, he bargained, Soka Gakkai would buy up all the copies.
- That Soka Gakkai be allowed to see the pre-publication manuscript.
- That the title be changed.
- That no mention of Daisaku Ikeda, the 42-year-old president of Soka Gakkai, be made in the book.
But Fujiwara, was a man with a mission. He laughed at Assemblyman Fujiwara and went right back to his typewriter. In addition he continued to snipe away at Soka Gakkai-Komeito in his television and radio appearances.
But Soka Gakkai (literally, Value-Creating Society) was not beaten yet. Strong-arm types, passing themselves off as promotion staff members of Seikyo Shimbun, the Soka Gakkai newspaper, and Ushio Company, the sect’s publishing house, began a series of calls at leading bookstores throughout Japan. They warned – in what was in reality open blackmail – that the stores would not be permitted to sell books recommended by Soka Gakkai if they persisted in peddling Fujiwara’s book. Since Soka Gakkai’s publishing empire (in addition to Seikyo Shimbun, a daily with 3.5 million circulation) includes a battery of monthly and pictorial magazines, a growing list of book titles and films and study materials, this was no idle threat.
Advertising agencies and distributors, also swayed by the affluence and power of Soka Gakkai-Komeito, boycotted Dr. Fujiwara’s upcoming book. Newspapers, too, shied away from accepting ads for “I Denounce Soka Gakkai.”
Dr. Fujiwara’s friends, fearing that he might be assassinated, urged him to back off. Invariably, he would reply: “My only weapons are my pen and my tongue. I don’t like bodyguards, and I do not know what to do. If I were attacked by a terrorist, I would say with Taisuke Itagaki, whose picture appears on the 100-yen note, even if Hirotatsu was dead, ‘freedom will never die.”‘
Nisshin Hodo Company, Dr. Fujiwara’s publishers, put the book on sale last October first. Ironically, Soka Gakkai’s repeated attempts to suppress it made “I Denounce” a runaway success from the day it hit the stands.
Distributing agencies – including the two largest in Japan – which had refused to accept copies of the book on consignment were now flooded with orders.
Copies went like rice cakes. Many persons, unable to find the book in the stores, sent money directly to Dr. Fujiwara.
“It was all a little embarrassing,” he recalls with a soft chuckle. “Also, many letters and contributions were sent – not only to me and my publisher, but to the media through which the problems of my book had been discussed. It was more than vindication. It was a revelation. What was it your Abraham Lincoln said about not being able to fool all of the people all of the time…?”
Immediately upon publication, Dr. Fujiwara began what might have been the strangest publicity campaign of all time; certainly it was the most audacious. He hired a fleet of sound trucks to prowl the street of Tokyo, blaring out a tape-recording of his own voice plugging his own book. Critics as well as admirers found that a little too eccentric.
“I had no intention of making a display of eccentricity,” Dr. Fujiwara says. “But there was no other way to publicize the book at the time. I hit on the sound-truck plan only as a last resort.”
Complementing Dr. Fujiwara’s sound-truck campaign was an extensive lecture tour designed to help promote his book. Often, the audience was loaded with Soka Gakkai members, there to ridicule and jeer. But often those who came to laugh stayed to ponder.
“Many, I think, began to realize that the freedom I was talking about was their freedom, not some abstract philosophical idea,” Dr. Fujiwara says. “Large numbers of Soka Gakkai members, on leaving the auditorium, were overheard by my publishers to ask, ‘Is this a true story?’ ‘I don’t know what the truth is!”‘
Critics have called “I Denounce Soka Gakkai” the most important non-fiction book published in postwar Japan. Dr. Fujiwara, however, despite the fame and wealth the book has brought his way, is proudest of two messages of congratulations he received shortly after his “victory party” of hot sake and pickled radishes.
One came, via telephone, from Prime Minister Sato, through his secretary, Ichiro Saito:
“How did you dare write such a brave book? I was much impressed by reading it, as was Mrs. Sato. Persevere!”
The other came in the form of a letter from one of his old middle school teachers, whom he had not seen in thirty years:
“Soka Gakkai, in a word, is nothing but a primitive spell group. Don’t you agree? ‘Spells’ in various forms still remain in Japan; Poverty gives rise to such charms. The moist soils of poverty, which extensively remain in Japan, have produced a mold, which is called Soka Gakkai. If we do not uproot the source of poverty, the mold of the second and third Gakkai will appears but this mold is harmful and must be cut off similarly. When the mold spreads too far all living things wither and fall like a huge tree, which has been entwined in a parasitic plant.
“Please tackle the problem with courage, Compromise is not permitted now…”
Although avowedly Dr. Fujiwara will never compromise in his struggle against Soka Gakkai, he is aware that he has taken on a resourceful and fanatical adversary. Its phenomenal growth alone attests to that.
The sect was founded forty years ago as a religious organization of lay believers In Nichiren Shoshu with the purpose of saving “the unhappy in the entire world and achieving peaces” through propagation of the teachings of Nichiren, a lonely and fiercely nationalistic Japanese Buddhist monk who lived from 1222 to 1282. In 1930 Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, an elementary school principal, founded the group under the name of Soka Kyoiku Gakkai, or Value Creation Education Society. Originally the society was designed to bring about educational reform; but in 1931, Makiguchi became a convert to Nichiren Shoshu.
