-Caveat Lector-
Tick ... Tick ... Tick ...
If Japan's many doomsayers are right, the world will come to an end within
weeks, maybe days. Do they know something the rest of us don't?
By TIM LARIMER Tokyo
Ah, summer in Japan. folks drenched by the June rains look forward to a
brief respite before the monsoons. In a few days it will be time for the
Tanabata festival, when children tie colorful origami to bamboo branches
and float them down rivers and streams. Later this summer the most popular
sporting event of the year, the national high school baseball tournament,
gets under way with the first crack of the bat.
Or will it? Put those dreamy thoughts on hold. Pack away the bats and
balls. Crumple the origami. This is 1999. Anybody in Japan who hasn't been
sleepwalking for the past five years is well aware that Nostradamus, the
long-dead French astrologer, predicted that the world would end in 1999's
seventh month. Wake up, people, it's Apocalypse Next Week!
Yes, this sounds far-fetched. But a surprising number of Japanese are
taking the warning seriously. Depending on which Nostradamian faction you
believe, in just a matter of days Japan--and, in some scenarios, other
parts of the world--will be bombarded by a giant asteroid, destroyed by
errant nuclear missiles, used as an impact zone for the creaky Russian
space station Mir, blown to bits by crashing satellites armed with nuclear
devices, washed away by the mother of all tsunamis, whipsawed by a
devastating typhoon, submerged by monsoon rains that will make Noah's flood
look like a drizzle, leveled by an earthquake, smothered by lava from a
volcanic eruption at Mount Fuji, invaded by aliens in spaceships,
suffocated by a giant toxic cloud or targeted by North Korean rockets. The
list includes pretty much everything but killer bees and Godzilla.
Akiko Arakawa, for one, is plenty worried. The 41-year-old typist and
Website designer is planning for the worst, packing away a tent, a water
purifier and a survival guide at her hideaway in Hirosaki at the northern
tip of Japan. She is convinced that Nostradamus' 16th century prophecy
means the earth's pole will shift and cause several, simultaneous
cataclysmic events. She warns anyone who will listen to prepare for the
chaos by building boats and buying camping equipment. On one of the many
Nostradamus Websites proliferating in Japan, she wrote that she cannot
imagine how his prophecy could not come true. "That," she opined, "would be
the mystery."
There's never been a better time to worry about the end of world. The
coming conclusion to the millennium is inspiring apocalyptic visions
everywhere. Some concerned Americans, for example, are already hunkering
down in remote sites, stocking up with canned goods and plenty of
ammunition, just in case. Even many solidly rational folks are fearful that
the Y2K computer bug could wreck much of modern civilization. But few
places are as jittery as Japan. Fears about the end of the world aren't
fringe; they're mainstream. And, oddly, they center on the visions of
Nostradamus, who based his cryptic warnings on the Bible. No matter that
Japan, a relatively non-religious nation, doesn't even follow the calendar,
based on Jesus' birth, that informed Nostradamus. In official Japan, this
isn't 1999; it's year 11.
But this is a freaky year, and apparently anything goes. Of Nostradamus'
writings, 16 words in one of the oblique four-line verses he published in
1555 have resonated throughout Japan. "The year 1999, seven months, from
the sky there will come a great king of terror," he wrote. No one really
knows what he meant, which only adds to the intrigue. But for believers,
the reference to the seventh month is disturbingly clear. In other words,
this may be the last magazine you ever read.
First, let's back up a bit. For four centuries, few Japanese were even
aware of Nostradamus. True, his predictions occasionally surfaced in the
West: adherents have credited him with forecasting, albeit indirectly,
everything from the bombing of Hiroshima to the Mount Pinatubo eruption to
the Pentium-chip flaw. But Japan got into the act only in the late 1960s,
when a relatively unknown journalist named Ben Goto took up the cause.
