'Ritual to Send You Back Home' Was a Scam: Leaders of 'Bokyo no Kai' Arrested

According to police, "Bokyo no Kai" began recruiting members around 2024, mainly among first-generation Drifters, with claims that "a ritual performed by the representative herself, on a special night when a big tide coincides with a Yuragi forecast, can send you back to your home world." Paying an initial fee of 300,000 yen placed a person on a list of "ritual candidates," after which members were asked for monthly "offerings" of a few thousand to tens of thousands of yen, framed as tied to the ritual's supposed progress. Police arrested representative Tomoe Shiodome, 58, and two others on the 5th on suspicion of fraud, believing the group never performed any ritual at all and simply collected money.

Investigators believe the group's targets were mainly first-generation Drifters in their seventies and older, and that it collected roughly 80 million yen in total from more than 40 members over about two years. Unlike the previously reported "Awakening Camp" and "Society for Returning to the Shore" cases, which targeted younger people through self-improvement schemes, most of this group's members were elderly Drifters preyed upon through the hope of "perhaps seeing the family left behind in their home world once more." The city's consumer life center had received complaints about the group since last fiscal year, many describing "the ritual date being postponed again and again" and "the offering amount rising year after year."

According to investigators, "Bokyo no Kai" assigned each member a so-called "progress stage," raising the stage each time the offering amount increased. Once a month, representative Shiodome reportedly handed members a handwritten sheet labeled "observation results," filled with numbers resembling measurements that did not, in fact, correspond to anything real. "It appears they dressed the scheme in a scientific-looking form to convince members they were making progress," an investigative source said. On average, it is estimated to have taken more than two years from joining to the promised date of the ritual — a structure built to keep members paying offerings over a long stretch of time.

The family of one victim, a man in his seventies, told reporters, "My father is a first-generation Drifter and often spoke of my late mother's home world. After he joined the group, he truly believed he could go back someday, and wouldn't listen when we tried to stop him. More than the money, what's hardest is that he was kept hoping right to the end, only to be betrayed." The family of another member recalled, "Every time the offering amount went up, they were told it meant he was getting closer to the stage where the ritual could be performed. It was a well-made system for appearing to make progress."

The TDA restated on the 5th its longstanding position that "sending someone back through Yuragi has never been confirmed, either in law or in any observation to date." An official said, "This scheme exploited the one-way nature of the phenomenon itself to prey on hope. However deeply felt the wish, there is no need to pay money for a ritual with no scientific basis." Police plan to continue investigating the group, including possible violations of the Specified Commercial Transactions Act, and the city's consumer life center says it is also open to consultations from the families of first-generation Drifters.