Transformation des Précurseurs en association religieuse

The transformation of the Predecessors into a registered religious association was both a legal turning point and a change in the community’s character. In 1979, official recognition gave it protections that made police scrutiny more difficult; by then, correspondence with its former openness had faltered, outsiders were barred from its enclosed grounds, and the group had become, in the Master’s judgment, a secluded religious sect rather than a peaceful farming community.

From Open Community to Enclosure

The Master traced the change through ordinary channels of contact that gradually ceased to work. Fukada, once a regular and expansive correspondent, stopped sending letters about community affairs and his own feelings. The Master’s letters went unanswered. Telephone calls brought little more than a brief exchange, and Fukada spoke abruptly, as if aware that someone else was listening. The altered correspondence was the first sign that the community was closing itself off.

When writing and calling failed, the Master travelled to the Predecessors’ grounds to speak with Fukada about Éri. He was turned away despite repeated attempts to negotiate. A high palisade had been built around the property, and outsiders were prohibited from entering. The barrier made the community’s change visible: a group once friendly toward its neighbors and known for organic agriculture now presented itself as a fortress. Local residents, like the Master, were bewildered by the shift in its members’ conduct and even their appearance. The Master could do little beyond caring for Éri, and the situation remained unresolved for seven years.

That closure seemed all the more difficult to explain because the Predecessors had previously appeared unlike an armed underground faction. The Master understood why the Dawn, with its revolutionary aims, might need secrecy; the Predecessors, by contrast, had farmed peacefully and maintained good relations with people nearby. Their sudden withdrawal therefore raised a question that the Master could not answer from outside: what had happened within the community, and what had become of Fukada and his wife?

Legal Recognition in 1979

In 1979, the Predecessors received official approval to form a religious association. The change astonished the Master, who learned of it from the police and struggled to believe it even after inspecting the relevant documents. He knew Fukada as a political, rational person with an almost physical aversion to religious systems, making the decision seem especially improbable to him.

Registration altered the community’s position in relation to the authorities. Once it could claim the legal status of a religious association, police investigation inside its grounds became difficult: an intrusion could be challenged as an infringement of constitutionally protected freedom of religion. The Master explained that the process involved administrative checks, but that political maneuvering or special favors could help an organization through them. Official status also brought favorable tax treatment and substantial legal protection. In his account, the new designation was not merely a description of belief; it materially strengthened the group’s insulation from scrutiny.

The Master consequently described the change as more than a shift in name. The Predecessors had ceased to be simply an agricultural community and had become an exceptionally closed religious organization—what he bluntly called a sect. Its legal recognition and its physical exclusion of outsiders worked in tandem: one established a protected public identity, while the other limited what could be known about the group from beyond its walls.

Public Doctrine and Hidden Organization

The group’s public explanation of its religion presented it as a community of practice rather than fixed doctrine. During a visit by journalists, its members described studying early Buddhist principles and undertaking exercises intended to produce individual awakening. In their account, spiritual insight came first; doctrine and rules emerged afterward from the combined, spontaneous awakenings of individuals. They rejected the need for a codified manual and distinguished their approach from established religions.

The same presentation emphasized self-sufficiency and discipline. Members described voluntary contributions as only one source of funds and held up a simple life based chiefly on agriculture as their goal. Physical purification and spiritual exercises, they said, would foster serenity and contentment. They portrayed the association as a place for educated, socially established people seeking a demanding spiritual practice, not as a convenient source of comfort or assistance. Its polished, courteous representatives offered the press a careful account of an organization that claimed to be open to inspection and distinct from an ordinary “new religion.”

Other accounts left the internal structure much less clear. The Master said the group had no well-defined sacred texts and combined esoteric elements with work and severe exercises. Young people came from across the country, drawn by the reputation of its rigorous spiritual life, while members presented a united front to the outside. Although personal worship was officially prohibited and administration was said to be collective, the Master could not tell how authority actually operated. Information escaping the walls was scant; he could observe only that the organization was expanding, had ample funds, had bought more land, and was acquiring improved facilities and more imposing walls.

The Leader and the Costs of Secrecy

Reports from outside the community suggested a more personal center of authority than its formal language acknowledged. The group’s founder was said to call himself the Leader and to possess extraordinary powers, supposedly healing serious illness, predicting the future, or producing supernatural phenomena. The Dowager dismissed these claims as clever illusions, but noted that they attracted followers. Ayumi likewise described the Leader as charismatic and deeply influential, perhaps functioning as the core of the group’s doctrine despite the official prohibition on personal worship.

The Leader remained hidden from public view. Ayumi said his name, age, and face were unknown; a different person held the formal position of president and appeared at public events, while the organization described itself as collectively administered. The anonymity could conceal a past, she suggested, or be cultivated deliberately to make outsiders wonder whether the Leader existed at all. The discrepancy between a public structure without personal rule and reports of an unseen figure at the system’s center sharpened the mystery surrounding the transformation.

The organization’s apparent egalitarianism also contrasted with accounts of a sharply ranked membership. According to Ayumi’s limited inquiries, dissatisfied members who left were generally low-ranking followers. Education and specialist credentials helped determine access to leadership: only the elite were connected to the system’s center, could meet the Leader, or receive his directions. The majority contributed money, worked on the farms, trained, and meditated, while knowing little about what happened above them. Their daily routine and hope of eventually meeting the Leader did not grant them meaningful knowledge to take with them if they left.

The Human Stakes of the Closed Community

The institutional change bears directly on Éri’s history. She had grown up in the Predecessors’ mountain community, where each child had an assigned task. At ten, she was responsible for watching an old blind goat, which the group treated as important because the Little People were believed to pass through its body between worlds. After she neglected her duty and the goat died, she was confined with its corpse in an old earthen storehouse for ten days, isolated and forbidden to leave or speak with anyone. The episode shows the community’s authority reaching into a child’s body, movements, and access to other people.

After Éri escaped to the Master’s home, he did not press her to explain what had happened. She seemed emotionally unresponsive but adapted readily to life there, and she became inseparable from Azami. Because she did not speak, she did not attend school. Meanwhile, the Master could not establish what was happening to her parents: the community’s communications had failed, its gates were closed, and even its newly protected religious status made investigation difficult.

The Predecessors’ transformation therefore remains both an organizational development and an unresolved rupture. Publicly, the association presented disciplined spiritual practice, agricultural self-reliance, and a legal willingness to cooperate; from outside, the Master saw enclosure, silence, and an unexplained reversal. Reports of hidden leadership and unequal access further complicate its official account of spontaneous individual awakening. The formal recognition in 1979 did not explain what had changed inside the community. It gave that change a durable institutional shelter, leaving the people beyond its walls to infer the consequences from fragments.