Word: sects
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...Japanese government did not immediately name a perpetrator. But within days, under another pretext, it responded with its morning raid on 25 branches of a heretofore obscure sect called Aum Shinrikyo, which translates as Aum Supreme Truth. The sect, which started as a yoga school, focuses on the apocalypse to come-perhaps as soon as 1997. Its members insist it merely practices a form of Buddhism; but in reality it is a cult revolving around a long-haired, charismatic mystic, Shoko Asahara, a magnetic misfit who preaches that government efforts to obliterate his movement will coincide with the beginning...
...members' financial assets. One 35-year-old who has since left the group says that when he became a devout follower, he was required to surrender his passport to the group and donate all his cash and belongings. He also recounts working under near slave-labor conditions at a sect project on the southern island of Kyushu. "Their strategy is to wear you down and take control of your mind," he says. "They promise you heaven, but they make you live in hell...
...shortly afterward an Aum member questioned Kariya on her whereabouts. On Feb. 28, four young men jumped out of a Mitsubishi van and grabbed him. He has not been seen since. When police found a similar van with traces of Kariya's blood in it and the fingerprints of sect members, they issued a warrant for the arrest of a high-ranking cultist...
...being held there against his will. The raid had been a long time in the planning, both in order to assemble evidence and because the Japanese authorities are particularly sensitive to charges that they are persecuting religious groups. Nonetheless, concerns about Aum's possible connection with sarin and other sect-related tensions prompted them to act. In response, the cult's leaders had its lawyers file suit. And the next day, Japan is whispering, it did more...
...most famous new religion is the Soka Gakkai, a sect based on Buddhism. Its leader is a man named Daisaku Ikeda, who is treated by his followers more like a monarch than a priest. Then there are more obscure figures who claim to have found the secret of universal happiness and peace for all time. Though these leaders may collect a great deal of money from their followers--and though the involvement of the Soka Gakkai in national politics through its own political party, the Komeito, is widely criticized--most of these religions are relatively harmless...