Introduction

This chapter will discuss aspects of management and marketing within the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University (BKWSU), an Indian globalized new religious movement (NRM) established in 1936 in pre-Partition Hyderabad (now in the Sindh province of Pakistan). The founder, Lekhraj Kripalani, a middle-aged, pious and wealthy jewellery merchant received dramatic yet contrasting visions of the supreme beauty of paradise and the destruction of the present world. He subsequently sold his half of the lucrative business and created a meditative community, initially called Om Mandli. He handed over his wealth and management of the community to a small group of young women followers, thus initiating a revolutionary spiritual path for women in the context of Hindu society (Ramsay 2017).

Students of the community call themselves BKs (Brahma Kumaris1) and, as part of their lifestyle of brahmacharya [seeking God realization through a virtuous life], practise celibacy and consume a ‘sattvic’ [‘pure’] lacto-vegetarian diet. These disciplines mirror Hindu Brahmin tradition, embodying a revolution in social identity within the dominant Hindu culture, as members are termed ‘Brahmins’ regardless of their caste origins. Despite its close adherence to the most ascetic forms of Indian religious practice, in the early 1970s the movement spread to Europe and Asia.

Introduction

Tenrikyō was founded in 1838 in a farming village in Yamato Province (currently Nara Prefecture) and expanded its religious activities even after Miki Nakayama, the Foundress of Tenrikyō, withdrew from physical life in 1887. After about 50 years, the number of its adherents reached three million. Tenrikyō attained government recognition of its sectarian independence from the Shinto Honkyoku in 1908 after it had institutionalized into a religious organization with numerous branch churches. In ten years, the number of branch churches increased rapidly and reached approximately 1300 in Japan. In Japan and abroad, Tenrikyō altogether has approximately 16,000 branch churches at present and is viewed as a representative Japanese new religion in terms of its scale and historical importance.

Tenrikyō's global expansion has led to the establishment of overseas bases in Asia, Europe, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Its first overseas post, the Kankoku Fukyō Kanrisho (Tenrikyō Mission Administration Office in Korea) was established in the year it attained sectarian independence, and was renamed the Chōsen Fukyō Kanrisho the year after Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910. It is possible to interpret that Tenrikyō's overseas expansion occurred as a result of the historical context of the Japanese government's colonial occupation of Asian countries, for Tenrikyō's next overseas missions were established in Taiwan and the South Pacific

In the non-Western world, the contemporary revitalization and expansion of Pentecostalism, a movement within Christianity that stresses a believer's personal encounter with God through the Holy Spirit, is an unprecedented phenomenon. This development is of particular interest because Pentecostalism itself is not a ‘new’ religion. While its formal origins are generally traced to revival meetings held in Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906, antecedents can be found in Christian renewal movements in the late nineteenth century. The name is derived from the Greek Pentekostas [50], which in Jewish tradition refers to the ritual held seven weeks after Passover. The Pentecostal movement takes its inspiration from the biblical description of events on the Day of Pentecost that followed the death and resurrection of Christ as described in Acts 2. A group of disciples were gathered together for prayer when the sound of a mighty wind engulfed the entire house. ‘And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance’. The conviction that the Holy Spirit can once more descend in all its power is thus central to Pentecostal theology.

The multi-directional face of modern globalization

Globalization is envisioned here as multi-directional. For some time now globalization in its various forms, including its economic, cultural and religious forms (Clarke 2000), has been moving in all directions perhaps most noticeably from East to West, rather than from the West to the rest of the world, as was once largely the case. Some have argued this is profoundly modifying the ethos and worldview of the latter (Campbell 1999) and, it may be added, the way we think of and define religion.

Moreover, in the contemporary world the boundaries of religions, notwithstanding the attempts made by their officials and spokespersons in the past decade to police them more efficiently, are noticeably much more porous than was the case only 50 years ago. This change is due as much as anything else to the developments in information technology and communications, large scale economic migration and the new forms of religious pluralism that have emerged as a result of these developments. Thus, although the labels Western/Occidental and Eastern/Oriental, or African or Middle Eastern are still sometimes applied to religions, these labels are becoming increasingly obsolete.

The model of habitat segregation

Hawaii is the first place where Japanese religions started their overseas missions. At first, priests from the home prefecture of emigrants carried out their missionary work sponsored by the immigrants. Then, Japanese religious organizations themselves supported missionaries who they sent from Japan to strategically expand their overseas activities. In those days, Japanese emigrants in Hawaii faced many hardships in working on the sugar-cane plantations. Each plantation community built its own Buddhist temple (which came to resemble a Buddhist ‘church’) or else a Christian church (see below). Compared to Buddhist temples, there were fewer Shinto shrines built. Shamans and mediums from a Japanese cultural base also started their activities. New religions such as Tenrikyō and Konkō Kyō also commenced their diffusion to Hawaii. In the Japanese diaspora communities, however, it was Jōdo Shinshū and Protestantism which struggled for supremacy. There was severe competition between the leader of Honpa Hongwanji, Emyo Imamura, and that of the Makiki Holy Castle Church, now called Makiki Christian Church, particularly through the establishment of Japanese language schools. A strike involving employees of sugar-cane plantations brought them into conflict, though the two leaders addressed the workers together to persuade the Japanese to return to work (Hunter 1971: 66, 87, 92).

