5 Commemorating Crisis: State, Media, and Civil Responses to the Aum Affair

The arrests of Asahara and his aides in mid-1995 reduced the possibility that there might be more terrorist plots, bringing a sense of momentary closure and relief. However, the arrests did not resolve all the problems that the Aum Affair had brought to the fore. Just as similar controversies surrounding ‘cults’ and cult violence around the world have prompted state interventions and the regulation of religions, the Japanese government faced a raft of problems and questions, such as whether Aum should be banned, how the financial damages caused by Aum should be repaid to various stakeholders, and whether existing laws governing religions were fit for purpose. In court, due to the sheer number and magnitude of the crimes committed, trials were slow, complex, and contentious. Public anxieties about the continuing presence of Aum members living in their neighbourhoods persisted for years, as there remained strong public demands for security agencies to continue to monitor Aum’s activities.

In short, what started as the ‘Aum Affair’ (Oumu jiken) gradually become the ‘Aum Problem’ (Oumu mondai): how the state and civil society should interact with remaining Aum members in a ‘post-Aum’ society. The Aum Problem was also a problem of collective memory. There appeared to be a consensus of public opinion that the horrors of the Tokyo subway should not be forgotten. For many victims and bereaved families, forgetting Aum’s crimes was hardly an option. They had no choice but to remember and relive the traumatic moments that they had suffered. Moreover, for many survivors and bereaved families, remembrance was a personal duty and ethical obligation to honour those who died. Yet, the victims’ willingness to remember and commemorate the attacks stood in direct contradiction with another impulse shared by various segments of society to forget the trauma of the Aum Affair as much as possible. The psychological and social drive to erase – and to symbolically cleanse – marks of Aum was particularly acute for communities neighbouring Aum’s shared accommodation. For them, the complete eviction of Aum believers from their neighbourhood and the eradication of all physical remnants of Aum’s facilities was non-negotiable for recovering their ordinary lives ‘before Aum’.

This chapter examines this conflict between the will to remember – or more accurately, the will to selectively remember – and the will to forget by focusing on the interactions between actions by dominant institutions and responses by lay actors. While the following chapters will discuss actions by a variety of actors, it is important to focus first on elite institutions, as elite groups enjoy a disproportionate advantage in managing and controlling not just the collective memory of a given society, but also the social organisation of time itself (Zerubavel 2003).

Various levels of government have the means and the capital to stage officially sanctioned forms of commemoration that range from commemorative ceremonies and national holidays, to monuments and memorials, street names, and education curricula. The option of building memorials and statues, of course, is also open to elite non-state actors; hence powerful historical figures have sought to preserve an image of themselves as represented through statues, as recent protests against statues of European and American colonialists and slaveholders in recent years have demonstrated only too well. Whatever the commemorative process involved, they all require substantial investments of economic capital, political power, labour, and time, that less privileged actors may not have the means to provide. As a result, elite representations of the past often become the hegemonic frame through which national memory is reproduced. Dominant representations of the past provide cultural templates for interpreting not only actions of the past, but also for understanding present and future events: collective meta-narratives – such as ethno-national self-identities, histories of conflict, and categories of friends and enemies – provide ready-made answers for social issues in predictable, almost algorithmic, ways.

As Bakhtin (1981; 1986) highlighted, elite public discourse has a tendency to benefit the status quo. ‘Elite’ and ‘official’ speech genres, he argued, work for the benefit of the ruling class by concentrating meanings to the linguistic and political centre, which he called ‘centripetal’ discourse. Official languages of bureaucracy, law, and academia provide authoritative and unquestioned representations of the world that neutralises ‘the way things are’. Elite discourse therefore stands above, and in opposition to, vernacular speech and provincial dialects, which challenge and disperse meanings through their ‘centrifugal’ characteristics away from the political centre.

In this heteroglossic – vertically stratified – structure of commemorative speech acts, socially dominant actors’ responses in dealing with the aftermath of the Tokyo attack are essential for understanding the ‘official’ representations of Aum that have persisted in public discourse in the following decades. Although the state and the mass media had different interests at stake, they both converged on the framing of Aum Shinrikyō as a ‘destructive cult’ and a perennial threat to the body politic. This dominant narrative has been reproduced through criminal trials, legislation, mass media coverage, and municipal governmental policies. For state authorities such as the Public Security Intelligence Agency (PSIA), Japan’s national intelligence agency, this narrative has enabled them to secure a legal mandate to carry out regular searches of premises belonging to Aum and its successor organisations – possibly in perpetuity – while municipal governments have defended policy decisions to unlawfully exclude Aum from receiving municipal services based on the perceived threat that Aum represents to public safety.

As with all forms of commemoration, elite commemoration is selective with what information it seeks to impart and reproduce. While dominant representations of Aum have relied on this representation of Aum as a ‘destructive cult’, elite responses to Aum’s violence have also been marked by occasions of non-commemoration, where there are notable silences and omissions surrounding events when they apparently failed to follow the best course of action. For instance, until relatively recently, the police had rarely acknowledged missteps in investigating the first violent crimes committed by Aum. Similarly, the mass media have tended to avoid public discussions of the ‘TBS Video Scandal’, in which the TV broadcaster TBS was indirectly implicated in the murders of the anti-cult lawyer Sakamoto Tsutsumi and his family. By and large, with the notable exception of commemoration of the Matsumoto sarin attack, neither state authorities nor mass media outlets have systematically addressed their own shortcomings through their organisational responses to the Aum Affair.

