Japan’s Happy Science
In the first of two reports, SD TUCKER meets some very Happy Chappies who aim to spread joy and peace worldwide – by preparing Japan for nuclear war on the advice of famous ghosts.
Japan’s most persistent electoral candidate is surely TV star Yoshiro Nakamatsu, aka ‘Dr NakaMats’, who claims to be the world’s greatest inventor on the basis of his (purported) design of the floppy disk in 1952. Among his other creations are a perpetual-motion machine, a pair of ‘Invisible Glasses’ shaped like human eyes, and the ‘PyonPyon Jumping Shoes’, which allow even the most flat-footed of assailants to impersonate Spring-heeled Jack with ease. The winner of a 2005 IgNobel Prize, NakaMats credits his 4,000-plus patents to the risky method of immersing himself underwater until only “0.5 seconds from death”, the lack of oxygen proving a spur to his grey matter. Arguing in his book Invention of Politics and How to Become a Superman Lying Down that politics itself is an “invisible invention”, he has been fruitlessly bouncing for high office since 1995.
In 2010 and 2013, Nakamatsu chose to fly the banner of the new Happiness Realisation Party (HRP), dressing as a Tibetan Buddhist monk in honour of the HRP’s founder… who claims to be Buddha himself. Both Dr NakaMats and the HRP share a profound concern about Japan’s falling birthrate. NakaMats once sold a RoboCop-friendly condom with a magnet inside to enhance penile pleasure, but now prefers to market his ‘Love Jet’ fluid, a stimulating perfume for the genitals intended to “save Japan” from impending demographic doom. This is also the aim of ‘Master’ Ryuho Okawa, who founded the HRP as an offshoot of his Happy Science (Kofuku-no-Kagaku) religious movement in 2009, the difference being that he aims to achieve such an outcome via a unique blend of nuclear re-armament, opendoor immigration, free-market economics and communication with the dead.
THE HAPPIEST HUMAN IN THE HUMAN RACE
Happy Science (HS) was founded by Okawa in 1986, following an ecstatic experience termed ‘The Great Enlightenment’. According to a full hagiography on the HS website, Okawa (who had read 1,000 books by the age of 20) began as an employee of the “major trading company” Tomen in their New York offices, where, in the Twin Towers, he developed a twin regard for the ostensibly unrelated spheres of free-market capitalism and New Age spirituality. On 23 March 1981, during a rare break from work, the 24-year-old Okawa suddenly sensed an “invisible presence” and grabbed a pencil. Then, he said: “My hand holding the pencil began to move as if it had a life of its own. On card after card it wrote the words Good News, Good News, Good News…” The Good News was that he was Buddha reborn. Rather than renouncing all worldly goods, this time around Buddha continued to grease the wheels of global commodity-exchange until, on 17 June 1986, “high spirits came down one after another from the heavenly world” to advise a career-change. Okawa handed in his notice and “stood up alone for the
salvation of all humanity at the expense of his personal life”. By that October, HS had been founded, and was legally certified as a religious movement – and thus, officially not a cult – in Japan in March 1991. Prior to this, it preferred to pose as being simply “a graduate school for life”.
If you think Okawa’s claim to have read over 1,000 books is impressive, just consider that he has written over 2,500! In 2011, he made Guinness World Records after publishing 52 titles – one per week – during the previous year. By 2014, even this seemed lazy, with 161 tomes hitting shelves. Many Japanese bookstores maintain a special ‘Okawa Corner’ where fans can peruse his works in a variety of formats. Some books have become bestsellers, with his early work The Laws of the Sun shifting a million copies. Admittedly, Okawa has had a little help in penning them, as most were channelled down from discarnate spirits, gods and aliens. One entity from which Okawa has drawn inspiration is El Cantare, described as “God of the Earth” and “The Tree of Life” – namely, God Himself. El Cantare is the ultimate source of every Earth religion, and plans to reunite all faiths in His worship, as He revealed to Okawa upon the day of the minor Sun god Emperor Hirohito’s death in 1989. Rarely, El Cantare allows His “core consciousness” to inhabit a human body in the form of an avatar; previous incarnations have included Hermes in ancient Greece and, 2,500 years ago, Gautama Buddha in India and Nepal. Gautama was El Cantare’s last incarnation prior to 1956, when Master Okawa was (re)born. But why is Buddha now promoting the free-market?
