Daisaku Ikeda’s prface about family

     The family is the basic unit in social life. People are social animals who can not live alone, and from the moment of birth to the time of death, one’s life is a composite of interactions with others. The essential unit in social relationships throughout a lifetime is the family.
     Families come in all sizes, big ones and little ones. There are many different types as well; families is a patriarchal society differ in many ways from those in a matriarchal society. Form of marriage varies, too, from monogamy to polygamy or polyandry. Th
e family is, nevertheless, the first social group to have existed, before there was any community or society, state or nation. The birth of the family occurred with the inception of the human race.
     In japan, until a generation ago, the word “ family “ was likely to bring up an assortment of gloomy associations all related to the prewar institution of house. The family system of the pre-1945 period was patriarchal, and the authority of the father was nearly absolute. Primogeniture was the rule, and the second son and his younger brothers, not to mention the women, were subordinate to patriarchal authority. Restrictions, restraints and obedience; these were the images of the prewar family system, based as it was on a Civil Code that was heavily influenced by the confucian concept of morality.
     For postwar Japan’s professed democracy, abolition of such concepts of family and household was essencial to the construction of a healthy society. But certain ramifications of the destructions of the oldstyle family are lamented by many. The loss of maternal feeling among mothers and the decline in paternal authority, for example, seen to come right out of the age of the nuclear family. But I for one think the course of democratization itself has been a good thing. I have no sympathy for those who feel nostalgia for the prewar period, who moan that Japan’s society today has brought about the collapse of morality. A society like that of prewar  Japan creates a system in which the indivisual, male and female alike, is bound by the chains of family and group; and such a society can hardly be called wholesome.
    Postwar democratic societies, in the too hasty attempt to liberate the indivisual, have been totally oblivious to something, and the important thing is to discover just what that something is. Society is chenging faster than it ever has, and many adults are bewidered by the growing generation gap and sense of discontinuety. These times are difficult ones indeed, and as an organization leader, I have been able to gain a somewhat broad perspective on those difficulties.
    However, we will not make any progress by just lamenting the confusion. We must not run helter-skelter in bewilderment but get back to our beginnings---our beginnings as human beings, for whether we are old or young, man or woman, we have to try to answer the question of how we should live. This constant searching must begin from a spirit of independence. Only then can we look for the way to harmony and accommodation. This is an easy thing to say, but all the more difficult to put into practice, for we lack a spirit of independence today, and that, I think, is the blind spot  of postwar society.
     Women’s liberation is neccessary. I understand that there is , in the United States and other countries, a men’s liberation movement developing along with the women’s. Before considering whetherone is male or female, parrent or child, the urgent need is to cultivate a spirit of human independence. This is the movement for human liberation. Through the efforts of each and every person, we can leave behind us the forms of the past and out of this will come something new; the creative family. I hope this matter will be of some helpin that work