Cases of religious terrorism and religious violence often result in state responses which seek to identify and prevent similar instances from happening in the future. Although these may not fall under a formal definition of ‘commemoration’, studying state responses to terrorism through legislation nevertheless helps to elucidate the permanent and sweeping social effects of terrorist attacks on a society, as well as how states and state authorities form institutional memories about how to respond to current and future terror threats.

For instance, in the context of terrorist attacks by religious motives such as the 9/11 US attacks and the 7/7 London bombings, states have generally responded through an overhaul of governmental powers such as greater oversight of religious organisations, tightened security measures on public transport, and enhanced surveillance online as well as in public places. On the one hand, these measures are often accepted by the public as inevitable and necessary to reduce the risk of future attacks; for example, tighter airport security checks and the restriction of liquids on airplanes have become the global norm. On the other hand, terrorist attacks have frequently provided governments with a justification to enhance their legal powers at the expense of individual freedoms. Responding to the 9/11 attacks, the USA PATRIOT Act greatly strengthened state powers to search and collect personal data about its citizens, while in the UK, the Prevent strategy – initially introduced as part of the anti-terrorist CONTEST approach in 2003 as a response to 9/11 and significantly strengthened after the 7/7 London bombings – has made it mandatory for public institutions to report potential cases of radicalisation to the authorities (Qurashi 2018).

In other contexts, the perceived threats of newer religions to public safety and public order have resulted in legislation that specially targets minority religions. In France, responding to cases of violence by new religions including the murders and mass suicides by the Order of the Solar Temple and seeking to address a moral panic about cults, the government enacted the 2001 so-called ‘About-Picard Law’. The Act legally demarcated the differences between authentic ‘religions’ and ‘cultic movements’ (mouvements sectaires) and created a new category of criminal misdemeanour called ‘abuse of weakness’ (abus de faiblesse) of vulnerable individuals. The law also enabled the state to dissolve religious groups whose executives have been found guilty of certain crimes. In 2004, Arnaud Mussy, a leader of a small millenarian group called Néo-Phare was convicted of the new crime of ‘abuse of weakness’ after one of his followers committed suicide (Altglas 2010; Palmer 2011). It is important to note that not all state responses have been grounded in cases of religious violence. In the past two decades, the Chinese government has adopted from Euro-American discourses and legal categorisations of officially sanctioned ‘religions’ and illegal ‘cults’ (xie jiao, translated as ‘evil cult’) to crack down on minority religions including the Falun Gong and the Church of Almighty God (Edelman and Richardson 2005; Irons 2018; Richardson 2011; Yang 2012).

Like many other national governments responding to terrorism, the Japanese government faced a range of legal and political obstacles in the wake of the Tokyo attack. Some legal hurdles were relatively simple to overcome, such as making sarin production a criminal offence.¹ Other, more sensitive, problems regarding the state regulation of religion touched upon fundamental constitutional values of freedom of religion and freedom of association. Put simply, can a religious group that has committed terrorism continue to exist?

There were four key legal developments in the state’s handling of the ‘Aum Problem’: firstly, the government initially attempted to dissolve Aum through an application of the controversial Prevention of Destructive Activity Act (commonly known as habōhō, shortened from hakaiteki katsudō bōshi hō in Japanese, abbreviated here to PDAA); secondly, the reform of the Religious Corporations Act altered the accreditation method for granting preferential tax exemption to religious organisations; thirdly, the enactment of a new set of ‘Aum Laws’ placed Aum’s successor under state surveillance and held the group financially accountable for damages, and fourthly, the belated creation of a set of laws provided state-funded financial relief to victims of Aum’s murders and terrorist attacks.

Following the arrests of Aum’s leadership, the focus of public debate shifted from bringing suspects to justice to discussing how the remaining organisation should be regulated and possibly disbanded. In October 1995, the Tokyo District Court revoked Aum’s ‘religious corporation’ status, a charity status that gave Aum not only preferential tax treatment but also a mark of public respectability. The Tokyo government had granted the status to Aum in 1989, despite opposition from believers’ parents. Following the revocation of the status, officials confiscated Aum’s assets and Aum lost its formal status as a legal body, hereafter becoming an unincorporated organisation (nin’i dantai). Aum sued to void the decision but the revocation was well-grounded in law, and the decision was upheld by the Tokyo High Court in December 1995, as well as by the Supreme Court in January 1996.

Whilst the revocation of Aum’s public status was relatively straightforward, the question of whether Aum should be disbanded completely was altogether separate and much more complex. With Aum’s leaders in custody, remaining members – although fewer in number – continued to live in shared accommodation across the country much as before. The government’s initial plan was to apply the Prevention of Destructive Activity Act (PDAA) to Aum to forcibly dissolve it. The PDAA is a repressive law established in 1952, originally intended to curtail leftist activism in the context of the Cold War and McCarthyism in the United States. Theoretically, the Act could be applied to individuals or groups and enabled the state to forcibly dissolve and outlaw anti-social, ‘destructive’ groups that threatened domestic security (Reader 2001: 228). Liberal and leftist parties, including the Social Democratic Party of Japan in the 1994–6 coalition government, had previously opposed the Act on the basis that it gave too much power to the state and that it potentially violated Article 21 of the Constitution, which guaranteed freedom of association. The debates were further complicated by the fact that, given the Act’s historical context, it had not explicitly provisioned for religious terrorism or the disbandment of religious organisations. A forced dissolution of a religious organisation potentially contravened the constitutional freedom of religion as enshrined in Article 20 of the Constitution.

