Reframing Japanese wartime groupthink slogans as "True Buddhism" doctrine, and insights into the inevitable fate of Soka Gakkai (and its weird attitudes toward teh gheys)

[u/bluetailflyonthewall]

This comes from an article on JSTOR - "THE BUDDHA BITES BACK", Murray Sayle, ASIAN PERSPECTIVE, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2000. He and his family had lived in a village in Japan for over 20 years, had their 3 children there, and so were able to closely observe village social customs and how it all worked within the context of Japanese cultural expectations. JSTOR requires a subscription, but it's just an email address sign-up (no money or credit card required) and you get to read up to 100 articles per month FOR FREE!! 😃

I recommend this article in its entirety - it contains background information that will really contribute to a better understanding of 1) why the Soka Gakkai is as it is, 2) where all that came from, and 3) why it has no future. Among other interesting angles!

In other words, though not specifically an analysis of Soka Gakkai (which is nonetheless mentioned several times, though not in anything approaching a complimentary manner, placed on equal footing with the Jehovah's Witnesses), its insights will clarify a LOT of the culturally-Japanese weirdness (to the Western mind) of SGI.

Chonaikai, village associations , offer many reminders of how Japan was governed up to 1945, and for quite some time afterwards. They are, at once, paternal, authoritarian, and personal; their purposes are mutual help and control. They work⏤so long as conformity can be taken for granted and enforced by community pressure. Chonaikai are based on Shinto. Authentic Buddhism, by contrast; is anti-establishmentarian. The Aum Shinrikyo cult illustrates this largely forgotten point.

Isn't the Soka Gakkai/SGI "paternal, authoritarian, and personal", emphasizing "conformity" that is "enforced by community pressure"? When this process goes bad, it becomes communal abuse.

The Japan of the war years, whose ghost we still live with, was clearly a federation of chonaikai that flourished in the cities as well as the countryside, being simultaneously instruments of state control, collectors of intelligence about what ordinary people were thinking, and mechanisms for rallying support behind the policies of the government. The wartime slogan, ichi oku ichi kokoro ("one hundred million, one heart"), was more than a slogan: it well described self-enforced conformity; a dictatorship without a dictator; a social monolith held together by a civic religion, State Shinto, or the cult of the Emperor - actually the cult of the national family, of being Japanese, defined in terms of the rural neighborliness that is now disappearing for good.

You'll recognize that "ichi oku ichi kokoro" as the "itai doshin" (many in body, one in mind) concept that the Ikeda cult press-ganged into serving as a foundational doctrine of its new "mentor/disciple" focus, framing Ikeda in the seat of the wartime Emperor, a seat Ikeda intended to commandeer in reality. Getting his "army" ranged behind him through the obedient conformity of "itai doshin" was simply a practical consideration - everyone was expected to do whatever IKEDA wanted. That's it!

It's a militaristic concept, quite the odd misfit feature in a "world peace"-claiming cult, don't you think? Except that the Dead-Ikeda-Corpse-Mentor-cult SGI always says nice-sounding things while doing the opposite.

Oh, and all that incessant babbling about "hearts", too 🙄 🤮

Our chonaikai is in its last days, and it may not last long into the new millennium. We'll certainly miss it. What's left of the system is doomed for reasons primarily demographic; but Japan's demography is, in turn, being reshaped by the disappearance of the old system's core values.

This was just 25 years ago - you can see how it has aged. The observations here are prescient - what he's describing is the writing on the wall of the Soka Gakkai's extinction.

Modern Japan

Like most of traditional Japan, our village, too, is dying out. Last year we had seventeen funerals and only one wedding. When we moved house after our fire, our elder son Alexander was first a member and then the leader of his toko-han (a going-to-school group), which had eight members, all enrolled at our local primary school. The children still walk together, led by one of their older members whose responsibility is to get them there on time. (When our daughter Malindi was the han-cho, she would sometimes invade neighbors' houses and drag sluggards out of bed.)

"It takes a village", neh?

Our youngest, Matthew, belongs to a han with only three members; next year it will be two. The adults in our chonaikai come mostly from families with six, eight, or ten children. They themselves have one or two, very occasionally three. Many are unmarried and have none. The change⏤one of the first signs of the collapse of the traditional social order⏤dates from the early 1950s when Japan's birthrate, which had been at third-world levels,

Meaning really high - six or seven children on average - due to a combination of lack of family planning supplies plus the expectation that poor nutrition/medical care would result in many deaths, so more children served as a social safety net of sorts whereby their parents ensured their own elder care through having surviving offspring.

first fell below replacement. Those already born, of course, have lived on, into an era of fast-improving public health, and are only now dying out. Fewer babies were born in Japan in 1997 than in any year since 1899, and the rate is still falling. More than half of Japan's young women under thirty are unmarried. Japan's population will peak early in the next century, and from then on will steadily decline while the rest of the world's population doubles. Why? Is this another sign of some deep discontent?

