Cosmic Brotherhood Association
Entry updated 24 March 2025. Tagged: Community.
Official English translation of the Uchū Yūkō Kyōkai, an organization founded in Japan in 1957 for the purpose of establishing contact with Aliens. Swept up in the UFO fervour of the era, aviation journalist Yūsuke Matsumura derived a strong inspiration from the flying-saucer cult of George van Tassel in the United States, suggesting that aliens could be contacted through Telepathy by chanting the mantra "Bentra, Bentra."
Unlike most other Japan-based UFO organizations, which at the time were devoted to debunking and identifying supposed strange aerial phenomena, Matsumura's club took on elements of one of Japan's new twentieth-century Religions, including staged events at which believers attempted contact. Yukio Mishima attended one such conclave in 1959, and used it as the foundation for his novel Utsukushii Hoshi (October 1962 Shinchō; 1967; trans 2022 as Beautiful Star).
Matsumura was soon telling his inner circle that he had personally received transmissions from the Aliens, and that they had warned him of a coming shift in the Earth's magnetic poles, sure to occur by 1962 (see Magnetism). In support of his thesis, he offered his own translation of Ray and Rex Stanford's Will the Earth's Axis Tilt? (original date unknown; trans Yūsuke Matsumura as Chijiku wa Katamuku? 1959-1960). According to Matsumura's version, the faithful could only be saved from Disaster by waiting for a coded message, "Send Apples, C" (for cataclysm), and then assembling at a predetermined point for extraction by flying saucers. Such claims, when leaked to the outside world, caused a huge rift in the Japanese ufology community, which split between Matsukura-ites and more "moderate" followers of George Adamski.
Although regarded by the Japanese mainstream as a Pseudoscience crank, Matsumura shifted his public activities away from establishing contact towards trying to prove various tales of Forerunners presented within Mythology, presaging the works of Erich von Däniken. He attracted enough followers to commence the construction of a huge mountainside altar, a literal stairway to heaven, cut into the side of a mountain near Biratori on the island of Hokkaido, the mythical site of the Earthbound appearance of Okikurumi, a deity of the native Ainu people (see Shaggy God Story).
By the time the altar was complete in 1967, the apocalypse was much-delayed, and Matsukura was in ill-health, causing his followers to drift away. Arguably, it had been rendered science fictional by the refusal of the departing members of the religion to believe in it any more.
The CBA remains a touchstone of Japanese popular culture, most obviously glimpsed in the Anime Urusei Yatsura (1981), in which enthusiastic students form a ring to chant: "Bentra, Bentra, Space People." [JonC]
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