Religious Battle Taking Shape in Foothills of Mt. Fuji : Japan: The Buddhist order of Nichiren Shoshu has expelled its lay organization, Soka Gakkai. Political fallout is probable.

In the foothills of Mt. Fuji, just lightly dusted with snow this time of year, are the sprawling grounds of Taisekiji, the ancient temple headquarters of the Buddhist order of Nichiren Shoshu.

It’s a startling sight. Attached like a misplaced appendage to the 700-year-old temple compound of prayer halls, pagoda and inner gardens is a stadium-sized, white granite structure shaped like a slice of melon. The old temple grounds have meandering, rough stone slab pathways, while the new buildings have angular, wide-open plazas. Everything is deserted.

These odd temple grounds are the backdrop to a sometimes ludicrous, yet historic religious battle taking shape in Japan. The Soka Gakkai, the lay organization that built the melon-shaped behemoth and made it the center of a powerful worldwide organization, has declared war on its own priests.

The high priests of Nichiren Shoshu are fighting back with every weapon available to them. In their latest and most telling blow, the priests announced recently that they had excommunicated the Soka Gakkai, breaking the group’s affiliation with Nichiren Shoshu and its 600 temples.

The battle could hasten the decline of the Soka Gakkai and the Komeito, the Soka Gakkai’s political arm and a key party in the Japanese Parliament. The Komeito recently began to forge an alliance with the ruling party in an effort to cling to its waning power, a decision that has had major implications for national policy.

The battle also has hurt the reputation of the Soka Gakkai and could weaken its affiliate, Soka University, in its continuing fight with environmentalists for the right to build a large university in the Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California.

The Soka Gakkai began as a small study group affiliated with the Nichiren Shoshu order. But beginning in the early 1960s, under the leadership of the charismatic and dictatorial Daisaku Ikeda, the group brought in millions of converts by using high-pressure tactics. Many Japanese have told of having been pushed into a car, carried into a Soka Gakkai meeting hall and subjected to hours of intense indoctrination.

While the Soka Gakkai contributed billions of dollars to the religious establishment, building 350 temples throughout Japan for the priests, it maintained strict control over its own converts. Soka Gakkai officers gathered contributions and passed on a small proportion to the priests. Soka Gakkai guided its flock with sermons at its own meeting halls and through its 5.4-million circulation newspaper.

“It’s like they created a North Korea inside Japan,” said Kunio Naito, who has written several critical books about the Soka Gakkai. Naito quit his job as a journalist 20 years ago to investigate the sect because he feared the growing political power it was exercising through its party, the Komeito, at all levels of government.

It was no idle fear. In 1965, Soka Gakkai leader Ikeda predicted that he would convert all of Japan to the sect by 1990 and guide the emperor on a ceremonial tour through the temple grounds.

And for a while the Soka Gakkai didn’t do badly. It now counts 10 million members, and the Komeito, which is nominally independent but depends on the Soka Gakkai for policy direction and votes, effectively has the swing vote in the upper house of the Japanese Parliament. It claims 1.26 million overseas followers in more than 100 countries.

But today, the Soka Gakkai is fighting for its religious and political life. The high priests of Nichiren Shoshu, who for decades were content to enjoy their Mt. Fuji views while the Soka Gakkai brought in new devotees and contributions, say Ikeda has drifted too far from orthodox teachings, and they are attempting to reassert control of the religion.

Last year, the priests unseated Ikeda from his position as head of Nichiren Shoshu’s lay organizations. The priests followed in mid-November with a note to the leaders of the Soka Gakkai advising them to disband. The excommunication of the Soka Gakkai will cut the organization from its religious underpinning as a lay group of the Nichiren Shoshu faith.

The Soka Gakkai responded quickly to the excommunication, terming it “groundless” and “invalid” and saying it was reminiscent of “the Dark Ages in the medieval period.”

“We spoiled the priests a little,” said Einosuke Akiya, president of the Soka Gakkai and Ikeda’s No. 2 man, speaking in the group’s tightly guarded headquarters, garishly decorated with rows of oil paints and alabaster Greek statues.

The priests say Ikeda simply refused to follow the principles of Nichiren Shoshu and was developing his own brand of religion. Ikeda got into trouble with the priests earlier, when he urged followers to read a book about his spiritual transformation as if it were “a modern bible” and he were a “spiritual king,” said Kotoku Obayashi, a senior Nichiren Shoshu priest who greets guests in the modern brick and concrete office complex off to the side of the temple compound.