Goto, who covered Japan's royal family, became intrigued with Nostradamus
while studying French. Watching the Apollo moon landing in 1969, he was
struck with an epiphany: Didn't he read that Nostradamus had predicted man
would walk on the moon? Goto decided to do more research into this 16th
century visionary. Four years later, he published the first book about
Nostradamus that anyone in Japan ever paid attention to.
The book was well-timed. Japan was in the throes of an economic downturn,
similar to today's, after a decade of dizzying growth. The global oil
crisis threatened energy supplies in Japan, which relies on petroleum from
the Middle East. The cold war exacerbated a general sense of edginess in
Japan about real-life cataclysmic events like earthquakes and tidal waves.
And the atom bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still fresh in many
citizens' minds. "I wanted to warn people," says Goto, who is now 70. "I
was afraid humans would become extinct because of radiation or a nuclear
winter." His publication of Nostradamus' prophecies struck a nerve. Goto
tapped into Japan's deep insecurity, a sense of vulnerability about living
in a troubled world, dependent on outsiders it doesn't understand. Goto's
book was a best-seller. A phenomenon was born.
At that point Japan's publicity machine, which can churn out fads faster
than Nintendo creates Pokemon characters, shifted into high gear. Almost
immediately a small industry of Goto imitators and Goto detractors sprang
up. Media companies churned out Nostradamus movies, books and comics.
Charlatans adopted his apocalyptic visions in new "religions" aimed at a
population that, since the end of World War II, has been hungry for
spiritual guidance. Goto himself followed up with nine more books; his
works have now sold a combined 5.8 million copies.
The Nostradamus fad might have been just that, a short-lived blip that
would evaporate when the Next Big Thing came along. And it might have been
dismissed as nothing more than a few whackos' nutty obsession with
doomsday. But a lot of un-nutty Japanese take it seriously, and its
influence has persisted for nearly three decades. The most alarming
development occurred when certain cults, including Shoko Asahara's Aum
Shinrikyo, got in the act. Aum, which allegedly masterminded the deadly
sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway four years ago, developed its own
interpretation of the Nostradamus prophecies, which served to attract
followers already bitten by the Nostradamus bug. Other groups did likewise,
while also providing avenues for surviving doomsday. "Writers like Goto
fanned a sense of fear," says Yoshihiko Otsuki, a Waseda University physics
professor. "The books sell, but the writers don't have any solutions. So
the cults step in with the 'answers' and attract followers."
These days, Nostradamus has become such an ingrained part of Japanese pop
culture that most people are well-versed in his doomsday scenario. Even
many skeptics pause to consider his predictions when confronted with
real-world dangers. Ever since Pyongyang sent a missile flying over Japan
last August, North Korea has been viewed as the most plausible source of
apocalyptic terror. The naval battle between the two Koreas in the Yellow
Sea in mid-June only agitated the nervous Nostradamians. "My mother thinks
it's all a joke," says Yuka Inoue, a college freshman in Tokyo. "But when
she hears about North Korea, even she gets nervous about July." And if it
weren't Korea, something else--Kosovo, dioxin in European chickens, the
weakness of the yen, Martina Hingis' loss at Wimbledon--would suffice among
the faithful as evidence that Nostradamus was onto something.
Nostradamus Fever in Japan tends to skew toward young people, like
18-year-old Inoue. A 1998 survey of 5,000 college students found that
nearly all had heard of Nostradamus and his prophecy and that more than 20%
thought an end-of-the-world scenario was possible. Many still do. Inoue and
some friends even organized a farewell party of sorts in Tokyo's trendy
Shibuya ward in May. "We wanted to feel as if we had accomplished something
before the world ends," she says. The goal, says Inoue, was to create
fashions "that we want to be trendy." (Even for Japan, these would be some
of the shortest-lived fads on record.) She promoted beach clothes,
cosmetics and a drug that promises to enlarge a woman's bust. Here it's
hard to tell whether Inoue is really a believer or just using Nostradamus
to boost a career in marketing. And her explanation suggests how fact and
fantasy can coexist in today's Japan. "My friends and I create an
atmosphere where you can't say it's ridiculous," she says. "We tell people
about the missiles from North Korea and people have to believe us. By
convincing other people, we convince ourselves that it's true." Got that?
