God Is Watching From the Wall

I’ve spent years trying to correct the record on Japan—that it isn’t just vending machines dispensing underwear, rectangular melons, and tentacle pornography. That underneath the Kawaii surface there are serious artists, gifted musicians, designers who’ve shaped contemporary fashion globally, writers and illustrators who have nothing to do with any of the clichés. I still believe all of that.

And then something like Little Pebble comes along.

The sect in Akita is run by a man going by Jean-Marie Thornbush Little John, who has built a religion that resembles Catholicism the way a funhouse mirror resembles a face. He performs rituals with yogurt. He sleeps with mentally disabled women on camera. The Pope and the Son of God observe from images mounted on the wall. The compound is lined with rows of stuffed animals. Somewhere in the mythology, there are unidentified flying objects.

Japanese journalist Yuka Uchida visited the community for VICE and documented what she found: naked skin, prayer, a man who appears to genuinely believe that what he’s doing is sacred. The stuffed animals disturb me more than the rest of it, for reasons I haven’t fully worked out. Maybe it’s the contrast—the softness of them against everything else happening in the room.

The cliché of weird Japan is lazy and usually wrong and I’ll keep arguing against it. But I’m not going to pretend this story doesn’t exist, because Uchida went there and filmed it and the footage is exactly what it looks like. The stereotype survives on incidents like this one. I’m not sure what to do with that except sit with it.