Foot Reading on Trial in Post-Aum Japan

Ho no Hana Sanpogyo's collapse was a landmark of the legal reckoning with new religions that followed the Aum Shinrikyo attack. The group's signature practice, reading a person's destiny from the soles of the feet, funnelled visitors into escalating payments: a diagnosis would find peril in the sole, and training seminars, scroll purchases and donations at fixed prices were prescribed as the remedy, with revenues in the billions of yen. From the mid 1990s bar associations organised victims into coordinated civil litigation, and courts began ordering refunds on the ground that the sales were fraudulent religious solicitation, a doctrine Japanese lawyers had been developing against spiritual sales practices since the 1980s.

In 2000 prosecutors arrested founder Hogen Fukunaga and senior staff; the criminal trials established that the organisation had continued taking money for diagnoses its leadership knew to be baseless, and in 2005 Fukunaga received a twelve year sentence for fraud, among the heaviest ever imposed on a Japanese religious founder. The organisation was driven into bankruptcy by damage awards, though successor groups under new names were reported for years and consumer affairs bodies continued to warn against them. In the scholarship on Japanese religion the case marks the moment when the courts, not doctrine, became the operative test of a movement's legitimacy, and foot reading entered the language as shorthand for monetised revelation.