Ikeda made a formal apology to the priests in 1977. Soon afterward, the new head priest of Nichiren Shoshu, Nikken Abe, made his own conciliatory gesture by excommunicating 200 priests who continued to be critical of Ikeda.

This time, however, the dispute has gotten so petty and nasty that few see any ways to mend the rift.

The priests complained about Ikeda’s decision to have his followers sing “Ode to Joy” in German because it contained allusions to Christ, a point Ikeda says proves that the priests are still living in the Middle Ages.

Each side has sent spies to tape conversations at the other’s top-level meetings, then released the tapes to the media pointing out what are viewed as particularly objectionable segments, such as a priest’s “dictatorial” tone of voice or Ikeda’s anti-clerical comments.

Ikeda encouraged open rebellion against the Buddhist priests. Comparing his fight with the temple to Martin Luther’s Reformation movement against the Roman Catholic Church, Ikeda mounted a massive economic boycott of the temple. In one of its recent publications, the Soka Gakkai accused Abe, the chief priest, of beating his priests, eating sumptuous meals and riding everywhere in a Mercedes-Benz automobile. Disciples must bow when Abe passes even if they happen to be swimming in the pool beside the dormitory, the Soka Gakkai charged, adding that priests play golf and frequent bars.

The senior priest Obayashi said Nichiren Shoshu is a loose religion and he sees nothing wrong with the priests playing golf and visiting bars. Where 150,000 Soka Gakkai members used to make the pilgrimage to Taisekiji every month, just before the excommunication that number had dwindled to less than 10,000. The bullet train station built three years ago to handle the masses of faithful is deserted. Gift shops and restaurants alongside the temple have mostly closed. The president of a tourist bus company that went bankrupt because of the dispute recently committed suicide.

One gift shop owner who has kept her place open to catch the occasional tourist said she sides with the priests because “ever since second grade, I didn’t like their (Soka Gakkai’s) way of putting pressure on people.” She said her husband, who is a member of the Soka Gakkai, is criticized for not being able to “control” his wife and make her join. She would not give her name, saying the Soka Gakkai often boycotts stores whose owners are critical of the group.

The Soka Gakkai also has begun a campaign of harassment against the priests. Rumors have been spread that the Taisekiji temple grounds are in disarray, with stray dogs wandering about and robbers lurking in the shadows. Right-wing groups park their sound trucks outside the temple and blast out their criticism of the priests’ intransigence.

Temple signs have been splashed with paint. Soka Gakkai’s youth group members, in numbers as large as 200, have shown up at temple prayer meetings to badger the priests.

Soka Gakkai members were told to do without priests at funerals, one of the priests’ key sources of income, and to use Soka Gakkai officials instead.

The priests said they were not about to give in to the pressure. “It is a question of faith,” said Obayashi, the senior priest.

And the priests have their own powerful weapons. Even prior to the excommunication, they were refusing to present to Soka Gakkai members the gohonzon, the sacred scripture that every disciple must have at home to chant before and that only the head priest, Abe, is allowed to write. And many older members have resisted the move toward funerals without priests because, they believe, only a priest can give the deceased his special name for the afterlife, a name that Buddhists believe is necessary for the spirit to rise to Heaven.

But the most vulnerable element of the Soka Gakkai is its political arm. Naito, the writer, recently testified before a committee of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party that the Komeito will probably receive fewer than 6 million votes, perhaps as few as 5 million--a substantial decline from the 7.4 million votes it got six years ago.

Komeito must overcome not only the bad publicity from Soka Gakkai’s battle with the head temple, but also a series of recent scandals. In April, the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, an affiliate of the sect, was embroiled in an art scam over the purchase of two Renoir paintings, “Woman Bathing” and “Woman Reading.” Tax authorities say prices on the paintings were manipulated to help one or more of the parties save on taxes.

In a desperate effort to attract voters in next July’s upper house elections, the Komeito has begun putting up posters of its candidates, far in advance of other parties. The party also has allied itself closely with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on a variety of issues in the hopes of gaining the LDP’s backing in the coming battle.

Since early 1989, when the Liberal Democrats lost their majority in the upper house, the Komeito, whose name means Clean Government Party, has had the swing vote.

Akiya is confident that Komeito will come out ahead and said he does not fear excommunication. “Religions gets stronger when they face difficult times like this,” he said.

Priest Obayashi said he has time on his side. “We’ve been here for 700 years. We survived without them before; we can do it again.”