In denial: Happy Science on love and war (well mainly war) and myself on an abortion of a journalism career
Perhaps some cause for full disclosure here. Why am I so
interested in a kooky New Age groupuscule whose TGIF is paranormal Q&A
sessions? Surely the only reasonable response to this Close Encounter with the
Weird Kind is to bash out a brief, smart-alecky hatchet job, Vice-style, and
forget it ever happened? (Or better yet just read n’ retweet Vice’s actual
version of events. For all my griping, I can’t do what they do so well)
The answer – and don’t forget it’s a very personal one - lies in Happy Science’s almost unique position in the uncomfortable overlap between faith and politics. I’m increasingly fascinated by those who calmly stare down the warnings from today’s legion secularists, and bestride, Colossus-like, the supposedly unbreachable chasm between church (or temple as the case may be) and state. As you’d expect, I have found very few outlets for this guilty pleasure, so for now I am prepared to accept the rough with the smooth when I encounter a new specimen, whether the rough be the extreme, the bizarre or even the not-quite-serious. One of my favourite Internet sensations of recent years has been the Facebook-based declarations of the Reverend Dr Henry Sacheverell, whose impassioned pleas for “HIGH CHURCH & HARD BREXIT” have gained such a devoted (or devotional) following that I am only ninety per cent sure that they shouldn’t be recategorised from satire to an example of genuine belief in Brexit as divinely ordain’d masterwork. You won’t be surprised to learn it was on his page that I saw the flyer for Margaret Thatcher’s Spiritual Message.
But nonetheless, while business can be mixed with pleasure,
we all have a responsibility to report accurately and honestly, warts and all.
On departing the Temple, my impression of Happy Science was of an extremely
eccentric but altogether peaceful and perhaps even rather wise denomination. In
tarot archetypes, the Fool; a deliverer of striking truths whimsically packaged
in hours-worth of baffling absurdity.
It did not take long to discover the warts. A skimming of the passages in the Manifesto of the Happiness Realization Party critiquing Japan’s Constitution – specifically the passages concerning Japanese complicity in WWII - on the way home rings some alarm bells. Point number 1 in “Various problems in the Preamble to the Constitution” is “The understanding of World War II is incorrect.”:
So far, so unremarkable. It seems quite likely that Japanese honour culture would engender broad support for militarism and that, in defeat, there would be an existential imperative to cast the government as scapegoat in order to exculpate the people. But, given the context, pointing this out does seem like the thin end of a revisionist wedge. We know enough by now to deduce the HRP is not motivated by the dispassionate shining of cold, harsh light on national myths. Quite the opposite in fact.
The section continues with indictments of the Constitution’s confused sourcing of sovereignty – people or Emperor? – and a supposed negation of the Japanese human right to self-defence (speaking as it does of a “desire [for] peace for all time…” based on merely “trusting in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world”). But to my mind it is only the chapter’s conclusion that sails close to a dangerous wind: “World War II was not just ‘Democracy versus fascism’”. There is an account of the UK’s alliance with the “devilish” Stalin, a move acknowledged as “necessary” but raised to remind us that in a supposedly clear-cut black-and-white conflict between freedom and tyranny “there were also some crossovers”.
Again, nothing automatically problematic; however, this familiar moral caveat often accompanies efforts to discredit the legitimacy of the British stance. Pat Buchanan is a long-time Western exponent of this, claiming memorably that Churchill’s appeasing overtures toward Soviet expansionism “make Neville Chamberlain at Munich look like Davy Crockett at the Alamo”. Just as Buchanan’s wider claim is that Britain needlessly sacrificed her Empire in a quixotic crusade, there is sure to be an agenda behind Okawa’s own muddying of the water.
Sure enough, Okawa takes up the same mantle as Buchanan and other right-wing commenters whose anti-communism comes close to superseding their anti-fascism. Combined with Okawa’s lack of understanding of the European theatre (he has deeper knowledge of the East Asian conflict, as – as we learnt – did Margaret Thatcher), this produces the extraordinary counterfactual musing that:
The “many more people” referred to are the 20 million widely thought to have died under Soviet-style communism. Maybe it’s because my political baby shawl was the Bandera Rossa and my route to anti-communism was the jaded Whittaker Chambers route rather than the more clear-eyed William F. Buckley one, but I’ve never been entirely convinced by the conservative argument that the hammer and sickle is morally equivalent to, or worse than, the swastika. I don’t doubt that many more were ultimately killed in the name of class struggle than racial supremacism, but the Stalinists achieved their hideous body count over many more years than the Nazis achieved theirs. Why? Because Nazism insisted on conquering Europe and thus had to be stopped in its tracks, whereas the Soviets were content with their post-war buffer zone of cajoled east European states. If that’s a brutal pragmatist logic, then it is only as much as is necessary to convince some of my fellow right-wingers that an ideology founded on exterminating entire races is uniquely evil.
