Jossei Toda

"É meu ardente desejo que a humanidade se livre do ciclo da guerra e crie sucessivas gerações de pessoas imbuídas de um profundo respeito pela dignidade da vida."

Josei Toda was born in 1900. Like his mentor, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, he was a passionate and innovative educator. Disillusioned with a Japanese educational system that advanced the interests of the state and suppressed independent thought, Mr. Toda took immediate interest in Mr. Makiguchi's pedagogical theories when they met in 1920. Mr. Toda was the first to apply those theories when he began managing a private school in Tokyo.

In 1930, together with Mr. Makiguchi, he founded Soka Kyoiku Gakkai (the Value Creation and Education Society), and helped his mentor publish his major work, The System of Value-Creating Pedagogy. With the onset of World War II, however, because of their unyielding commitment to human rights and the pacifist principles they espoused, they met with harassment and persecution and both were arrested and imprisoned by the militarist government in 1943. Makiguchi died in prison in 1944, and Toda was released just weeks before Japan's surrender in 1945. While imprisoned, Mr. Toda, had come to a profound understanding that human life is the most precious of all treasures. 

This realization, coupled with his deep anger toward the military government's wanton exercise of power, became the motivation for his efforts to rebuild a grassroots movement for peace for the remainder of his life. In 1957, Mr. Toda issued a declaration condemning the use of nuclear weapons as criminal under any circumstances, and called on the young people of the world to work for their abolition.