HIS PREVIOUS INCARNATIONS INCLUDE HERMES AND BUDDHA
MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE
Okawa bills himself as “CEO of the Happy Science Group”, which follows the traditional management structure of a large Japanese corporation. Photos show a well-groomed, presentable salaryman type in smart suit and tie, not a semi-naked, long-bearded guru. In 1991, a piece of prime Tokyo realestate was acquired for the HS HQ, thereby
displaying the Happies’ economic strength as “manifest proof” of Okawa’s sacred nature; in materialistic early-1990s Japan, high financial status equated to high spiritual status, and many recruits were essentially Japanese yuppies. Unlike most religions, HS had a business-plan. When targets for expansion were met, they suddenly became recast as successful ‘prophecies’ on The Master’s behalf, in a reversal of politicians’ usual tactic of abandoning unmet targets as mere ‘aspirations’. Okawa’s ultimate aim is to convert the entire world.
It was originally quite hard to join HS: hopeful applicants had to read “at least” 10 of Okawa’s books and then write a tough essay, but these exams later became multiple-choice, with the new chance to win cash prizes attached; now even these have been abandoned. Okawa has built a rich, professional international organisation with a claimed 12 million members worldwide, who gather at temples called ‘Happy Science Shojas’ – “town squares of the soul” and “lighthouses shining Heaven’s light to the surrounding areas”, no less – to recite sutras from Okawa’s books and arrange charity work. Here, a practice known as ‘Happiness Planting’ takes place – the soliciting of financial donations, or, if you prefer, donations of your free time instead. These are voluntary, as with church collectionplates, but carry echoes of Okawa’s previous career in finance. There is such a thing as ‘seed-capital’, in which investors give money to start-up businesses in hope of seeing them grow, thus contributing to the expansion of both the wider economy and the investor’s own bank balance. Happiness Planting looks similar. By donating money to them, the Happies say, “not only do you contribute to creating more prosperity in this world, but store spiritual wealth and virtue for when
you return back to Heaven. Let us all aim to become angels of wealth.” 3
If Okawa can work such wonders for the soul, then why not also for the stagnating Japanese economy? Can he magically multiply Yen just as Jesus could loaves and fishes? To find out, Okawa founded his political wing, the HRP, just in time for 2009’s General Election. Run initially by his wife Kyoko, whom Okawa said was the earthly incarnation of the goddess Aphrodite (all husbands think that at first), the HRP put forward 345 candidates but failed to land a single MP (although they did get a million votes). Their bizarre manifesto was explained in an interview Okawa gave to the Japan Times prior to polling day. Avowedly right-wing in outlook, the HRP aimed to make Japan great again by lowering taxes to stimulate fiscal growth, and reverse population decline by throwing open Japan’s borders with the aim of nearly doubling the population to 300 million. If such measures were not taken, then Japan’s ageing population would lead it to economic collapse, with too many pensioners for the working-age citizenry to support with taxes. Thus, the HRP wishes to recreate Japan’s miraculous 1980s boom-years by imitating the Reaganite policies of laissez-faire economic liberalism their High Priest saw working at close-hand during his early days in New York.
UNDIPLOMATIC CHANNELS
Away from economics, the HRP seeks to overcome Japan’s “colonial” mentality by revoking Article 9 of the pacifist Japanese constitution, which prevents the country properly re-arming. Japan had to be able to defend herself, Okawa explained, because North Korea’s then-dictator, Kim Jong-Il, was preparing to nuke the Imperial Palace in Tokyo at the behest of China. The HRP released an election video of a mushroom cloud billowing over Tokyo, arguing the urgent need for Japan to develop its own A-bombs as a deterrent against Kim’s plans, which Okawa claimed to have heard straight from the horse’s mouth… by talking to Kim’s ghost. 4 This seems puzzling, as in 2009 Kim Jong-Il was still alive. However, as Okawa’s channelled book The Guardian Spirit of Kim Jong-Il Speaks made clear, it was not his ghost precisely Okawa quizzed, but an aspect of his soul. As was explained during a 2016 grilling by Okawa of the brain-ghost of the similarly still-animate Donald Trump, it is the view of HS that each person’s soul consists of six separate entities termed ‘soul siblings’, one of whom, the ‘Guardian Spirit’, lives within (and basically is) our subconscious mind.
