Is SGI a cult to the average Japanese

Found this on the Beliefnet Nichiren forum

Yes. 

I looked through all the comments on this thread, and there's the normal pro / con SGI stuff and each person puts up the hype which suits their team.  Nobody's actually answered the question given because nobody lived in Japan.

I do.  I'm not going to obscure the issue by turning it into a debate about "What is a cult anyway?"  I live in Tokyo.  If anyone else lives in Tokyo, I can meet them for coffee.

OK. 

All the information which western SGI members get about the SGI comes from the SGI.  They're told their president is two inches from a Nobel Peace prize and all he ever does is campaign for peace and he's had such a hard time over it all, yadayada.  SGI really pushes tis fantasy in their internal communication, so these people believe what they're saying.  They're never going to tell you 'Oh guess what, they just told us they're a cult!', because Japan HQ have no interest in telling them anything other than what they want to hear.

But the question put is important, because the SGI have been around for a while.  And like Greenpeace and Coca Cola and any other large organization, they have been acquiring a reputation in their society.  Which is not good.  Their internal communication acknowleges this and, like a beleaguered 3rd world regime, they claim they have triumphed over their critics in one breath and then claim to be the underdogs of hostile persecution in the next.  But they are an organisation in decline precisely because of the very poor impresson they have made on ordinary Japanese people.

The simple fact is, if you talk to ordinary Japanese people and ask them what they think, they tend to tell you the following -

1) There are many members who are nice, well-meaning people and respectable citizens.  They're very keen to proselytise. They're not strong on critical thinking or rational dialogue.  But they're often nice people.  Most people here say that.

2) The organization is a different matter.  Organizationally, they are seen as a corporate cult, interested only in acquiring money and power.  That they claim to be campaigning for world peace is deeply unconvincing to ordinary Japanese people.

3) Their interpretation of Buddhism is like a groupthink which idolises the organisation president, Daisaku Ikeda. It's not respectable Buddhist scholarship and while the Nichiren Shoshu sect they derived from is seen as a respectable and well-established mainstream form of Buddhism, the Soka Gakkai have composed an interpretation of it which is bending over backwards to imply that the organization president is a living Buddha. To ordinary Japanese people, this is somewhere betwen laughable and sinister.

4) They have more money than anyone wants to know about, going into trillions of dollars and while it's very difficult to prove in court, most people see them as having obvious connections with the Uyoku ultra-right and the yakuza to carry out their dirty work.   It's a bit like the mafia in Italy - nobody likes them, but they're so hard to remove, we just acknowledge they're going to be around for a while.

5) They had a huge influence in Japan's politics.  Among themselves they say this is "to clean up corruption in Japan's politics".  Most ordinary Japanese don't see it that way.  They see it as an undemocratic breach of the constitutional separation of church and state found in most developed democracies. Officially, SGI argue they are seperate organisations. Nobody believes them.  They're suspicious of a religion which has a poitical party and vice versa.  Japanese people who take an interest in politics say the Kometo party have no principles other than the acquisition of further power. They're neither left wing, right wing or anything else. They work strategically to gain power for power's sake.  They are percived as intrinsically corrupt.

6) In response to criticism from the press, SGI bought shares in Japanese media, so there is a huge but rather ominous absence of public debate in the media.   There are only a few publications who can say anything negative at all about SGI.  It's like the elephant in the living room in Japanese media.

7) Nobody talks about them in private life either.  They avoid discussing them in the work place. The whole subject is embarrasing and uncomfortable as a topic.  Also, the members tend to get very angry, very quickly in response to any criticism of their leader.  So everybody just avoids talking about it unless they can be quite sure they're not talking to members.