THE MEANING of certain events in collective human history is clear from the moment they happen. A ship is sunk, and a war begins. After years of careful planning, a human being sets foot on the moon. The significance of personal events, however, usually emerges only with the benefit of hindsight. This is especially true when we speak of the hardships or tragedies. By their very nature, such events interrupt the course of individual lives, forcing us to reevaluate ourselves—our goals, our values, even our sense of who we are.
On August 23, 1950, having already failed in business the previous year when his publishing company was forced to close, Josei Toda suspended operations of the credit association of which he’d become director the year before. In the shadow of a government investigation, and with legal action against him seemingly inevitable, Toda voluntarily stepped down from his position as general director of the Soka Gakkai, a post he had held for more than twenty years. His motive was to prevent negative associations with the still-fragile postwar organization. Added to Toda’s disappointment over his failed business ventures and the constant harassment of creditors was the knowledge that a number of Soka Gakkai members had invested heavily in the association and some suffered financial hardship because of its failure. Some even left the movement as a result.
Toda remained generally optimistic in his attitude toward business matters (the economic climate in postwar Tokyo was, after all, extremely volatile and fraught with risk). But he became deeply reflective about his relationship to the teachings of Nichiren Buddhism, unwilling (or perhaps unable) to go forward in his spiritual life until he had asked himself the most penetrating questions. Naturally, the most urgent of these questions concerned the role of business in his spiritual life.
From the earliest days of the Soka Gakkai, Toda had assumed responsibility for the financial viability of the organization, often funding its operations and outreach programs out of his own pocket. “Therefore, when he dedicated himself to the reconstruction of the organization after the war,” writes Ikeda, “he first gave consideration to the establishment of its economic foundation rather than its organizational development.” This strategy made sense while Makiguchi was alive; Toda’s writing and publishing efforts allowing the older man to concentrate on pursuing his educational reforms. But now he began to wonder if, all along, this strategy hadn’t been a way of avoiding responsibility for the spiritual leadership of the organization.
If it is true that new religious movements typically follow three stages in their years of formative growth— foundation, development, and completion—and that in each stage of growth a leader emerges whose temperament and abilities match the demands of the movement at that particular stage, then it is clear that Josei Toda was continuing to build a foundation for the Soka Gakkai, when it was actually the development and rapid expansion of the organization that was being called for.
Josei Toda showed a dynamic entrepreneurial spirit as a businessman and, given the right economic climate, had the skills to succeed as a businessman. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine anyone remarking years after Toda’s death that he had been unusually gifted in that field, that there had been no other businessman of his caliber during the years of economic reconstruction. And yet, today even those who are critical of Josei Toda and the Soka Gakkai are forced to concede that, when we consider those religious leaders who rose to prominence immediately following World War II, Toda has no equal. He was the most innovative, most dynamic, most successful religious leader of his day.
The second period in the formation of the Soka Gakkai—the period of development—rightly begins when Toda resolved to succeed Makiguchi, becoming the organization’s second president. According to Toda, that resolve occurred when he realized that other new religious groups had experienced dramatic growth during the mid-twentieth century, while the Soka Gakkai had not. Toda blamed himself for this and made a public vow to spread the teachings of Nichiren Buddhism to 750,000 families before he died. His fulfillment of that vow had much to do with the core idea behind the Soka Gakkai—that of religion serving life. It was a message with tremendous urgency in postwar Japan, as people sought the vitality and the sense of hope necessary to rebuild their lives and their nation. Toda’s decision to make the spread of that “viral message” the principal activity of the movement allowed the Soka Gakkai to spread by the force of its own intrinsic appeal.
All that remained was for Toda to set that message in motion. When he announced his determination to increase the movement’s ranks to 750,000 families during his lifetime in his inaugural address of May 3, 1951, most people felt it was an impossible goal to fulfill. The Soka Gakkai membership at that time stood at just a little more than three thousand individuals. The fact that Toda was able to convince the membership even to embrace such a goal is a testament to his powers of persuasion. But there is more at work here than the charisma of a single individual. What Toda seems to have felt within himself—and was therefore able to communicate to others—was the sense that the Soka Gakkai had been entrusted with a special mission to spread the teachings of Nichiren to a struggling nation. At the back of his mind, however, he must have felt glimmers of the global movement that ultimately developed from that national mission. This is made clear by his desire, shortly before his death on April 2, 1958, to spread the teachings of Nichiren Buddhism to the rest of the world. However, nowhere is this broader concern with humanity as a whole more clear than in his declaration of September 8, 1957, proposing the worldwide ban of nuclear weapons.