Luckily, the highly psychic Okawa is able to access the Spirit Guardians of living world leaders and talk shop about their true intentions. From Trump – “a man whose time has come” – Okawa learned of his fear that large numbers of Muslims allowed into the US together might not integrate well. Trump suggested Japan could accept all Syrian refugees instead, which chimed nicely with the HRP’s own liberal immigration policy. Ghost-Donald also endorsed the other key HRP policy of arming Japan with nucleartipped ICBMs, rather than the country relying upon the US to defend them from the Kims at great expense. 5
Okawa can speak to actual dead souls too, the majority of whom also love HRP policies. The Prophet Muhammad, Nelson Mandela, JS Mill, Jesus Christ – all agree with different aspects of the Happy platform, and it was upon the advice of such spirits that Master Okawa entered politics in the first place. 6 So frequent are his channelled chats that Japan’s publishing industry
could not keep pace, and HS felt compelled to create its own online newspaper in 2010. Called ‘The Liberty Web’, it seeks to provide “not only spiritual, but also political, economic and educational advice on a global scale”, pointing “the direction in which this confused and drifting planet should go.” What this amounts to is rather like a surprisingly pro-immigrant Japanese Daily Mail, as written by Spiritualists. I agree with editor Jiro Ayaori’s desire to prove that “Marxist income-distribution and a controlled economy produce nothing but poverty”, but would not choose to prove this by running interviews with like-minded ghosts. 7
THE IRON LADY-BOY
The site carries a wealth of weirdness I can only hint at here. Particularly impressive was how, in 2013, Margaret Thatcher’s ghost granted a world-exclusive first interview only hours after her death – the Lady was for returning after all. Although “puzzled by the sudden summoning”, it was definitely her, as her spirit said things like “Yes, [I am] the Iron Lady, I’m not very kind, and I have a short temper.” On 23 November 1990, the day following Maggie’s tearful resignation as PM, Master Okawa had already given a speech declaring the great woman was really an “angel of light” from the seventh dimension, as well as a man who had chosen to be born into a woman’s body to advance the feminist cause by swinging her handbag at all and sundry: Mrs T was really Mr T. During a 1986 conversation with the 1,000-year-old female novelist Murasaki Shikibu, Okawa had discovered that, this time around, the gods had given permission for Thatcher to be born with a vagina instead of the penis he/she normally wielded. It transpired Thatcher’s previous Earthly incarnation had been as the demonstrably male Otto von Bismarck – Germany’s ‘Iron Chancellor’ transforming with startling logic into Britain’s ‘Iron Lady’. As Okawa said, this was “a big scoop”, and he asked Maggie/Otto what lessons Japan could draw from Britain’s conduct during the Falklands War. If Japan and China were currently at loggerheads over the disputed Senkaku Islands, like Britain and Argentina once were over the Falklands, then what should Tokyo do? According to Samurai Thatcher: “You must attack, of course… [As I said to my Cabinet in 1982] If we believe that it’s our island, we must keep it, protect it, and attack our enemies, the invaders, and destroy them!” 8
When he first attracted public attention, Master Okawa sounded every bit as belligerent as Maggie. Riding the tail-end of Tokyo’s 1980s stock-market miracle, Okawa’s 1991 top-seller Nostradamus: Terrifying Prophecies claimed Japan’s destiny was to become ‘Leviathan’, the last superpower standing in a post-Cold War world. “In the 21st century there will be no enemies for Leviathan,” he had Nostradamus predict.
