Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution: The Rise of a Mimetic Nation in Modern Japan

Contemporary Buddhism

by Levi McLaughlin

Soka Gakkai is Japan’s largest and most influential new religious organization: It claims more than 8 million Japanese households and close to 2 million members in 192 countries and territories. The religion is best known for its affiliated political party, Komeito (the Clean Government Party), which comprises part of the ruling coalition in Japan’s National Diet, and it exerts considerable influence in education, media, finance, and other key areas.

Levi McLaughlin’s comprehensive account of Soka Gakkai draws on nearly two decades of archival research and non-member fieldwork to account for its institutional development beyond Buddhism and suggest how we should understand the activities and dispositions of its adherents. McLaughlin explores the group’s Nichiren Buddhist origins and turns to insights from religion, political science, anthropology, and cultural studies to characterize Soka Gakkai as mimetic of the nation-state. Ethnographic vignettes combine with historical evidence to demonstrate ways Soka Gakkai’s twin Buddhist and modern humanist legacies inform the organization’s mimesis of the modern Japan in which the group took shape. To make this argument, McLaughlin analyzes Gakkai sources heretofore untreated in English-language scholarship; provides a close reading of the serial novel The Human Revolution, which serves the Gakkai as both history and de facto scripture; identifies ways episodes from members’ lives form new chapters in its growing canon; and contributes to discussions of religion and gender as he chronicles the lives of members who simultaneously reaffirm generational transmission of Gakkai devotion as they pose challenges for the organization’s future.

Readers looking for analyses of the nation-state and strategies for understanding New Religions and modern Buddhism will find Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution to be an especially thought-provoking study that offers widely applicable theoretical models.

Genres: Japan

363 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 31, 2018

Reviews

[Robin Danckaert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is probably the most significant (modern) entry in Soka Gakkai history from an academic and non-member viewpoint. The nation state framework McLaughlin uses is quite competent in its description of different Gakkai processes, and the personal note involving the various Gakkai members and non-members he encountered throughout his time, paint a vivid picture of Japanese Gakkai life, culture and Ikeda personalism. Whilst this book of course does not speak of SGI (the international branch) experience, it provides a nuanced take on the belief system. The author goes over every change and criticism the organization has received, as well as highlighting the various historical tactics it employs to provide meaning and loyalty in its followers. In this sense, the book is a must have for any aspiring and current SGI member, to diversify their information intake on the organizations history, as well as to allow them to be critical in their thinking. In a way, it is the perfect stepping stone for the Gakkai Nichiren Buddhist, to acknowledge his/her own buddha nature. We should cast up a "mirror" not only to ourselves, but also to those who came before us.

[Javier Delgado · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book about Soka Gakkai 「創価学会」. McLaughlin not only provides a good historical overview of the group, but he narrates personal experiences he had when he joined Soka Gakkai adherents in Japan, explaining how they live following the group's fusion of Buddhism, Western Humanism and devotion for the leader Ikeda Daisaku.

[Spencer Heath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goated professor goated book.