Abstract

CONTEMPORARY JAPAN 2021, VOL. 33, NO. 1, 138–146 BOOK REVIEWS Soka Gakkai’s human revolution: The rise of a mimetic nation in modern Japan, by LeviMcLaughlin, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2019, 236 pp., USD 68 (hardback), ISBN 9780824875428 Soka Gakkai must be the most study-worthy among Japan’s numerous modern religious move- ments for so many reasons: its size, its international outreach, its involvement in politics, and its function as a role model for many of its rivals. Yet, with the exception of Seager’s Encountering the Dharma (2006), this is the first monograph in English on this influential organisation since the 1970s. There are multiple reasons for this. Japanese “New Religions,” which were once booming, are now in decline, and even Soka Gakkai has long been stagnant. Japan no longer catches the world’s attention as a country that is “modern and yet religious,” an exotic exception to the rule that modernity means secularisation. More ominously, after the Aum Shinrikyō Incident of 1995 many scholars (not least in Japan) have shied away from researching so-called New Religions altogether, worrying that they might get caught up in new scandals or even tragedies. McLaughlin suggests that Soka Gakkai’s “negative public image” has caused