Daisaku Ikeda, who succeeded Toda as Soka Gakkai's third president, founded Soka Gakkai International in 1975 as an umbrella organization carrying Nichiren Buddhist teaching beyond Japan, fulfilling what the movement remembers as Toda's dying wish that the practice be spread worldwide, a goal the movement calls kosen-rufu. SGI today reports membership in the millions across more than one hundred and ninety countries and territories, making it one of the most successful global exports of any Japanese new religious movement and a rare case of a Buddhist lay organization, rather than a monastic institution, driving Buddhism's spread into new cultural contexts.
Soka Gakkai's domestic political engagement in Japan is unusually direct for a religious movement of its scale: Komeito, the political party the movement helped establish, remains an active participant in Japanese national politics and has been part of Japan's governing coalition for extended periods, a church-and-state relationship that draws periodic public and academic scrutiny in a constitutionally secular democracy, a tension McLaughlin's study treats as central to understanding the movement's distinctive place in modern Japanese society rather than as incidental to its religious character.
This atlas records Soka Gakkai's history from Makiguchi's wartime imprisonment through Toda's postwar rebuilding to Ikeda's international expansion as a documented account of one of the twentieth century's most consequential new Buddhist movements, alongside the political and social entanglements, Komeito chief among them, that distinguish it from most other lay Buddhist organizations worldwide.