Soka Gakkai in Politics: Komeito in Postwar Japan

Nichiren arrived during a turbulent period in Japanese history, when the country was beset by natural disasters, political strife, and a looming Mongol invasion. He attacked the political and religious leaders of the time for pursuing their own gain instead of improving the lives of those in their care. Seven hundred years later, during the hard times following WWII, Josei Toda revived this message as he led the Gakkai to its explosive growth in the 1950s. Under his leadership, the Gakkai became famous for its aggressive, even abusive, proselytization, and for its militant organization, which mimicked the cell structure of Bolshevik and Nazi revolutionaries.

The Gakkai formally entered politics in 1954, when Toda's successor-to-be, Daisuke Ikeda, mobilized new converts in Osaka to elect representatives to the prefectural assembly. The Komeito formed in 1964, after the Gakkai had elected fourteen members to the national Diet (the Japanese parliament), and in just four years it grew to forty-seven seats, surpassing the Communist and Democratic Socialist parties. It spent the next thirty years in opposition, speaking for those left behind by Japanese industrialization, advocating welfare payments for children and the elderly and stricter controls on industrial pollution. It pushed a neutralist foreign policy, criticizing the US-Japan Security Treaty and playing a major role in Japan's normalization of relations with China in 1972.

Komeito's position as a critical observer did not last long, however, and it was soon drawn into orbit around the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which ruled Japan from 1955–1993 with the backing of farmers and the business community. By 1969, the two parties were helping each other cover up scandals, and sporadic electoral cooperation began in 1970. In The Secret History of Coalition Government, Shunsuke Eto and Wajo Hichiri point to this moment as the beginning of a long slide into supporting a corrupt status quo in return for power and influence, arguing that the Komeito has fallen away from its ideals of peace and social justice. In their account, they draw heavily on the memoirs of former Komeito Chairman Yoshikatsu Takeiri (Reference Takeiri1998), which were serialized in the Asahi daily (Japan's New York Times). Reading the original, it seems clear that Takeiri himself succumbed to LDP Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka's personal charisma and the attractions of power, though the actions of other Komeito leaders are not fully explained. Hirano makes a similar claim in The Truth about Komeito – Soka Gakkai. He draws on experiences from his career as a Diet staff member, though, to argue that this entrapment was a deliberate LDP strategy; Takeiri's account supports this, since it reveals that LDP politicians typically initiated contact, not the Komeito.

The story culminates in 1998, when the Komeito ended four years of parliamentary chaos by formally joining the LDP in a stable ruling coalition. From 1993 — when the LDP's thirty-nine-year rule ended — to 1998, the Komeito appeared poised to join a conglomerate of small center-left parties, in forming a new opposition party that could offer voters a realistic alternative to one-party rule. That role had formerly been held by the Socialist Party of Japan, which collapsed in the mid-1990s without having won an electoral majority since 1949. The Komeito suddenly dropped out, however, to form a coalition with the LDP that still holds power in 2007.

In the process, Komeito dropped its opposition to close security ties with the United States and to American-style capitalism, major shifts on the two most salient issues in Japanese politics. It is unclear whether these shifts mark a return to the conservatism of Buddhist politics found in prewar Japan as well as contemporary Southeast Asia, a compromise for power, as Naoki Yamada, Eto and Hichiri argue, a reflection of changing member demographics, as Shimada argues, or something else entirely. This remains an important question for the literature.

