Recent events in Tokyo have only heightened my confusion about the new religious cults of Japan

Recent events in Tokyo have only heightened my confusion about the new religious cults of Japan. On the other hand, the harmoniousness of Yamagichism, its tranquillity and the absence of an obvious heirarchy, made a great impression on me. The next day I left, on good terms, for Tokyo.Since then I have had mixed feelings about the experience. My suspicion of anything remotely like brainwashing – even an inculcation as gentle as Yamagichism’s – was enough to make me refuse. Vanity simply does not exist.After two surreal but invigorating weeks, I was politely asked by Udo and his friends whether I would like to undergo tokko I declined. One thing I noticed about Toyosato was the complete absence of mirrors.

Only then are you ready to give up the pride and acquisitiveness of normal life. As I walked the beanfields and computer rooms of Toyosato, I began to grasp the significance of tokko. It’s a kind of week-long group therapy session, chaired by more experienced group members, during which you immerse yourself in self-analysis or kansen; through kansen, built-up anger, or okoru, is relinquished. Their parents would have joined by undergoing an induction known as tokko.

These happy children had probably been born into the movement. I watched Yamagichi children climb off a school bus after they had spent eight hours in the Yamagichi classroom, and gleefully run towards the fields where they were scheduled to spend two hours picking turnips. All of them were friendly, keen and enthusiastic and ever so slightly opaque.Their enthusiasm for agricultural labour was astonishing. While I was in Toyosato, I saw people singing as they cleaned cowsheds at six in the morning, and whistling as they shovelled pigshit in a freezing monsoon. I met ex-office workers and ex- airforce pilots, former industrialists and reformed heroin addicts; a few Europeans and Asians, but mainly Japanese.

The Yamagichi have been remarkably successful; there are now Yamagichi settlements in Taiwan, Germany, America, Switzerland, Australia and Korea, aside from the dozens in Japan itself In Toyosato there was an extraordinary social mix. It was here that one startling fact about Yamagichism sank in No one owns anything No one has any personal possessions. From clothes to cars, books to bath towels, everything is held in common.If such communality smacks of monasticism or kibbutzism, so it should. Yamagichism is a proselytising agrarian movement that uses the free market to sell its products, making enough money to fund new communes round the globe. Blearily I obeyed: climbing out of bed, I let myself be led to a large communal wardrobe, where I was to choose some clothes for the day.