The incident transpired in a Kumamoto prefecture town, where a 50-year-old man and a 56-year-old monk resolved to drive out the evil spirits which they believed possessed the man’s 13-year-old daughter.
Her father had apparently quit his job 4 years ago after finding religion, and became a full-time cultist from this time on. His daughter was described as quiet and normal by her classmates, but had ceased coming to school some months previously.
She was strapped into a chair with belts around her arms and legs around 3AM on the night of the 27th, and then had her face forcibly doused with a stream of water continuously falling from an outlet 2.5m above her for 5 minutes at a rate of 40 litres a minute.
She suffocated to death during the ordeal, which she had apparently been forced to endure 100 times over the last 3 months.
Locals had apparently heard her screaming on many occasions, and the cult had been the subject of many complaints due to its endless banging of drums, chantings of sutras, and comings and goings late at night.
The murder came to light when the girl’s father called her school to inform them that his daughter “died in the pursuit of the waterf austerities.”
Police arrested both men on manslaughter charges soon after.
Her father maintains his innocence, saying it was necessary to drive the evil forces from her, but regrets that it ended in her death.
She had been absent from school for 7 months, but despite 6 visits to her home her teacher was repeatedly told she was not home by her father, an explanation the school apparently accepted without further question.
The Japanese government says the group was formally recognised as a religious organisation in 1952, and currently has about 350 temples and churches, and as of 2008 “305,555″ believers.
The organisation has yet to make any formal comment on the incident, although believers have been quick to denounce the killing as a distortion of their teachings, claiming the practice is supposed to be a voluntary one for cleansing the soul – and that they have no idea where anyone could get it into their heads that it could be used in exorcising evil spirits.
Although most Japanese are essentially irreligious, much of what is lumped together as “Shinto” and “Buddhism” in Japan actually consists of diverse and not infrequently highly cultish and bizarre “new religions,” Buddhist sects and Shinto (animistic) traditions.
These are not generally subject to a great deal of outside scrutiny – save when it transpires they have been sexually enslaving members or plotting to gas the Tokyo subway.
Source: sankaku
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