Seiichiro Nishimoto doesn't need convincing. He has outfitted his home in
Habikino, a suburb of Osaka, with a personal bomb shelter. It has
30-cm-thick concrete walls, reinforced steel escape hatches, a hand-cranked
battery-operated generator and a ventilation system that pumps in air while
filtering out radioactive elements and biological and chemical
contaminants. He is selling the shelters, fully installed, at $82,000 a pop
to those who share his apocalyptic fears. "I believe there will be wars,
earthquakes and floods," says Nishimoto, who converted to Christianity more
than 40 years ago and takes his cue from the New Testament's book of
Revelation. "The destruction of the environment, the ozone hole,
dioxin--these are signs the earth cannot go on like this forever." He
denies that he is trying to profit from Armageddon. As he puts it: What
good would all that yen do him anyway? "I'm trying to educate," he says.
"The Japanese people have become numb living in postwar peace. No one is
ready! They have no idea about crisis management."
Not far away, at the base of a mountain in Ikeda, near Nagoya, Yoshimoto
Tanahashi's Order of Peace is trying to pray away the threats. Every day,
at least 50 pilgrims meet to chant and sway their bodies to help protect
Japan from what Tanahashi believes is the most likely doomsday scenario: a
massive flood that will leave two-thirds of the archipelago nation under
water. He claims he has a map showing which land masses will be saved, but
he isn't sharing the information. (His religious compound, by the way, sits
on high ground.) The prediction allows for several possibilities: a
tsunami, melting polar ice caps caused by global warming, or even 40 days
and 40 nights of old-fashioned biblical downpour.
Tanahashi's Order of Peace takes its doctrine from an obscure American
named Edgar Cayce, who, before he died in 1945, claimed to have
communicated with Nostradamus while under hypnosis. Of course, if the
calamity doesn't occur, Tanahashi can claim credit. But he says he is
uneasy. He thinks he has enough supporters to save Japan, but not the whole
world. "One person with the correct spiritual powers can stop rain, wind
and fire," Tanahashi says. "To save Japan from total destruction, we must
have 50 people every day. If we could get 1,000, we could pray for the
whole world." How did he arrive at the 50:1 formula? "The gods revealed it
to me," he reports.
If the doomsday predictions seem familiar, it's no surprise. Besides the
Aum Shinrikyo group, cults elsewhere have predicted, incorrectly (so far),
the world's end. In Texas, the Branch Davidians' forecast of a fiery
apocalypse came tragically true, at least for them, in 1993 when their
compound erupted under fire from U.S. marshals. Two years ago, members of
the Heaven's Gate cult anticipating the arrival of UFOs committed mass
suicide in California. Members of the Order of the Solar Temple, another
doomsday cult, died in an apparent series of murders and suicides beginning
in 1994 in Canada and Western Europe.
In France, Paco Rabanne's book on native son Nostradamus has topped the
bestseller lists, and the fashion designer has announced that he plans to
move forward his haute couture collection because he believes the Mir space
station will destroy Paris on Aug. 11. (Leave it to the French to be late.)
Others are sounding the alarm, too. An Indian magazine predicted in April
that the world would end in May, coinciding with meteorological warnings of
a cyclone. That was enough to send 35,000 migrant workers at a
ship-breaking yard in Alang, Gujarat fleeing home to their villages. In New
Delhi, prominent astrologer Lachhman Das Madan says the world will
experience all sorts of disasters during the rest of this year, although it
won't actually end. But he foresees a major catastrophe for Japan in 2000.
A "bad phase," he predicts, could lead to a big fire or earthquake early
next year. "They're in trouble in Japan."