By the outbreak of the war in 1941, Soka Gakkai boasted more than 3,000 members. The government, fearing the subversive potential of the movement, ordered Soka Gakkai to merge with the other Nichiren sects which supported state Shinto and the war effort. Makiguchi and most of his flock refused. Further, they defied the government edict that a kamidana, or Shinto god-shelf, be placed in every home.
In July of 1943, Makiguchi and his closest disciple, Josei Toda, were arrested along with twenty-one other leading Soka Gakkai officials on charges of “blasphemy against the Emperor.” They sat out the war in Tokyo’s dankly notorious Sugamo Prison. Makiguchi did not survive the ordeal. He died of malnutrition in his solitary cell in 1944.
At that juncture most of the other jailed Soka Gakkai people renounced their beliefs and were released. But Toda stayed on until July 1945, when he was freed on bail. It is claimed that he chanted the Daimoku (“Namu Myoho Renge Kyo“) more than two billion times during his two years in Sugamo’s dungeons.
By 1951, Soka Gakkai had 5,000 members and Toda was inaugurated as the second president. A tireless organizer, he died in 1958 after having built Soka Gakkai’s membership up to more than three quarters of a million. Daisaku Ikeda, a fiery debater and spell-binding speaker, succeeded to the presidency In 1960 at the age of thirty-two. Following the dictum of practicing shakubuku “defiantly, merrily, amicably and gallantly,” he saw the Soka Gakkai rolls swell daily to the impressive figure of ten million current converts.
Soka Gakkai has been called a chop-suey mixture of the evangelism of Moral Re-armament, the discipline of the Communist party and the show-biz razzmatazz of a three-ring circus. Simplistically, the sect holds that faith equals power. If you want something – a better sex life, a new Sony color television set, skinnier legs or even a stash of good dope – chant for it: Namu myoho renge kyo. Recruiting most successfully among the ranks of disenchanted small entrepreneurs, bank clerks, chambermaids and taxi drivers Soka Gakkai, with its roots in the misty Buddhist past and its Dale Carnegie smile in the chrome-and-neon present, flowered quickly in the spiritual vacuum created by the war and the Occupation.
Even a sizable number of American servicemen, converted by their Japanese mistresses and wives, joined Soka Gakkai and took to chanting the Daimoku with considerably more alacrity than they ever showed while reciting their General Orders. The sect has expanded to the United States, where a thrice-weekly newspaper flourishes along with a growing list of converts.
Soka Gakkai is big. Soka Gakkai is rich. Soka Gakkai wants you. All you have to do to join is 1) Destroy the implements of your previous faith; 2) purchase the texts, including a manual on gaining converts; 3) repeat the sacred phrase over and over at eight daily prayer sessions; 4) participate in as many as five meetings per week; 5) pay a visit to the head temple at the foot of Mt. Fuji where Nichiren’s own mandala is enshrined, and 6) conduct shakubuku, keeping in mind that one is not a member until one has made a convert.
Despite its all-embracing nature (the sect claims 10,000 foreign members), many observers – including Dr. Fujiwara – have compared Soka Gakkai’s close-ribbed organization and tactics to the Hitler youth movement and Nazism in general.
Arthur Koestler, commenting on Soka Gakkai’s policy of maintaining tightly knit worship groups under the control of block leaders (the sect has surpassed the communists in use of the cell technique) wrote:
“This structure, perhaps quite unjustly, reminds one of the erstwhile Nazi Blockwarts. Indeed, the uneasiness about Soka Gakkai is not alone caused by its political aims – which are vague and undefined – but by the fact that it evokes so many chilling echoes of the past. However, there can be little doubt that Soka Gakkai has found a psychologically effective answer to the frustrations of Japan’s lonely crowd and its spiritual cravings.”
Despite the obvious linkage to the Hitler epoch, the misgivings about the gangsterish recruiting, the doubts that Soka Gakkai can really lead one down the lotus-strewn path to Kosen–Rofu (salvation and peace), despite the vague feeling that Nichiren Shoshu is somehow a sort of cosmic put-on, it is the specter of Komeito that looms darkest to the detractors of Soka Gakkai.
Although the Japanese constitution clearly delineates the division between church and politics (Article 20: “No religious organization shall…exercise any political authority…”), Komeito has burgeoned into the third largest political party In the space of just six years. With the merest modicum of luck, Soka Gakkai’s political alter ego could gain control of the Diet within two decades. The brainchild of Soka Gakkai president Ikeda, Komeito came into being in 1964 because, as Ikeda put its “Politics in Japan today is divorced from the people and the people are living in miserable conditions.”
Born then with the alleged purpose of exerting a spiritual control on political life in Japan, Komeito has, in the view of Dr. Fujiwara, grown into a full-scale political monster. And, inevitably, President Ikeda emerges as the Frankenstein.
Calling Ikeda a consummate actors a political “star” with all the charisma of a John Kennedy or a Sukarno, Dr. Fujiwara points out that Ikeda has a firm grip on the reins of both Soka Gakkai and Komeito and that before long he will take over the chairmanship of the latter body.
