Ryuho Okawa’s new book, The Laws of Justice, could not have come at a more appropriate moment. The Japanese thinker, whose books, according to his publisher, IRH Press, have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, takes on our turbulent times in this latest effort, offering potential paths to a peaceful society.
Okawa, who, according to IRH Press, has written some 2,100 titles (many adapted from speeches, lectures, and interviews he has given dating back to the 1980s), is the founder of the spiritual movement Happy Science. A former businessman working for a Japanese company based in New York, Okawa was inspired to found Happy Science in the late 1980s. He began laying out the tenets and ideas for Happy Science in 1986 and formally established the group as a religion in Japan in 1991.
Dedicated to helping people achieve spiritual happiness, Happy Science is based on a set of four principles: love, wisdom, self-reflection, and progress. Each principle encourages self-fulfillment. In The Laws of Justice, Okawa specifies that love teaches us how to “give ourselves freely,” wisdom helps us find “insights of spiritual truths,” self-reflection helps us achieve “a mindful, nonjudgmental lens,” and progress emphasizes “the positive dynamic aspects of our spiritual growth.”
The Laws of Justice is a departure from much of the work Okawa has published to date, as Bob Newman, a publicist working on the book, explains. Whereas most of his titles focus on spiritual and religious ideas, The Laws of Justice has a political message. It proposes, Newman says, “how world leaders, academic thinkers, and thoughtful readers can bring the world together.”
How does one book come up with solutions for such a seemingly intractable problem? Newman says that whereas Okawa believes most books tackle world peace by focusing on “diplomatic and political relationships,” The Laws of Justice “looks at the roots of how human beings act and communicate in communities both nationally and internationally.” By doing this, Newman says, Okawa offers possibilities for “how, in the future, human beings can find common ground and better understand each other’s feelings, opinions, and agendas.”
Okawa believes that the world is in the throes of a precarious and dangerous moment, with the growing threat of global terrorism and the rise of ISIS, the growing tension around the use of force by police in the U.S., and more. Okawa explains that as the U.S. presidential campaigns bring many of these issues to the fore, his ideas, as laid out in The Laws of Justice, offer a “new vision” for world peace, and one that is “required” right now. “This vision,” he continues, is based on six of his lectures that compose the book, which puts forth the notion that government affairs, political events, and spiritual values are actually deeply connected.
Elaborating on this notion, Okawa believes that both world conflicts and religious conflicts are on the rise because so many “world economies are shattered.” Okawa sees “a unique religious movement as the solution.”
The Laws of Justice, which is subtitled How We Can Save World Conflicts & Bring Peace, explains, according to Okawa, “the reason why people forever undergo revolutions in pursuit of democracy.”
By connecting domestic and international conflicts with spiritual values, Okawa shows how religion can be used as a unifying force in the world. “There are two major trends opposing each other in the world today,” Okawa writes in The Laws of Justice. “One centers around the United States. This force is comprised of countries that want its support and spread the ideologies of democracy, liberalism, fundamental human rights and market economies. The other is a force comprised of countries that will suffer if these ideologies spread across the world.”
In the hope that the tension between these two opposing factions won’t lead to war, Okawa offers these six lectures presented in The Laws of Justice—originally given in Japan between 2013 and 2015—to demonstrate how religion can be used as a way to protect human rights and encourage governments to establish and support democracies.
