Soka Gakkai is a Japanese lay Buddhist movement rooted in the teaching of the thirteenth century monk Nichiren, founded in 1930 as an educational reform society, the Soka Kyoiku Gakkai, by the educator Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, who saw in Nichiren's philosophy a framework for genuine social transformation achieved through individual transformation rather than through political or economic reform alone. Central practice centers on chanting the daimoku, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, the title of the Lotus Sutra that Nichiren taught as containing the whole of the Buddha's enlightenment condensed into a single invocation accessible to any practitioner regardless of education or monastic training.
Makiguchi was imprisoned in 1943 by Japan's wartime militarist government for refusing to support state Shinto, and he died in prison from malnutrition and old age in 1944, a death Soka Gakkai's own institutional memory treats as a founding martyrdom comparable in significance to the movement's original founding a decade earlier. His protege Josei Toda, imprisoned alongside him and released after the war, rebuilt the organization from 1946 as an explicitly Buddhist lay movement rather than an educational society, renaming it Sokagakkai and reorienting its mission toward postwar spiritual and social recovery.
Rapid growth followed under Toda's leadership: membership grew from roughly three thousand to over seven hundred and sixty five thousand families within the seven years from 1951 to 1957, an expansion Levi McLaughlin's study situates within Japan's wider postwar search for new sources of social belonging and meaning after the collapse of the prewar state ideology that had imprisoned the movement's own founder.