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COMMENT: A Japanese fascist mind control cult called Happy Science joins Falun Gong in the list of participants in the Conservative Political Action Conference.
” . . . . On Friday afternoon at the Hyatt Regency Orlando, Hiroaki ‘Jay’ Aeba, a prominent Japanese conservative, will address CPAC about the threat China poses to the U.S., taking a prime spot in the lineup just after Donald Trump Jr. Aeba is no stranger to CPAC. In fact, 2021 marks the tenth anniversary of his first visit to the Republican lovefest. His speaker bio on the CPAC website notes that Aeba is the chairman of the Japanese Conservative Union (JCU), a right-wing political organization, and that he helped found CPAC Japan, which has been running for the last four years in Tokyo.
What isn’t mentioned is the central role Aeba plays in a Japanese cult called Happy Science, whose leader believes he is the Messiah and sells ‘miracle cures’ for COVID-19. . . . Happy Science was founded in October 1986 by Ryuho Okawa, a former Wall Street trader who claims to be the reincarnated form of Buddha, who himself was the reincarnated form of El Cantare, a god from Venus who created life on earth millions of years ago. . . .”
One of the cult’s prominent activities is fascist historical revisionism on behalf of Imperial Japan. ” . . . . . . . . At the same time, the organization’s political wing, the Happiness Realization Party, promotes political views that include support for Japanese military expansion, support for the use of nuclear deterrence,[8] and denial of historical events such as the Nanjing Massacre in China and the comfort women issue in South Korea . . . . ”
One of the group’s most outrageous undertakings–crafted by the group’s founder–Ryuho Okawa–is a book in which he claims to have channeled the spirit of Iris Chang, the late author of The Rape of Nanking. In this piece of offal, Okawa claims that Iris Chang’s spirit has confessed to publishing a false book, and wishes that it be withdrawn.
In FTR #‘s 1107 and 1108 we looked at the suspicious death of Iris Chang, whose work overlapped the world of Black Gold discussed by the Seagraves in Gold Warriors.
The lineup of the Conservative Political Action Conference this week includes political heavyweights like former President Donald Trump, Cancun-loving Sen. Ted Cruz, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. It also includes the political head of a Japanese religious cult that promotes nationalism, xenophobia and the belief that its leader is the reincarnation of an alien from Venus who created life on earth millions of years ago.
On Friday afternoon at the Hyatt Regency Orlando, Hiroaki “Jay” Aeba, a prominent Japanese conservative, will address CPAC about the threat China poses to the U.S., taking a prime spot in the lineup just after Donald Trump Jr.
Aeba is no stranger to CPAC. In fact, 2021 marks the tenth anniversary of his first visit to the Republican lovefest.
His speaker bio on the CPAC website notes that Aeba is the chairman of the Japanese Conservative Union (JCU), a right-wing political organization, and that he helped found CPAC Japan, which has been running for the last four years in Tokyo.
What isn’t mentioned is the central role Aeba plays in a Japanese cult called Happy Science, whose leader believes he is the Messiah and sells “miracle cures” for COVID-19.
“Happy Science is a Japanese cult run by a man who claims to be the incarnation of multiple Gods while pretending to channel the psychic spirits of anyone from Quetzalcoatl to Bashar al-Assad to Natalie Portman,” Sarah Hightower, a researcher and expert on Japanese cults, told VICE News.
While he has been a prominent member of the Happy Science cult from the beginning, Aeba has worked over the past decade on building close ties with prominent U.S. conservative figures and creating Japan’s Happiness Realization Party (HRP), the cult’s political wing that focuses on ultranationalism and increasing Japan’s population by making child-rearing easier for Japanese women.
Happy Science is Japan’s antisocial far-right cult. And Jay Aeva is a believer and former executive of Happy Science.The image shows Jay Aeva, who played a leading role in the cult event in 1992.Jay Aeba does not explain his career in Happy Science and leaves it ambiguous. https://t.co/fsDpGPNOBq pic.twitter.com/v5FsdwQhzS— Algorab archives (@Algorab_MAIKA) February 23, 2021
In the 12 years since it was formed, the HRP has failed to get a single candidate elected to Japan’s parliament. But in recent years, under Aeba’s leadership, the group has gained more political legitimacy back home by aligning itself with right-wing U.S. figures like Steve Bannon and Matt Schlapp.
