Fight Against Coercive Tactics Discusses $oka Gakkai

[Craig Bratcher]

F.A.C.T. NET , A cult awareness organization has this published at:
http://www.xenu.org/factnet/AFF/FILES/CO0690/CO0690AB.TXT

Key words: Soka U, Soka Gakkai, NSA, CUT, Daisaku
Ikeda, Tina Turner, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter,
Patrick Duffy,__ Manual Noriega.__

From "Canyon Controversy," by Stephen London, Gold Coast Lifestyle,
Nov. 1990, 7-13, 37-37.

The development of Nichiren Shoshu of America's (NSA) Soka University
of Los Angeles (SULA) - on the Calabasas site of the Church
Universal and Triumphant's former Summit University - continues
to raise controversy. SULA is closely linked to the wealthy,
evangelical Buddhist Soka Gakkai sect, a significant religion-political
movement in Japan led by industrialist Daisaku Ikeda.

Soka Gakkai, active in the U.S. through its NSA organization,
has about 10 million members in Japan and claims 7 million
more around the world. Soka Gakkai arose from post-war Japan's
recoiling from the former state religion, Shintoism, which
was widely identified with militarism.

State and national park officials have wanted to buy for
public use the valuable parkland on which SULA sits ever since
CUT put it up for sale seven years ago. The govern-ment agencies,
which could not afford what NSA paid for the 232-acre property
seven years ago - more than twice the market value - are concerned
about SULA's plans to buy additional adjacent acres of Los
Angeles County's rapidly shrinking wilderness area.

Homeowners, meanwhile, have joined park officials in objecting
on environmental grounds - in an area already besieged by developers
- to SULA's recently announced plans to scale up the student
body of under 100 Japanese students - who come to the U.S.A.
for 7-week English courses - to a 5,000-student four-year liberal
arts college over the next 25 years.

Unlike the closed and paranoid Church Universal and Triumphant
establishment that preceded it, Soka University has been quite
open to the public at certain hours of the day and invited
the local community to special events, such as a symposium
featuring a speech by Nobel laureate Linus Pauling. Both Los
Angeles mayor Tom Bradley and Congressman Mervyn Dymally have
accepted NSA-financed junkets. Starting next summer, Japanese
language courses will be offered at a nominal fee to the public.
And SULA officials have been holding public meetings to discuss
its expansion plans with the wider community, assuring everyone
that the development will be environmentally responsible.

Representatives of the homeowners' association say SULA
promised at first not to expand the original purchase, and
now that it has, in fact, done so, they don't trust SULA's
word. "If they tell us 5,000 students now," said one, "maybe
15 years from now it will be 15,000.

"Mind Control"

Another element in the controversy over SULA is the belief among
some in the community, supported by a Boston Globe article now
circulating in the community, that Nichiren Shoshu is a dangerous,
deceptive, extremely well-polished cult that practices shakubuku
("break and subdue")when recruiting members, whom it then crassly
manipulates. Priscilla Coates, Southern California chairperson
of the Cult Awareness Network (CAN), likens Soka Gakkai leader
Daisaku Ikeda to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the Unification Church
leader. "They're both cut from the same cloth. They both want
to rule the world and both want a theocracy," she says. "They
claim to be a Buddhist sect, but they actually use very little
Buddhism. They (followers) don't really know what they're getting
into. They haven't got the foggiest notion that this isn't Buddhism."

Rachel Andres, director of the Commission on Cults
and Missionaries for the Jewish Federation Council of
Greater Los Angeles, classifies Soka Gakkai's intensive
chanting as a form of mind control. "It's a pretty powerful,
pretty intense experience," she says. "We get a fair number
of calls about NSA from friends and family members of
people involved. It's in our top ten."

According to Doug Lyon, an independent cult researcher in
Los Angeles, "chanting is a big part of the indoctrination
process because any time you chant for long periods of time,
you bring on, more or less, feelings of euphoria. Once you
accept their beliefs, you can't get out. You're slowly opened
to areas you totally accept. It's cognitive dissonance theory."

The notion that millions of Japanese, and others around
the world, are under mind control is chilling, but schisms
in Soka Gakkai and recent efforts at liberalization suggest
that it's more like a religion and not a cult with absolute
power over its members. Indeed, cult-associated features such
as sleep or food deprivation and abduction for deprogramming
by parents are absent from reports about NSA. Donations asked
do not seem to be burdensome, and the fact that thousands have
joined and dropped out suggests that chanting is not dangerous
to all who try it.

Authoritarian Aspects

There are, nonetheless, other disturbing aspects of the group
besides chanting. "It's a definite mind control process" says
former high NSA official Brad Nixon. "The leadership becomes
parental figures, then instills control over their [members']
lives. Yet NSA is a flop in the U.S., Nixon says, with membership
plummeting and 30 times as many former members as current adherents.
"They're amateurish," according to Nixon. "Only people with
a real dependency complex stay." Most quit, he adds, because
they won't put up with the pressure of endless meetings, control
over their lives, constant pressure to proselytize, chanting,
attendance at meetings and rallies, and general all-consuming
lifestyle. "But we're not talking religion here," says Nixon,
who is still a Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist. "They could be operating
any religion. We're talking power here."

According to an NSA members' handbook entitled Precepts
for Youth, whatever the direction of your seniors, "don't question
it. Even if the leader were to give the wrong direction, you
should follow it. . . There is no need to doubt the direction
you are given in faith and activities from your seniors, just
take action." Former Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka
called Soka Gakkai leader Ikeda a "sutra-chanting Hitler."

When 180 Nichiren Shoshu priests in Japan, a full third of
the country's priesthood, protested against Soka Gakkai's glorification
of Ikeda and its twisting of the religion in favor of a materialist
credo, the priests were excommunicated en mass.

Worldly Power

Soka Gakkai brings in $1 billion a year and holds extensive
Tokyo real estate, all of which helped build or renovate 30
NSA community centers in the U.S. It owns the third-largest
newspaper in Japan, and NSA's own paper, the 120,000 circulation
World Tribune, is more widely read than the much better-known
Unification Church-owned Washington Times.

Both Soka Gakkai and NSA cultivate power brokers. The organizations'
patriotic efforts, such as orchestrating a campaign to exhibit
a facsimile of the Liberty Bell to hundreds of grade schools
across America, have garnered congratulations from the likes
of George Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Ted Kennedy. As an international
ambassador of goodwill for Soka Gakkai, Ikeda received the
United Nations Peace Award in 1983, and NSA has even been granted
"NGO" (non-governmental organization) status at the U.N.

"CELEBRITY" MEMBERS

Soka Gakkai has a number of celebrity members including Tina
Turner, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Patrick Duffy, and Manual
Noriega. Even after the U. S. broke with Ikeda, Ikeda visited
the Panamanian ex-dictator, who received him with all the trappings
reserved for a head of state.

Undoubtedly the celebrity members would bristle at the suggestion
that they belonged to a cult rather than to a form of Buddhism.
But Daniel Golden, author of the Boston Globe article on NSA,
sees the sect as perhaps torn between the two. "NSA went from
frantic flag-waving in the mid-1970s to a period of retreat
and study, and now it's back to glitz again. When lay leaders
go too far, the priests rein them in; but if recruitment then
falters, the laity reassumes control. One might even say that
NSA shifts back and forth from religion to cult, depending
on who's in charge."
"Now that we have clearly separated ourselves from Nichiren
Shoshu, let us firmly establish a religion for human beings..."
Daisaku Ikeda, Sept. 1993 Daibyaku Renge (SGI)