The main basis of this conflict was the differing orientation of Japanese community members; towards America or towards their homeland (Nakamaki 1978: 20-22).

This chapter focuses on the rise and fall of a Malaysian Islamic movement, Arqam, and in doing so, contributes three unusual perspectives: Islamic movements in Asia, (in this case, one of revitalization of a traditional religion), a global religious movement originating from a developing economy, Malaysia, and finally a case of failure.

A cursory browsing of digital and paper-based material on Asian globalized religious movements reveals the fact that the successful examples, especially new religious movements (NRMs), are overwhelmingly from Japan. Their success is often explained with reference to their style of organization which is highly corporate in nature and is measured, along with membership size, by their global reach made possible by good management, leadership, and a compact internal bureaucracy. Some well-known Japan specialists – local and foreign – have noted the parallels between Japanese multinational corporations (MNCs) and the Japanese NRMs (Matsunaga 2000; Nakamaki 1991, 2003; Smith 2008), which began to expand their international push around the same time, in the 1970s. Hence an epistemological focus on organization theory is now emerging more strongly in studies of NRMs to explain their success, as indeed was revealed in the case of Japanese NRMs. However, the task of accumulating sufficient and relevant ethnographic detail on organizational structures of each of the NRMs is not an easy one, especially if questions are asked about accounting and finance systems.

Japanese Buddhist denominations launched their foreign propagation [kaikyō] programmes [opening the (Buddhist) teachings] in the late nineteenth century, and Japanese priests subsequently crossed the Pacific to Hawaii and mainland United States to conduct kaikyō. The word kaikyō was coined in the Meiji period (1868-1912) to describe the spreading of the teachings of Buddhism to non-Buddhist local residents in a foreign country. Early on, one critical view actually held that the word should be tsuikyō [teachings following (immigrants)] because the priests were following the Japanese immigrants (Kojima and Kiba 1992). The latter term denotes the clear contrast between this propagation of Buddhism by Japanese Buddhist denominations and the enthusiastic proselytization by Christians missionaries which had converted a significant number of non-Christians in Asia and Africa. One kaikyōshi [missionary priest] who had served in pre-war North America for eighteen years admitted that he had conducted mainly traditional propagation to Buddhist immigrants from Japan, while maintaining his desire to disseminate something more than just the ‘extension of Japanese Buddhism’ or ‘religion affiliated with immigrants’ (Uchida 1930: 20). This statement reflects the situation at that time, in which the Buddhist missionaries actually preached mostly among the Japanese immigrants, although a proportion of priests held out the ideal of spreading Buddhism to the local people in the New World in the manner of the Christian missionaries.

Propagation to the Japanese and analysis of the management strategy used

Due to the progress of globalization, the propagation of religion has accelerated in many directions. In recent years, the expansion of traditional religions and new religious movements from foreign countries into Japan has been striking. This chapter examines a case that is an example of this trend: Wat Phra Dhammakaya (Dhammakaya Temple), a branch of Thai Theravada Buddhism, and its propagation in Japan.

In June 2009, I requested permission to conduct research on the Tokyo branch of Wat Phra Dhammakaya. I requested information about their missionary work among the local Japanese population, and was interested in the difficulties of propagating their work in a different culture. The chief monk of the branch temple in Tokyo declined my request, saying that the activities of Dhammakaya Temple in Japan were directed to Thai people living in Japan and that they had no plans to conduct missionary work among the Japanese either at that time or in the future. It therefore seemed slightly strange to me that a few days after receiving this reply, a short ordination course to enter the priesthood was advertised in the official temple blog, as well as in a newspaper of religious affairs in Japan (Chūgai Nippo 2009). The course was targeted at foreigners, including Japanese, and was to be held in Thailand.

Introduction

Some of the new religious groups in Japan, including Perfect Liberty Kyōdan, Church of World Messianity [Sekai Kyūsei Kyō] and Sūkyō Mahikari, are well-known for their huge sacred places. A common element among these sacred places is beauty. The sacred places, which combine traditional or novel (or sometimes even bizarre) buildings with natural scenery, cleverly apply a Japanese aesthetic of beauty. The Church of World Messianity (hereinafter called Messianity) is a Japanese new religion known for its practice of jōrei, meaning ‘purification of the spirit’ in Japanese, the foundation of all its activity.

Messianity has actively been proselytizing in Brazil since 1955. According to a census in 2000 (IBGE N.d.), the number of its followers is 109,310. There are 410,000 according to Messianity's website in Japan (Izunome 2008).

In 1995, Messianity founded its extensive and well-maintained sacred place, Guarapiranga, in the suburbs of Sao Paulo. Many Brazilians, both adherents and non-Messianity followers, have visited the site since then. Messianity calls the 320,000 m2 site beside Lake Guarapiranga ‘heaven on earth’ [paraiso terestre], and ‘sacred place’ [solo sagrado]. It is a space that incorporates natural features such as the lake and forest. A woman in her 30s who visited there told me it is ‘Beautiful, just beautiful! I have no words to explain’. Many followers responded in the same way when asked about their impressions on visiting Guarapiranga for the first time.