The Karma of Gender: How Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Members of Soka Gakkai in Japan Challenge Temporalities and Institutional Fixity

Since its rapid expansion in the decades after the Second World War, the lay Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai (lit. the “Value Creation Study Association”) has maintained a dominant presence in Japan’s religious landscape. Its affiliated political party Komeito (the “Clean Government Party”) is a key player in Japan’s national-level governing coalition. The religion has also established itself as an influential presence in business, education, and a host of other spheres, and it has distinguishing itself as one of Japan’s most successful religious exports, claiming close to two million adherents in 191 countries and territories outside Japan through Soka Gakkai International. In Japan, where an estimated 2-3% of the population is actively engaged in Soka Gakkai, the organization became notorious for its hard-sell proselytizing inspired by uncompromising teachings from the medieval Buddhist reformer Nichiren (1222-1282), a perceived transgression of constitutional divides between religion and politics, and reverence for its Honorary President Ikeda Daisaku (1928-2023).

For generations, adherents have dedicated themselves to their organization’s institutional expansion, electioneering, and related activities through cultivation within Soka Gakkai’s starkly gendered administrative divisions. Training within the Gakkai’s Young Women’s, Married Women’s, Young Men’s, and Men’s Divisions has perpetuated the gendered ethos of mid-twentieth century Japan: men are raised to go forth and advance a transcendent mission while women nurture the family and home in keeping with “good wives and wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo) femininity.

This paper asks what happens to Gakkai adherents whose gender is different from the one they were assigned at birth. How do transgender and gender non-conforming devotees navigate Soka Gakkai’s gendered hierarchies? What tactics do they cultivate to realize themselves within, and between, their religion and Japanese legal and social frameworks, which are historically hostile to transgender and gender non-conforming people? And how does attention to the multiply marginalized perspectives of transgender Gakkai believers help us unmask the gendered natures of operative categories such as “religion” and “politics?”

To address these questions, the paper draws on the author’s years of ethnographic engagement as a non-member participant within Soka Gakkai in Japan to introduce three devotees (presented under pseudonyms): Yutaka, a transgender man in his mid-thirties who is firmly committed to Young Men’s Division activities and Komeito electioneering; Kaoru, a transgender woman in her mid-twenties who has forged an individual path beyond the oversight of the Women’s Division, one realized through dedication to doctrinal mastery and political opposition to Komeito; and Auntie, a gender non-conforming believer in their late fifties who remains a devout Nichiren Buddhist but rejects both Soka Gakkai and Komeito. All three of these practitioners cultivate their subjectivities through Nichiren Buddhism. Yutaka asserts that he is the rebirth of his own grandfather, who was an abusive parent to his mother and a devotee of a school of Buddhism Soka Gakkai regards as heterodox; he narrates his existence in this lifetime as penance to be performed in the “wrong” body. Kaoru quietly rejects the authority of the Gakkai establishment by convening independent study groups whose participants reclaim Nichiren- and Ikeda-centered doctrinal interpretations to support queer and transgender identity and allyship. Kaoru fosters a community of like-minded Gakkai youth who contest Soka Gakkai and Komeito authority by reaffirming foundational commitments to equality and pacifism they regard their religion and affiliated party as having abandoned. And Auntie engages in self-realization by treating ritual devotion to a contested object of worship and interpretations of Nichiren that refute Gakkai orthodoxy as means to denounce a religion they regard as a morally corrupt enterprise that victimized them.

These perspectives all place karmic causality at the center of gendered subjectivities. Taking karma and rebirth seriously requires us to adjust our timescale in keeping with Buddhist cosmological and cosmogonic principles, and adopting these adherents’ perspectives as an analytical frame means reframing intra-sectarian and political conflicts from the point of view of subjects whose very existence threatens the institutional fixity of their religion and its associated party. These three subjectivities are indicative of the diversity and complexity of transgender and gender non-conforming experience within an influential religious organization that faces profound transformations in its immediate future. Insights they provide promise to translate beyond individual case studies into broader inquiry.

I present this paper from my position as a queer and transgender ally. Advocacy requires analysis that takes its cue from the hermeneutics of those who are marginalized. As Melissa Wilcox explains in Queer Religiosities (2021), transgender study of religion at its most meticulous is structurally transformative because it offers “analytical tools for thinking through complex dynamics of power, embodiment, fixity and lack thereof, the normative and its demons” (viii). My research on Buddhist actors in Japan I hope may enhance the transformative potential of transgender religious studies by expanding its range of traditions and temporalities through shedding light on Buddhists’ doctrinal interpretations and institutional commitments. I am eager to receive insights from experts in queer studies and transgender experience in religion by taking part in a conversation that situates the perspectives of my interlocutors within a global setting.