Criticism of the Soka Gakkai's Political Activity

The Gakkai has suffered withering criticism for its open support of the Komeito. The party was originally a division of the Gakkai organization, but was spun off in 1970, after revelations that the Komeito had tried to suppress publication of a critical book, Hirotatsu Fujiwara's (Reference Fujiwara1970) I denounce the Soka Gakkai. This offered detractors evidence of a religious organization wielding state power, which is expressly forbidden under Article 20 of Japan's constitution. Today, while there are no official ties between the two organizations, the Komeito draws its support almost entirely from Gakkai members, and campaigning for the Komeito is a regular part of Gakkai religious meetings. Conversation with members reveals that they see campaigning as a semi-religious activity, using a single phrase “spreading friendship” to include both campaigning and proselytization. This does raise constitutional questions, and opponents seize on it to argue that Gakkai leaders are using members' faith to manipulate their political activity. While criticism of the Gakkai first arose among leftwing parties — with whom the Komeito competed for urban blue-collar votes — it has spread across the political spectrum.

Understanding the source of this criticism is especially important for an English-language review of the Japanese literature because the Japanese political realm looks quite different from its American counterpart. There are no hot-button social issues like abortion or gay rights that divide Japanese voters across religious lines, and the authors' — especially Yamada and Eto and Hichiri — attempts to blame Komeito for Prime Minister Koizumi's (2001–2006) controversial neo-liberal policies are brief, unsupported, and totally unconvincing. Hardacre (Reference Hardacre2005) argues the opposite, that the Komeito was actually instrumental in stopping the LDP's efforts to revise Article 9 (which forbids a Japanese military) and the constitutional commitment to gender equality. Similarly, Shinoda's (Reference Shinoda2007) and Shimizu's (Reference Shimizu2005) studies of policy-making in the Koizumi administration dispel any myths about Komeito influence over anti-terror policies. In short, academic research reveals that policy fears cannot explain the very real suspicion of the Gakkai's motives among Japanese authors and voters. The authors are better at questions about whether leaders use religion as a tool to control members' behavior then they are at asking what the leaders might be using their influence for.

Yamada goes to the heart of the matter in What is the Soka Gakkai: “Unlike normal people — who have no connection to religion — Soka Gakkai members are moved by this compulsive teaching of the Gakkai: punishment and reward. […] Perhaps ‘spell’ is a better term” (134, italics added). Hirano makes a similar observation, and Eto and Hichiri use the related term “mind control” to explain members' loyalty. Yamada is right about “normal people” — most Japanese adults' connection to religion amounts to superficial participation in an occasional ritual, making real belief difficult to comprehend. To most Japanese, religion seems like nothing more than blind belief in a set of obviously false propositions — making it easy for them to label the Gakkai's activities as manipulative brainwashing. For their part, Gakkai members themselves see this antipathy toward religion as the main source of criticism that typically culminates in claims that Ikeda is subverting democracy and hopes to make himself absolute ruler.

Yamada and Hirano's views of the Gakkai, and their open accusations of fascism, are straight from Kornhauser's (Reference Kornhauser1959) collective behavior theory of Mass Man, like much of the 1960s-era writing on the Gakkai. Cut-off from outside social contact, limited to organization-approved news sources, and alienated from society, mass man represents a block of potential fascists easily led to support their leaders' totalitarian plans. Indeed, the Gakkai of the 1950s resembled revolutionary totalitarian movements in its organizational structure and strident demands. Unfortunately for the authors, White assembled copious survey evidence to show that Gakkai members in the 1960s were neither isolated nor alienated — they tended to be involved in more organizations than the average Japanese, be better informed about social/political issues, and show a more positive outlook on society. This is especially striking when one considers that the mean income and education among Gakkai members was significantly lower than average at the time, which implies they should be less engaged and informed. As a group, then, Gakkai members should have been among the least susceptible to political manipulation, raising serious doubts about accusations of fascism.

Still, the question of where Komeito and the Gakkai stand on democracy is important because the Komeito is even more powerful than its position as a swing vote in the Diet implies. LDP-Komeito cooperation extends beyond parliamentary action to electoral cooperation. Japan switched from multi-member parliamentary districts to a mix of single-member ones — like in the United States or Great Britain — and proportional representation. This means that with only ten percent or so of the vote, the Komeito was unlikely to win any district elections outright. Faced with marginalization, Komeito leaders struck a deal with the LDP whereby Gakkai members would vote for LDP candidates in their districts in return for a portion of the LDP's proportional votes.

In close elections, this strategic voting has proved enough to push LDP candidates over the top. For example, Hirano begins his book with Taku Yamazaki, a former vice-president of the LDP who lost his seat, then won it back after he apologized to Gakkai members in his district for past insults. Yamazaki pledged to “share the same spirit” (itaidōshin) — a key phrase in Nichiren Buddhism that members use to describe the relationship between the Gakkai and Komeito. He, the authors imply, is one of many LDP legislators who owe their seats to Gakkai members, giving it the ability to shape policy from the inside as well as from its Komeito representatives on the outside. Except for Shimada, the other four authors argue that parliamentary democracy is finished in Japan. It has become “bunraku (puppet) democracy,” where the government dances to strings pulled by an off-stage religious cabal.

As the tone of these quotes suggests, the Gakkai's political activities are a highly charged issue in Japan; too often discussions degenerate into ad hominem attacks and conspiracy theories. Eto and Hichiri's explanation for the Gakkai's hostility toward radical leftism is a representative example.

In return, the Gakkai's press outlets reply with vituperation of their own. After publishing his memoirs Takeiri was attacked as corrupt, a liar, and a womanizer, and in Soka Gakkai to wa Nanika Yamada describes how he received the same treatment.

Nevertheless, there are important constitutional issues at stake underlying this rhetoric, as David O'Brien (Reference O'Brien1996) points out in his study of postwar religious freedom. Japan's long history of state control over religion makes the Gakkai's demands for religious freedom especially powerful, but its own lack of transparency and its rhetoric about establishing Buddhist law makes the Gakkai's political influence problematic. Unfortunately, these books offer a one-sided look at this larger issue. Similarly, the question of how its engagement in politics affects a religious organization deserves a more balanced treatment than the authors give it. David Kisala's Prophets of Peace (1999) is a good start, looking at how the Komeito's involvement in making foreign policy has forced its Gakkai supporters to compromise their pacifist beliefs. Still, much work remains to be done on both of these issues, and discontent within the Sangha about participation in politics throughout Southeast Asia suggests that cross-national work holds on the issue promise.

Religion and Political Mobilization

If we reject accusations of fascist mind control, the Gakkai's ability to mobilize millions of voters in every national election demands an alternative explanation from political scientists. The broader question of how religious groups mobilize voters is especially salient in this case, given the Gakkai's unusual ability to convince members to vote strategically for a party they once opposed. Wald, Silverman, and Fridy (Reference Wald, Adam and Kevin2005) argue that scholars of religion and politics should use Social Movement Theory (SMT) to explain this connection between religion and political mobilization. SMT assumes movements are directed by elites who use grievances as tools to manipulate followers in their quest for power. Eto and Hichiri do not mention SMT explicitly, but the similarity is obvious, since they accuse Gakkai leaders of doing just what SMT predicts. Unfortunately, that theory too is problematic. The Gakkai's political action is ostensibly driven by Nichiren's call for kosen rufu, progress toward a Buddhist utopia, but Wald, Silverman, and Fridy (Reference Wald, Adam and Kevin2005) insist that “saving the world” is not a sufficient motive; religious organizations need concrete grievances to mobilize their supporters.

