The Nail That Stands Up

In Japan, there’s a famous phrase - “deru kui wa utareru” - which means “the nail that stands up gets hammered down”. Japan is a country that typically prides itself on conformity, and sees anyone who is outspoken and holds different views to popular opinion as a potential threat to the rest of the group.  This lone voice must be knocked back into line.  It doesn’t even matter if the difference is the teaching of a great philosophy or something that can be harmful to society, as long as you are different from the mainstream, you must be put in your place.

Throughout most of Japan’s history, religions in Japan generally avoided any kind of persecution, keeping to themselves.  They didn’t really make efforts to expand their membership (which had been illegal from the 1600s onwards!) and they were happy to live in harmony alongside other Buddhist temples.  If Religion A didn’t “steal” members away from Religion B, Religion B wouldn’t steal members from Religion A.  Each temple earned enough to support their priests from the voluntary contributions of their followers and from the different services and rituals you could pay for.  Even the Nichiren Shoshu Temple seemed happy to ignore their mission of kosen-rufu and to follow the status quo and the orders of the military government.

After the war, it became possible to propagate your faith and, while a lot of the temples continued to “play by the rules” and enjoy a peaceful coexistence with other Buddhist schools and sects, some new religions emerged and tried to sell their brand of religion to the poor, sick and hungry.  They might have irritated the established temples, but they weren’t really that successful, so were seen as a nuisance rather than a threat.  But, the Soka Gakkai, under President Toda started to become more and more popular.   Members were energised by the practice and were seeing results and gaining hope in their lives.  In Osaka, around 9,000 households joined the Soka Gakkai in April 1956, which meant 9,000 households had left other Buddhist sects.  Understandably, the priests of those temples weren’t happy and knew that the Soka Gakkai had to be hammered down to protect their livelihoods.  Some tried malicious lies to discredit the organisation, some tried unsuccessfully to engage in debate and prove the supremacy of their teachings and some tried to involve the media in their deceptions.  None of these proved successful, but at the same time, the authorities weren’t really that bothered.  They may have been curious about the Soka Gakkai, but the problem belonged to the world of religion and didn’t really have an impact on the running of the country or day to day issues in society.

However, once the Soka Gakkai became involved in politics with their Clean Government Political League (Komei) and they started to get candidates voted into local and national government, the authorities became more concerned.  The temples may have tried to hammer down the Soka Gakkai with light taps, but once the government and police became involved the power of the hammer was significantly increased and the Soka Gakkai started to feel the full force of persecution for the first time since the war.

Toda knew that the situation would only get worse as more and more people felt their lives being affected by the enthusiasm and determination of the Soka Gakkai members and wrote this poem on 9 July 1956:

            An even steeper mountain path
            We are now entering
            Proceed with great care.
            On the journey of kosen-rufu
                                                                                            (The Human Revolution: Volume 10, p256)

Throughout its history the Soka Gakkai has continued to be persecuted and the split with the Nichiren Shoshu Temple in the early 1990s was a source of much speculation and scandalous gossip in the tabloids.  When I was first introduced to the practice in Japan towards the end of the 1990s, the tabloid newspapers were constantly full of tales of President Ikeda’s “crimes”, all of which were proved in court to be unfounded, unsubstantiated and untrue.

In recent years though, the media seems to have focussed less and less on the organisation, and, based on voting figures, there are certainly more people voting for Komeito Party politicians than there are Soka Gakkai members.  Maybe the public have got bored of reading dishonest “news” or maybe the tide is starting to turn as more and more people embrace the humanistic philosophy of Nichiren Daishonin and see the valuable contribution the Soka Gakkai is making in Japan.

President Toda knew that these powerful obstacles, devils and enemies would emerge, but he also knew that as votaries of the Lotus Sutra we are the ones to lead our communities and our countries to victory.   We are not a passive religion that sits in solitude and contemplates the wonders of the universe, but an active presence in society that wants to share the joys of our daily practice with others and bring happiness to the lives of people throughout the world.
  

For more information on the Komeito Party, see my previous post Soka Gakkai and Politics