In 1981, at age twenty-six, during his troubled Tokyo days, he joined Agonshū, one of the most successful of Japan’s “new religions.” Although he was later to disparage Agonshū and even claim that it had been spiritually harmful to him during his three years of membership, there is every evidence that he derived from it many of his subsequent religious principles. Indeed, he found there a powerful guru model, sixty-year-old Seiyū Kiriyama, a highly charismatic figure.
