Daisaku Ikeda's Philosophy of Peace

Dialogue, Transformation and Global Citizenship

Olivier Urbain

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780857730589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Bouddhisme

Who is Daisaku Ikeda? At one level, he is the leader of a religious movement - Soka Gakkai - which began in Japan, where it still has its headquarters, but which now claims 12 million adherents around the world. At another level, he is a globetrotting figure whose formal conversations with diverse writers, thinkers and diplomats - including Arnold Toynbee, Joseph Rotblat and Mikhail Gorbachev - have garnered him an international profile, as well as academic recognition. Perhaps above all else, Daisaku Ikeda is viewed as a campaigner for peace. And it is Ikeda's specific contribution to peacebuilding, notably through the central emphasis he has placed on the significance of dialogue, that this book explores: the first to do so in a concerted way. Olivier Urbain shows that while Soka Gakkai (the 'value society') may stem from the medieval principles of Nichiren Buddhism, under Ikeda's leadership it has taken these classic wisdoms and transformed them.
Now essentially classless and secularised, as well as adaptable and sensitive to modern challenges like resource shortages and climate change, this - argues the author - is a pragmatic approach to peace which has proved both popular and eminently transportable.

 

PART I

A PHILOSOPHER OF PEACE

CHAPTER 1

Daisaku Ikeda and his Circumstances: Recollections of War and Peace

I am myself plus my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I cannot save myself.

José Ortega y Gasset (1961, 45)

The burning commitment to peace that remained unshaken throughout his imprisonment was something he carried with him his entire life. It was from this, and from the profound compassion that characterized each of his interactions, that I most learned. Ninety-eight percent of what I am today I learned from him.

Daisaku Ikeda about his mentor Josei Toda,

in a lecture at Columbia University in 1996.

(Ikeda 2001, 106–7)

The first time I met Daisaku Ikeda in person was in Los Angeles, USA, in 1987. The occasion was the official opening of the first campus of Soka University of America (SUA), and I was playing the vibraphone in the local SGI band. At some point I found myself looking straight into Ikeda’s deep brown eyes, and even though he did not say anything and was only smiling and raising his arms in a welcoming gesture, I was overwhelmed with the very distinct feeling of hearing someone telling me: ‘Please study hard and never give up!’ I had just started my first PhD at the time and I was indeed in need of this type of encouragement, preoccupied as I was with my new endeavors. Why I gained the impression that Ikeda was responding to this need is still a mystery to me, but the fact remains that I was able to make a renewed and more profound commitment to my studies at that moment. The memory of this episode is still much alive today.

Ikeda’s 80th birthday, on 2 January 2008, was celebrated by millions of SGI members around the world. Further, congratulatory messages were sent by prominent cultural and political figures, such as Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury, former United Nations Under-Secretary-General.¹ Others included futurist and sustainable development expert Hazel Henderson; Elise Boulding, peace activist and professor emerita of sociology at Dartmouth College; and former Indian Prime Minister Dr. Inder Kumar Gujral. On 5 December 2007, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Georgia, introduced a resolution in congress (H.Res. 844) ‘recognizing the service and dedication of Dr. Daisaku Ikeda and celebrating his 80th birthday.’² On 27 February 2008, Peking University in Beijing, China, hosted an academic symposium in honor of Ikeda’s birthday. It was attended by around 350 participants, including representatives of 20 Chinese universities.³

These events, as well as his achievements for peace mentioned below, present a contrast with Ikeda’s humble origins. Hailing from a long line of fisher folk and seaweed farmers, he grew up poor and sickly amidst the miseries and devastation brought about by the Pacific War (1937–45). I believe that the turning point in his life was his meeting with Josei Toda in 1947.

Ikeda became the third president of the Soka Gakkai⁴ in 1960, succeeding his mentor Toda. In 1975 he established the Soka Gakkai International (SGI), devoted to the ‘promotion of peace, culture and education.’ The SGI has spread to more than 190 countries and territories with more than two million members outside Japan. Under his leadership, the Soka Gakkai membership that stood at one million Japanese households⁵ in 1960 has soared to about ten million members.

