This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Daisaku Ikeda became Soka Gakkai's third president in 1960, succeeding his own mentor Josei Toda in a line of leadership already running back through Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, the movement's founder. Where Toda had rebuilt a wartime shattered Japanese organization, Ikeda led its growth into a movement organized internationally as Soka Gakkai International, a documented expansion from a single country's lay Buddhist movement into a worldwide one under his own presidency.
In 1971 he founded Soka University in Japan, extending the movement's own educational commitments, already visible in its founder Makiguchi's career as an educator, into a formal institution rather than leaving education as an informal value alone. The Soka school system that grew from it today spans kindergarten through university and a correspondence division, a documented institutional footprint built during Ikeda's own decades as president rather than inherited from either of his two predecessors.
That the same office, held in succession by an educator, a rebuilder and finally an internationalizer, produced first a lay Buddhist organization's survival and then its global expansion and its own university system marks Ikeda's presidency as a documented case where the third leader in a mentorship chain carried an already tested movement into a scale neither of his own teachers had reached.