The application of the PDAA was widely supported by public opinion, with 79 per cent of the public stating in a straw poll that it should be applied to Aum.²Amongst politicians, however, opinion was more mixed. The ruling Social Democratic Party, which had vehemently opposed the Act’s enactment in 1952, was initially reluctant to apply the PDAA, due to its sweeping powers and lack of precedence, with some party members considering the Act unconstitutional. In October 1995, Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi made a special request to the Ministry of Justice demanding ‘extra prudence’ in making an application for the application of the PDAA. Members of the Liberal Democratic Party, nominally the junior coalition partner, were also split over whether the application was essential, given that the key culprits had already been arrested.³

Among the national newspapers, editorial opinions were divided along the political spectrum. The conservative paper Yomiuri Shimbun defended the move as necessary and urgent.⁴ By contrast, the Asahi Shimbun, historically a flag-bearer of progressivism, opposed the application of the PDAA, arguing that it was unconstitutional and merely handed the Public Security Intelligence Agency (PSIA) more investigative powers and funding that it did not need.⁵ The Japan PEN Club (the national branch of the free speech advocacy organisation PEN International) and the Japanese Federation of Bar Associations both opposed the application of the Act as unconstitutional and a breach of fundamental liberties.⁶

While it may first appear counter-intuitive that so many politicians were anxious about disbanding a group that had just committed the largest-ever terrorist attack at the heart of Japan’s largest metropolis, these divisions amongst politicians, mass media, and other stakeholders can only be understood with reference to long-term institutional memories of political and religious repression under the pre-1945 militarist regime. Under the military-fascist state, which ended only with Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, all forms of organisations, including political parties, professional organisations, trade unions, and religions, faced the stark choice between collaboration with the government or severe and violent repression. Religious persecution prior to Japan’s defeat in 1945 was both widespread and violent. As Benjamin Dorman (2012a) argues, Shinto worship was enforced upon the national population between 1868 and 1945 as a civic duty comprising part of the ‘national body’ (kokutai) ideology, and authorities and mass media vilified new religions in particular as ‘lewd and evil cults’ (inshi jakyō). Perhaps most notably, the new religion Ōmoto, a movement founded in the late 19th century by Deguchi Nao, was persecuted and shut down by state authorities on two separate occasions in 1921 and 1935. The group was investigated on suspicion of lèse-majesté and for the violation of the Peace Preservation Act, a notorious law that initially targeted left activism but later expanded to curtail any form of religious and civil activism that the authorities saw as a threat to public order. On both occasions, its leader and Nao’s son-in-law Deguchi Onisaburō was arrested and detained. In the second police raid, other members of the leadership were tortured, and the headquarters were razed to the ground. The leadership was eventually acquitted of all charges in 1942, but not before dozens of followers were killed under torture and the group suffered massive financial and reputational damage. The bloody history of violent religious persecution, combined with the PDAA’s dubious legacy as explicitly anti-Communist legislation, prompted many stakeholders to oppose the Act being applied to Aum. For progressives and liberals, the freedom of association and freedom of religion were inalienable rights, even if this meant begrudgingly allowing Aum to exist, while conservative politicians that wanted to see Aum dissolved were fearful of being linked to the difficult legacies of the pre-1945 regime.

The Prime Minister eventually gave the go-ahead to the PSIA to dissolve Aum through the PDAA at the end of 1995.⁷ However, the government’s plan to forcibly dissolve Aum did not come to fruition. In 1997, the Public Security Examination Commission, a body under the Ministry of Justice that considers PDAA applications, rejected PSIA’s claims, ruling that the application did not meet one of the necessary criteria for dissolving a group that the group in question presented an imminent security threat and that it could engage in repeated destructive activities in the future.⁸ As authorities sought alternative solutions to disband or regulate Aum, the group continued to practice much as before, albeit under the close scrutiny of law enforcement.

The second significant legal development that occurred in parallel with debates about PDAA was a proposed reform of the Religious Corporations Act (shūkyō hōjin hō, RCA). The original Religious Corporations Act, passed in 1951 by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers led by the US, formed a relatively laissez-faire framework in which regional governments oversaw the registration and monitoring of religious organisations by granting recognised religions the status of a legal person and offering them preferential tax rates. Under existing laws, Prefectural Governors granted religious corporation status to individual organisations, with relatively little oversight from the central government. As the historical circumstances surrounding Aum’s accreditation process became clearer, critics highlighted some flaws in the existing legislation: Aum had exploited the religious corporation status as a badge of public respectability to attract new members and had benefited from lower tax rates to run side-businesses, including a merchandise shop, a restaurant, and a computer hardware shop. More seriously, the decentralised administrative system meant that the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, with which Aum was registered, had no oversight whatsoever of Aum’s illegal activities in its headquarters in Yamanashi Prefecture, 100 km to the west of Tokyo.