“It will slash the throats of the old eagle [America] and the exhausted Red bear [Russia], and laugh at the ageing Europe. It will use China as a slave and Korea as a prostitute.” 9 One appraisal of the early HS creed was of “a constantly changing cosmology based on social Darwinism” which “matched the ebullient, competitive mood of the [late-1980s] bubble-economy”. Times change, though, and any successful right-wing coalition must now tread a fine line between appealing to traditional conservatives and more liberal centre-right figures, so Okawa’s toned-down domestic message is now Darwinian more in its habit of adapting to an evolving environment. When in 2016 a misfit stabbed 19 disabled people dead at a Japanese care-home, Okawa saw an opportunity to release yet another book, Love, the Disabled and the Workings of the Devil, in which he argued the Hitlerloving killer was possessed by the ghost of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose cruel ‘survival of the fittest’-style doctrine had to be resisted. Though an economic burden, the disabled must still be supported; especially as many had selflessly chosen to be born like that, to “awaken to love” the souls of compassionate, able-bodied tax-payers. 10
MERCURY RISING
Another tactic was to exploit Thatcher’s inherently cross-over status as a cross-gender ghost to win over both right-wing social liberals and right-wing economic liberals by pursuing the ‘pink pound’. “Spiritual research” caused Okawa to realise that if a male soul like Mrs Thatcher is suddenly reborn in a female body, force of habit might see her still attracted to women, meaning she is either born a lesbian or with gender dysphoria – which is fine, says Okawa, as he’d still love their votes. Being born in the wrong body should be viewed as an opportunity “for polishing and training the soul”, he argues, citing the case of one voter who had been too aggressively masculine in a previous incarnation as a samurai who was later reborn with breasts “to balance out the radical samurai’s karma”. Businesses should welcome this phenomenon, as reincarnated LGBT wallets were worth $4 trillion globally; Okawa suggested supporters establish “bridal businesses that accept gay weddings”.
So, that’s Matthew Parris’s vote won. How to woo Norman Tebbit, too? By warning gays not to go “too far” in their rainbow ways and unleash a wave of queer “extremism”; if Japan bent too far to pink power, then even fewer citizens would get pregnant, national demographics would totally collapse and “the future of humanity could be endangered.”
To soothe the Tebbit caucus, therefore, Okawa raised the ghost of Freddie Mercury who, he helpfully explained, was “a gay man who had relationships with many men and women, which caused him to contract AIDS.” Freddie’s suffering soul said he was doomed to strut our Earth forever like the Wandering Jew; was the flamboyant former Queen frontman being punished by God for leading a life of overly-bohemian rhapsody? Freddie “was religiously Zoroastrian”, said Okawa, so he conjured Zoroaster’s own ghost
MARGARET THATCHER’S GHOST GRANTED AN INTERVIEW
to provide clarification. “Gay is evil,” spat the holy Persian prophet, but as Freddie’s music was so funky, he had grudgingly been shown mercy and allowed to danse macabre about the world post-death instead of being cast into the flames of Hell – a wise electoral compromise. 11
PUBIC RELATIONS DISASTER
One of HS’s first political PR campaigns came in 1994 when disciples marched through Tokyo waving placards demanding ‘STOP THE HAIR NUDES!’; they objected to modern Japanese porn-mags openly displaying pubic hair instead of obscuring it with a little black rectangle. As salarymen often read such publications on trains, the Happies felt kids might sneak a peek, thus warping their minds. By damning these “hair nudes”, Okawa hoped to gain kudos from moral conservatives. 12 But such activities caused more liberal folk alarm, due to the general anti-religious sentiments “which leftish post-war education has fostered”.
There are many shinshukyo ,ornew religious movements, in Japan, the bestknown being the now-banned Aum Shinrikyo, whose deadly sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 killed 13 people and injured 5,000. It is well remembered that Aum plotted mass murder only after being rejected by voters at the 1990 General Election – would the Happies one day do the same? Seemingly not. The HRP preaches only peace; except against Pyongyang, obviously. Okawa says he actually tried to warn authorities about Aum’s plans to attack Tokyo with remotecontrolled, sarin-loaded mini-helicopters, claiming he was targeted by the cult himself, having VX nerve-agent pumped into his car by assassins. HS and Aum did not get on; as Aum’s perverted, semi-sightless leader Shoko Asahara used to clip and collect his followers’ pubes, whereas the far smoother Master Okawa wished only to banish such hairy horrors from his sight forever, they proved natural enemies. Trading insults, Okawa called Shoko a “frog” due to his habit of underwater yoga, while Shoko mocked Okawa’s lack of asceticism; possibly it was such relentless Master-baiting that made Asahara blind in the first place. Nonetheless, in the wake of Aum’s attacks, restrictive antishinshukyo laws were passed, so entering politics was a prudent counter-move.
