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SOKA GAKKAI JAPAN`S MILITANT BUDDHITS

BY NOAH S. BRANNEN

FOREWORD

A hero of one of Dostoevsky`s novels is made to say, “ Man has done nothing but invent God so as to go on living and not kill himself; that`s the whole of universal history up till now”.

In the Battle for Okinawa, the greatest battle of the Pacific War, when the Japanese  32^nd Army had been routed out of the mesh of coral caves all up and down the island and finally pushed to the last point overlooking the ocean, with no navy to come to the rescue and no place left to go, General Ushijima arose in the early morning before dawn and, with his officers and men, climbed to the highest point of the peak overlooking the ocean. And here, in the traditional manner of a brave Japanese warrior, the general cut his stomach open. Thousands of his men followed, those without weapons leaping off the cliff to dash their heads on the coral rocks below. Here were men left with nothing to believe in. Unconquerable Japan had met defeat.

Search for a faith to live by would seem to explain the phenomenal popularity of what called “new religions” in Japan today. When the national faith – faith in the divine origin of the emperor and the divine mission of his subjects – was shattered because of her defeat by the allied power in the Second World War, Japan was left in a spiritual vacuum with nothing left to live by.

But a vacuum cannot continue indefinitely in either the physical or the spiritual world. Something will rush in to fill the void. The requirement to believe in something in order to live becomes the rationale for believing in anything. And this is the condition in which millions of Japanese find themselves today. This book is an attempt to describe in some detail the case of Soka Gakkai, the answer of sixteen million Japanese (and some non-Japanese) to the quest for faith by which a man can live.

CONTENTS

Foreword

1.     The “ Third World Power”

2.     Religions of the Here and Now

3.     Japan`s Buddhist Prophet

4.     The Martyr and the Organizer

5.     The Smashing of Idols

6.     Religion and Politics

7.     Theory, Doctrine, and Faith

8.     A Pilgrimage to the Foot of Mt. Fuji

Note and Acknowledgments

A Selected Bibliography of Works in English

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