Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how embodying the power of chanting Soka Gakkai youth create new affective spaces detached from Japanese patriarchal norms; through the affective technology of chanting for a 'greater self' the need for egalitarian relations come to intricately underpin their sense of well-being.

Paper long abstract:

Processes of detachment of past practices in the (re)making of the social characterised Soka Gakkai as it moved Nichiren Buddhism from a focus on priestly rituals to an ‘art of living’. This paper discusses the various individual, social and political layers of a daily practice of chanting nam-myōho-renge-kyō, a process felt to be a self-empowering cognitive-emotional transformation, a ‘technology of affect’ to reveal one’s ‘greater self’. This is also a process of detachment to alter past structured emotions and outlooks that inevitably involves a negotiation of hitherto normative sensibilities, or habitus. In the context of Japan, feelings of meiwaku, or causing trouble to others is a sentiment that captures the strongly felt pressure to conform to established social expectations. Such forms for structured self-regulation in public spaces, or tatemae performativity speak deeply to how one chooses to act and speak in what is considered authoritative and normative ways of behaving. In Japan where speaking about ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ generally make for socially uncomfortable topics, if not taboo, Soka Gakkai also experienced deeply a felt pressure to appear ‘normal’ in wake of the excommunication from the Nichiren Shōshū priesthood and the Aum Shinrikyo affair in the 1990s, and saw its own forms for routinization of 'perfection' partly to avoid the meiwaku label and stigmatisation of ‘bad’ religion. Such ‘Japanization’, however, is being challenged by contemporary Soka Gakkai youth. This is particularly occurring in the way that Japan’s most ‘sacred’ postwar strata of the salaryman doxa is being revoked. Affecting detachment from established sensibilities and social expectations is not so much in terms of cutting oneself off from certain relations as it is transforming established normative attitudes on various fronts - work, friendship groups, club activities and Soka Gakkai organizational culture itself. I discuss these processes of affecting detachment and remaking of the social through ethnographic examples of younger Japanese and overseas Soka Gakkai members living in Japan; negotiating patriarchal hegemonic structures by creating new affective spaces and ontological realities seek to establish egalitarian socialities as something deeply rooted in notions of what a ‘greater self’ is that is affected through chanting.