In 1995, HS founded The Association for the Protection of the Nation from Heretical Religions, thereby asserting that, unlike Aum, they were not one, and recruited prominent politicians to their cause, like mainstream LDP Party MP Hiroshi Mitsuzuka. In the book Hiroshi Mitsuzuka for Prime Minister! HS offered the LDP support on strict condition their smiling acolyte was made its leader. 13 But he never was, so HS took matters into their own hands instead.
Oddly enough, many HRP policies are actually not that far from the domestic political mainstream these days. In 2015,
aspects of Article 9 of the constitution were indeed bypassed by the current LDP PM, Shinzo Abe, just as Okawa wanted, and, given North Korea’s penchant for WMD-based blackmail, the notion of a nuclear-armed Japan is no longer quite as unthinkable as it once was. In response to demographic decline, PM Abe has cautiously begun opening the borders to larger and larger numbers of East Asian migrant-workers too, hoping to turbo-charge the free-market economy. Rather surprisingly, Happy Days might lie ahead for Japan after all…
NOTES
A throughout good general is Trevor source Astley’s of information 1995 essay used ‘The Transformation Religion: Okawa of Ryuho a Recent and Kofuku Japanese no New Kagaku’ in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 22/3-4, p.343-380, online at https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/ nfile/2580.
1 http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2010/06/30/ japanese-politics-the-unusual-suspects; www. ageekinjapan.com/doctor-nakamatsu/; http://www. japaninc.com/article.php?articleID=653; https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshiro_Nakamatsu; bizarre footage of Dr N on the campaign-trail can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb53205M38
2 http://happy-science.org/ryuho-okawa/; http:// happy-science.org/el-cantare/
3 http://happy-science.org/activities/
4 www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2009/08/04/ issues/party-offers-a-third-way-happiness/#. Vs2ME2pFDcs; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Happiness_Realization_Party; www.youtube.com/ watch?v=k354akEKAZw
5 http://eng.the-liberty.com/2016/6091/; To protect the HRP’s US political soul-mate, Dr NakaMats has now developed a ‘self-defence wig’ for use by Trump, filled with hidden iron bars, to enable him to take out any wannabe assassins by flinging it at their heads with a secret spring. Film of NakaMats
promoting this item, together with detailed patent-diagrams, is online at www.huffingtonpost. com/entry/donald-trump-guard-weaponized-wig_ us_56d603b4e4b0871f60ed0584
6 www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2009/08/04/ issues/party-offers-a-third-way-happiness/#. Vs2ME2pFDcs ; for Nelson Mandela’s opinion that, if Japan had won WWII, he would never have ended up in prison, see http://eng.the-liberty. com/2013/4855/
7 http://eng.the-liberty.com/about-us/
8 http://eng.the-liberty.com/2013/4397/; the interview also PROVED that Thatcher would have advised us to vote for Brexit (an event Okawa had successfully predicted as early as 1990), thus solving a recent controversy in the British media. You can read more of Mrs T’s stirring rhetoric in Okawa’s books, Two Spiritual Secrets of the Iron Lady and Margaret Thatcher’s Miraculous Message: An Interview With the Iron Lady 19 Hours After Her Death or at http://eng.the-liberty.com/2012/995/; http:// eng.the-liberty.com/2013/4397/; http://eng.theliberty.com/2013/4400/; http://eng.the-liberty. com/2016/6344/
9 www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-10-19ca-721-story.html
10 theconversation.com/gurus-gas-attacks-andpubic-hair-the-strange-history-of-japans-newreligions-97980 http://eng.the-liberty.com/2017/6868/; http://
11 http://eng.the-liberty.com/2018/7245/; http:// eng.the-liberty.com/2019/7415/
12 http://theconversation.com/gurus-gas-attacksand-pubic-hair-the-strange-history-of-japans-newreligions-97980
13 http://www.japantimes.co.jp/ community/2009/08/04/issues/party-offers-athird-way-happiness/#.Vs2ME2pFDcs; http://happyscience.org/ryuho-okawa/; http://eng.the-liberty. com/2014/5110/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Ryuho_Okawa
For more Japanese shinshukyo ,see FT99:34-39 (Aum Shinrikyo), 154:34-41 (Mahikari) and 173:3638 (Pana Wave).