Not being a historian and being culturally removed from the particular European complexes coursing through the veins of the war in Europe, Okawa can perhaps be forgiven for not recognising the purity of the National Socialist poison. But the idea that the Russians should have surrendered to their invaders – responsible for an estimated 12,250,0002 non-battle deaths (civilians and POWs) alone in Soviet territory – in the name of some teleological pro-democracy endgame is not one that will altogether garner much sympathy. This is quite apart from the very practical matter of how the British, Commonwealth and US forces would’ve taken out Hitler once he’d goose-stepped into the Kremlin. Only the A-bomb comes to mind.
The chapter ends with an effort to place clear blue water between the Nazi and Tojo regimes, specifically in the spiritual sector. Okawa is convinced that the Japanese were guided by the old Shinto gods (residing in Major Heaven, in Happy Science belief), and thus responsibility for Japan’s involvement lies with them and with their then manifestation on Earth, Emperor Hirohito. Germany had the more problematic “traditional forest religion…somewhat close to Minor Heaven in the spirit world” while the populace “were driven by the power of black magic”. Not a ringing endorsement it is true, but does this mean – as I’ve suspected – that the Third Reich is seen as the lesser of two evils as against the atheistic, “devilish” USSR?
That Japan had ‘gods on their side’ in the war surely presents a theological quandary for Okawa. Why would they lead their people into a conflict in which they would become known for committing genocidal horrors and ultimately to ignominious defeat? Once again I am clobbered by my Judeao-Christian-centrism. Apparently the Shinto gods, much like those of European antiquity, are not eternal and unchanging: “At that time, the gods of Japan thought, ‘If the religion of Japan spreads to the world, the world will become happy.’” Determined to salvage something from this cataclysmic divine misfire, Okawa argues that Japan’s post-war prosperity and “certain degree of influence in the Pacific Basin” proves they were not entirely wrong. And the incalculable toll in human lives caused in the former approach? Ever true to the Fourfold Path, Okawa reflects that “there is perhaps cause for more self-reflection”.
If I had been hoping that the Happiness Realization Party might be a strong voice for liberal democratic values, perhaps even an ally (spoiler: I had), this doesn’t bode well. Nor does it bear any friendly omens for my foray into journalism. And it gets worse: the Happy Science Wikipedia page records accusations of denial of the notorious Rape of Nanking by the group. I chastise myself for being charmed and led along by skin-deep ideological affinity and well-presented PR; for being a pathetic Western Narcissus, too busy seeing his own views reflected in the calm waters to notice the katana-wielding Pepe the Frog grinning an inch below the surface.
Oh yikes.
But no! It can’t be true! As Buzz Lightyear sings in the original Toy Story. They must’ve been misrepresented. I turn to the Happy Science website, which leads to the site of its paper, The Liberty Web, and skim it for references to the Japanese atrocities in Manchuria. With trepidation I discover an article criticising a memorial to the ‘comfort women’ – female prisoners of war from all over the ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ forced into sex slavery for the relief of Japanese soldiers – in Taiwan as part of “China’s Communist Party’s Strategy for Taiwan’s Annexation”. But hang on! That’s not the same as denialism. The claim that Japanese war guilt is being exploited by Chinese revanchism is entirely compatible with acknowledgment that Japan has something to be guilty about. This hope holds out throughout my eagle-eyed scan of the article until…boom. The final line.
“In the name of historical truth”. Well there it is. A hasty search of ‘comfort women’ and ‘rape of Nanking’ then produces plentiful results, all bearing revisionist flavours. I have conversed with the Japanese answer to the Institute for Historical Review and came alarmingly close to jumping into bed with them. If I were a samurai, hara-kiri would be too good. Buzz Lightyear hits the floor and his arm falls off.
Something else Wikipedia has brought to my scattered attention: Master Okawa, the man whose words I have been casually pondering, is not just an enlightened priestly leader; he’s actually God. Yes, you read that right. In the Happy Science conception of the universe, the man who I watched rocking a mauve two-piece and delivering Margaret Thatcher impression that snaps at the heels of Meryl herself, is the earthly manifestation of El Cantare himself.
Luckily I have Taku’s email.
