Most religious founding stories exist only in scripture, oral memory or scholarly reconstruction. Soka Gakkai's exists, unusually, as a 1973 studio film that Japanese audiences bought tickets to see in large enough numbers to make it one of the year's biggest domestic hits.
Ningen Kakumei, directed by Toshio Masuda for Toho, dramatizes the movement's own early history through the mentor and disciple bond between Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, the educator who founded Soka Kyoiku Gakkai, and Josei Toda, the man who rebuilt it into Soka Gakkai after the war. Both men were imprisoned as thought criminals during the Second World War for refusing to renounce their Nichiren Buddhist convictions and cooperate with wartime State Shinto orthodoxy. Makiguchi died in that imprisonment. The film follows Toda through his own prison experience, including an account of the spiritual realization he reached while incarcerated, and then through his release and his work rebuilding the organization from almost nothing in the immediate postwar years.
Tetsuro Tanba, later familiar to international audiences from a role in a James Bond film, plays Toda, and the screenplay by Shinobu Hashimoto works from a story credited to Daisaku Ikeda, who would become the movement's own third president. The result is a founding narrative told in mainstream commercial cinema rather than confined to internal history or hagiography alone.