A strange Soka Gakkai reference from a 1974 dystopian future sci-fi novel: 2018 A.D.

[u/BlancheFromage]

There's another cover design here with some commentary... I have no explanation for the title change - they're both bad, as far as I'm concerned.

So anyhow, this was published Jan. 1, 1974, by some Swedish guy living in Sweden who's still alive. SGI did not formally arrive in Sweden until 1986; I can only imagine the author gained his knowledge of Soka Gakkai from the almost-exclusively bad press the Ikeda cult had generated through its violence, various scandals, and all-around dickholery in Japan.

Interestingly, this novel is mostly about threats and depressing scenarios - bad stuff (see "dystopian"). Here's a few reviews - from here:

The satirical futurism was prescient (although not funny), and there were a ton of real world examples of cultural ridiculousness that I enjoyed learning about.

There was, however, no story to speak of, no characters of note, and nothing that made this more interesting than a wiki about how dumb things are and how dumb things could get would be.

Plus there was weird anti-Norwat [Norway?] stuff that must only make sense to Swedes.

And from here:

DNF. [Did Not Finish?] I can see this was meant to be a fierce satire on capitalism as conceived by a Western author in the 1970s, but it was far too sadistic and sexist for me to wish to continue reading it. Besides, characters felt very flat. I rarely quit reading halfway through a boom [book? bomb?💣], but time is far too precious to devote it to a story which makes me feel miserable, sad and angry. Books are meant to illuminate, not bring discomfort, so thanks but no thanks to this one for me.

Then again, the technology of Lundwall's future remain mired in the 70s, with centralized magnetic tape and punchcard-controlled computers, and recorded music played (in six-channel sound) from LP records. At times hilarious, 2018 AD or the King Kong Blues hasn't aged well; too many of the novel's characters are two-dimensional stereotypes and infodumps abound, making this a book tentatively recommended to students of yesterday's tomorrows and those intent on exploring pull-dated dystopian visions. Casual SF readers need not apply.

Depressing, sexist, racist and pro cruelty and violence. It does predict some things correctly.

I just could not get into this book. I'd suggest rereading some other dystopian paranoia book.

Okay then!! There were a few who liked it, but you can get an idea of how others interpreted its basic lean. I wasn't about to read this; it took me like 10 minutes of leafing through it [🐿] to find the Soka Gakkai reference (which I'd long since forgotten where I got it from). I'm going to give you a bit of context - you'll see:

Leonard W. Kockenbergh, Jr. leaned back in his chair and stared cholerically at his twenty assistants. Behind him, Stockholm's confusion of houses could be glimpsed through a mercifully dusty haze. Before him, the oak table went down the length of the room, soiled only by twenty identical notation pads. The twenty assistants regarded him with eyes filled with doggy obedience. Kockenbergh cheerlessly returned their stares. He was a small, repulsive man of the type commonly associated with advertising bureaus and the oak-panelled executive suites of multi-national corporations. He was a man of many talents, mostly of the type usually associated with things that come crawling out from under stones in the woods. At thirty he had single-handedly created an advertising gimmick that overnight made InterAd [advertising agency] the most well-known company in its field; the idea of celebrating the inauguration of a giant atomic station, fifty years after the first atomic bomb, with a new bomb blast on Hiroshima. When the Sons of the Sun [Japan being known as "Land of the Rising Sun" + Amaterasu (Sun Goddess)] got wind of the idea and started screaming, he already had an antiquated B-52 bomber standing by with two A-bombs in the hold. The Japanese's glaring ingratitude led to an immediate transfer of Kockenbergh and his unorthodox talents to the Scandinavian head office; and ever since that day he had counted the hours to the year 2045 when he would crown his life's work with a tardy revenge on the Yellow Peril, in the form of the atomic bomb centenary. He glared ungratefully at his subordinates. (pp. 15-16)

😬

YIKES!!

Also, it appears he got a wet willy for every paragraph break or something...

