← Back to the front page

History’s Out of the Ordinary Radicals

Khalid Elhassan June 29, 2020 33 min

Lebensborn - Schutzstaffel — Kidnapping of Polish children for the Lebensborn association. Wikimedia

31. A Crackpot Leader For a Crackpot Organization

League of Blood defendants awaiting trial. Wikimedia

Japan’s League of Blood was headed by a crackpot Buddhist preacher named Nissho Inoue, who had experienced some mystical visions in the 1920s while wandering around China. That left him convinced that he had been chosen as Japan’s savior, and that the country needed a spiritual rebirth.

So Inoue returned to Japan and opened a school that pushed an agrarian philosophy that advocated the superiority of farmers over workers, and rural life over urban. Inoue slowly began radicalizing his students, and within a few years, his school had morphed into a training center for ultranationalists pining to make Japan great again, by returning to the traditions of past centuries. In 1932, Inoue preached that Japan should be reformed with an assassination campaign.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.