Goodness, Beauty & Benefit-But for Whom?

The vast auditorium of Tokyo's Nihon University seats 10,000, but it bulged with twice that many people as local and regional leaders of Soka Gakkai packed the hall to hear an announcement: their religious society will enter the political field in earnest by running 30 candidates in the next election to the 467-member lower house of the Diet.

Japan's political parties were as rattled as if the Emperor had suddenly reclaimed his forsaken divinity. Soka Gakkai, a society of Buddhist laymen, already holds 15 seats in the 250-member upper house, plus some 4,000 seats on local councils. Soka Gakkai (the Value-Creation Society) is more than just another party; it is a militantly organized, crusading sect vaguely combining Buddhism with left-wing reform or perhaps revolutionary politics, and its confessed ambition is to convert Japan and then the world.

Fuji's Foot. The movement mixes the evangelism of Moral Rearmament with the get-out-the-vote discipline of the Communist Party and lots of show biz. Founded in 1930, it was suppressed during World War II and began sweeping the nation in 1947 under a talented organizer and ex-schoolteacher named Josei Toda. Soka Gakkai now claims 13 million members and 100,000 converts a month. While some critics question these figures, there is no doubt that the movement is gaining impressively. Last month, at ceremonies featuring martial bands, a waltz-playing orchestra, an all-girl chorus and sutra-chanting priests, Soka Gakkai formally dedicated a $4,500,000 recreation-and-worship center at the foot of Mount Fuji.

Soka Gakkai is tightly organized into squads (each composed of 20 to 30 families), companies (made up of six squads), districts (formed by ten companies) and regional chapters. In thou sands of local meetings held throughout Japan on any night of the week, members discuss their spiritual progress and prepare for their highest duty, which is shakubuku (literally, break and subdue), or gaining converts. Until some years ago shakubuku was accomplished by relays of devotees chanting sutras round the clock in a prospective recruit's home and literally wearing him down. In other cases, members burned a family's Shinto altar, or prevented a doctor from treating a sick devotee on grounds that faith alone would cure him. Because of public protest, Soka Gakkai eased off on such tactics, but even today it stresses obedience, and members must vote for the sect's political candidates as a religious duty.

Highest Values. Just what its faith and its political program consist of is not easy to discern. The society propagates a simplified, modernized version of doctrines taught by the 13th century Buddhist reformer, Nichiren, who maintained that happiness consisted of pursuing the highest values in life--"goodness, beauty and benefit." Grandly promising its followers material as well as spiritual benefits, Soka Gakkai, operating through a political affiliate called Koseiren, is competing with Japan's Communists and Socialists for the support of the discontented urban poor, who have missed out on the country's industrial boom. A Tokyo newsman explains, "Soka Gakkai is more appealing because religion sounds better than Communism." Soka Gakkai collects no dues, instead selects 400,000 families a year to provide 1,000 yen ($2.78) apiece; being allowed to contribute is considered a great honor. The sect derives even more income from a vast publishing empire that puts out a newspaper, two monthly magazines, a picture magazine and a children's magazine, boasting a combined circulation of 5,000,000.

Domestically, the society visualizes a powerful welfare state, attacks corruption, political bosses, waste of taxpayers' money and favoritism for big business. In the Diet, Soka Gakkai has supported aid to small businessmen and most welfare measures. In contrast to the easygoing approach of many of their fellow representatives, Soka Gakkai Deputies painstakingly investigate every bill, carefully compile factual data on which to base their support or opposition.

In foreign policy, the society calls for diplomatic relations with both Nationalist China, which Japan already recognizes, and Red China, friendly relations with South Korea, and the return of U.S.-occupied Okinawa to Japanese control. Explains a Soka Gakkai spokesman: "We do not think it is good to be friendly to the U.S. and the Western nations to the exclusion of others."

Fixing Fences. Many Japanese are sure that there is far more to the movement than this sort of crusading reform spirit. They worry about Soka Gakkai's militant organization, its occasional signs of fanaticism. Many hope that the movement may prove a passing phenomenon, but Japan's political pros are not so sure. One fact that particularly impresses them: the society's converts are mainly young adults under 30. Soka Gakkai's president, Daisaku Ikeda (no kin to Japan's Premier), is himself only 36. Before the war, Ikeda says, the Japanese did have an ideal of sorts--to conquer Asia by force. But since then his argument goes, nothing has been advanced to take its place. Says he: "We give the young a principle, a practical and sincere ideal."

Just what that ideal is, and where it might lead, is another question. Last week Premier Hayato Ikeda's Liberal-Democratic Party, as well as the Socialists, began discussing ways to repair their political fences among the masses and counteract Soka Gakkai.

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