Like the application of PDAA, RCA reform had overwhelming public support, with 85 per cent agreeing that the law needed to be reformed, surely a reflection of the public distrust towards ‘religions’ as something that is outside and in tension with ‘civil society’.⁹ However, like the debate surrounding the PDAA, widespread public support did not translate into cross-party consensus, as the RCA quickly became the topic of intense party politics. The conservative LDP saw the RCA reform as an opportunity to undermine Kōmeitō, a party supported by members of the lay Buddhist movement, Sōka Gakkai. Although the LDP and Kōmeitō have had coalition agreements since 1999, the two parties had had a strained and often hostile relationship in the second half of the 20th century, as Sōka Gakkai’s ambitious and forceful proselytisation tactics to transform Japan’s religious landscape had come under repeated public criticism. Thus, the LDP wanted to use the RCA reform to weaken Kōmeito’s influence on national politics. Unsurprisingly, the opposition party, New Frontier Party (NFP), which had arisen out of a short-lived merger between Kōmeitō and several other parties between 1994 and 1997, opposed sweeping RCA reforms.

New religions were also conflicted over proposed changes. The Federation of New Religious Organisations (Shinshuren) – which represents many Japanese new religions and has had a historic rivalry with Sōka Gakkai – supported the LDP but lobbied against the reforms, fearing that this would have the double effect of increasing political interference into religions and decreasing the ability of religions to intervene in political issues (Klein 2012). Eventually, the pro-reform faction won, and the reformed Religious Corporations Act was passed in December 1995, coming into effect in September 1996. The changes were relatively limited in scope, and less restrictive than many religious organisations had feared. The reformed Act brought the registration system under central administration by the Ministry of Culture (renamed in 2000 as MEXT: the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) for religions operating across multiple prefectures.¹⁰ It also expanded the state’s authority to investigate religious organisations and required registered organisations to file annual financial records for greater transparency (Inoue N 2011: 410–12).

The third wave of legal responses that institutionalised and routinised state responses to the Aum Affair in law was a new set of security-related laws pertaining to Aum’s legal obligations and long-term surveillance of the group. These changes sought to hold Aum legally and financially accountable, even after it had lost its status as a religious corporation and had been declared bankrupt.

Following the PSIA’s unsuccessful attempt to disband Aum through the PDAA, the state saw a need for new legislation that would enable authorities to continue to monitor Aum continuously. The 1999 Act Relating to the Regulation of Organisations Which Have Committed Indiscriminate Mass Murder (Musabetsu tairyō satsujin kōi o okonatta dantai no kisei ni kansuru hōritsu), abbreviated here as the Organisations Regulation Act (ORA, Dantai Kisei hō), effectively replaced the PDAA for keeping Aum under state surveillance. As the name suggests, the Act placed groups that have committed indiscriminate mass murder under state supervision for an initial period of three years, with the possibility for extending it indefinitely. Unlike the PDAA, which forcibly dissolved any organisation targeted by the security authorities, the ORA enabled organisations to continue to exist, subject to various conditions such as regular submissions of reports of financial and personnel details, as well as complying with unannounced searches by the police and PSIA.

The Act was a major victory for security agencies, especially the PSIA. Prior to the Aum Affair, in the face of a decline of right-wing and left-wing terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s, the PSIA had faced the possibility of severe budget cuts and possible closure. The enactment of the ORA came at an opportune time that secured the agency’s future longevity. The legislature also passed a corollary Act which enabled the state to recover assets belonging to organisations monitored under the ORA.¹¹ The law ensured that Aum’s successor organisations remained liable for the same financial liabilities and obligations, even if they set up new groups or changed their name. In the end, the effects of the ORA were relatively limited; after all, security authorities had been continuously monitoring Aum’s activities even before the ORA was passed. Perhaps more disconcerting were the public’s responses to the ORA being applied to Aum. Once the courts permitted ORA to be applied to Aum, this re-ignited public anxieties towards Aum’s remaining members, triggering local resident protests demanding Aum’s expulsion from their neighbourhoods across the country. In response, municipal governments cited the ORA as a normative (if not legal) justification for implementing discriminatory policies against Aum members.

The fourth set of laws relating to financial assistance to victims developed much more slowly than security-related laws. From the initial response immediately after the Tokyo attack until 2008, the government held that victims should seek financial compensation from the perpetrators through the civil courts, and that the government was not party to these disputes. As a result, victims of Aum’s crimes faced significant hurdles in recovering financial losses. The first obstacle pertained to the fact that Aum was unable to repay vast sums of compensation that the courts awarded to claimants including individual victims, the Tokyo Metro Company, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, and the national government. As a result, Aum was formally declared bankrupt in 1996. Secondly, as bankruptcy law stated that official bodies and corporations were entitled to recover debt before individual claimants, these individuals would have received a much smaller share of the compensation than they were originally awarded in court. Following extensive lobbying by victims led by Takahashi Shizue (see Chapter 7), the government passed a special law in 1998 to prioritise individual claimants over official bodies. Although this was a small victory for victims’ rights advocates, Aum’s limited assets meant that only a small proportion of the compensation was recoverable.

As a result of extensive activism by victims’ rights groups, in addition to gradual broader shifts in state responses to crime, the 2004 Basic Act Relating to Victims of Crime (hanzai higaisha tō kihon hō) fundamentally shifted the state’s stance on victims’ entitlement to state assistance.¹² The Basic Act spelled out responsibilities for national and municipal governments to proactively assist individual victims of crime. This paved the way for the enactment of the landmark 2008 law, The Act Relating to the Provision of Payments for the Relief of Victims of Aum Shinrikyō’s Crimes (Oumu Shinrikyō hanzai higaisha tō o kyūsai suru tameno kyūfukin no shikyū ni kansuru hōritsu), abbreviated here as the Victims Relief Act (VRA). The law set up a system of one-off relief payments to victims and bereaved family members of Aum’s crimes, including the 1989 murder of the Sakamoto family, the two terror attacks, and other murders and assassination attempts. Crucially, this excluded victims who were members or ex-members at the time.¹³

