IT IS NOT CLEAR whether Tsunesaburo Makiguchi knew that he was laying the foundation for a new paradigm of religious worship when the first volume of his book The System of Value-Creating Pedagogy was published on November 18, 1930. He may have ended up as an amulet burner, but he did not begin as one.
On a research trip to Tokyo in 2007, I visited one of the elementary schools, now said to be the finest in Tokyo, where Makiguchi had served as principal. Along the wall of the current principal’s office were the portraits and photographs of the school’s twenty-five previous heads, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, including a now well-known portrait of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi. The photo had only recently been restored to its proper position, I was told. Makiguchi’s arrest as an enemy of the state had kept it off the walls for many years. Standing in the principal’s office of Shirokane Elementary School, I was struck simultaneously by two contradictory thoughts: That Makiguchi’s photo didn’t really belong there, and that it did.
Makiguchi alone, among all the principals of Shirokane Elementary, had achieved national fame (and at one time, infamy) as something other than a school administrator. Asked if they recognized any of the faces on that wall as belonging to a person of historical significance, the average Tokyo resident might not pick out Makiguchi’s face every time, but his would doubtless be recognized far more often than the others.
It wasn’t just the fact that Makiguchi had gone on to found a religious movement. There was another reason his portrait didn’t belong on the principal’s wall—the fact that he had been forcibly transferred, not only from the Shirokane Elementary School, but from four other schools as well. Here was a man whose educational career was devoted to the work of reforming a system that didn’t want reforming—a system which, moreover, in the decades leading up to World War II, was moving in the opposite direction.
Tsunesaburo Makiguchi had opposed rote learning, and although in the beginning he hadn’t resisted the emperor system, accepting it as a distinct and perhaps even a natural expression of the Japanese character, he had no interest in an educational system devoted to producing robotic, unthinking servants of the state. Makiguchi had championed the rights of children to learn as children, following the lines of inquiry and curiosity natural to them and learning at their own age-appropriate pace. And he had placed the happiness of children before all else. His entire educational philosophy was based on that fundamental principle, which informed everything he wrote.
That philosophy, which would later merge with the writings of Nichiren Daishonin to form the Soka Gakkai’s teachings on Human Revolution, was already well developed before Makiguchi began writing his theories on value-creating education. Standing in the office of the Shirokane Elementary School principal, it occurred to me that Makiguchi’s philosophy had been developed in the “human laboratory” of that school and others like it. Call it a growing conviction—that happiness was, or should be, the root concern of human life. That changed everything. But most of all it changed him. The face peering back at me from the wall in the principal’s office told the story of a man determined to reform a system and of that system’s determination to resist his ideas. His face didn’t belong there.
Or perhaps it did, for exactly the same reason. It depended on how you looked at it. His face belonged on the wall precisely because he had resisted a war that had claimed the lives of so many of the young people Makiguchi had taught when he served there. Perhaps Murata was right and it was an honor in those years to be declared an enemy of the state. Society is fickle, and governments often go wrong. And so it sometimes happens that the villains of one generation become the heroes of the next.
The Soka Gakkai marks November 18, 1930, roughly two years after Tsunesaburo Makiguchi’s forced retirement from the Tokyo educational system, as the date of its founding. And yet, given that the Soka Gakkai was not formally registered as a religious organization until 1952, this seems a peculiar choice. In a country where the age of a religious sect is typically measured in centuries, the addition of a few years to make it that much older hardly seems worth the effort. Nevertheless, I believe there is a compelling reason to take that earlier date as the real beginning of the Soka Gakkai. The reason is simple: The day Tsunesaburo Makiguchi published The System of Value-Creating Pedagogy was the day he first spoke out. That he died in prison for his beliefs exactly fourteen years later on November 18, 1944, makes this all the more poignant.
It is tempting to suggest that the two events might be mystically connected. How else can we explain how the publication of what amounted to little more than a collection of unedited notes on the theory of education set forces in motion that would lead to the death of its author and the creation of a worldwide spiritual revolution?
In a magazine interview I conducted in 2008 with Daisaku Ikeda, I asked him to comment on the “prophetic” voice in Nichiren Buddhism—its tendency to challenge prevailing authority systems, holding them responsible for discrimination, injustice, or corruption, even when doing so brought along with it certain risks. In response, Ikeda spoke of Nichiren himself:
Nichiren understood the risks [of challenging the Kamakura-era authorities] and his writings record with great frankness the doubts and questions that assailed him early in his career as he pondered whether or not he should speak out. At one point he confessed to a disciple: “I, Nichiren, am the only person in all Japan who understands this. But if I utter so much as a word concerning it, then parents, brothers, and teachers will surely censure me, and the ruler of the nation will take steps against me. On the other hand, I am fully aware that if I do not speak out I will be lacking in compassion.” After a process of intense self-questioning, Nichiren recalled the words of the Lotus Sutra urging that this teaching be spread after the Buddha’s passing, and he made a great vow to transform society and enable all people to live in happiness.
In the life of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi we see this same pattern of intensive self-questioning, followed by the firm resolve to speak out. Even so, like Nichiren, the decision was probably a long time in the making.
Makiguchi’s theory of value-creating education evolved during his years as an elementary school administrator, the broad outlines of it were there as early as 1903, when he published A Geography of Human Life. At that time already, Makiguchi was struggling with what was to become the core problem of the twentieth century—namely, the tension between cultural and global awareness. This conflict is reflected even in the title of the work, which is a kind of paradox in itself.
