A Japanese Group and a Landmark Fraud Prosecution

Ho No Hana Sanpogyo was a Japanese group founded by Hogen Fukunaga, who claimed a special ability to diagnose a person's spiritual and physical condition, and to foretell illness such as cancer, by examining the soles of their feet, a practice that gave the group its popular nickname as the "foot-reading" religion.

The group charged substantial fees for these diagnoses and for the trainings and materials it said were necessary to avert the misfortunes it forecast. Its significance in the record is chiefly legal and consumer-protective rather than doctrinal: numerous former members brought claims that they had been defrauded, pressured into large payments through fear induced by false diagnoses. These claims were tested and upheld in the Japanese civil and criminal courts, and in 2008 Fukunaga was convicted of fraud and sentenced to imprisonment, with the organization ordered to pay damages. The case is cited in Japan and in the wider study of new religious movements as an example of the "spiritual sales" (reikan shoho) problem, the use of claimed supernatural insight to extract money, and of the use of ordinary consumer-fraud law, rather than any special measure against religion, to address it.