Can the Partridge redeem his cack-handed amateurism and put journalistic rigour before flights of political fancy? Will he ever decide if Happy Science is a cult? And does he even know anything about the rape of Nanking...? Find out in (sorry) Part IV.
The answer – and don’t forget it’s a very personal one - lies in Happy Science’s almost unique position in the uncomfortable overlap between faith and politics. I’m increasingly fascinated by those who calmly stare down the warnings from today’s legion secularists, and bestride, Colossus-like, the supposedly unbreachable chasm between church (or temple as the case may be) and state. As you’d expect, I have found very few outlets for this guilty pleasure, so for now I am prepared to accept the rough with the smooth when I encounter a new specimen, whether the rough be the extreme, the bizarre or even the not-quite-serious. One of my favourite Internet sensations of recent years has been the Facebook-based declarations of the Reverend Dr Henry Sacheverell, whose impassioned pleas for “HIGH CHURCH & HARD BREXIT” have gained such a devoted (or devotional) following that I am only ninety per cent sure that they shouldn’t be recategorised from satire to an example of genuine belief in Brexit as divinely ordain’d masterwork. You won’t be surprised to learn it was on his page that I saw the flyer for Margaret Thatcher’s Spiritual Message.
In which a handsome chap assures the Reverend that the heretical witches art not halfe bad
It did not take long to discover the warts. A skimming of the passages in the Manifesto of the Happiness Realization Party critiquing Japan’s Constitution – specifically the passages concerning Japanese complicity in WWII - on the way home rings some alarm bells. Point number 1 in “Various problems in the Preamble to the Constitution” is “The understanding of World War II is incorrect.”:
First of all, [the
Preamble] states that we have “resolved that never again shall we be visited with the horrors of war through the action of government,”
expressing that “the government alone carried out the war, and the people had
nothing to do with this”. But that is not the case. A large part of the public approved of the war.
So far, so unremarkable. It seems quite likely that Japanese honour culture would engender broad support for militarism and that, in defeat, there would be an existential imperative to cast the government as scapegoat in order to exculpate the people. But, given the context, pointing this out does seem like the thin end of a revisionist wedge. We know enough by now to deduce the HRP is not motivated by the dispassionate shining of cold, harsh light on national myths. Quite the opposite in fact.
The section continues with indictments of the Constitution’s confused sourcing of sovereignty – people or Emperor? – and a supposed negation of the Japanese human right to self-defence (speaking as it does of a “desire [for] peace for all time…” based on merely “trusting in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world”). But to my mind it is only the chapter’s conclusion that sails close to a dangerous wind: “World War II was not just ‘Democracy versus fascism’”. There is an account of the UK’s alliance with the “devilish” Stalin, a move acknowledged as “necessary” but raised to remind us that in a supposedly clear-cut black-and-white conflict between freedom and tyranny “there were also some crossovers”.
Again, nothing automatically problematic; however, this familiar moral caveat often accompanies efforts to discredit the legitimacy of the British stance. Pat Buchanan is a long-time Western exponent of this, claiming memorably that Churchill’s appeasing overtures toward Soviet expansionism “make Neville Chamberlain at Munich look like Davy Crockett at the Alamo”. Just as Buchanan’s wider claim is that Britain needlessly sacrificed her Empire in a quixotic crusade, there is sure to be an agenda behind Okawa’s own muddying of the water.
Sure enough, Okawa takes up the same mantle as Buchanan and other right-wing commenters whose anti-communism comes close to superseding their anti-fascism. Combined with Okawa’s lack of understanding of the European theatre (he has deeper knowledge of the East Asian conflict, as – as we learnt – did Margaret Thatcher), this produces the extraordinary counterfactual musing that:
If Hitler had been
a little bit stronger and defeated Stalin, and then Hitler was
defeated after that things might have been better. For some reason
things went
wrong and Stalin survived, so it seems that as a result, many more
people suffered.
The “many more people” referred to are the 20 million widely thought to have died under Soviet-style communism. Maybe it’s because my political baby shawl was the Bandera Rossa and my route to anti-communism was the jaded Whittaker Chambers route rather than the more clear-eyed William F. Buckley one, but I’ve never been entirely convinced by the conservative argument that the hammer and sickle is morally equivalent to, or worse than, the swastika. I don’t doubt that many more were ultimately killed in the name of class struggle than racial supremacism, but the Stalinists achieved their hideous body count over many more years than the Nazis achieved theirs. Why? Because Nazism insisted on conquering Europe and thus had to be stopped in its tracks, whereas the Soviets were content with their post-war buffer zone of cajoled east European states. If that’s a brutal pragmatist logic, then it is only as much as is necessary to convince some of my fellow right-wingers that an ideology founded on exterminating entire races is uniquely evil.
