Posted on Wednesday 7 May 2003

This is a highly disturbing the development.
The world is going to end on May the 15th and I'm stuck here while Japan's best and most avant-garde performance art troupe, the inimitable "Panawave Laboratory" are on their final tour.

If you haven't heard of them before, Panawave's routine consists of driving about in rural Japan, draping themselves and everything else in white cloth and terrifying the villagers with stories about communist guerrillas blasting everyone with electromagnetic radiation, hilarity ensues.

White cloth brigade A caravan of vehicles belonging to a New Age group holed up on a mountain road in western Japan for almost a week left today after it was searched by hundreds of police and warned it was breaking traffic laws, an officer said.

The group, Panawave, has become a focus of media attention in Japan since it began camping along the little-travelled two-lane road in western Gifu prefecture last Friday, obstructing traffic and draping trees with white cloth.

Panawave says it is seeking sanctuary from electromagnetic waves generated by left-wing guerrillas in Japan as part of a conspiracy to destroy its leadership.

It claims the cloth neutralises the effects of the waves. [more]

	White-robed members of a mysterious doomsday group which calls itself "Panawave Laboratory" make their way around their mountain road camp draped with white sheets in "protection against electromagnetic waves" in Kiyomi village, central Japan. Cult members are convinced that the human race will be destroyed on May 15 this year because of a dramatic change in the angles of the Earth's axis.
	Panawave group members wrap a tree in white cloth near their camp to deflect electromagnetic waves that they say have made their founder gravely ill.
	A Panawave cult member in all white costume holds a mirror-like shield during a face-off with local police officers in a mountain road in Yamato, central Japan. For years, they have traveled the backroads of Japan in an all-white caravan, swathing their camps in white fabric.
	The white-clad cult members, who were forced by police to leave Hachiman, Gifu Prefecture, where they had occupied a section of road for a week since April 25, made a short journey in their fleet of white vehicles and arrived at a neighboring village of Kiyomi in the predawn hours of Friday May 2.