The title is not a metaphor, as the titles of such books often are today. Nor is it a gimmick. It doesn’t indicate that Makiguchi simply intended to discuss human culture in a systematic way, using elements of geography as the organizing principle. A Geography of Human Life is a work of geography plain and simple, though one which seeks to situate human life and human culture in relationship to sea, sky, and land. Early on in that work, however, Makiguchi confesses that, although geography itself is quite literally a global discipline, its study must necessarily begin where we are:
I arrived at a conviction that the natural beginning point for understanding the world we live in and our relationship to it is that community of persons, land, and culture that gave us birth.
The importance of this passage can scarcely be overemphasized in light of Makiguchi’s later theories and the conflicts they inspired, first with educational authorities, and later with the government itself.
The first thing to realize is that, as Makiguchi uses it, the idea of “the community of persons, land, and culture which gave us birth” (referred to as “homeland” by other writers of the same era) is so wholesome and so fundamental that it is hard to see how anyone could have felt inspired to challenge it—at least not in 1903. Indeed, A Geography of Human Life seems on the whole to have been received with some enthusiasm by the educational community. The idea of homeland was then popular in many countries around the world as a way of recognizing that a single ethnic group had a long history and deep cultural association with a certain geographical area. Even today, the same concept (if not the word) is used to justify the protection of indigenous peoples and their land.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that in 1903 there was very little understanding of human origins. It was not widely accepted, as it is today, that human beings had originated in Africa and dispersed only much later to other points around the globe. Therefore, it was still possible for many Japanese people to believe that their emperors had descended from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, rather than from some common ancestors whose descendents left the African subcontinent approximately seventy thousand years ago—ancestors who have recently been identified by geneticists as the true forebears of all humankind.
At the turn of the twentieth century, there was also nothing approaching a realistic understanding of human destiny or the limits of economic growth. As humanity neared the end of the age of colonial conquest, it experienced a sudden technological explosion—in transportation, in communication, in agriculture, in medicine, in nearly all aspects of life. That explosion literally supersized humanity, extending the influence of those countries who were its masters and expanding the range of human control over the planet and its resources to a level inconceivable to people living only a few decades before.
The availability of cheap effective lighting alone, following Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent bulb in 1879, greatly extended the range of waking human consciousness, effectively adding more hours onto the day—for work, for entertainment, for study, for discovery, for consumption. Subsequently, one development led to another, and to yet another, fueled by a corporate economy in developed nations, and then later by the arms race, and then the space race, as human ambition literally outgrew the planet. It seemed that there was no limit on what humanity could achieve. But there was a flaw at the heart of that expansive optimism—namely, that humanity cannot exist as a thing apart from nature; it has no destiny but annihilation apart from the land that gave it birth.
I believe that Makiguchi’s theory of value has its true origin in the earth, which gives birth to human beings and all other species on the planet, and which works ceaselessly, if naturally, to sustain them and give meaning—and value—to their lives. But if this is true, then homeland meant something very different to Makiguchi the geographer and the educator from what it has come to mean to us today.
As the twentieth century wore on, the term homeland gradually came to be used in fascistic terms. During the lead-up to World War II, the word Heimatland was used in propaganda by the Nazi Party, along with its companion term Vaterland (“Fatherland”). In fact, the pro-Nazi magazine by the same name, edited by Wilhelm Weiss, was instrumental in that party’s rise to power.
Even in America—and in the new millennium no less—the term still expresses a profound ambiguity. Following the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration adopted the name Department of Homeland Security for its newly founded anti-terrorist agency. But even Republican speechwriter and Reagan biographer Peggy Noonan wasn’t comfortable with the term. “The name Homeland Security grates on a lot of people, understandably,” she wrote in the Wall Street Journal the following June. “Homeland isn’t really an American word, it’s not something we used to say or say now.” Noonan warned that the term had “a vaguely Teutonic ring” and suggested that it was likely to get the Republican Party in trouble. She understood that the concept of homeland, with its overtones of isolationism and ethnic solidarity, didn’t accord with who Americans thought they were, or who they wanted to be. And, indeed, the election of Barack Hussein Obama, a man of mixed race, mixed religion, and mixed ethnicity, as the forty-fourth president of the United States seemed to suggest something in the nature of a political correction—a nationwide referendum on the whole notion of homeland and what it means to be secure.
In a speech given in March of 2008, Obama delivered what amounted to a short post-tribal declaration:
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners—an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles, and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
Obama’s speech on race was played on the Internet millions of times across the globe, making it one of the most watched events in human history and justifying in some measure the claim by one political commentator that its message was intended, not just for Americans, but for people of varied races, histories, and ethnicities across the globe.
But Obama’s message could hardly be called American at its core. The America he described in his speech was a kind of nexus point for the post-tribal age—a place where, beginning hundreds of years ago, diverse peoples from across the globe began assembling to forge “a more perfect union.” From the beginning that union was fraught with difficulty, and much innocent blood was shed to create and preserve it, but at bottom it was never based on the idea of homeland—the rootedness of one people to one place. Its origin lay in the idea that, having been created equal, people of every race, religion, and national origin could at last come together in one land to find a common home. The “union” it proposed was ultimately a microcosm—a picture in miniature of the globe.
All of this is foreshadowed in A Geography of Human Life, and Makiguchi’s own life is the story of the gradual but inevitable collision of these two very different ideas of what it means to be at home in the world. These in turn boil down ultimately to the question of what it means to be human, whether that means being a member of a species or only a member of a religion, a nation, or a tribe.
Naturally, some may challenge this view of Makiguchi, and I am the first to admit that my way of reading history relies heavily on the power of ideas—especially progressive ones—to have their way. But I believe that slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers’s declaration “you can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea” is more than borne out by history, as the examples of Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrate all too well.