Besides academic honors, Ikeda has received a large number of honorary citizenships from cities throughout the world. More than 15 research centers devoted to a study of his philosophy have sprung up in China in the last few years. For instance, Shanghai Sanda University established a research center dedicated to the study of his educational philosophy in 2004. There is a travelling exhibition featuring his work for peace alongside that of two giants of nonviolence, Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.⁶

Ikeda has established a complete educational system from kindergarten to university level, with a growing number of schools operating outside Japan. He has founded a concert association, a fine arts museum, two research institutes in Japan and one in the US, a newspaper and several magazines in Japan and the Komeito political party. He has championed friendly ties between China and Japan from as early as 1968, as well as proposed reforms of the United Nations (UN) and other original ideas for global peace in yearly peace proposals and other publications, a number of which have been implemented over the years. These achievements have not failed to trigger controversy, as Richard Seager reports after a meeting with Ikeda:

From our brief encounter, I can see that Ikeda likes to connect with people, which is probably one reason he is so intense – that and the fact that he’s a political-spiritual celebrity beloved by disciples and hated by enemies, a favorite target of the tabloid press, which pulls out his cult-leader reputation whenever Komeito faces a crucial election (Seager 2006, 49).

Having lived in Japan since 1991, I can confirm from first-hand experience that all kinds of rumors and scandals concerning Ikeda appear in the tabloid press around the time of important elections. The timing would make anybody suspicious, and moreover all attempts to trace the source of these slanders reveal that they are empty fabrications concocted for commercial purposes, and most often refuted and condemned in court. During my meetings with Ikeda, I have also noticed that he was intense. I interpret this as partly due to his capacity to give his interlocutors his full attention, as explained in Chapter 6.

I believe that the source of Ikeda’s motivation for these endeavors can be traced to his relationship with his mentor, Josei Toda. Indeed, Ikeda as a boy and adolescent was swept away by the militaristic propaganda that dominated Japan at the time, and a brief overview of the country’s imperialistic and colonial adventures will show why almost nobody could escape from that tidal wave. It was his meeting with Toda in 1947 that set Ikeda on the path to global peacebuilding. After his mentor’s passing in 1958, Ikeda continued to forge a path based on Toda’s teachings, showing remarkable consistency and tenacity through the domestic and international upheavals that have affected most pacifist movements in postwar Japan.

Growing up in militarized and wartime Japan (1928–40)

Ikeda grew up at a time when Japan was marching towards war, and his adolescence was spent in the middle of the second global conflagration of the twentieth century. This environment was to decisively shape his life trajectory. Another important event was the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, which drastically changed the Ikeda family’s social and financial status five years before Ikeda’s birth. The information concerning Ikeda’s life until 1975 is taken from his autobiographical work entitled My Recollections (Ikeda 1980).

Part of Tokyo Bay, the Omori area where Ikeda grew up once led Japan in the production of nori, a form of edible seaweed. The Ikeda family had been fisher folk and seaweed farmers growing nori for a long time, and by the turn of the twentieth century, they had become so successful that they were the largest producers in Tokyo Bay. For instance, they had pioneered the setting up of large drying areas for the nori, as well as the technique of ‘farming out’ the seaweed in different areas. The 1923 Kanto earthquake dealt a lethal blow to the family nori enterprise, and by the time Ikeda was born the family was destitute. Moreover Ikeda’s father became bedridden with rheumatism and could barely move for about two years, during which the family had to severely reduce its activities. Ikeda’s mother became the pillar of the family, his elder brother Kiichi had to quit middle school in order to bring some money home, and Ikeda himself had to try his young hands at various jobs.

The year when full-scale war broke out between China and Japan (1937), Kiichi had to enter military service, followed by the next three brothers one after another, with Ikeda himself barely escaping the same fate. Within a few years the whole country was mobilized around the war effort, from elementary pupils marching around the schoolyard with oak staves to major industries converted to produce military materiel. In the collection of poems entitled Fighting for Peace (2004b), Ikeda wrote:

Our family saw

my four elder brothers,

all in the prime of life, called away to war.

All four were made tools

of Japan’s invasion of China (29).

Around the same time, Nazi Germany was preparing the 1939 invasion of Poland, and the whole world would soon be plunged into World War II. It is said that Japan was at peace during the Edo Era (1603–1867), so what happened during and after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and how did Japan become part of the Axis during World War II, ending up with being the first country (and hopefully the last) to be hit by atomic bombs in August 1945? Ikeda wrote:

None of us had wanted

this war.

We had never

accepted or supported it.

Yet over time

almost without noticing,

we were all influenced,

maneuvered and brainwashed

to extol the glories of war.

The human heart holds

terrible possibilities.

More terrible still

are those who use their power

to mold and manipulate

people’s minds (2004b, 31).

In order to understand the context of Ikeda’s upbringing and the indoctrination to which the Japanese population was subjected, it is necessary to review the rise of Japanese nationalism, militarism and imperialism leading up to the defeat of 1945.