Perhaps we can locate the mobilizing grievance in the Gakkai's historical association with the down-trodden. But while the Gakkai once carried the banner of society's disenfranchised, Shimada argues that such an image is out of date. Azumi (Reference Azumi1971) describes the Gakkai as originally appealing to the rural laborers that gathered in big cities to find blue-collar jobs as Japan industrialized in the 1950s and 1960s, because it offered converts meaning and social networks to replace the ones they left behind in the countryside. In general, the Japanese “new religions,” of which the Soka Gakkai is the largest, are seen as responses to the stressful transition from traditional to modern society. But that transitional era in Japanese history is now finished. Today, the vast majority of members under fifty are “fortune babies,” born into the Gakkai rather than adult converts, and these members are not uneducated blue-collar workers. A recent headline in the Gakkai's newspaper boasted that Soka University students had the fourth highest bar exam pass rate among private universities, reflecting the membership's upward mobility (Seikyo Shinbun. August 15th, 2007). Leadership speeches and the organization's newspaper are relentlessly positive, and evidence of any effort stir up member grievances is sorely lacking. It is hard to see any grievance that could come close to supporting the weight of the Gakkai's mobilizing power in the twenty-first century. Social Movement Theory, then, falls short as an attempt at explaining Gakkai political mobilization. While the Gakkai and Komeito seem to act like the coherent blocks that SMT visualizes, they lack the micro-foundations that SMT requires.

Shimada offers an alternative. Where collective behavior (Yamada) and SMT (Hirano, Eto and Hichiri) take mass movements as the proper subject of research, he argues that these perspectives blind us to important events within the Gakkai. For example, he examines the Komeito's 1994 split into pro- and anti-LDP factions and reveals that the puzzle regarding which legislators joined each party is neatly explainable by the individual electoral situations they faced. Those that faced elections under the post-1994 reform rules joined the new anti-LDP party to gain the support of its non-Gakkai members, while those that didn't — regional politicians and those upper house members who were not up for re-election — maintained their old contacts with the LDP. By contrast, Eto and Hichiri's argument requires they say the split was Ikeda's personal decision, yet offer no solid evidence to support this implication. Shimada strengthens his thesis by discussing the dissension among Gakkai voters over Komeito policies after it joined the coalition.

Shimada argues that we need to look at the Komeito-Soka Gakkai connection in the same way scholars treat other politically active groups in a pluralist society. For example, each of these books single out Gakkai members' campaign activity as disturbing, suddenly remembering their “friends” at election time, asking them to vote for the LDP/Komeito — one acquaintance in his late twenties keeps his high school yearbook on hand so he can call his classmates before every election. But political scientists have known since Curtis (Reference Curtis1971) and Thayer (Reference Thayer1974) that secular Japanese politicians exploit social networks to gather votes in the same way. Readers with experience in Japan may have themselves heard an acquaintance in the construction industry asking friends and relatives to vote LDP — another example of the same phenomenon.

Yet we should not ignore the possibility that religious motives for such political behavior may produce outcomes other than financial or personal motives. For example, the persistence of Gakkai support after the Komeito's coalition with the LDP remains puzzling, given the collapse in Socialist Party support following its own coalition with the LDP in 1994. It is also important to recognize the qualitative difference between groups in society that claim access to Truth (religious and secular) and groups that simply claim a larger portion of society's wealth. From the perspective of democratic theory, this complicates the Gakkai's role in politics. Nevertheless, Shimada's research, combined with Yamada, Hirano, Eto and Hichiri's inability to offer a convincing explanation for Gakkai behavior, suggests that researchers should move beyond studying the Gakkai as a whole, as those four authors do, and investigate individual members' motives and actions.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Political scientists in Japan are accustomed to reading the inside scoop from LDP politician interviews, but we suffer from a distinct lack of first-hand information on Komeito or the Gakkai. Hirano comes closest, since his long career as a Diet staff member brought him into close contact with Komeito politicians, but even his book relies heavily on hearsay. Equally apparent is the dearth of scholarly citations in any of the books — probably because, as Shimada notes, there is little scholarly literature to cite.

