Cross AUM Shinrikyo with the Unification Church, suggests Focus (11/24), and behold a new mystery called Life Space.
As if life wasn't mysterious enough! Picture a mummy in a hotel room. Flash (11/30) makes it easy with photographs of a blackened hand, foot and torso. "He's not dead, he's being cured," Shukan Asahi (11/26) quotes the mummy's supposed wife and son as protesting when police entered the Narita, Chiba Prefecture, 12th-floor hotel room four months after the family checked in. Throughout their stay the family had strictly guarded their privacy, refusing the services of the cleaning staff. At last the hotel management got suspicious enough to call the police. And suddenly a new cult was in the headlines: Life Space.
Guru to the cult is 61-year-old Koji Takahashi, whose hirsute appearance suggests a grandfatherly Shoko Asahara. Asahara, the light of AUM Shinrikyo, is nearly blind, and Takahashi too has vision trouble: as a teen-ager, reports Focus, his right eye was punctured by an air gun bullet. He graduated from high school in his native Shikoku, Focus continues, and went on to qualify as a tax accountant. Inspired by a "self-enlightenment seminar" he attended in Tokyo, he opened a similar establishment in Osaka in 1983. Sessions featured lectures and meditation. Takahashi was a good speaker and his fees were moderate; he drew crowds.
Accounting knowledge combines dangerously with religious inspiration. Takahashi's religious claims intensified, and his fees rose - to as high as 5 million yen, says Focus, for a five-day seminar. He formed a company, set up a research center, and in 1992 began identifying himself as spiritual heir to the Indian holy man Sathya Sai Baba. He healed the sick, or claimed to, by tapping their palms or heads and thus altering their karma. He could, or so he said, read your DNA, thus identifying the purpose for which you were born in order to steer you onto your true course. He arranged ideal marriages and a 1995 group marriage involving eight couples at Majorca, Spain, that recalls the mass weddings of the Unification Church.
In February 1995, says Focus, a Life Space acolyte died while undergoing religious training in a very hot bath. The family sued, and last July was awarded 28 million yen in damages. Life Space has yet to pay.
The man in the Narita hotel has been identified as Shinichi Kobayashi, 66, of Itami, Hyogo Prefecture. Shukan Asahi says he collapsed at home at the end of June and was rushed to hospital, where he was diagnosed as suffering from a brain hemorrhage. Over doctors' protests his family, Life Space believers, removed him from the hospital after two weeks and undertook to cure him their own way. The investigation continues.