Happy Science / Ryuho Okawa

Ryuho Okawa, born Takashi Nakagawa in Tokushima Prefecture, Japan, in 1956, worked at a Tokyo trading house before reporting spiritual revelations from Buddha, Christ and other figures and founding Kofuku-no-Kagaku (Happy Science) in 1986; by the mid-1990s he was teaching that he was himself El Cantare, the supreme being above all the spirits who had earlier "spoken through" him. The movement expanded rapidly through Okawa's mass publishing — he is credited with more than 3,000 books, including purported "spiritual interview" transcripts with living and historical public figures that drew defamation complaints — and built temples, Happy Science University, an in-house studio producing dozens of theatrical anime and live-action films promoting his teachings, and the Happiness Realization Party (2009), which has contested Japanese elections on nationalist platforms without winning a national seat. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Happy Science sold "spiritual vaccines" at prices from roughly US$100 to over US$400 and marketed Okawa lecture recordings and DVDs as immunity boosters, a documented instance of the movement converting a public-health emergency directly into seminar and product revenue.

Okawa's five children were raised inside the movement's leadership structure. His eldest son, Hiroshi (b. 1989), was long positioned as his successor: he worked for Happy Science after university, left for a construction-company job when he felt unequal to the role, and returned in December 2015 and became president of the group's entertainment agency the following month. Hiroshi broke publicly with the movement in October 2018, saying in a later interview that his father had pressured him to marry actress and Happy Science member Fumika Shimizu and turned on him when he refused in November 2017; Happy Science disputes this account, saying Hiroshi himself was the one interested in the marriage. Okawa denounced his son as "demonic" and possessed by devils, the organisation sued him for defamation, and Hiroshi has lost several of the resulting lawsuits even as he has continued publicly describing Happy Science as a "cult" and estimating its true active membership at around 13,000 — far below the movement's own far larger claimed figures. Happy Science subsequently indicated that Hiroshi's younger sister Sayaka, the group's managing director and general manager, would be heir to its leadership instead; two more of Okawa's children hold senior administrative posts, and several of the children's spouses were drawn from within the organisation's own board and staff, an endogamous pattern that keeps control concentrated inside the founding family. The group's tiered donation seminars and book-purchase expectations among devotees are documented in Japanese weekly press and ex-member accounts, as is a 2022 episode in which the publisher Shueisha withdrew chapters of a manga critical of Happy Science and other new religions after pressure from the group. Okawa died in Tokyo on 2 March 2023, days after being hospitalised for a collapse at home, leaving a doctrine built around a now-deceased incarnation of the supreme being and a succession still centred on family control rather than an open leadership contest.