Makiguchi the Value Creator: Revolutionary Japanese Educator and Founder of Soka Gakkai [Paperback]

Dayle M. Bethel (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Weatherhill (July 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0834803186
• ISBN-13: 978-0834803183
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #583,776 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Life and Wisdom of a Great Educator and Buddhist Leader, March 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Makiguchi the Value Creator: Revolutionary Japanese Educator and Founder of Soka Gakkai (Paperback)

Tsunesaburo Makiguchi is one of Japan's most significant yet perhaps least-recognized educators. His fame as the founder of Soka Gakkai has somewhat eclipsed his reputation as an educator. (Soka Gakkai International is now the largest Buddhist organization in the world with over 12 million members in 128 nations.)

Mr. Makiguchi had spent a lifetime developing his "value-creating" educational philosophy from his experience as teacher, principal, and teacher of teachers before he founded the Buddhist lay organization.

A man ahead of his time, Mr. Makiguchi made proposals over sixty years ago that are being made anew today. He was staunchly opposed to the rote memorization that was the backbone of Japanese pedagogy in his day (and largely remains so today), and he called for greater involvement by community members in the education of children.

The author, himself an educator, gives a clear and vivid picture of the magnitude and revolutionary quality of Mr. Makiguchi's theories. Until this book, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi has gone virtually unrecognized in the West because so little information on non-Western educators has been available in English. This work fills a need at a time when Mr. Makiguchi's impact on education and society is of increasing importance.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Life and Wisdom of a Great Educator and Buddhist Leader, March 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Makiguchi the value creator, revolutionary Japanese educator and founder of Soka Gakkai, (Hardcover)

Tsunesaburo Makiguchi is one of Japan's most significant yet perhaps least-recognized educators. His fame as the founder of Soka Gakkai has somewhat eclipsed his reputation as an educator. (Soka Gakkai International is now the largest Buddhist organization in the world with over 12 million members in 128 nations.)

Mr. Makiguchi had spent a lifetime developing his "value-creating" educational philosophy from his experience as teacher, principal, and teacher of teachers before he founded the Buddhist lay organization.

A man ahead of his time, Mr. Makiguchi made proposals over sixty years ago that are being made anew today. He was staunchly opposed to the rote memorization that was the backbone of Japanese pedagogy in his day (and largely remains so today), and he called for greater involvement by community members in the education of children.

The author, himself an educator, gives a clear and vivid picture of the magnitude and revolutionary quality of Mr. Makiguchi's theories. Until this book, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi has gone virtually unrecognized in the West because so little information on non-Western educators has been available in English. This work fills a need at a time when Mr. Makiguchi's impact on education and society is of increasing importance.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An unknown man whose ideas changed many minds, January 10, 2011

By 

be "pimobius3" (Washington) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Makiguchi the Value Creator: Revolutionary Japanese Educator and Founder of Soka Gakkai (Paperback)

I noticed a copy of The Value Creator laying on a table at a garage sale in 1988 and bought it for a quarter. At that point I had a long simmering anger towards anything Japanese because of Pearl Harbor but I read the book anyway. As I read it I felt ashamed at my own lack of knowledge because it hadn't occurred to me that Japan had dissidents who felt their country needed to change it's course and they were imprisoned. I wondered whether we should just love our country, right or wrong. He didn't incite overthrowing the government but he was in prison when we were at war with Japan. This man believed creating values (not monetary values), learning to love work, to love learning as a life long process should be the foundation of his country's politics and education system.

The corporation I worked for in 1988 was sending supervisors to Japan to learn their way of doing busines. In my smaller world anything Sony built was where I expected to find real value, always excellent products.

I loaned my copy of The Value Creator to a supervisor just before he went to Japan and he read some of it then returned it. He told me it was 'heavy stuff' too much to think about. The corporation that employed us was thinking of values and principles but strictly in their monetary contexts however.

With the experience of the past 20 years behind me, globalization was just beginning, it had already begun in 1988 when 'value' and 'principal' was about money, the other interpretations vanished. Money and making money has won global respect at this point. But their opposite meanings are still alive too, much as they were described in this book by a man who was imprisoned for just thinking and writing non-violent ideas. There are more and more people who are promoting creating values in life and being of service the way Makiguchi did. That makes every person's life potential interesting and rewarding. There's a lot of promotion now about 'value' the way this teacher understood it.

It was not just a book that changed my mind about politics and our countries 'enemies', history itself and my place in it, the book really made me know for certain that one person's ideas can positively infect others, something in nature itself must keep them alive in Time, moving forwards. Unfortunately parallel to their exact opposite. But Makiguchi was a planet level mind, there are now reasons to believe the planet does have some kind of mind, it's been named Gaia. I have a hunch Makiguchi was a living point of view of the planetary mind.