JAPAN Founder of controversial Japanese religious sect ‘Happy Science’ dies

Ryuho Okawa was 66 years old and in 1986 a syncretic movement of the new era had started in Japan, which claims (with unverifiable figures) 12 million followers. His proselytizing channels also include a cartoon series and a far-right political party that denies atrocities committed in World War II.

Tokyo () – Ryuho Okawa, one of Japan’s most controversial religious leaders, passed away on Thursday, March 2 at the age of 66. The news was not officially announced by his congregation, but it was by the main newspapers in the country, which cited sources informed of the facts. okawa passed away at an unspecified hospital in Tokyo, where he had been admitted a few days ago due to cardiac arrest.

Okawa was born in 1956 in a prefecture in western Japan and studied at the University of Tokyo before going to work in one of the country’s large companies. His religious and personal change came in 1986, when he left his job to found a new religion known as “Happy Science”, of which he was 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 major religions. According to his followers, Okawa is a deity reincarnated many times on Earth, capable of communicating with the spirit world.

After its legal recognition in 1991, Ciencia Feliz expanded thanks to an aggressive proselytizing campaign, whose messages are also disseminated through a series of cartoons. According to the information available on the website, the sect is present in Japan and 165 other countries with more than 10,000 structures, including temples, local branches and propaganda centers. The organization claims to have more than 12 million followers worldwide, but there are no independent figures on the matter. Okawa’s ex-wife claimed in 2011 that she actually had 30,000 followers.

In 2009, Okawa gave his movement a political arm by founding the Happiness Realization Party, which has been a regular contestant in Japanese elections ever since. Okawa has never entered Parliament, like none of the other candidates from his party, although in the 2016 election his candidates garnered nearly a million votes. In local assemblies, however, a handful of members have managed to get elected in recent years.

The religious movement party He is on the extreme right of the political spectrum. Japanese and claims a fiercely anti-communist stance with hints of Sinophobia. On the issues of defense and historical memory, Okawa never concealed that he considered it necessary to review Article 9 of the Constitution (which rejects the right to belligerence and prohibits the country from maintaining armed forces) and that he did not believe in the historiography that accuses Japan of being guilty of serious atrocities during World War II.

The Party for the Realization of Happiness and Happy Science grew in the same bed from which other sociopolitical phenomena such as QAnon or conspiracy spiritualism have emerged in other countries. For this reason, even without taking into account the donations that the faithful have to make to ascend in the hierarchy of the sect, the movement is at the center of many controversies. During the pandemic, for example, followers were offered a “spiritual vaccine” against Covid. Of course, in exchange for a payment.