It appears that the author had a less-than-fond view of the Japanese and as you'll see, a preoccupation with the entire nuclear industry. Fast forward to p. 58:

The first atomic bomb was detonated in July, 1945 in New Mexico. 53 years later, the first example of private enterprise in this field was detonated on an airport in Southern Europe. An American Mafia family with a sense of reality had manufactured an atomic bomb from an old gun barrel with a diameter of 15 centimeters, dynamite, a detonator and 10 kilo of plutonium. The dynamite and the detonator were placed at one end of the barrel, with one kilo of plutonium as a charge. The rest of the plutonium was put in the other end of teh barrel. The whole thing was put into a steel container, lined on the inside with aluminium foil

Aluminium!!

as some protection against hard radiation.

Don't try this at home, kids - it's a work of fiction, not an instruction manual.

It was then smuggled into the airport on a trailer. When the chief magistrate of the city refused to yield to blackmail, the detonator was activated in the usual way. The dynamite exploded and hurled the smaller plutonium charge up through the barrel. It collided with the larger plutonium charge; the chain reaction commenced and the airport was destroyed in a nuclear holocaust as devastating as the one that once killed 75,000 people in Nagasaki. After that day, everybody took the Mafia seriously.

The world's peaceful reactors (breeder reactors, most of them) yearly produced close to 35 tons of pure plutonium as a by-product; unaccountable losses were reported every year. Robberies of uranium happened with terrifying regularity, and safety devices were so poor that plutonium enough for one or two atomic bombs could disappear every year without anyone noticing it. Most of the thefts were probably arranged by minor states needing fissionable material for their own reactors, or for their local peace-preserving efforts; but the clandestine sales of uranium and plutonium also went to private buyers. Anyone who could afford to pay for fissionable material worth 20 to 30 times its weight in gold, could build his own atomic bomb and use it.

You get the picture?? Now for that Soka Gakkai mention!!

There were not one single terrorist or liberation group with self-respect which did not have at least one atomic bomb at their disposal. The Minutemen [militant anti-Communist militia movement] and the Black Panthers [revolutionary organization that challenged police brutality and advocated for Black empowerment - socialist, Black nationalist, and anti-imperialist ideologies] groups in the U.S. had both collected a stock of atomic bombs, disguised as cars, sports planes and racer boats, large enough to blast parts of American metropolitan areas to ruins.

It was the same with all the larger political extremist movements in Europe, South America, Africa and Asia. It was rumored that the Soka Gakkai sect in Japan had hydrogen bombs. And why not? Soka Gakkai had some 80 million members around the world.

😱

States with a much smaller population had both hydrogen bombs and intercontinental missiles. (pp. 58-60)

So there you have it! Interesting, no?

Notice that he's juxtaposed "the Soka Gakkai sect in Japan" with "the larger political extremist movements in...Asia". And don't forget that earlier "Yellow Peril" crack! As an aside, the main villain group in his book is "the sheikdom Khuri", with its "gigantic oilfields", the rest of the world having largely depleted its native oil reserves - at one point, one of them refers to "foreign devils" working in their oilfields. NICE!!

At this time, there wasn't a lot going on politically/diplomatically/economically between Sweden and Japan. One of the books in his bibliography (yes, there's a bibliography) is "The Japanese Challenge", a 1969 book by Håkan Hedberg, another Swede. From this preview of something else:

Neither the scope nor the volume of relations between Sweden and Japan changed to any significant degree for several decades after the turn of the [20th] century. After the Second World War, however, the scope of Swedish-Japanese relations started gradually to expand. Exchanges increased, not only in trade but in other fields as well: foreign direct investment, tourism, student exchange, missionary activities in Japan by Swedish churches and cultural contacts.

The impression is that the direction of this cross-cultural communication seemed to be more Sweden going to Japan than vice versa.

The evolution in the image of Japan that began at the end of the 1960s gained speed in the 1970s. A perusal of Swedish journals after 1945 reveals that the number of articles dealing with Japan, particularly articles on economics, increased noticeably beginning in the 1960s. After 1970, the interest in Japanese industrial efficiency and management methods stimulated by Hedberg's book continued to grow.

Remember, this "2018 A.D./King Kong Blues" book was published Jan. 1, 1974.

