Think about it - how many of you have discarded your cell phone because it works exactly the way it has been advertised to work?

IF OVER 99% of everyone who ever tried a cell phone ended up discarding it, the cell phone companies would be doing some very different things, wouldn't they?

SGI claimed "12 million members worldwide" for over 50 years (starting around 1970), until they downsized that total to "11 million members worldwide" in October 2022. If even half of those members had managed to successfully shakubuku a single person and convince them to join SGI and STAY in SGI, SGI would now have around 17 or 18 million members worldwide, wouldn't it? But no - go on over to SGI-USA's page and aside from a single mention of "11 million members worldwide", you'll see that all the linked articles from after October 2022 have stopped including worldwide membership numbers!

If you look around on the internet, though, there's no shortage of Soka Gakkai/SGI-controlled pages still claiming "12 million members worldwide", as here and here and here and here. Why is it taking the Ikeda cult so long to update all its sites to that new lower "11 million" number? Lazy and incompetent or just reluctant to accept reality?

How can SGI claim to be growing when they were stuck at "12 million members worldwide" for OVER 50 years and then downsized by a MILLION? The world's population has more than DOUBLED since 1970! "12 million" out of the 1970 world population of almost 3.7 billion = 0.3%, or 3 out of every 1000 people; "11 million" out of the current (2023) world population of over 8 billion amounts to a vanishingly irrelevant 0.1%, or 1 out of every 1000 people. Most researchers who study SGI consider the membership numbers claimed by SGI to be vastly overstated. For example, SGI-USA's world map (the closest they'll get to disclosing membership numbers) STILL lists the same "352,000 members" for North America as before the 2022 downsizing to "11 million" (even while the SGI-USA's internally reported numbers from early 2020 showed only HALF that). Wowzers, huh? Betcha had NO IDEA there were hundreds of thousands of active SGI members in the USA!

Because there aren't.

SGI-USA's active membership is only around 30,000 AT MOST, maybe 16,000, possibly as few as 3,000 to 5,000, so well over 99% quit rate. Japan is where the lion's share of the Soka Gakkai/SGI membership is and always has been, and the Japan Soka Gakkai membership numbers are simply a tally of nohonzons issued and there is no adjustment made for deaths or defections, according to Ikeda himself. According to recent polls, the Soka Gakkai's membership numbers have dropped over 80% to just 1.77 million even as the SGI's world map is still claiming "8.27 million households". This map of which religions dominate which prefectures in Japan clearly shows the reality that, even in its ancestral land of Japan, Soka Gakkai is irrelevant - even Ikeda's nemesis Nichiren Shoshu dominates more territory! Too bad, so sad...so much "winning"...

Well over 99% of everyone who's ever tried SGI-USA has quit - and that's out of just the few people who were ever willing to try something so strange, irrational, and foreign in the first place. The Soka Gakkai and SGI were the product of a specific time and place, now long gone, always far away to us in the Soka Gakkai's SGI international colonies. The SGI's entrenched, ossified religious format simply does not have the same appeal now as it did back then. Even there in the Soka Gakkai's stronghold (Japan), it's dying out; that's how important the significance of the time is. That's why Josei Toda said that, if they didn't "accomplish kosen-rufu in Japan within the next 25 to 26 years", they wouldn't have another chance, because they needed to exploit that uniquely Japanese post-war defeat/occupation experience and resulting bitterness within the population in order to take over and replace the still-new US-imposed government before everybody got too used to it. And Toda was right! Toda was saying that ca. 1954; that 25-to-26-years window closed several generations ago. Newer generations simply aren't signing on in anything close to the numbers needed to simply replenish the SG/SGI's dwindling ranks, much less "conquer the country" as Ikeda envisioned. What a joke.

Joining SGI isn't a matter of getting on the winning team by any stretch of the imagination; SGI is losing, and losing badly.