| This dissertation investigates Soka Gakkai, a Japanese lay Buddhist movement founded in 1930. Today, Soka Gakkai claims 8.27 million households in Japan and almost two million members in close to two hundred other countries. Soka Gakkai is Japan's largest active religion and the largest active independent organization of any kind in Japan today. It is best known for its affiliated political party Komeito (part of Japan's ruling coalition), and for its private school system, publishing empire, and vast cultural enterprises. It also has a history of aggressive proselytizing under charismatic leadership. However, Soka Gakkai remains under-researched, and the few existing studies have adopted a top-down perspective that focuses on the organization's leaders and neglects day-to-day activities of its grassroots members. I employ a twofold approach that combines ethnographic methods not previously applied to this particular group with archival research to provide the first account of Soka Gakkai's historical development that privileges a grassroots perspective. My ethnography is based on interviews with more than two hundred members, months spent living with Gakkai families, and approximately seven years of participant observation, including studying for and taking the Soka Gakkai doctrinal examination and playing violin with a Soka Gakkai symphony orchestra. The historical research in this study draws on rare primary sources acquired through contacts with veteran members to investigate the group's distinctive conflation of Japanese Buddhism with ideals drawn from modern Romantic heroism. This dissertation pays particular attention to ways that Soka Gakkai's creative borrowings from Japanese Buddhism and modern Western imports---especially European and American pedagogical traditions---forge a distinctive ethos of aspiration and self-sacrifice among its practitioners. I argue that this ethos underlies members' self-cultivation practices and contributes to the organization's continuing development as a politically active mass movement with millions of adherents. My findings not only illuminate Soka Gakkai but have implications for the study of postwar Japanese society and for understanding other global mass movements in the modern era. |
