Founder
Soka Gakkai was founded by Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871-1944), a school principal (Hammond and Machacek 2002: 1189). Makiguchi had moved south to Tokyo from Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s main islands. Makiguchi had been publishing books on education that sold reasonably well, but his approach to individual ‘value creation’ in pedagogy was stymied by the policies of Imperial Japan in the 1930s (Montgomery 1991: 181). In 1928, he converted to Nichiren Shoshu through the influence of another school principal. As a movement, Soka Gakkai dates its founding to the publication of Makiguchi’s Soka Kyoiku Gakkai (Value-Creating Educational Society) in 1930 (Hammond and Machacek 2002: 1189).