Happy Accidents
The cult whose meeting I went to by accident a few weeks ago, The Happy Science, just started a political party! It’s appropriately named The Happiness Realization Party, going along with the feel-good culty theme, and it was founded by the cult leader’s wife.
Marriage is about Teamwork.
(No libel regarding the character of the leaders in question intended. Ditto implication that the cult founder was made to found the cult/party by his wife and her vaulting ambition, anything like that)
I met a member of the political party, propagandizing on campus, a few days ago. According to his pamphleteering, the party takes a left turn from the vague Buddhist-y end-of-days leanings of the cult, instead focusing on how Japan should amend its constitution to allow for the creation of a standing army, to take the initiative in the coming Pan-East-Asian war.
The argument for this goes: Obama’s more concerned with domestic problems and the Middle East than with East Asian issues and wants to keep things chummy with China. So, Japan has to re-arm to fight against the very real possibility of either North Korea or China invading Japan and enslaving the Japanese people. I’m probably understating the hyperbole of the rhetoric, but given Japan’s history of invading China/Korea and enslaving them, the paranoia might be understandable.
Conscripted Korean laborers towards the end of WWII
Is much international policy dictated by the fear of population-wide enslavement anymore? I think our modern-day empires are savvy enough to go for the hegemony route, at least throw up a puppet dictator and poorly enforced human rights instead of going for out-and-out enslavement. But hey, who knows, maybe depression-era economics’ll pump out some depression-era Asian expansionism, too! Happiness ahoy!
These pictures just came up trawling google images:
Catchphrase 2k9
Giant jellyfish that invaded Japanese/Korean waters in 2005