By giving Aeba a platform, CPAC and the Republican Party is showing once again that it is willing to accept and embrace dangerous fringe movements, like QAnon and the Falun Gong-backed Epoch Times, a pro-Trump newspaper that spread disinformation and has become a firm favorite in MAGA world.
“Look at things like The Family, QAnon or even Epoch Times,” Hightower said. “The GOP are willing to openly and flagrantly cooperate with groups many people would call ‘cults.’”
According to the movement’s own websites, Happy Science is “Japan’s biggest and the most influential religion, and it is rapidly growing on a worldwide scale.” The group claims it has 11 million followers and thousands of missionary outposts around the world, but former members have cast doubt on those figures.
Happy Science was founded in October 1986 by Ryuho Okawa, a former Wall Street trader who claims to be the reincarnated form of Buddha, who himself was the reincarnated form of El Cantare, a god from Venus who created life on earth millions of years ago. Happy Science was officially recognized as a religious group in Japan in 1991, quickly gained a huge following, and made Okawa a very rich man. One estimate from 1991 put the group’s annual revenues at around $45 million.
Okawa claims that he can channel the spirits of famous people — both alive and dead. In 2019, the Happy Science branch in London hosted a séance to hear Margaret Thatcher’s thoughts on Brexit. Okawa has written over 500 books filled with outlandish claims about UFOs, demonic warfare, and most recently, coronavirus and how it originated on another planet.
Just like Scientology in the U.S., a focus on making money was baked into Happy Science from the start. Along with buying books, DVDs, and CDs, followers have to pay to advance within the group.
The group has been selling “miracle cures” for COVID-19 for the past year — which are essentially just blessings — and even when it was forced to shut down its two New York branches during lockdown, Happy Science continued the grift by selling COVID-19 cures remotely.
If you couldn’t afford the “cures’ — which cost up to $400 — the groups also sold COVID-themed DVDs and CDs of Okawa lecturing that the cult claims will boost immunity from the virus.
But money was just part of the plan, and Okawa has always had much larger ambitions to turn his burgeoning religious movement into a political one.
Even before Happy Science branched out into politics, Okawa openly expressed ultranationalistic views, spreading anti-Korean and anti-Chinese rhetoric, and engaging in historical denial of the Imperial Japanese military’s system of colonial sex slavery.
“Okawa’s never been particularly shy about his ambitions or his nationalist beliefs,” Hightower said. ” “He wants to dominate. He wants to be a major player on the world political stage. So it really only makes sense to start making these inroads and back in Japan, Okawa can point to anything HRP does in America as proof of some sort of political legitimacy.”
Aeba, who was a board member of Happy Science until 2015, became central to Okawa’s political ambitions, and it was he who was sent to CPAC in 2011 to forge closer ties with conservative U.S. lawmakers who Okawa wanted to emulate.
“You have many superstars who can attract the audience by their speech,” Aeba told The Atlantic at CPAC in 2012. “We don’t have stars in Japanese politics. When our politicians speak, people feel tired and bored.”
And even though Aeba will be speaking at CPAC this year, the movement’s efforts have mostly failed to have any impact at home.
…
This year, CPAC will be dominated by the presence of Trump, and his quest to maintain control of the Republican Party in the wake of his election loss.
But the GOP is also grappling with its embrace of QAnon and other more extreme ideologies within its ranks. Experts say that by giving Aeba a platform to speak, the Republican Party is signaling just where its loyalties lie.
“CPAC is at the forefront of a reactionary global network — demonstrated once again by Jay Aeba being invited to speak,” Joe Mulhall, a senior researcher with U.K.-based advocacy group Hope Not Hate, told VICE News. “That CPAC continues to associate with Jay Aeba demonstrates clearly what values they are trying to promote, and ally with, around the world.”
2. “Happy Science;” Wikipedia.com.
