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SGBye
Well, to be fair, Ikeda did go through some suffering, but it happened ages ago. I'm talking about the war, his tuberculosis, and how he helped his mentor Toda when his business was in financial ruin. It's been very easy for me to remember all of this because he only mentioned it in every single frickin' speech he ever gave in his life! And, here, I have the quotes to prove my point. Enjoy!
I supported Mr. Toda day and night. I dedicated my entire youth to my mentor and the Soka Gakkai. (1/22/10, World Tribune)
I tirelessly supported and assisted Mr. Toda. No disciple has ever cared more for their mentor. (2/5/10, World Tribune)
OK, OK, Ikeda, we get it already!!!
This just goes to prove that if you have one issue of the World Tribune or Living Buddhism, you have them all.
Yes! The World Tribune and Living Buddhism are like a closed loop, repeating themselves endlessly.
I'm not arguing that Ikeda did not suffer during and after World War II...but let's get a little perspective here. Japan was devastated, both physically and in spirit by its defeat. Homes, schools, businesses, roads and bridges were destroyed, people were homeless, malnourished and jobless. Orphans tried to survive on the streets; young women from respectable backgrounds became prostitutes for the occupying American forces --- just to survive. Was Ikeda's suffering greater than that of other Japanese his age? Did he endure more than Koreans or Chinese his age, whose countries were occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army?
And it's also a good point that Ikeda's contemporaries are not going to say, "Hah -- WE were doing all the work at meetings, while DAISAKU was just flirting with the YWD!"
And as for Japan's racial equality -- Wakatta is right, there isn't any, despite what some Japanese will tell you. A Japanese Women's Division member once showed me some yen, paper money, and pointed out that the man on a bill was a philosopher, Meiji era, who said something like all people are equal under the heavens. She said, "See? People think that the Americans brought us democracy in 1945. That is not true. We had ideas of equality and democracy long before that." Uh huh. And the military dictatorship was just a bad dream?
The reality is that the Japanese treat Amerasians, people with a Japanese mother and American father, like trash. Japanese discriminate against the Burukumin, Japan's untouchable class. During World War II, the Japanese forcibly brought Koreans to Japan to do work that was considered too dirty or dangerous for Japanese. After the war, many of these Koreans were stranded in Japan. Some of their descendants still live in Japan -- without the civil rights that "pure" Japanese have. Have Ikeda, or any other SGI Japan senior leaders ever spoken out regarding Japan's discrimination against Amerasians, Burukumin, and people of Korean ancestry? I doubt it.
An interesting note is that there are some right-wing Japanese websites that want to discredit Ikeda -- and one of the things that they say about him is that he is of Korean ancestry -- which is a great insult in Japan. (I doubt that this could really be true -- if he really were of Korean ancestry, I'm sure it would have been proved by now.)
SGI has been in the United States since after World War II, and yet the SGI-USA director has always been a Japanese man -- George Williams, Fred Zaitsu, Danny Nagashima. After all this time, there is NO American qualified to lead SGI?
SGI's charter says that national chapters of SGI should be autonomous. Again, the reality is quite different. They're not and probably never will be. SGI-USA's senior leaders are handpicked by Ikeda, finances are run by Japan, local chapters study what Tokyo says to study. How is that autonomous?
We had a poster a while back, Commongirl. She was pro SGI and pro Ikeda, and as you'd expect, quite critical of this thread. She says her mother was Japanese, her father American, and the family knew George Williams, the then director of SGI USA (which, back then, was called NSA -- Nichiren Shoshu of America.) She did not like George Williams, saying that he expected women like her mother to wait on him, and that he (Williams) felt that American leaders like her father were incapable of truly understanding Buddhism anyway. Interesting.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/25/2010 10:12PM by tsukimoto.