Ho No Hana Sanpogyo (foot-reading cult)

Hōgen Fukunaga, a failed businessman, announced a divine revelation in 1980 and incorporated Ho No Hana Sanpogyo in 1987, at the crest of Japan's new-religions boom. The organisation's signature practice was sokushin — foot reading. Clients, recruited through introductions, flyers, and its magazine, received an examination of their soles from which Fukunaga or trained staff read illness, ancestral karma, and impending misfortune.

Litigation discovery and journalist investigations later showed the operation ran on scripts: staff were coached to steer readings toward cancer fears for older clients and family or fertility fears for younger ones, then to present the remedy — multi-day training seminars costing millions of yen, calligraphy scrolls, and donations scaled to the client's disclosed assets. Former members described seminar environments of sleep restriction, repetitive confession, and pressure to recruit relatives. At its peak the organisation claimed tens of thousands of members and Fukunaga cultivated an international-statesman image, photographed with foreign dignitaries.

The collapse came through the courts. From 1996 onward, lawyers organised hundreds of former members into coordinated civil suits alleging systematic fraud; judgments and settlements mounted, and in May 2000 police raided the headquarters. Fukunaga and senior staff were arrested; prosecutors charged that the organisation had defrauded clients — many elderly, several terminally ill people among them — through fabricated diagnoses. Fukunaga was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to 12 years, a sentence upheld on appeal. Japanese consumer-law practice now cites Ho No Hana alongside other 'spiritual sales' operations as the template case of monetised supernatural threat.

On the CLCI's axes the group is distinctive: behavioural and informational control over ordinary members was moderate — most clients lived independently — but the emotional axis scores very high, because the entire commercial engine was the deliberate manufacture of terror (of cancer, of a child's death, of ancestral curses) with the organisation as sole reseller of relief. The case demonstrates that a group need not control housing or careers to cause severe documented harm; it need only control the fear.