Figure 2 - uploaded by Anne Mette Fisker‐Nielsen
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Ikeda Daisaku delivering the speech on September 8, 1968 (Copyright permission received by Sōka Gakkai).
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This article discusses an episode in the history of Sōka Gakkai that began as alternative youth movement under Ikeda Daisaku who came to advocate “people’s diplomacy” (minkan gaikō) as a way to foster goodwill between China and Japan. Why would Sōka Gakkai, a legally constituted “religious corporation” (shūkyō hōjin) be so serious about engaging wi...
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... It saw itself as a member of a global civil society, and its social mission to that effect was adopted in the Soka Gakkai International (SGI) Charter in November 1995 2 . Arguably, a global outlook already underpinned Ikeda's broader framework for SG's collective support for the political party Kōmeitō that was established in 1964, and which, in the context of Japan brought 'internationalism' into the local context, although its status as a 'religion' was often criticized for overstepping presumed 'secular' boundaries (Fisker-Nielsen 2021, 2022b. SG in Japan grew to become a ten-million-member organization at the end of the 1960s, and under the leadership of Daisaku Ikeda (b. ...
This paper investigates how young Japanese women in contemporary Soka Gakkai (SG) navigate Japan’s continuous gender stratified society that remains culturally rooted in the ‘salaryman-housewife’ ideology. How are young SG members reproducing or contesting these hegemonic gender norms that few seek to emulate? While SG has long proclaimed that it stands for gender equality, its employment structure and organization in Japan until recently reflected the typical male breadwinner ideology that came to underpin the post-war Japanese nation-state and systemic gender division of labor. As shown here, this did not mean that SG women were without power; in fact, in many ways they drove organizational developments in the Japanese context. The recent imposition of the global framework for Sustainable Development Goals of 2015 has enabled SG to more substantially challenge its own patriarchal public front. Based on long-term fieldwork, in-depth interviews and multiple group discussions with SG members in their 20s, this article explores how SG-Japan is being challenged to follow its own discourse of ‘globalism’ and ‘Buddhist humanism’, promoted by Daisaku Ikeda since the 1990s. Using Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic power, the research shows how Japan’s powerful doxa of ‘genderism’ that held sway over earlier generations is currently being challenged by a glocalized Buddhist discourse that identifies Nichiren Buddhism as ‘humanism’ rather than Japanese ‘genderism’.
... While it was and is common in Japan for 'religious organizations' to collectively support individual politicians, SG's exclusive support for one party, which may have carried a message of 'middle-way' (chūdō 中道) politics with a focus on improving welfare and education, nevertheless entered a fierce competition with both the left and the right wings. When Ikeda advocated that the Japanese government should overcome its arrogance, which he argued underpinned Japan's foreign policy, in a much-publicized address in 1968 (see Ikeda [1968] 2013), he promoted the view of remorse and repentance for the wartime abuses of Asian neighbors that went well beyond the common sentiments, general attitudes, and expectations of a 'religious' organization (see Fisker-Nielsen 2021). ...
This paper investigates the Japanese Nichiren Buddhist organization, Soka Gakkai (SG), whose members have supported the political party known as Kōmeitō, or Clean Government Party, in Japan for over half a century. SG members have often been criticized as ‘impure’ political actors, undergoing frequent public questioning of their motivations for engaging in electoral politics in light of their ‘religious’ status. The paper shows how the SG members’ support for Kōmeitō at a qualitative level indeed transcends the typical demarcations of the ‘secular-religious’ binary system. However, they also simultaneously challenge the term ‘religion’ that has functioned as an ideology in the creation of statecraft and in their competition for legitimacy. The current paper is based on long-term fieldwork, extensive interviews, and doctrinal analyses that highlight how socially productive this discourse on religion has been. It also shows how a counter-episteme, rooted in Nichiren’s theory of the Rissho Ankoku Ron and the idea of kōsen-rufu, sought to bring a ‘Buddha’ consciousness to bear on individual and collective action as a model for alternative ‘politics’. Contrary to many claims, this did not entail contesting the modern institutional separation of ‘church’ and ‘state’, but is rather an attempt to find legitimacy for participating in ‘Japan-making’ in ways that cannot easily be understood or confined to explanations framed within the ‘religious-secular’ binary system.
