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that there had been no other businessman of his caliber during the years of economic reconstruction. And yet, today even those who are critical of Josei Toda and the Soka Gakkai are forced to concede that, when we consider those religious leaders who rose to prominence immediately following World War II, Toda has no equal. He was the most innovative, most dynamic, most successful religious leader of his day.
    The second period in the formation of the Soka Gakkai—the period of development—rightly begins when Toda resolved to succeed Makiguchi, becoming the organization’s second president. According to Toda, that resolve occurred when he realized that other new religious groups had experienced dramatic growth during the mid-twentieth century, while the Soka Gakkai had not. Toda blamed himself for this and made a public vow to spread the teachings of Nichiren Buddhism to 750,000 families before he died. His fulfillment of that vow had much to do with the core idea behind the Soka Gakkai—that of religion serving life. It was a message with tremendous urgency in postwar Japan, as people sought the vitality and the sense of hope necessary to rebuild their lives and their nation. Toda’s decision to make the spread of that “viral message” the principal activity of the movement allowed the Soka Gakkai to spread by the force of its own intrinsic appeal.
    All that remained was for Toda to set that message in motion. When he announced his determination to increase the movement’s ranks to 750,000 families during his lifetime in his inaugural address of May 3, 1951, most people felt it was an impossible goal to fulfill. The Soka Gakkai membership at that time stood at just a little more than three thousand individuals. The fact that Toda was able to convince the membership even to embrace such a goal is a testament to his powers of persuasion. But there is more at work here than the charisma of a single individual. What Toda seems to have felt within himself—and was therefore able to communicate to others—was the sense that the Soka Gakkai had been entrusted with a special mission to spread the teachings of Nichiren to a struggling nation. At the back of his mind, however, he must have felt glimmers of the global movement that ultimately developed from that national mission. This is made clear by his desire, shortly before his death on April 2, 1958, to spread the teachings of Nichiren Buddhism to the rest of the world. However, nowhere is this broader concern with humanity as a whole more clear than in his declaration of September 8, 1957, proposing the worldwide ban of nuclear weapons.

a global spiritual shift
    I N 1946, the year following the world’s first use of nuclear weapons, Albert Einstein declared, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking.” Sadly, nearly seventy years later, this is still the case. The discovery of nuclear energy represented a radical shift in the paradigm that until then had governed scientific theory and practice, but there was no corresponding shift at a social or spiritual level to prepare humanity for the awesome responsibility that came with unprecedented destructive power. A widening chasm opened before us that, then as now, seems almost impossible to bridge.
    Fortunately, what seems impossible at the level of society (namely, a global spiritual shift to keep pace with the rapid scientific one) is nevertheless possible at the level of the individual, and so there is reason for hope. As Daisaku Ikeda has written: “A great human revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a nation and further, will enable a change in the destiny of all humankind.”
    In retrospect, I believe this “human revolution in just a single individual” is precisely what we see happening on September 8, 1957, when Josei Toda gave his famous declaration calling for the