The background of Japan’s militarization and involvement in the Pacific War and World War II: Japanese imperialism (1879–1945)

Japan followed a policy of isolation for about 250 years from the seventeenth century, which can be said to have ended on the symbolic date of 8 July 1853, when four ‘Black Ships’ of the US Navy under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry entered Edo (Tokyo) Bay. Japan could no longer ignore the rest of the world and had to become actively involved in it for the first time in more than two centuries (Naval Historical Center 2008). The following year the Shogun reluctantly signed a treaty establishing formal diplomatic relations with the US, and within five years Japan had signed several similar treaties with other Western countries. This situation was experienced as threatening by most Japanese intellectuals, who felt Japan was brought into the Western sphere of influence against its will through ‘gunboat diplomacy.’ The treaties were considered as humiliating and unequal:

Japan, like China, suffered under the unequal treaties it had signed with the West. Japan was particularly humiliated by the extraterritoriality provisions in the treaties, provisions that allowed Westerners in Japan to be subject to their own nation’s laws, not Japan’s. The Japanese were also unhappy about the privileges that foreigners living in the treaty ports enjoyed as a result of the unequal treaties (Menton 2003).

This pressure from the Western powers is one of the reasons behind the 1868 Meiji Restoration, when the Shogun resigned, the emperor was symbolically restored to power, the feudal system was abolished and Japan started to adopt numerous Western institutions and legal frameworks (Japan Society 2008). In 1875 Japan had to yield the Sakhalin Islands to Russia, but on condition that they received the Kuril Islands instead. Tensions with Russia were already mounting as early as the eighteenth century (Bukh 2009). This incident, among many other vexations, contributed to the mood of humiliation and defeat, and the conviction among the intellectual and political leadership that Japan was faced with a stark choice mostly due to the Western steamroller advance to conquer the world: Japan would be either among the colonized or the colonizers.

A first response came in the 1870s with military incursions into the Ryukyu Islands, culminating in 1879 with their formal annexation and renaming as Okinawa Prefecture. A second followed in 1895 with the annexation of Taiwan, ceded from China following its defeat by Japan. By 1898 the last of the ‘unequal treaties’ with the West had been cancelled and Japan was on its way to becoming a world power.

With its victories in the first Sino–Japanese War (1894–95) and the Russo–Japanese War (1904–05), Japan became the first non-Western modern imperial power, and showed that it could defeat a Western state (OnWar.com2008). In 1908 the government ‘reaffirmed its foreign policy of expanding Japan’s colonial position on the Asian continent within a framework of continued division of spoils with the European powers and the United States’ (Bix 2001, 31). The last decade of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century were a period of intense internal turmoil in Japan, as its leaders were trying to find the best way to react to Western imperialism. A photograph dating back to 1902 symbolizes the complexity and ambiguity of the situation. A one-year-old baby clutches a flag and joyfully waves it above his head. The baby is Hirohito, the future emperor of Japan, and he is holding the military flag of the Rising Sun (Bix 2001, 244).

Korea was annexed as part of the Japanese empire in 1910, and a long period of colonial occupation started for the Korean people, only to end in 1945. There were mass deportations to Japanese labor camps, the kidnapping of thousands of young Korean (and other Asian) girls turned into Imperial Army prostitutes through the ‘comfort women system’ (a euphemism for sexual slavery),⁷ an attempt to wipe out the Korean language and other atrocities. Among a number of complex factors, this weakening of the Korean Peninsula can be considered as one of the reasons for the 1950–53 Korean War and the subsequent division of the Korean people into two states (Stueck 2002).

Japan joined the Western powers in quelling the Chinese Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) and then entered World War I on the side of the Entente against the Central Powers. Several victories allowed Japan to secure territories previously held by Germany. After the war Japan was recognized by the Treaty of Versailles (1919) as one of the ‘Big Five’ of the new international order, and it joine...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Note on proper names and spelling
• Preface by Johan Galtung
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: A Philosopher of Peace
• 1. Daisaku Ikeda and his Circumstances: Recollections of War and Peace
• 2. Autobiographical Sketches
• 3. Josei Toda: Ikeda’s Mentor in Life
• 4. Nichiren Buddhism: Principles and Values for the Twenty-first Century
• Part II: A Philosophy of Peace
• 5. Inner Transformation and Human Revolution: Enhancing Courage, Wisdom and Compassion for the Creation of a Better World
• 6. Dialogue and Dialogical Methods for Peace: Socrates, Montaigne, Buber, Habermas and Ikeda
• 7. Global Citizenship and Elements of a Global Civilization of Interconnectedness in the Peace Proposals
• 8. Ikeda’s Contribution to Peace Theory
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: A Brief Overview of Pacifism and Peace Movements in Japan
• Appendix 2: Josei Toda’s Declaration Calling for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons
• Appendix 3: The Life and Teachings of Nichiren (1222–82): a Brief Overview
• Appendix 4: Daisaku Ikeda’s Published Dialogues
• Appendix 5: List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography