Soka Gakkai's Human Revolution: The Rise of a Mimetic Nation in Modern Japan

Levi McLaughlin is a scholar of Japanese religion, and this is an academic monograph published by University of Hawai'i Press studying Soka Gakkai, the lay Buddhist movement, as a modern social and religious phenomenon rather than through its own promotional materials. Its method draws on ethnographic fieldwork and the organization's own historical record to trace how Soka Gakkai built its identity and institutions in postwar Japan. Its strength is independence, it examines the movement's claims about itself critically rather than repeating them, while still taking the movement's religious self-understanding seriously rather than dismissing it. As a scholarly study focused on one national context and one period, it does not attempt to be a complete account of Soka Gakkai's international expansion or its full doctrinal system.