The Japanese certainly know that. In the past two decades Nostradamus Fever
has spawned countless cults, the latest manifestation of Japan's often
frantic search for spirituality in the modern world. In the immediate
postwar era, many eccentric faiths took hold, including the "electricity
religion" whose god was Thomas Edison. Faith is a particularly complex
question in Japan. Many people are leery of religion, in part because, in
the years before World War II, militaristic nationalists manipulated Shinto
beliefs by deifying the emperor as a way to generate support for the war
machine. Today, although people routinely visit shrines or temples on
holidays, they do so mostly for recreation or good luck. Only about 20% of
Japanese say they actually practice a faith, according to Nobutaka Inoue, a
professor of sociology at Tokyo's Kokugakuin University. When asked in a
1998 survey to rank their trust in 17 institutions--including the military,
police, education, the United Nations--organized religion came in dead
last. (Even the much-maligned media scored higher.) As traditional religion
fails, New Age sects are stepping in. "Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines
do not function as places for counseling," says Inoue. "People with
problems end up at a new religion group where the teacher or guru has all
the answers."
Japan is witnessing a proliferation of odd groups: communes, UFO religions,
global peace movements. One pacifist organization is plastering Japanese
cities with signs that read, in English and Japanese, may peace prevail on
earth. There is even an evangelical Christian outfit led by a converted
yakuza gang member. "Groups predicting great crises keep appearing,"
observes Inoue. "When the time for the crisis passes, the members drop out,
but there are always new groups to join." And many, including Aum, focus on
the infamous 16th century French astrologer. "New religions in Japan pick
up on Nostradamus because it is already established as popular," says
Robert Kisala, an American professor of religious studies at Nagoya's
Nanzan University. "Popularity feeds off itself."
Another reason Japan has been receptive to Nostradamus' visions is the
country's fascination with the paranormal: ESP, UFOs, ghosts, fortune
tellers. Arakawa, the doomsday survivalist, claims she gleaned insight from
space aliens that she has met. There are many Japanese who make similar
claims: about one-fourth of the world's alleged UFO sightings have occurred
in this industrialized nation.
Nostradamus himself juggled science and the occult. A well-educated
physician, he first gained fame in France for treating victims of the
plague. But it was his reputation as a soothsayer that won him an
appointment to the court of King Charles IX and that, centuries later, made
him an international icon. He died in 1566--in July, apparently a bad month
all around--just as he predicted he would. He kept his prophecies
intentionally vague so as not to incur the wrath of the Church during the
Inquisition, and that has left them open to a wide range of
interpretations. That obliqueness has also helped interpreters like Ben
Goto make the French astrologer appear to be speaking directly to people in
distant times and distant lands like Japan.
In predicting doom, Nostradamus offers a sense of inevitability that
somehow appeals to Japanese sensibilities. "Interest in Nostradamus is a
reflection of ambiguous feelings about Japan's future," says Inoue, the
sociology professor. "Japanese fear that global actions could affect and
damage them in a very serious way." Moreover, the very idea of an
apocalyptic event is credible in Japan because, well, bad things do happen.
Endless natural disasters loom just offshore or underground: earthquakes,
tsunamis, floods, typhoons. TV network NHK added to the jitters earlier
this year when it aired a documentary about the potential for an eruption
of Mount Fuji. And of course there are the memories of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. The idea that a society could be wiped out in the blink of an eye
seems intimately plausible. People are reminded constantly that disaster is
imminent: through signs instructing them where to go in the event of an
emergency or reminders on vending machines about what to do when an
earthquake strikes.
Ben Goto's interpretation of Nostradamus has been gnawing away at Japan's
psyche for years. Asked about Nostradamus, many Japanese will say they are
at once frightened and excited by the prospect of imminent doom. This is
especially true of young people, who grew up during a period of affluence
but now approach adulthood in an apparently rudderless nation that seems
adrift. "Since there's nothing better to expect in the future, they want to
demolish everything and start from ground zero," says Hiroshi Yamamoto, a
science fiction writer who is a harsh critic of Goto. "They think it's the
only way to find a meaningful existence."