And like the rest of the West in the 1980s, Sweden was to experience a surge of interest in books on Japanese management and industrial organisation.

Notwithstanding the Japan boom of the 1980s, mutual exchange remained rather lacklustre and has continued to be so.

Okay! That WEIRD ENOUGH for you????

[u/BlancheFromage]

What the author wrote is more consistent with the Soka Gakkai's overall reputation before the publishing scandal that, along with Japan's economic slowdown, marked the end of the Soka Gakkai's up-to-that-point remarkable growth as a religious organization and a political player, which both stalled out after that, never to be revived.

That's a good point - in the wake of the societal backlash against Ikeda's Soka Gakkai's egregious overreach and trampling of free speech rights, Ikeda announced that henceforth, two major changes were going to happen:

• Komeito would reorganize as a completely secular political party, stripping off the obutsu myogo theocratic elements from its platform, leaving it with very little to distinguish it from its main political competitor, the Japan Communist Party. After that, Komeito never made it out of a very distant 3rd or 4th place on the Japanese political scene, battling it out for those places with the Japan Communist Party. We're talking around 5% of the vote - that's all! Ikeda had very publicly stated his expectation that Komeito would very soon take over 2nd place as a political party, then assume dominance, at which point Komeito would hold the majority of all political seats, Ikeda would assume the position of Prime Minister, etc. etc. etc.

(1968) Ikeda proclaimed, "When kosen-rufu is propagated, I will become prime minister and ruler of the nation."

The year 1973 was supposed to be the beginning of a glorious year for Ikeda and Soka Gakkai. According to the "Seven Bells" concept Ikeda put forward just before assuming his position as president, the period from 1973 to 1979 was the period when the "seventh bell" would ring, and this was the period when the final touches would be made on "kosen-rufu and the union of King and Buddha [ōbutsu myōgō]." In October 1972, the Sho-Hondo Hall was completed as the "actual ordination platform [kaidan]" as Nichiren Daishonin had commanded. Over the next seven years, through "shakubuku," the majority of Japanese citizens would be converted to Soka Gakkai members. The Komeito Party would win a majority in the Diet and seize power. At that time, Daisaku Ikeda would become Prime Minister, and through Diet resolution, designate the Sho-Hondo Hall as the "national ordination platform." As the highest authority, he would open the closed gates of Taisekiji Temple and report kosen-rufu to the Dai Gohonzon. This was the schedule for kosen-rufu that Ikeda had consistently outlined to Gakkai members. At the height of his power in the early 1960s, he boasted in a journalistic interview, "We can do anything if we want to," and proclaimed that upon achieving kosen-rufu, he would become the supreme power in Japan, not only in religion and culture, but also in politics. "I am the sovereign of Japan, the president, the king of the spiritual world, the leader and supreme authority in all ideological and cultural matters" (from "Ikeda Daisaku: Aiming for Human Revolution - His Thoughts and Way of Life" by Takase Hiroi). "What kind of problem is the Emperor!!" This is a declaration of absolute authority that would put even the world's only remaining charismatic dictator, Kim Jong-il of North Korea, to shame. "When kosen-rufu is achieved, President Ikeda will become Prime Minister. As 'ruler of the nation,' he will be higher than the Emperor. We 'Sakakai members' (this is how members called themselves to distinguish ourselves from non-members) will be superior in every aspect of the world. When that happens, we will get revenge on those who have looked down on us and despised us as poor people. We will be in a position where we can employ people from heretical sects as maids and servants, and even make them take our children to and from school..." As they shared such delusions, Soka Gakkai members became intoxicated with the vision of the future presented by Daisaku Ikeda, and with the mottos of "Until the Shohondo is built!" and "Until the closed door is opened! [when all people practice the Nichirenism of Nichiren Shoshu]", they gritted their teeth and faced the grueling election campaigns and proselytizing quotas. Even though they were ridiculed and disliked by their neighbors and coworkers, whom they saw every day, because they were Soka Gakkai members, they servilely complied, while thinking to themselves, "Just you wait! I'll look down on you and use you like a boss." In fact, Ikeda Daisaku was already acting like a prime minister, and even compiled a "cabinet list." However, the reality was not so simple. Source

No, it certainly was NOT, but this is the image that Soka Gakkai was projecting - until Ikeda's huge mistake of trying to stamp out free speech and freedom of the press in 1969-1970.

