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endure on account of spreading the ideals of the Lotus Sutra. Believing that they
were living their lives as disciples of Nichiren inspired a sense of justice,
because how were people to point
fingers when they had found the ability to
overcome their own challenging circumstances? Moreover, members were
learning in Soka Gakkai that su
ering is a necessary ingredient for developing
human characteristics such as compassion and courage. In this way, Nichiren
Buddhism was promoted as a philosophy that found human nobleness, dig-
nity, creativity in di
cult circumstances, and in the process built strength of
character. This formula of enabling people to take responsibility for their own
circumstances attracted millions of people to join the Soka Gakkai.
White
s The S
-
kagakkai and Mass Society (1970) portrays how the public
(or mass media) perceived the growing Gakkai movement and its subsequent
involvement with politics. He evaluated Soka Gakkai
'
s relationship with
Japanese society as one in which it faced adverse criticism (White 1970: 273).
White used the concepts of The Politics of Mass Society (Kornhauser 1959)
and Political Man (Lipset 1963) to analyse the Soka movement. Kornhauser
was concerned with the political implications of mass movements, while
Lipset predicated that the lower classes tend toward undemocratic beliefs and
behaviour. The concept of
'
ned by Kornhauser and outlined by
White (1970) refers to an individual who is primarily unattached to any
common identity, alienated from society and from themselves, as well as from
the social, economic and political opportunities that are present. Kornhauser
also talks about
'
mass man
'
as de
'
'
as behaviour unmediated by social relations
and characterised by periodic intensive activity followed by long periods of
apathy (White 1970: 3). While this describes an
mass behaviour
(in the Weberian
sense, as noted by White 1970: 4), White goes on to suggest that such behaviour
as displayed by members of Soka Gakkai at the time could have been sub-
versive, even to the extent of directly contravening the currently democratic
constitutional order. In light of such a view,
'
ideal type
'
is a state of being
within which the norms and social networks of his [sic] surroundings have lost
their ability to organise behaviour. Individuals in turn
'
mass man
'
find themselves in a
state of anomie in the Durkheimian sense. Writing in 1970 after only a few
decades of democracy in Japan, White
s conclusion that Japan could not be
described as having a pluralistic social base appears valid enough. From this
perspective, White concludes that Soka Gakkai could be seen as one of those
'
'
(White 1970: 6) of democracy, which might not be seen as a
welcome diversity, but rather as potentially undermining democracy itself.
White pictures how the public feared the
unstable aspects
'
'
conglomeration of lower social
elements
, perceived as people with little social attachment, resulting in a
sense of alienation (White 1970: 6). The people who were attracted to Soka
Gakkai indeed may have felt alienated and disillusioned, as many people
probably did at that time. The strength of Soka Gakkai, however, lay in
linking this
'
to the state of politics, and to a collective criti-
cism of the political establishment that had caused the current misery, i.e. the
wrong ideas of nationalism that underpinned disastrous political decisions.
'
disillusionment
'
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