Beyond the financial implications for the victims, the VRA was a symbolic statement of the state’s denunciation of crimes committed by Aum. The first article of the Act situated the moral impact of Aum’s violent crimes as a heinous assault on the nation’s governing institutions. It declared that provision of assistance in the form of relief payments was significant for making clear the state’s stance in their fight against terrorism.¹⁴ The relief fund, which was funded by the state in conjunction with private donations and successor organisations, provided financial aid to 5,859 applicants to the sum of ^￥2,806,400,000 (approximately US$280 million) until the programme concluded in 2010 (National Police Agency 2010). However, a minority of victims refused to accept compensation on the basis that they did not wish to be reminded of the attack.¹⁵ Whatever the original intentions, the legislation was a fault-line which caused a clash between the will to acknowledge and remember, on the one hand, and the will to forget and move on, on the other.

Besides legislative measures designed to prevent similar cases from occurring in the future, the Aum Affair resulted in hundreds of criminal trials involving scores of defendants on a raft of charges. Due to the sheer number of cases being considered, and the fact that many of the defendants stood accused of multiple serious charges, trials of the leadership took several years, with Hayashi Ikuo being one of the first culprits to receive a life sentence in 1998. Asahara’s trial took considerably longer, with the first verdict passed down in 2004 and finalised in 2006.

Asahara’s trial was complicated by the numerous charges that he faced, the amount of evidence, the number of witnesses called to testify, Asahara’s behaviour, and the defence team’s strained relationship with the court. Asahara’s behaviour during the detention was a source of considerable controversy. During the first months that he was placed under custody, he sent messages to his adherents via his lawyer to continue their training.¹⁶ In the trial proceedings, he initially pleaded not guilty. As the hearings progressed, however, his comments became increasingly erratic and incomprehensible, before eventually falling silent for the remainder of the trials. Whether this was voluntary or the result of deteriorating mental health has been fiercely contested.¹⁷ During the appeals process, Asahara’s defence team released a whistle-blower account by a prison inmate, who described Asahara as being unable to communicate with the guards, barely able to stand, and incontinent (Asahara Kōsoshin Bengonin 2006). Although some – including Asahara’s third daughter Rika, and the filmmaker Mori Tatsuya – had called for a stay of execution on medical grounds, some critics argued that Asahara was simply faking illness to avoid the death penalty.

The trials of other key culprits were also lengthy and complicated, partly due to Murai Hideo’s untimely death. While some culprits such as Niimi Tomomitsu never renounced their faith in Asahara, many others did, and claimed that they were coerced or under the influence of mind control (see Chapter 8). However, claims of mind control were almost entirely rejected by the court, which ruled that all the individuals had acted out of their free will. As an exception, Inoue Yoshihiro, who led the ground-level operation in the Tokyo attack and orchestrated several terrorist attacks during the investigation, was initially sentenced to life, as the verdict acknowledged the effect of mind control. However, on appeal, the sentence was revised up to the death penalty, ruling that he had acted voluntarily. By the end of the ‘Aum trials’ (Oumu saiban), a total of 13 people had been sentenced to death by hanging. Many of them were members of Murai Hideo’s Science and Technology team, having been personally involved in the manufacture of deadly chemicals as well as the terrorist attacks. Others, such as Hayakawa Kiyohide, Minister of Construction, and Inoue Yoshihiro, Minister of Intelligence, were accomplices in multiple cases of murder and assassination attempts. Of the five assailants that placed the sarin bags on the train carriages, only Hayashi Ikuo, who killed two in the attack, escaped the death penalty on the basis that he had shown evidence of genuine regret and remorse. By contrast, Yokoyama Masato, whose attack resulted in no fatalities, received the death penalty. Four of the getaway drivers for the Tokyo attack also received life sentences, while the fifth driver, Niimi Tomomitsu, was sentenced to death by hanging for his role in the Sakamoto murders and the Matsumoto and Tokyo attacks.

While the cases were ongoing in the criminal court, there were also numerous disputes in the civil court. Aum and its successor organisations have repeatedly appealed against the application of the ORA, which has been renewed to the present day. Notably, following the release of Jōyū Fumihiro from prison in late 1999, Aum announced that it would rename itself Aleph to signal a new beginning. This was seen as a strategy to avoid being subject to laws which specifically named Aum Shinrikyō: however, this move was ineffectual, as the ORA extended to any successor organisation deemed to have continuities with past groups. In 2007, following several years of animosity between Jōyū’s faction, seen as a ‘reformist’ faction, and the ‘loyalist’ faction led by Asahara’s wife Tomoko, Jōyū announced a split from Aleph, forming his own organisation, Hikari no Wa. As of late 2021, both Aleph and Hikari no Wa continue to be monitored under the ORA.

The legal developments discussed above affected different areas of the law and varied in scope and effect. Nevertheless, the implications of responding to the Aum Affair through legislation were clear; the national government had recognised that Aum’s crimes were significant for the nation-state and required a wholesale response. Yet, while acknowledging the national significance of the Aum Affair through legislation, the government has played an insignificant role in the coordination and choreography of commemorative processes beyond the legal arena. Large-scale events, such as commemorative ceremonies and symposia have been hosted almost entirely by private actors, with politicians and state officials playing a secondary role as participants and speakers.