Nostradamus Fever could be dissected and deconstructed until, well, the end
of time. But he remains the biggest celebrity these days in a country that
venerates the famous. Besides the books and film adaptations, the obsession
with Nostradamus' writings has fueled countless debates on countless TV
shows featuring countless "experts" (including one who claims to speak the
"Venusian" language and is preparing for an invasion of earth's planetary
neighbors). One of the most popular Nostradamus experts is Waseda professor
Otsuki, who has carved out a secondary, more lucrative career as Japan's
leading Nostradamus naysayer. "Like any other July in Japan, there will be
heavy rains, typhoons, maybe an earthquake or two," Otsuki says. But after
July, he predicts, there will be an August. Then a September. And an
October. The professor, who is represented by a talent agent and who
recently began endorsing a brand of sensible shoes, regularly chastises his
fellow Japanese for falling for what he considers nothing more than mumbo
jumbo. As Otsuki puts it: "Japanese don't think about these things very
rationally."
Japan's most popular TV variety show, Denpa Shonen, which features regular
folks making fools of themselves coping with absurd physical and mental
challenges, has jumped on the Nostradamus bandwagon. The program is
currently following two strangers thrown together to dig themselves a bomb
shelter as July approaches. Will they make it? Will they fall in love while
trying to save their skins? Stay tuned to see if they can snatch survival
from the jaws of Armageddon, which by the way, just happens to be the title
of the No. 1 film at the Japanese box office this year.
If only life were a cartoon. Japan's favorite children's animated
character, the blue, earless robotic cat Doraemon, gets in on the act in
his most recent movie. When two little boys become lost in space, Doraemon
and friends zip off to the rescue. During the action, the little cat
squares off against the evil space captain Angolmois, who plans to destroy
the earth. Angolmois is the name that Nostradamus gave to the antecedent of
the great king (or missile, or satellite, or asteroid, or spaceship) that
is supposed to descend upon the earth this July. For the kids, at least,
there's a happy ending: the world is saved. Perhaps Doraemon is on to
something. Maybe it's safe to prepare the origami for the Tanabata festival
and dust off those baseball mitts after all.
With reporting by Sachiko Sakamaki/Tokyo, Maseeh Rahman/New Delhi and
Patricia Strathern/Paris
Predictions They Wished They Had Never Made
William Miller
U.S. evangelist told 50,000 followers that Christ would return in 1843.
When that didn't happen, he blamed faulty math and pinpointed Oct. 22,
1844, persuading adherents to unload all property and possessions
Sun Myung Moon
Korean Unification Church leader prophesied that a fuzzy, feel-good Kingdom
of Heaven would materialize in 1967
Jim Jones
After relocating his flock to Jonestown, Guyana, the doomsday reverend
persuaded 900-plus followers to down poisoned Kool-Aid in 1978
Moses David
The Children of God evangelist predicted that the Battle of Armageddon
would take place in 1986, with Russia defeating the United States and
setting up a global communist dictatorship
David Koresh
Gun-toting ex-rock singer forecast that the Battle of Armageddon would
begin at his self-styled Ranch Apocalypse in Waco, Texas. It did, in a
blaze of gunfire in 1993 between his Branch Davidians and government agents
Marshall Herff Applewhite
Heaven's Gate leader told his techno-religious cult in March 1997 that the
end was near and the only way they could survive was by committing suicide
and hitching a ride on an alien spaceship
Chen Heng-ming
Stetson-wearing pastor from Taiwan predicted God would make a cameo
appearance on TV channel 18 in March 1998, shortly before the end of the
world
http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/asia/magazine/1999/990705/cover1.html
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