Not being a historian and being culturally removed from the particular European complexes coursing through the veins of the war in Europe, Okawa can perhaps be forgiven for not recognising the purity of the National Socialist poison. But the idea that the Russians should have surrendered to their invaders – responsible for an estimated 12,250,0002 non-battle deaths (civilians and POWs) alone in Soviet territory – in the name of some teleological pro-democracy endgame is not one that will altogether garner much sympathy. This is quite apart from the very practical matter of how the British, Commonwealth and US forces would’ve taken out Hitler once he’d goose-stepped into the Kremlin. Only the A-bomb comes to mind.
The chapter ends with an effort to place clear blue water between the Nazi and Tojo regimes, specifically in the spiritual sector. Okawa is convinced that the Japanese were guided by the old Shinto gods (residing in Major Heaven, in Happy Science belief), and thus responsibility for Japan’s involvement lies with them and with their then manifestation on Earth, Emperor Hirohito. Germany had the more problematic “traditional forest religion…somewhat close to Minor Heaven in the spirit world” while the populace “were driven by the power of black magic”. Not a ringing endorsement it is true, but does this mean – as I’ve suspected – that the Third Reich is seen as the lesser of two evils as against the atheistic, “devilish” USSR?
That Japan had ‘gods on their side’ in the war surely presents a theological quandary for Okawa. Why would they lead their people into a conflict in which they would become known for committing genocidal horrors and ultimately to ignominious defeat? Once again I am clobbered by my Judeao-Christian-centrism. Apparently the Shinto gods, much like those of European antiquity, are not eternal and unchanging: “At that time, the gods of Japan thought, ‘If the religion of Japan spreads to the world, the world will become happy.’” Determined to salvage something from this cataclysmic divine misfire, Okawa argues that Japan’s post-war prosperity and “certain degree of influence in the Pacific Basin” proves they were not entirely wrong. And the incalculable toll in human lives caused in the former approach? Ever true to the Fourfold Path, Okawa reflects that “there is perhaps cause for more self-reflection”.
If I had been hoping that the Happiness Realization Party might be a strong voice for liberal democratic values, perhaps even an ally (spoiler: I had), this doesn’t bode well. Nor does it bear any friendly omens for my foray into journalism. And it gets worse: the Happy Science Wikipedia page records accusations of denial of the notorious Rape of Nanking by the group. I chastise myself for being charmed and led along by skin-deep ideological affinity and well-presented PR; for being a pathetic Western Narcissus, too busy seeing his own views reflected in the calm waters to notice the katana-wielding Pepe the Frog grinning an inch below the surface.
But no! It can’t be true! As Buzz Lightyear sings in the original Toy Story. They must’ve been misrepresented. I turn to the Happy Science website, which leads to the site of its paper, The Liberty Web, and skim it for references to the Japanese atrocities in Manchuria. With trepidation I discover an article criticising a memorial to the ‘comfort women’ – female prisoners of war from all over the ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ forced into sex slavery for the relief of Japanese soldiers – in Taiwan as part of “China’s Communist Party’s Strategy for Taiwan’s Annexation”. But hang on! That’s not the same as denialism. The claim that Japanese war guilt is being exploited by Chinese revanchism is entirely compatible with acknowledgment that Japan has something to be guilty about. This hope holds out throughout my eagle-eyed scan of the article until…boom. The final line.
In the name of historical truth, and in the
name of happiness for the people of Taiwan,
the Japanese government must
vociferously demand the removal of comfort woman statues.
“In the name of historical truth”. Well there it is. A hasty search of ‘comfort women’ and ‘rape of Nanking’ then produces plentiful results, all bearing revisionist flavours. I have conversed with the Japanese answer to the Institute for Historical Review and came alarmingly close to jumping into bed with them. If I were a samurai, hara-kiri would be too good. Buzz Lightyear hits the floor and his arm falls off.
Something else Wikipedia has brought to my scattered attention: Master Okawa, the man whose words I have been casually pondering, is not just an enlightened priestly leader; he’s actually God. Yes, you read that right. In the Happy Science conception of the universe, the man who I watched rocking a mauve two-piece and delivering Margaret Thatcher impression that snaps at the heels of Meryl herself, is the earthly manifestation of El Cantare himself.
Luckily I have Taku’s email.
Can the Partridge redeem his cack-handed amateurism and put journalistic rigour before flights of political fancy? Will he ever decide if Happy Science is a cult? And does he even know anything about the rape of Nanking...? Find out in (sorry) Part IV.
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