“Some of Ikeda’s followers,” Dr. Fujiwara notes, “are old enough to be his father, but they say that Ikeda-sensei (teacher) is like a father to us.’ Their president’s judgment, they say, is ‘absolutely faultless.’
“Ordinarily speaking,” the professor continues, “he would be estimated as a man with bank branch manager capabilities, but the problem is that as he has these ordinary abilities he is the head of a group of fanatics. He has achieved the status, however, of an Emperors the Emperor of Soka Gakkai. But a change has taken place in him. The Ikeda who had been a fiery and restive leader, after becoming president suddenly changed to a mild, quiet type of individual. It may be said that this type of personality change seems unavoidable for leaders of a fanatical group in current Japanese social conditions.”
But isn’t it true, Dr. Fujiwara was asked, that Ikeda has repeatedly stated that he will never enter the political arena?
“Yes,” Dr. Fujiwara replies sardonically, “but it is also true that President Ikeda repeatedly promised that Komeito would never advance into the House of Representatives, either.” A look at the facts explains the professor’s wry reaction, Currently, Komeito holds forty-seven chairs in that chamber and is aiming, by 1977, to obtain 140 out of the 486 seats, thus becoming the No. 2 party in the land.
Komeito, in its unprecedented surges has now passed the Communists and attained a ranking behind the ruling Liberal Democrats and the Socialists. Noting this with trepidation, Dr. Fujiwara does not discount completely the possibility that, Komeito might achieve its goal of controlling the nation politically by 1987. Should this occur, he has warned the nation tirelessly, Nichiren Shoshu – like Shinto before it – would become the state religion and every vestige of democracy would disappear.
At the recently concluded eighth Komeito convention, at which Soka Gakkai’s political cadre affirmed its desire to “mutilate” the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty and normalize relations with Red China, some effort was made to at least hint of a trial divorce between Komeito and Soka Gakkai.
But Dr. Fujiwara considers such talk a mere smokescreen.
“It is well to remember,” he says, “that the Japanese militarists waged a fanatical war in the name of the Emperor…” His resonant voice trails off, leaving one to draw his own parallels.
Dr. Fujiwara’s main hope resides in his intuitive feeling that public opinion is beginning to stir, if not shift, against Soka Gakkai-Komeito. He senses that the Japanese people are at long last evaluating the movement on the basis of policy and achievement rather than on its numerical strength, combativeness and influence. The man on the street, the Watanabes and the Kawamotos, are beginning to look askance at the sect’s “opportunistic behavior and coercive practices.”
“If they continue to stifle their critics – or rather, attempt top as in my case – and to trick people with words,” Dr. Fujiwara contends, “then to think they will come to power is to show contempt for the citizens and Is nothing but an impudent illusion. Before Soka-Gakkai can establish itself as a single party machine, it must purge itself of the sin of confusing politics and religion.”
Dr. Fujiwara, however, has retained his finely buffed optimism, applied atop the deep-rooted conviction that history has taught the Japanese a number of painful lessons; among them what he calls “postwar responsibility.”
“I deeply feel,” he says, “that we must ask anew what has allowed such a fanatical group to so easily expand their influence. Unless at this time the citizens of Japan awake from what might be called their ‘postwar vagueness,’ there is the possibility that they will be seized by a counterfeit – meaning Soka Gakkai-Komeito.”
What of the youth of Japan? One hears and reads that they have largely ignored the enticements of Soka Gakkai…?
Dr. Fujiwara ticked off some relevant data: When Josei Toda died in 1958 at the age of 59, his last request was, “Choose the next president from the Youth Division.” Ikeda, then only 32, was the most brilliant member of that group and the natural choice to succeed Toda. It is natural then to conclude, Dr. Fujiwara insists, that Ikeda will make a similar request prior to his death or resignation. Soka Gakkai, taking a leaf from the book of the Zengakuren (the National Federation of Students’ Self-Government Associations) has formed what it calls the New Student Union and its appeals after a somewhat faltering start, has been broadening recently, Its purpose is three-fold: 1) To push forward the ‘anti-war’ struggle based on global nationalism and absolute pacifism; 2) Fight for the building up of right politics, economics, education and culture based on humanism, and 3) Creation of a new scholarship based upon the integration of wisdom and knowledge.
“All of this sounds innocuous enough,” Dr. Fujiwara says. “But it could well lead to the establishment of another Zengakuren. They may simply be assuming a posture to wedge their way into the mainstream of the dissident student movement.”
Dr. Fujiwara stands up and holds out a friendly hand. The interview is over. But the confrontation between Soka Gakkai, “the great religion of the 21st century,” and Japan, the country which Herman Kahn claims will be the nation of that same century, has only just begun.
And, as Dr. Fujiwara’s old middle school teacher warned him, there can be no compromise.
Unfortunately – on either side.
Received in New York on August 14, 1970.
©1970 Darrell Houston
Darrell Houston is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner on leave from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. This article may be published with credit to Darrell Houston, the Post-Intelligencer, and the Alicia Patterson Fund.
