What do credit cards, microchips, the Illuminati and Space Jesus have in common? Several groups in Japan claim to have the answer.
I’ve mentioned before how we were accosted by many proselytizers while in Japan. At first we accepted their literature for the sake of being polite, but once we realized that all their pitches started the same way it got very old, very fast.
With that being said, here are some of the more amusing pieces that were distributed to us.
Jehovah’s Witnesses
This one was handed to us in Hiroshima at the Peace Park Memorial.
Here we have your standard nuclear family, eyes all glazed over, catatonic child attempting to clutch something that has been taken from her. It’s a creepy photo to begin with, and I was disappointed to find that the contents of the pamphlet failed to answer the fundamental questions asked on the cover.
Space Jesus and the Meteor Shower
I don’t know what group published this tract, but the art is literally out of this world.
Unknown (666)
I believe we were walking around Harajuku when we picked this one up. After spending enough time in Akihabara it become more work to politely decline things than to just take them, and in the end we had no shortage of tissues or flyers for hostess bars.
Something possessed me (pun intended) to look at what I was holding:
Good god what the hell is this all about? I kept reading:
I don’t understand any of it, and they weren’t kind enough to include furigana, but it seems credit cards are the mark of the devil. Given the financial situation of most Americans and how much better off Japan seems to be for staying a cash economy, I’d actually have to agree with the cultists on this one.
The Family International
We were handed this token piece of literature at some point:
The group behind this one goes by the name “The Family International.” Given the name of the group, the free-love insinuation and the illustration, I remembered a 2005 murder-suicide involving a former child victim and his abuser, along with a hunch that proved correct after a quick search– this was the re-branded face of the infamous Children of God cult from the 80s. Apparently they are alive and well in Japan.