In a notable exception to the state’s apparent reluctance to commemorate, the Police Museum in Tokyo held a temporary exhibition in March 2015 to mark 20 years after the Tokyo attack. Held in the temporary exhibition hall, the exhibition consisted of numerous photographs, newspaper clippings, and informational panels that explained the historical background of Aum’s violence and the police’s responses to Aum since the Tokyo attack. Recordings of radio communications between emergency services played repeatedly in the background, recreating the tense atmosphere in the moments after the Tokyo attack. The exhibition also displayed replicas of protective suits worn by the Self-Defense Forces to avoid contamination, alongside other protective suits from security forces around the world. The exhibition justified the continued surveillance of Aum’s successor organisations on information panels, reiterating the state’s position that Asahara’s teachings continue to compose a central component of activities by Aleph and Hikari no Wa, and that they could yet turn to terrorism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the exhibition also displayed signs of selective amnesia: the exhibition made little mention of the police’s flawed response to the disappearance of Sakamoto and his family in 1989, and glossed over their inadequacies in handling the investigation of the Matsumoto attack.

Elsewhere, the state has played a marginal role in commemorating the Aum Affair. Instead of hosting state-sponsored commemorative ceremonies, it has become customary for government representatives such as the Prime Minister and cabinet ministers to regularly visit Kasumigaseki Station on the anniversary of the Tokyo attack to offer flowers and to give media interviews. There are possible reasons for politicians’ reluctance to take a leading role in commemorating the attack. For instance, the government may have been reluctant to choreograph official commemorative ceremonies at a time when its official position was that it would not provide state-funded financial assistance to victims, or state institutions may have wanted to avoid greater public scrutiny of uncomfortable facts in the years leading up to the Tokyo attack, such as the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s decision to grant religious corporation status to Aum, and the mishandling of police investigation in the years prior to the Tokyo attack.

Although there have been few official commemorative events, these official institutions have nevertheless engaged in the reproduction of memory narratives in different ways. In particular, the PSIA, Japan’s equivalent to the UK’s MI5 or the US’s NSA, has been a steadfast advocate for the most stringent laws to be applied to Aum and has continuously reproduced narratives of Aum as a continuing security threat. The Aum Affair revitalised the PSIA at a time when its raison d’être as a bulwark against political radicalism had increasingly come under question following the end of the Cold War and the decline of far-left and far-right terrorism.¹⁸ For the agency, the Aum Affair constituted an opportunity to redefine its purpose to identify security threats beyond political radicalism and to demonstrate its indispensability in its fight against ‘cults’ as a new security threat (Hughes 1998). One of the strategies the PSIA has employed has been to reiterate the continuing threat that Aum, Aleph, and Hikari no Wa pose to public safety. For instance, in a 2002 news article in Japan Times, a quality English-language newspaper on Japanese affairs, the PSIA spokesman emphasised that Aum ‘is no less dangerous than it was seven years ago, in the sense that all of its members are under mind-control to worship Asahara’, and that the membership ‘is sufficient (for the cult) to engage in terrorism on a grand scale’ (Matsubara 2002). These official statements have enabled journalists from inside and outside of Japan to sustain public anxieties about the scale and activity of Aum’s successor organisations.

The PSIA has also pushed the official narrative of Aum as a perennial security threat through the dissemination of uncertain and unverified information through the mass media. In an illustrative case in 2000, two months after the ORA came into effect and several weeks before the fifth anniversary of the Tokyo attack, security agencies announced that Aum had been developing software for major contractors including government agencies and major telecommunications corporations (Sims 2000). This revelation raised fears that Aum had infiltrated government agencies, and that they could exploit the software for cyberterrorism or to steal confidential information.¹⁹ Responding to the reports, the Japanese telecoms giant NTT announced it would review the software, while government officials and corporate executives expressed their intention to avoid doing business with Aum-related companies in the future (ibid.). To date, there has been no concrete evidence to suggest that Aum members had ever intended, or had the capacity, to commit cyber-terrorism or to steal sensitive government information. It also seems incredulous that Aum would risk jeopardising one of its core revenue streams by engaging in cyber-crime at a time the organisation was already under intense scrutiny by law enforcement. Nonetheless, official releases such as the potential ‘risks’ of Aum committing another high-level terrorist attack have been relayed by media with relatively little scrutiny, helping to sustain this narrative. To this extent, there is much credence to the claim by Asano Ken’ichi, a former journalist and professor of journalism studies, that the media have colluded with security agencies to portray a simplistic image of Aum as a murderous cult without independently examining the veracity of claims made by the authorities (Dorman 2001).

The PSIA’s reiteration of Aum as a social menace have continued through successive applications to renew the three-year surveillance period, which have been approved by the Public Security Examination Commission. The PSIA’s consistent portrayal of Aum and its successor organisations is demonstrative of the ‘centripetal’ nature of official discourses that attempt to fix meanings in ways that are advantageous for socially dominant groups and institutions. It also illustrates how symbolic representations of Aum as a mind-controlling cult and Japan’s vulnerability to future terrorist attacks are directly tied to material and political interests of different state agencies. Despite its initial defeat in the debate over the PDAA, the PSIA’s victory through the enactment of the ORA has given the organisation a powerful legal mandate to supervise Aum – and, perhaps most importantly, a budget to match.