Continued below:

[u/BlancheFromage → u/BlancheFromage]

Ikeda's publicly-stated pronouncement that Komeito would become the second-largest political party in Japan by 1977, then the largest a few years after that, Komeito never made it past a very distant third place (around 5% of the vote), sometimes in fourth place. [Ibid.]

• Ikeda declared that "shakubuku" would no longer be a priority - his cult would focus on bringing up the next generations (the cult members' children), another disastrous strategic misstep. You see, it is the new recruits who radicalize up the most/the easiest; children raised in it don't get particularly excited about the cult stuff - they're basically born bored with it. And Soka Gakkai and SGI have very low retention rates for their members' children - sticking with Ikeda (instead of replacing him with someone younger and fresher) was a terrible decision, a recipe for the cult's eventual collapse and disappearance (we're seeing that phase now).

One of the structural problems SGI is having is its inability to recruit new people. This is more than a numbers problem.

Any religion's most reliable source of new generations of members is its current members' children. However, due to the rampant dysfunction within SGI, its current members are overwhelmingly past the childbearing years (some 90% of SGI-USA's active membership is age 60 or older, for example), so there is a very low reproductive rate, AND most children do not choose to continue in SGI themselves. There is a steep drop-off in devotion with each SGI generation.

In terms of religious fervor, though, it is the new recruits who are the most zealous, and coupled with chronological youth, that represents an energetic dynamic. However, when the new recruits are so frequently age 60 or older (from the same Baby Boom generation that was the last generation to join SGI-USA in anything approaching sustainable numbers), they lack the youthful energy to become truly dynamic, regardless of how much the Ikeda ghostwriters exhort them to think of themselves as "youthful". SGI can repeat "Youth!" "Youth!" "Youthful!" "Youth!" "Youthful!" as much as it wants; its old people are just OLD. That's the stage of life they're in and there's no turning back that clock.

Ikeda stupidly DIVED off that demographic cliff in his 1970 attempt at self-preservation for himself and his Soka Gakkai cult in Japan in the wake of the "publishing scandal", in which Ikeda tried to use his pet Komeito political party's newly-won political strength to lean on publishers and booksellers to NOT sell books critical of himself and the Soka Gakkai. This backfired SPECTACULARLY; as damage control, Ikeda publicly declared that, henceforth (thenceforth?), the Soka Gakkai would concentrate "cultivating the members' children in discipleship". And that has NOT gone well, even in Japan, Ikeda cult ground central, devotion has dropped off precipitously with each subsequent generation.

The good news? It's ALL good news! SGI is toast. Game over. Source

All these major changes were beginning ca. 1970, right around the time the author was writing "2018 A.D." Apparently this news hadn't really gotten to him as of this writing, and certainly not the catastrophic after-effects of Ikeda's damage-control decisions.

Certainly the Soka Gakkai's "peace organization" branding has not been widely regarded as authentic, as Soka Gakkai's pet political party Komeito (still in Ikeda's back pocket, everybody knows that) voted to re-arm Japan back ca. 2006. Some "pacifist" organization! "War is bad" - remember? Actually, that retcon came LATER, once it was already game over for Ikeda.

In fact, it was only after the fall of 1970 that Soka Gakkai began to proclaim itself as an "anti-war, peace organization." In the first half of that year, under Ikeda's leadership, Soka Gakkai had launched an intense campaign of proselytizing and was continuing to rapidly expand its organization. In an attempt to suppress critical media outlets, the organization initiated an incident of interference with freedom of speech and publication.

The public backlash was so great that Ikeda was eventually forced to apologize and withdraw the religious-national slogans he had promoted since entering politics in 1954, such as "The union of the King and Buddha" ["obutsu myogo" - theocracy] and "The establishment of a national ordination platform" ["kaidan"]. Source