Criticism
Happy Science is one of many Japanese new religions, or shinshūkyō, which are looked upon as "controversial" by the mainstream press and public. According to The Japan Times, "for many, the Happies smell suspiciously like a cult". Even though Happy Science protested against Aum Shinrikyo before the 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, comparisons have been drawn between the two groups and they often clashed in the media during the 1990s.
Happy Science have been noted for their use of high profile marketing company Dentsu Corporation, the largest advertising company in Japan, to implement their strategy.
Happy Science has released promotional videos that claim North Korea and the People's Republic of China are plotting to invade and colonize Japan after first subduing it through nuclear warfare.
In June 2012, Happy Science was blamed for a reservation mix-up at the Ugandan national stadium by the Ugandan athletes preparing for 2012 Olympics. Some athletes blamed Happy Science for their failure to qualify as they were forced to use the inferior track for time trials, as the national stadium was booked by Happy Science.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)