Daisaku Ikeda

was a Japanese Buddhist leader, author, and businessman. He served as the third president and then honorary president of the Soka Gakkai, the largest of Japan's new religious movements. At this time, he became a controversial leader, in Japan and abroad.

Ikeda is the founding president of the Soka Gakkai International (SGI), which claims to have approximately 12 million practitioners in 192 countries and territories, more than 1.5 million of whom reside outside of Japan as of 2012. But those numbers are controversial and impossible to verify.

In Japan, and many other countries, he has been described as a "controversial figure" over several decades from the 1970s. due to the ambivalent reputation of the Soka Gakkai— whose name has been linked to several political and financial scandals, cult of personality accusations, and his relation to the political party Kōmeitō, which he founded. He has been the subject of numerous articles, doubts and accusations in Japanese and international media. But as Jason Goulan notes (cited in footnote 5), much of the ctiticism is "libellous and unfounded", as Ikeda has been often recognized internationally for his work for peace. Robert Kasala (footnote 8) also mentions that he has been "prominent" in peace efforts internationally. Provided by Wikipedia