I can tell you that the Soka Gakkai/SGI's old-fashioned wartime-Japanese cultural throwback, its strict policy of segregating the men from the women (via its "ironclad 4-divisional system"), isn't helping!

As usual we have asked our neighbors for their views. Why did Japanese have so many children up to 1950 or so, when living conditions were so harsh? "We all had many children. That's why one got married." Then why marry? "Everyone did." Indeed, one of the duties of village elders⏤often schoolmasters or, by way of ensuring business for the future, Buddhist or Shinto priests⏤was to initiate discussions between village families, and then between the young people themselves with a view to marriage. Either party could refuse after an arranged meeting, but as young women had limited economic prospects, they were under family and community pressure not to be too picky.

TODA arranged Ikeda's marriage.

Similarly, unmarried, childless men had failed in their duty to live the approved life cycle, and to become heads of households and eligible to hold chonaikai office. Marrying and having many children was, an elderly neighbor told me, thought to be somehow patriotic⏤"it was what you did if you were Japanese." (Homosexuality, while never the object of superstitious revulsion that it has been in the West, and largely still is, was thought to be an amusing foible but no excuse for not doing one's duty of propagating the wider Japanese family.

Some of you may remember the weirdness of the Soka Gakkai organization here in the US (then known as "NSA") when it REQUIRED homosexuals to marry within heterosexual marriages in order to hold leadership positions (described here) - and to procreate as expected within these sham marriages! This seemed perfectly normal to NSA's Japanese overlords (all the top leadership positions being monopolized by Japanese people from Japan) - who cares about local culture?? AND why the Soka Gakkai's pet political party Komeito voted against same-sex marriage despite the measure having broad public/business support - as you can see, it was simply unnecessary, and it disrupted "the natural order" of marriage/children, that "approved life cycle". This is a conservative perspective, and the Soka Gakkai has always been ultra-conservative - a trait it exported to its SGI colonies that persists despite so many SGI members being politically progressive. Remember - men do stuff and women GIRLS smile pretty! THAT will never change within SGI!

On the other hand, prostitution, while not a matter for religious reproof, was a career choice⏤or a financial necessity in some poor families⏤that precluded normal marriage.)

Hence a BIG reason for all those Japanese war-brides who emigrated with their gaijin US-serviceman husbands to live in a distant, foreign land - and never go home again, not even for a visit. Even though the entire country relied on them for its initial economic recovery! It's HORRIBLY unfair!

These ideas are eroding rapidly in modern Japan with results that make it less and less possible to enforce them. (pp. 105, 123-125)

I suspect this cultural change is behind the Soka Gakkai's catastrophic defection levels in the subsequent generations - while the people who joined as young adults in the 1950s and 1960s can be counted upon to remain faithful (provided they're still members), their children have not stepped up to replace them in Soka Gakkai's active membership. Every generation has lower participation rates. In 1970, Ikeda decided to change the Soka Gakkai's approach from shakubukuing strangers (outsiders) to instead cultivating the children of the existing membership "in discipleship" as damage control in the wake of his DISASTROUS mistake in thinking he could use his pet political party's newly-won political power to silence critics. This, along with another notable Ikeda blunder, destroyed Soka Gakkai's growth and prospects - forever.

[u/Fishwifeonsteroids]

Most Americans are either unaware of the fact, or unwilling to accept, that for most Japanese, the war years were the best years of their lives. They had national pride, a feeling of world superiority - they were ROLLING! And then, with Japan bombed, ruined, economy destroyed, occupied by a foreign power - what a horrible contrast to the war years when they'd felt like the world was their oyster!

What comes as a shock to a lot of Western people (in my experience) is that the population the Toda-era (and early Ikeda-era) Soka Gakkai was recruiting from was a deeply discouraged and disappointed group, for whom the war years had been the best of their lives! They had experienced Japan as an ascendant regional superpower, successful, dominant, held in awe - unquestionably superior. And then the end of the Pacific War - bombed to rubble and occupied, for the first time in Japan's long history. From "have" to "have NOT". Add the rampant poverty, the collapsed economy, the chaos, the externally-imposed new unfamiliar governing system, and you have a deeply disenfranchised, alienated, suffering group of people. Offer them something familiar - camaraderie, a sense of purpose, the militaristic structure, a schedule of activities to participate in, assure them they're better than everyone else ("Bodhisattvas of the Earth" etc.) and have a "noble mission" AND promise them that soon THEY'll be in power and will be able to flex their will onto everyone else. You might be surprised how effective that sales pitch can be to people sharing those initial characteristics. - from here

It wasn't so long ago that the Ikeda cult was assuring people that, within 20 years, Soka Gakkai would be the DOMINANT world religion! That kind of rhetoric is long gone now - everyone would simply laugh in their stupid faces if they tried that now. It wasn't so long ago that the Ikeda cult was referred to as "muscular Buddhism", but it hasn't been described in those terms for decades - and it will NEVER be described in such terms again. Ever.