Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
came to underpin the Soka movement. S - ka,
or value-creation, coined by Toda, who worked very closely with Makiguchi,
was meant to re
education. His
'
theory of value
'
ect the movement for the creation of value. Thus, Maki-
s introduction to the doctrines of Nichiren Sh - sh - in 1928 was part of a
culmination of a lifelong intellectual quest in which his thinking had been
informed by various Western thinkers including Durkheim and Dewey
(Sharma 2006). He started to combine his previous scholarship with doctrines
of Nichiren Sh - sh - Buddhism.
Toda, like Makiguchi, was an educator from northern Japan and grew up
in Hokkaido. Toda worked under Makiguchi as a schoolteacher in Tokyo.
Both were fervent in their quest to improve the education system then, which
they believed to be wrongly engaged in manufacturing obedience to the state. The
intellectual-ideological vein that distinguishes Soka Gakkai from other reli-
gious movements in the twentieth century that followed Nichiren stems from
this time. Besides his teaching career, Toda was an astute businessman, 13 and
it was with Toda as editor and publisher that the
guchi
'
first volume of Makiguchi
'
s
Soka Ky - iku Taikei (The Soka Education System, 1930) was published.
Toda was to be instrumental
s theory of value to
rebuilding Soka Gakkai after the war. He described the new Western-based
constitutional developments and the appearance of General MacArthur as
the arrival of the Shoten Zenjin (protective gods), or the work of Bonten (the
great heavenly king Brahma, a god said to rule over the saha world). By this, he
meant that it was thanks to a foreign conqueror that freedom of religion was
institutionalised in Japan for the
in taking Makiguchi
'
first time. Presenting the occupiers of Japan
as
saviours symbolically described how they were instrumental in
allowing freedom of belief, seen as the fundamental criteria for building a
human rights culture. The critical view of the Japanese wartime government that
Toda and Makiguchi had maintained, and the ability to withstand the pres-
sure of imprisonment by a fascist regime, served as a prime example during the
1950s to show that Toda was serious about creating an organisation that
stood up for human rights and social justice. This gave him a strong sense of
legitimacy in his aim of widespread religious proselytising, as well as his later aim
to reform a political system that was corrupt and biased towards elite interests.
Thus although Toda used such terms as kokuritsu kaidan, a term that was
then commonly used by Nichiren Sh - sh -
'
divine
'
to describe the future goal of the sect,
it is di
cult to conclude that this could have been in a nationalistic sense.
Yet this term and Soka Gakkai
s relentless, but highly successful, proselytising
in the 1950s stirred up fear in wider society. Soka Gakkai was portrayed by the
mass media as aggressive and some members were reported to have resorted
to violence to remove objects of other religious worship from the home of new
adherents, although it is di
'
find evidence for this. The 1950s saw the
beginning of what was to become the signi
cult to
cant collective voting power of
Soka Gakkai members in the years to follow. The majority of members at the time,
like the rest of Japan, were living in poverty. Most of them had lost family
members, their homes and places of work during the war. The organisation
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search