Soka Gakkai and the cult-thang
This post will only interest folks that are aware of Soka Gakkai party in Japan. The author claims that Soka Gakkai is not a cult–but then goes into some observations about cults in general that merit reading. Not a profound blog entry, mind you, but interesting if you were in Japan and routinely heard Japanese folks refer to this as a “strange” group of people. When Japanese collectively label something strange, I tend to pay attention. And this is the first time I’ve seen a defense of it–in English, to boot.
Here is a the original news piece that stimulated the above rebuttal . Worth reading both since this latter appears more in the vein of journalism but still contributes to the obfuscation of this odd-ball group.
Posted on January 5th, 2007 at 3:01 pm. About 'Soka Gakkai and the cult-thang'.
Thanks for the link. SGI isn’t a big group in the USA- estimates range anywhere from 10,000 members to 100,000 members- but it’s slowly growing.
I heard the “cult” and “strange” accusations prior to joining. I take them all with a grain of salt, of course; if an American small-town guy like me thinks Japanese people are kind of strange, and they think that the SGI is kind of strange, doesn’t that mean that I’d find it normal?
I’ve got part II of that vein of thought- whether SGI is a cult- in draft form and will post it sooner or later. Check back occasionally, it’ll be up in… oh… whenever. A week, less, maybe. Depends on how busy my (agnostic non-SGI) girlfriend keeps me.
I like your blog, BTW. Kind of random. You might also really like my netfriend Luis’ blog, an expat in Japan: www.blogd.com
Cheers,
Paul