In contrast to sparse instances of state-led commemoration, mass media commemoration of the Aum Affair has been both voluminous and consistent. Various media outlets have produced intense bursts of Aum-related stories and special programmes around the anniversary of the Tokyo attack. The contents of these reports have ranged from the history of Aum prior to the attacks and the long-term effects of victims’ physical and psychological trauma, to the perceived continuing threat posed by remaining members across the country. Through these commemorative reports, generally speaking, the mass media have reinforced and reproduced the dominant trauma narrative that situates Aum as a dangerous cult that could commit another terrorist attack.

Media commemoration of Matsumoto has been qualitatively distinctive from other media representations of the Aum Affair. While many media reports and re-enactments have tended to focus on the profiles of the perpetrators, media discussions of Matsumoto have usually discussed Kōno Yoshiyuki’s experiences as the victim of a false accusation. This has meant that the binary code of Japan as ‘good’ and Aum as ‘evil’ has been somewhat attenuated in representations of Matsumoto as a ‘difficult past’. For example, marking five years since the Matsumoto attack, both the Yomiuri and Asahi newspapers ran a series of commemorative reports. These featured interviews with survivors still suffering from the physical and psychological after-effects of sarin poisoning. The stories told of feelings of loss experienced by the victims’ families, but, crucially, they included extended interviews with Kōno as the main protagonist of a social drama.²⁰ The centrality of Kōno as the tragic protagonist was reiterated in the Matsumoto mayor’s annual visits to Kōno’s unconscious wife in hospital, until she passed away in 2008; local newspapers reported on these annual visitations to Kōno and his wife, even when other forms of commemorative media coverage were absent.²¹

Kōno has been the subject of commemoration in television and film as well. The 2000 feature film Japan’s Black Summer: False Accusation (Nihon no kuroi natsu: Enzai) by the director Kumai Kei reconstructs the night of the Matsumoto attack and the subsequent police investigation (Kumai 2000). In the film, a team of secondary-school reporters interviews a local television station and a character based on Kōno to retrace the circumstances of the attack, to discover why an innocent victim was falsely accused as a potential suspect. Kōno played an advisory role in the making of the film, and some scenes were filmed inside his home and in the streets of Matsumoto, contributing to a sense of realism. Similarly, a 2009 TV documentary-drama by broadcaster Fuji Terebi recreated Kōno and his family’s ordeal, featuring interviews with Kōno and his children.²² In these symbolic representations, the primary narrative centred on Kōno’s personal biography, not on the broader context of Aum’s crimes.

While Matsumoto has been commemorated in various media, the volume of media discourse that it has generated has paled in comparison to commemorative reports of the Tokyo attack. On the first anniversary of the Tokyo attack, many newspapers presented vivid descriptions of the attack as survivors and emergency responders re-narrated the horror and panic of the attack. Yomiuri Shimbun’s editorial on the anniversary of the attack emphasised that for both bereaved families and survivors, ‘the deep wounds were still raw.’²³ As the years have passed, however, graphic accounts have given way to discussions about the long-term effects of the Aum Affair. An article in Yomiuri Shimbun marking the third anniversary stressed that ‘bereaved families and the injured have not yet been able to heal their wounds to their body and mind.’ The story narrated the sorrow of a widow and mother who was nine months pregnant when her husband was killed: the daughter, now nearly three, only recognises her late father through old photographs.²⁴ The media have frequently narrated the irreversible damage the attack has inflicted on ordinary people, and survivors and bereaved families have also expressed inextinguishable anger towards Aum. In an article marking the twentieth anniversary of the attack, a victim’s mother emphatically stated, ‘I cannot forgive Aum. This anger will never change.’²⁵

While many newspapers have covered the anniversary of the Tokyo with dutiful regularity, they have also addressed the victims’ concerns that their experiences are being quietly forgotten. In 2006, reflecting on the gradual loss of public interest in Aum, the widow and activist Takahashi Shizue lamented that the memory is weathering and being forgotten in spite of the continuing daily struggles of victims.²⁶ Beyond the media’s critical treatment of Aum, then, mass media have acted as a platform upon which victims have articulated these commemorative speech acts by stressing that the Tokyo attack must not be forgotten.²⁷

While many media outlets have, on the whole, reproduced the dominant narratives supported by the police and the PSIA and have often relied on information provided by them, it would be reductive to suggest that the relationship between the media and security agencies has been entirely collusive. In this sense, although elite discourse tends to be self-serving, these ‘centres of power’ are not necessarily singular. In contrast to state acts of commemoration, which have skirted around the history of police inaction prior to the Tokyo attack, some media reports have contained explicit criticisms of state authorities. Reflecting some of the voices of victims who felt that the police had failed to protect the public by not investigating Aum sooner, commemorative coverage has included criticism and self-criticism of law enforcement in the years prior to the Matsumoto and Tokyo attacks. This has been facilitated in recent years following the retirement of some senior police officers involved in the investigation. For example, one episode in the 2012 documentary series by the public broadcaster NHK titled Unsolved Incident – File No. 2: The Aum Shinrikyō Affair (Mikaiketsu jiken – fairu 2: Oumu Shinrikyō Jiken) relied on interviews with former police officers to reconstruct how different Prefectural Police forces had investigated Aum but had failed to fully grasp the dangers that Aum posed to the public.²⁸ In an article marking 20 years after the Tokyo attack, the former Superintendent General of the National Police Agency expressed regret for not taking decisive action against Aum sooner.²⁹

