ura hello work 7: cult member!
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7 – RELIGIOUS CULT MEMBER (新興宗教団体信者 SHINKOU SHUUKYOU DANTAI SHINSHA)
RISK: ***
SALARY:*
HARD LABOR:*****
ILLEGALITY:***
I DID PALM-READING
The first thing Mr. Miyazaki (32, not his real name) said to me in our interview was, “I can’t tell you too much about my cult work, I’ll get in trouble if I even say one word too many.” Until four years ago, he had been a follower of a shinkou shuukyou dantai (literally, ‘new religious group’, but let’s just say ‘cult!’ Better yet, let’s say kyoudan (教団), which is a more manageable contraction!!). The founder of the kyoudan lives a very lavish lifestyle, but how about the disciples?
“Basically, we get food and shelter. But that’s about all we are guaranteed. The cult doesn’t charge us rent, or charge us for food either. But all you have wear are the clothes that you had on your back when you joined, that’s all. No matter how old those clothes are.”
The cult members don’t stay in one house for very long – every one-to-six months the cult moves them. If they’re living in a single house, the men will stay on the first floor the women on the second. However, it’s also common for them to stay in apartments. Either way, entry-level members won’t get their own private room of course. Communal living is central to the cult’s beliefs.
The shinsha ( 信者:cult members) get breakfast and dinner at their quarters. But for lunch, they get around 5 dollars a day. They buy some food and eat it while they work, so as not to interrupt their labor. I asked him what kind of street-work the kyoudan does, and he told me:
“Basically, we do what is called ‘inspired selling’ or ‘inspirational commerce.’ Here’s what that means: We’ll work in front of a big, busy train station. We’ll approach people and tell them that we’re studying palmistry. If the sucker lets us read his palm, the next step is to tell him his fortune is INCREDIBLY BAD. We trap them with worry and fear! If they want to fix their bad fortune, and rescue their fate, they have to buy a really expensive inkan (seal) or prayer beads from us, or agree to come to one of our seminars.”
There are people who will actually pay several thousand dollars for this ancient scam, so you can’t really say it’s pathetic! I asked Mr. Miyazaki what kind of commission he gets from a thousand-dollar sale:
“Commission? No way! From the moment we head out the door to the moment we come back, all the money we make goes to the kyoudan What we get is status – the honor of selling more than another shinsha. That’s how a new recruit advances in the ranks. Plus they give you little things, too.”
I asked about the ‘little things’ and it turns out they really are little! Until the member joins the management class, they live in the same type of house and eat the same food. I asked him what a big seller DOES get, and he made a rueful face:
“They give you dessert. Or they let you watch TV an extra hour, when everyone else has to go to bed. Plus you get free coffee.”
In the street-work, they have a catchphrase: APAKINJO WO NERAE! (‘Hunt for the APAKINJO!’) Apakinjo is a contraction of APATTO (living in apartments) KIN (working),and JO (woman). This is because a woman who works for a corporation lives in her own apartment, apart from her family, so the family won’t cause trouble for the kyoudan if such a woman joins. I asked Mr. Miyazaki what the cult does besides street-work:
“Well, we also do door-to-door sales. For this scam we call ourselves the “Handicapped Person’s Shelter Foundation Volunteer Team.” We sell handkerchiefs and mops for around 30 dollars – the high price is because the money goes to the handicapped shelter. Since the wholesale price of these items is around 1 dollar, we can get a lot of money that way! Incidentally, some of the money actually DOES go to the Handicapped Shelter, but it’s a pitifully small amount. Also, we sell coffee beans. But for that scam, for some reason we call ourselves “The Refugee Aid Collection Fund” instead of Handicapped Shelter Volunteers!”
One cult member can usually sell around $100 of coffee beans per day. If that sounds like a lot, imagine 50 members selling! That’s $5,000 for the kyoudan per day. And it’s all profit for them, since they don’t pay members a penny.
“Let’s see what else . . . sometimes we call ourselves the Health Squad. We advertise our Free Health Clinics through the internet and by passing out flyers. The people that come to the Free Clinics . . . are they just passionate about healthy living? Or are they generally pretty worried about their own illnesses? You be the judge. We’ll listen to their complaints: If someone has stiff shoulders, oh, that’s cancer. If they have an upset tummy, that’s stomach cancer. If their vision is getting blurry? Eye cancer. Whatever it is, it must be cancer, and you’re going to die, die, die. If we make them afraid enough, they’ll buy our “Carrot Tea” – for 800 dollars a bottle! It’s a one-month supply, though. So if you want to live another year, you should buy a year’s supply. But there’s all sorts of laws nowadays about selling stuff – we can’t actually say it cures cancer. We just tell them, ‘If you drink this, you don’t have to worry anymore.’ That’s how we get around the law.”
