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Lese Majeste. Roughly 1,000,000 members of Japan's queer Omotokyo cult were driven from their 1,200 temples throughout Japan last week by order of new Home Minister Keinosuke Ushio, a nonparty civil servant of the most uncompromising stamp. Having thus offended at one swoop considerably more than 1% of the population of the Empire, Mr. Ushio had jailed seven Omotokyo leaders and their chief, Wanisaburo Deguchi. They were charged with using the Son of Heaven's crest on their stationery and "traitorously and blasphemously" inculcating belief that Mr. Deguchi is a reincarnation of Japanese deities of such antiquity that they were holding sway before the Sun Goddess begat Japan's still-ruling line of Emperors.
After a thorough study of Omotokyo, a foreign authority on Japanese religious cults described it recently as "a combination of Shintoism, chauvinism, megalomania and mesmerism founded by the half-crazy and illiterate widow of a drunken carpenter and propagated by a shrewd man of the world" — Mr. Deguchi. Upon her death, the drunken carpenter's not quite illiterate widow was found to have left a mass of illegible scrawls on scraps of paper. These have been piously collated and expanded with copious notes and much Japanese erudition into 30 large volumes of revered Sacred Teachings.