Other scholars point to the success in finding a willing and sympathetic substratum of society to serve as its base. Toda made repeated references to "the poor and the sick," making it evident that his propagation campaign was aimed at such people and, Murata concludes, "And evidently, for many of them, their new faith worked." Media impressions also portrayed the Soka Gakkai as "a conglomeration of lower social elements —the working class, the less educated, the low in status." According to Dower, after the war the Japanese population displayed a "kyodatsu condition," a mass state of personal and collective disorientation and depression characterized by war-weariness, sickness, malnutrition, numbness, and despair as many people poured into cities in search of work and food. To these people Toda's reconceptualization of Buddha with life force and his focus on Buddhism as a transformative force in culture and politics had appeal which resulted in rapid growth in the early 1950s.