Fanfare Opens Buddhist College : Soka Gakkai reveals ambitions to build major additions at Calabasas campus.

Declaring that they have come to stay, leaders of a Japan-based Buddhist group opened their $17-million college in Calabasas on Tuesday to the beat of a jazz band, Oriental drums and dancers wearing top hats and tails.

Officials of Soka Gakkai, whose 10 million members chant for personal prosperity and global peace, also disclosed that major construction projects may be in store for their rural campus at the intersection of Mulholland Highway and Las Virgenes Road.

“We’d like to go ahead, with the approval of the environmental officials, with the second, third, fourth and even the fifth phase” of development, said Daisaku Ikeda, head of the group and founder of the 16-year-old Soka University in Tokyo.

Although he gave no details of future construction on the campus, Ikeda said his group is committed to “creating a beautiful rainbow of hope for the 21st Century” in Calabasas “by completing other facilities and expanding.”

The pronouncement drew cheers from an invited crowd of more than 400 Soka Gakkai followers who nibbled sushi and sipped soda pop beneath a 300-year-old oak tree outside the 56-year-old mansion that houses the offices of Soka University Los Angeles.

Environmentalists Irked

But it was bad news to environmentalists and parks planners. They have looked at Ikeda’s 248-acre site as a potential headquarters and centerpiece of the sprawling Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

Federal officials say they want to acquire the old mansion and its surrounding pastureland, provided the Japanese will sell and provided they can raise money to buy it or trade other federally owned land for it.

There seemed little chance of that Tuesday as Soka Gakkai leaders showed off the refurbished site and announced that two groups of 100 students each will begin studying English there in July. The university offers a full liberal arts curriculum in Japan.

University souvenirs, including slick, colorful booklets that picture the Calabasas property, were selling briskly. So were hats and ties bearing the name of Soka Gakkai’s U. S. arm, Nichiren Shoshu of America (NSA), which has been controversial because of its aggressive recruitment of members.

Most of the crowd were white-suited NSA members who leaped to their feet and applauded lustily as their group’s chief, George M. Williams, was introduced as “honorary executive director” of the university campus.

A dozen NSA cameramen snapped pictures and made videotapes as Williams declared that Tuesday’s opening marked “a great begining of our quest as minutemen . . . for world peace.”

Some NSA members were elaborately costumed performers who entertained Ikeda with songs and dances on a large, arched, outdoor stage. The show included a white-helmeted, 75-member brass band, 35 top-hatted dancers and a 60-member chorus of women dressed in Grecian gowns and singing Japanese ballads.

Ikeda got in the act by playfully squirting aerosol cans of Silly String, a chemical foam popular with children, at the audience.

Presidential-style security protected Ikeda, who formed the conservative Komeito political party in Japan in 1964 and regularly rubs elbows with world leaders in his role as an advocate of disarmament and a strengthened United Nations. Guards were stationed every few hundred feet, and escorts were assigned to stay at the side of invited guests.

‘A Celebrity in Japan’

“Mr. Ikeda is quite a well-known man, a celebrity, in Japan,” explained one of the escorts, Kenichi Enomoto. “There would be 10,000 people here to see him today if it was not controlled.”

Tuesday’s ceremonies showed off the mansion, originally built in 1930 as a country retreat by razor-blade baron King Gillette. It has been cleaned up and restored at a cost of more than $1 million.

The property was used until last fall as headquarters for a religious cult, the Church Universal and Triumphant. That organization relocated to Montana after selling the property to the Buddhists for $15.5 million.

The development proposal revealed by Ikeda was described as preliminary by Soka University leaders.

“There are no actual plans to develop more buildings at this time,” said Chikao Kajioka, the Tokyo university’s secretary for public information. “It could be 100 years or 20. We don’t know.”