Death of the founder of 'Happy Science', a controversial Japanese religious sect
Ryuho Okawa was 66 years old and in 1986 gave birth in Japan to a syncretic new-age movement that claims (with unverifiable numbers) 12 million followers. Among its proselytising channels were a series of cartoons and an extreme right-wing political party denying the atrocities committed in the Second World War.
Tokyo (AsiaNews) - Ryuho Okawa, one of Japan's most controversial religious leaders, died on Thursday, 2 March, at the age of 66. The news was not officially announced by his congregation but was reported by all the country's main newspapers, which quoted sources familiar with the facts. Okawa died in an unspecified hospital in Tokyo, where he had been admitted a few days ago due to cardiac arrest.
Born in 1956 in a prefecture in western Japan, Okawa studied at the University of Tokyo before going to work for one of the country's big companies. His religious and personal turning point came in 1986, when he quit his job to found a new religion known as 'Happy Science', of which he remained president until his death.
The religious cult founded by Okawa shows strong New Age influences and presents itself as a syncretic movement that incorporates spiritual elements from all the major religions. According to its adherents, Okawa is a deity reincarnated many times on earth, capable of communicating with the spirit world.
After its legal recognition in 1991, Happy Science expanded thanks to an aggressive proselytising campaign, whose messages are also spread through a series of cartoons. According to information available on the website, the cult is present in Japan and 165 other countries with over 10,000 structures including temples, local branches and propaganda centres.
The organisation claims to have over 12 million followers worldwide, but there are no independent figures on this. Okawa's ex-wife claimed in 2011 that the actual following was 30,000.
In 2009, Okawa endowed his movement with a political arm by founding the Happiness Realization Party, which has regularly participated in Japanese elections ever since. Okawa has never entered parliament, like none of his party's other candidates, although in the 2016 elections his candidates garnered just under a million votes. In local assemblies, however, a handful of members have managed to get elected in recent years.
The party of the religious movement is on the far right of Japan's political spectrum, claiming a fiercely anti-communist stance with overtones of Sinophobia. When it comes to the issues of defence and historical memory, Okawa has never made a secret of the fact that he believes it is necessary to revise Article 9 of the constitution (which rejects the right to belligerence and forbids the country from maintaining armed forces) and that he does not believe in the historiography that accuses Japan of being guilty of grave atrocities during the Second World War.
The Happiness Realization Party and Happy Science have grown in the same bed from which other socio-political phenomena such as QAnon or conspiracy spiritualism have emerged in other countries. For this reason, even without considering the donations the faithful have to make to ascend in the cult hierarchy, the movement is at the centre of much controversy. During the pandemic, for example, followers were offered a 'spiritual vaccine' against Covid. Obviously at a cost.
.png)
