17. A Lunatic Organization’s Lunatic Leader
Japan’s League of Blood was headed by a lunatic Buddhist preacher named Nissho Inoue, who had experienced some mystical visions in the 1920s while wandering around China. The visions convinced him that he had been chosen as Japan’s savior, and that the country needed a spiritual rebirth.
So Inoue returned to Japan, opened a school, and taught an agrarian philosophy that advocated the superiority of farmers over workers, and rural life over urban. Inoue slowly began radicalizing his students. Within a few years, his school had morphed into a training center for ultranationalists pining to make Japan great again, by returning to the traditions of past centuries. In 1932, Inoue preached that Japan should be reformed with an assassination campaign.