TEACHING THE DOCTRINE AT THE SEMINARS
Mr. Miyazaki worked hard at street-sales for three years, and his efforts were rewarded with a chance to teach a seminar. People get approached on the street, then they go to the seminar, then they get indoctrinated and become members, and finally they themselves go out and recruit others.
“We have to get them to come to the seminar without telling them the name of our kyoudan! We just say it’s a ‘self-enlightenment study group.’ They study on their own for about a month’s time. Then I come in and for two weeks, I teach a seminar of the kyoudan’s beliefs, all without mentioning the name! After immersing them in our teachings, only then do I say the name. Their eyes go round. Their jaws drop. But by this time they have already spent a month studying it, and I’ve been pounding them with lectures for 2 more weeks, so usually they don’t quit. I won’t say it’s impossible for them to quit, but 99% of them stay.”
That’s how the cult accrues new members, and they really put their heart into their work. They only get to sleep around 4 hours a night. Let’s follow a typical new recruit through the course of a day: He gets up at 6, washes his face, eats, cleans the communal house. At 9, he goes in the street to hustle, and does that until 9 or 10 at night, with $5 allowance for food. Each group has a kind of leader – they have to call the leader every other hour for instructions. If they haven’t earned enough money, the leader tells them to stay late, like until the last train (12:30 or so). Sometimes, they’ll have to work until the next morning, if they are not earning enough. This life-style takes its toll on the physical and mental health of cult members.
“This one guy (a cult member) called out to a lady walking by. He tried passionately to explain about our beliefs, but he hadn’t slept in several days, and his speech was slurred. No matter how hard he tried, she couldn’t understand what he was talking about. He got so frustrated he started slamming his head into a wall. He was just trying to wake himself up. She tried to pull him back, but stopped when she saw his forehead all bloody. He continued to hit his head. You’d think she would run away after that, but she stayed. In the course of time, she joined our kyoudan! I don’t know if she was moved by his single-minded devotion to our god , or just felt sorry for him. Who knows why anyone joins a kyoudan.”
QUITTING THE CULT
“I was a shinsha for five years, but in the end I resolved to leave. The shinsha are really spin-controlled. Information coming from outside is either censored, or if we DO hear something, the leaders will call a meeting and ‘interpret’ it for us. For instance, if there’s a negative media report, they’ll tell us, “Jesus and Buddha were both hated and persecuted during their lifetimes, but as history goes on, they were both proved to be right. We are in the persecution phase of our religion.” That is how they make the members feel like we are in the right, and everyone else is wrong. That’s how they keep us mind-controlled and obedient.
When a shinsha is interviewed on television or in the media, his answers seem crazy to the average person. (even though to another shinsha the answers seem very nice)
“But,” says Mr. Miyazaki, “To a smart shinsha , over time, he might begin to realize how crazy it all sounds. Plus, if his family won’t agree with his cult lifestyle, there’s no way for him to keep doing it forever. Of course my parents were against it! But I was a true believer, so I didn’t listen to them. I thought everything I was doing was righteous. I joined the kyoudan right out of university, so I have no experience with the real world, you could say. And I never had a chance to really carefully talk about it with my parents. Today, I feel great sorrow over what I put my folks through – they didn’t cut me off, cast me out: they kept trying to gently persuade me, and they never gave up. It was their earnest, patient attitude that at last made me think maybe I was wrong about things. If I think about it now, my whole attitude was hypocritical.”
So that is why he quit. But, even after that, he’d have terrible flashbacks.
“I can laugh about it now, but immidiately after I left, I had terrible anxiety. It wasn’t hard to walk out of the cult, but it was hard as hell to STAY out: They teach you that the kyoudan is your only path to salvation, the only way to escape damnation. I felt like, no matter how hard kyoudan life was, how ridiculous it was, . . how could I so casually throw away my eternal soul? That’s how they trap you. Some people find this anxiety unendurable, and they return to the kyoudan. Fortunately, I had my family to help me. I’m grateful they did not cast me out!”
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Great translation again! I look forward to these every week.
This seems to be a big problem over there.
A few years ago Haruki Murakami wrote a book about the fallout and the victims of the Aum Shinrikyo Saron Subway gas attacks called Underground. It’s really a heartbreaking read but I think it’s worth checking out since this is the stuff of ruined lives.
Anyone interested in how someone can get into the frame of mind to get exploited by a cult should also check out the show “Welcome to the NHK”.
so, its like a cross between a pyramid scheme and a monastery? dude if my mom lived in japan she would totally have fallen for this. she went through so many different schemes and religions, but separately. if they had been presented as a contiguous whole, i bet she would have jumped right in!
madness!
@szaszha: There were many schemes like this in China (before the government decided that they were to be the only scheme in town), and my friend’s mom got sucked into it, mostly out of boredom. She didn’t go off to live in a commune, but bought all sorts of expensive knick-knacks to stay in the game.
The “URA HELLO WORK?” link is broken!