. . . . At the same time, the organization’s political wing, the Happiness Realization Party, promotes political views that include support for Japanese military expansion, support for the use of nuclear deterrence,[8] and denial of historical events such as the Nanjing Massacre in China and the comfort women issue in South Korea—see the Japanese-language version of the organization’s online news bulletin, The Liberty. . . .
So, Hiroaki “Jay” Aeba is like the test-tube mutation of Sun Myung Moon & Ryōichi Sasakawa’s genetic material spliced together, politically speaking?
@Robert Ward Montenegro–
Yes, indeed, with a bit of Shincheonji thrown in for good measure, along with some Falun Gong for flavor and texture.
Good to know our government promotes and, in some cases, funds things like this, isn’t it?
Best,
Dave Emory
Here’s a story coming out of Hungary that should serve as a reminder that interracial marriage really should be seen as being ‘on the chopping block’ of constitutional rights in the US following the historic Dobbs v Jackson Supreme Court ruling overturning. Recall how Justice Clarence Thomas actively called for a ‘review’ of a number of other constitutional rights in his concurring opinion in that ruling, but he notably left out interracial marriage. As we’ve seen, it was a strange omission for Thomas given that virtually all of the court-won constitutional rights of the 20th adn 21th century are seen as invalid under the judicial philosophies that Thomas and many other conservative legal ‘scholars’ tend to hold. So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that the upcoming Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference to be held in Dallas is going to feature a speaker notorious for their opposition to interracial marriage: Viktor Orban.
Orban wasn’t always notorious for his opposition to interracial marriage. But he is now following a recent speech where he denounced interracial marriage and managed to even squeeze in a few Holocaust jokes. The speech was so awful even by the low standards that people of come to expect from Orban that that one or Orban’s long-time advisors, sociologist Zsuzsa Hegedüs, resigned in disgust, calling the speech “a pure Nazi text worthy of Goebbels,” and the “racist” culmination of an increasingly “illiberal turn.”
Orban responded to the resignation of Hegedüs, who is Jewish, by pointing out that his government “follows a zero-tolerance policy on both antisemitism and racism.” The official response from the Hungarian government over the uproar was that it’s just “the mainstream media elite” that was “hyperventilating about a couple of tough lines about immigration and assimilation.” It’s the kind of trollish response we should have probably expected by now.
Which is why we shouldn’t at all be surprised by the response from CPAC about its decision to invite Orban to speak at the CPAC conference in Dallas next week. As CPAC organizer Matt Schlapp put it, “Let’s listen to the man speak.” It’s just one more milestone indicating where we we are. Which appears to be a Goebbels-adjacent space of endless transnational transgressive gaslighting:
““Let’s listen to the man speak,” conference organizer Matt Schlapp told Bloomberg News, even as criticism of the Hungarian leader mounted.”
“Let’s listen to the man speak.” That was the response from CPAC organizer Matt Schlapp following the international outcry over Orban’s denouncements of interracial marriage and jokes about the Holocaust during a speech that was so incendiary it prompted the resignation of one of Orban’s long-standing advisors. In other words, it was speech that was extreme even for Orban. Just when you think there’s no more mask left to drop, the guy manages to drop the mask even more. Right before CPAC. So when Schlapp implores us to ‘listen to the man speak’, it’s not a mystery about the kind of speech Schlapp is referring to. Schlapp wants us to listen to calls for an end to interracial marriage and holocaust jokes. Anything less would be ‘canceling’, and we can’t have that:
Finally, note the open trolling by Orban himself directed at his Jewish former advisor: Orban actually claimed that his government “follows a zero-tolerance policy on both antisemitism and racism.” It’s ‘owning the libs’ through increasingly aggressive gaslighting:
So are we going to hear more warnings from Orban about the threats to society posed by interracial marriage during his upcoming CPAC speech? Either way, the forum will obviously present an opportunity for attendees to question or challenge Orban on these matters. Are we going to hear anyone at CPAC challenging Orban on this? Anyone at all? We’ll see, but it’s somewhat notable that next week’s CPAC conference isn’t just a joint celebration for the far-right. It’s also going to be an opportunity for the US conservative movement to make clear to the public that it really doesn’t have the rights to interracial marriage in its crosshairs. And also an opportunity to skip that opportunity, which is presumably what’s going to happen.