Almost half a year after Nissan Motor Co.'s Murayama plant was shut down, the automaker announced in July it was considering selling a large portion of the 1.39-million-sq.-meter property to a Buddhist organization.
Followers of Buddhist organization Shinnyoen listen to their local branchleader on TV. The news was greeted with more anxiety than hope by many in communities around the property, which stretches between Musashimurayama and Tachikawa in western Tokyo. It was obvious that Shinnyoen, a Tachikawa-based sect with a 65-year history, would not be able to bring the same economic benefit as Nissan did with its fixed-asset tax payments and spending by the 2,300 workers at the plant.
Also behind some local concerns over the plan was the negative image of Japan's so-called new religious groups, most of which were founded during the last century.
"From an environmental viewpoint, I think hosting a religious facility is better than having another large factory," said a 34-year-old housewife living near the Nissan plant, which is currently being demolished. "But I'm still not happy with this area gaining the image of a home to a new religious group."
Local residents began a petition drive Monday to pressure Nissan to provide the land in manner that enhances the area, such as by selling the site to other industries.
Despite their often decades-long histories and success by some in attracting millions of members, many officials of new religions say they remain hampered by widespread negative perceptions of their groups.
"The general public still seems to have negative perceptions of many of the organizations as money hungry and untrustworthy groups," said Takashi Hirohashi, a spokesman for the Federation of New Religious Organizations of Japan, an umbrella body comprising 68 new sects.
"People tend to view religious organizations as exclusive, antisocial and often fanatical groups led by charismatic individuals, and thus terrifying," he said.
Such images were reinforced when members of cults recognized by public authorities as religious organizations were accused of a variety of crimes in recent years.
In 1995, the country was shocked by the sarin gas attack on Tokyo's subway system, which killed 12 people and injured more than 5,000, and the ensuring arrest of many followers of Aum Shinrikyo. Aum members have been tried since then for a raft of heinous crimes, including a deadly nerve gas attack the previous year in Nagano Prefecture.
In late 1999, the Shizuoka-based cult Honahana Sanpogyo came under the spotlight over a massive fraud. More than 1,200 former followers sued the group, whose leader, Hogen Fukunaga, claimed he could read people's past and future by examining the soles of their feet, luring many to pay huge sums for salvation seminars.
Reflecting such scandals, a 1999 survey conducted by the Institute of Japanese Culture and Classics at Kokugakuin University on more than 4,000 college students nationwide found that 65.8 percent find the term "religion" scary, or at least dubious.
A survey conducted by the Yomiuri Shimbun in 1998 showed that 43.8 percent of 2,015 respondents believe religious organizations collect large donations and 37.3 percent suspect such groups impose their doctrines on people through coercive means. Around 20 percent of the respondents also said such groups engage excessively in business and political activities.
To dispel such negative images, the new-religion federation plans to launch a telephone service next month to answer inquiries from the public and give advice to people who have trouble with religious organizations.
"Unlike cults, most new sects pay respect to traditional religions at the core of their doctrines and have enjoyed good relations with traditional religions and the rest of society," said Hirohashi of the federation.
The 68 member groups of the federation are estimated to have a total membership of 13 million. The federation does not include Soka Gakkai, the nation's largest lay Buddhist organization, which claims membership of some 8.21 million households.
To ease the concerns of the local community, Shinnyoen, which was founded by a Buddhist preacher in 1936 and now has some 796,000 followers, plans to build nonreligious facilities -- including parks and sports and cultural centers -- on part of the 1-million-sq.-meter plot that it plans to purchase from Nissan.
"We are hoping to make space (on the land the group plans to purchase) accessible and spiritually appealing to the public," said Minoru Shitara, a Shinnyoen spokesman.
Shitara also said he hopes the group's planned facilities at the site won't stand out too much from the local scenery.
New religions had experienced steady increases in membership since the end of World War II, but after the 1995 sarin attacks, many groups said they suffered membership declines -- though small -- for the first time in their histories.
For example, Rissho Kosei-kai, the nation's second-largest new sect, had grown from 970,000 households in 1971 to 2.2 million in 1991, but is currently down to 2.15 million.
Also, a problem shared by many is the plunge in the number of younger converts, pushing up the average age of their members.
Hirohashi of the federation said crimes by antisocial cults and money scandals involving profit-oriented groups are not the only factors that induce public distrust in new religions.
"Public distrust in new religions must be a product of our decades of neglect to make collective efforts to win social recognition and respect," he said.
"But also behind it is the declining public respect for religions in general in Japan, which has made religious groups and their sincere followers appear something odd in society."
Yoshiyuki Yamanaka, a spokesman for Rissho Kosei-kai, said established new sects should learn a lesson from the rise of cults such as Aum in recent years.
"Today's people, especially younger generations, expect different things from religions than people used to, and it is doubtful that we have successfully responded to their needs," Yamanaka said.
He added that poverty, illness and personal conflicts were the main troubles that made people knock on the group's door in the early postwar period, when new sects flourished.
"But today's young people seem to be interested in religions in search of their identity or a richer life than a simply materialistic one," he said. "It is questionable whether established groups like ours have given a helping hand to those youths desperate for spiritual guidance, including those who entered Aum."