This lacuna may partly stem from the Gakkai's well-known suspicion of outside investigators and its reluctance to allow access. For example, studying the LDP is a matter of building personal connections with individual politicians, but Gakkai members direct outside researchers to the organization's central headquarters, reinforcing the idea of a single collective identity. In an earlier study, Keiichi Kawanishi (Reference Kawanishi1996) describes how headquarters public relations staff refused to cooperate with the Asahi's request for interviews, which is almost unheard of, given the cozy relationship between politicians and the press in Japan. While the edited volume Tonari no Soka Gakkai [The Soka Gakkai Next Door: 1995] is an exception, most of those researchers who do gain access to the Gakkai, like Metraux (1988) or Seager (Reference Seager2006) rarely tackle controversial issues. This leads the Gakkai and its critics into a vicious cycle — with no information to the contrary, observers assume the worst about the organization, and in turn, their critiques only confirm members' distrust.

The Future of Soka Gakkai, Komeito, and Ikeda

As we look to the future, the question of Ikeda's passing is impossible to ignore when considering the prospects for Gakkai and Komeito in the years to come. His inevitable demise is a topic of speculation in all four books, and Shimada and several other authors have contributed to a volume that addresses just this question (Soka Gakkai after Ikeda Daisaku's Death, 2007). Even a brief experience with Gakkai religious activities reveals Ikeda's centrality to its theology, from his regular appearance on the Seikyo newspaper's front page to the predictability with which his name appears in member testimonials. Critics point to this as a cult of personality, but it is unclear how much this differs from other charismatic religious leaders. Unfortunately, none of the books refers to the comparative literature on charismatic leaders, which might offer more insight into this crucial question. Politically, Ikeda's passing is almost certain to weaken Komeito; members in the Osaka area claim loyalty to Komeito is a function of their gratitude for Ikeda's efforts, and it is unclear whether future leaders would be able to inspire similar loyalty.

The authors raise several possible scenarios, including a transfer of power, factionalism and breakup, or a situation where Ikeda is appointed eternal president and someone else runs the Gakkai in his name. Eto and Hichiri suggest that real power will shift from the Soka Gakkai to SGI, the umbrella organization that coordinates the Gakkai's different international branches, and a perusal of Japanese-language Gakkai publications confirms the growing emphasis on the international activities of SGI.

The importance of SGI raises a theological question with interesting implications. It seems reasonable to draw a continuum from the violent nationalism of Buddhism in Southeast Asia to the moderate internationalist Soka Gakkai in Japan to the universal peace and love paradigm of SGI adherents in Britain that Wilson and Dobbelaere (Reference Wilson and Karel1994) describe. This may simply reflect the diversity of a major religion, but if Queen (Reference Queen, Charles and Damien2003) is right about the “new religion” manifestations of Buddhism being a re-importation to modernizing Asia of Western interpretations of Buddhism, it implies that Buddhist political views are being transformed by globalization. The countries of Southeast Asia are following trajectories of modernization and globalization similar to Japan's, and while there are important differences, the Gakkai's political activism may foreshadow similar activity in those countries. These books are a starting point, but it's time for scholars to address the Komeito-Soka Gakkai connection in more robust, synthetic, and theoretically sophisticated ways.

Disheartening though it will be for members, Ikeda's eventual passing may make this easier (he is eighty, and has recently suffered from illness). These books, like the wider journalistic literature, rely too much on hyperbolic rhetoric and too little on dispassionate evidence, and Ikeda is a lightning rod for criticism. For example, Yamada, Hirano, and Eto and Hichiri argue that after Aum Shinrikyo's terrorist sarin gas attack rocked the country, the Komeito joined the LDP to prevent it from calling Ikeda as a sworn witness in Diet testimony. There is no shortage of quotes from Gakkai members insisting that he shouldn't be called (even its critics do not accuse the Gakkai of being connected to Aum Shinrikyo), but it is difficult to believe that Komeito changed the direction of Japanese politics over that issue. On the other hand, they do raise an important issue with the Aum controversy. The LDP was contemplating a new law that would increase legal control over religious activities such as proselytizing, and it is entirely plausible that the Komeito agreed to support the LDP in return for protecting religious freedom. Without Ikeda's presence, though, the connection would have been easier to make. In this fashion, the authors point to important questions, but it remains to future researchers to provide more useful analysis.