Former Members Bring Down the Founder They Once Trusted

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Ho No Hana Sanpogyo's foot reading and seminar system, which had built Hogen Fukunaga a substantial national following through the 1980s and 1990s, began to unravel when former members and their families came forward with complaints about the movement's practices. Japanese authorities arrested Fukunaga in 2000 on the strength of those accounts.

A Japanese court convicted him of fraud in 2005, finding that he had defrauded 31 identified believers of roughly 150 million yen through the diagnostic and seminar scheme he had built the movement around. The court sentenced him to twelve years in prison, a judicial verdict that treated the foot readings and their claimed diagnoses of cancer and other illness as outright fraudulent rather than the spiritual gift Fukunaga had long presented them as being.

The case marked a sharp reversal for a movement whose founder had spent two decades building trust through a performance of hidden knowledge about his followers' own bodies. Where Ho No Hana Sanpogyo had once recruited members by promising to reveal what conventional medicine could not see, the fraud conviction instead exposed what the seminar system itself had been concealing all along.