Despite these limited critical reflections, the mass media have also been selective about which events they choose to commemorate. Many media outlets remained silent about their own involvement in popularising and legitimating Aum in the early 1990s by inviting Asahara to talk shows, debate programmes, and interviews with celebrities. Commemorative coverage often neglected to mention the infamous ‘TBS Video Scandal’, in which the national TV broadcaster TBS was indirectly linked to the murders of the Sakamoto family. In October 1989, a week before the murders, Aum’s senior disciples entered the TBS headquarters demanding to see Sakamoto’s interview footage, which had been filmed for a segment to be aired at a later date. TBS showed them the tape, and, upon Aum’s protestations, agreed not to air it. Days later, after talks between Sakamoto and Aum broke down, Asahara gave the order to kill Sakamoto. When details of this encounter emerged in 1996, TBS instigated a cover-up and denied showing Aum the interview footage, until evidence emerged to the contrary (see also Gardner 1999; Hardacre 2007). Although the scandal led to the resignation of TBS’s CEO and senior staff, this event received only limited attention in subsequent media reports.

Beyond state commemoration, different civic actors have held various forms of commemorative rituals, such as memorial ceremonies, fundraising concerts, public symposia, and annual press conferences. These commemorative speech acts have tended to vary greatly in scope and content, as some interventions have been explicitly critical of state responses to the Aum Affair.

Outside of the mass media, numerous actors have used various media to commemorate the Tokyo attacks. A year after the attack, the Tokyo Metro Company (then known as Eidan) collected video testimonies of station staff to share the memories of the attack among its employees.³⁰ The Subway Sarin Incident Victims’ Society (see Chapter 7) has also self-published books and booklets to communicate their experiences directly to the public. In 1997, marking the second anniversary, the Victims’ Society self-published a collection of victims’ memoirs titled The Yellow Collection of Memoranda (Kiiroi Shuki-shū), which was distributed for free by volunteers outside Kasumigaseki Station. The following year, the group published a collection of victims’ writings entitled Still We Keep Living (Soredemo Ikite Iku) (Chikatetsu Sarin Jiken Higaisha no Kai 1998). In direct contradiction to official commemorative narratives which tended to omit references to the police missteps prior to the Tokyo attack, some of the contributions sharply criticised the police for their inaction. In 2007, the group published another collection of writings, this time with contributions from prominent public figures including the former Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi, journalists, victims, and members of the public. The booklet, titled What the Subway Sarin Incident Meant for Me (Watashi ni totte no chikatetsu sarin jiken) (Chikatetsu Sarin Jiken Higaisha no Kai 2007) contains a rich tapestry of narratives which details the personal impact of Aum’s crimes on individual relationships, careers, and worldviews (ibid.). The book was distributed for free to attendees of a commemorative symposium organised by the group to revitalise and preserve memory narratives from what they perceived to be the inevitable tide of ‘weathering’. Continuing in this vein, marking 15 years after the attack, the Victims’ Society made and distributed a DVD-only documentary featuring Takahashi Shizue interviewing other victims, their families, experts, and investigators (ibid.). While such forms of mediated commemoration have not necessarily enjoyed large-scale circulation compared with the national reach of newspapers, television, radio, and magazines, the Victims’ Society, under Takahashi’s leadership, has continuously engaged in mediated memory work to preserve and disseminate narratives to be shared with the wider public. However, this is not to suggest that victims have universally supported efforts to reproduce memories of the trauma. According to Aoki Yumiko, who edited a number of Aum-related publications including Still We Keep Living and What the Subway Sarin Incident Meant for Me, there were many survivors who declined to be interviewed or to write contributions for these projects. They could not even look at books on Aum in bookshops and had to avoid anything that reminded them of Aum.³¹ For them, it was more important to forget the traumatic past and to move on.

Commemorative ceremonies continue to play a central role in the public remembrance of the Tokyo attack. Every year, the Tokyo Metro Company has observed a minute of silence on the morning of 20 March at 8 a.m. This annual memorial service is attended only by Metro employees; this arrangement arose out of consideration for commuters who might not want to be reminded of the sarin attack as they travelled to work.³² Instead of holding public ceremonies the company temporarily converts the offices of the six worst affected stations as a sacred space where members of the public can visit to offer prayers and flowers. The station office, cut off from the usual prosaic space of the metro concourse, serves as a temporary memorial space which allows visitors to offer prayers for the dead without affecting the daily running of the stations. When I visited Kasumigaseki Station on 20 March 2015, I was welcomed solemnly by numerous station employees near the Chiyoda Line ticket barriers and was ushered into the room by station staff (Figure 5.1). Camera crews stood in the corridor on the approach to the office, ready to take photographs (with the visitor’s consent). Upon entering the room, I was struck by the juxtaposition of sacred Japanese funerary symbols in a room otherwise reserved for mundane office work. At the end of the room was a table covered with a white cloth. A wooden object resembling a tombstone (a rectangular pillar) sat atop the table, with offertory flowers surrounding it. To the left of the entrance was the service desk, again covered in white cloth, where I signed the register: another funerary custom. On the other side of the desk were several staff in uniform who stood and watched solemnly as I offered a bouquet of white lilies, a flower commonly associated with funerals, followed by a silent prayer. To the right of the entrance was another table stacked with bouquets of flowers from previous visitors. From available photographs of the commemoration from previous years, it appears that the design and routine of this custom has remained consistent over the years. This act of offering flowers at Kasumigaseki Station, in the absence of state-led commemorative ceremonies, has become customary in the political calendar for senior politicians. Successive prime ministers and cabinet members have visited the station on the anniversary of the attack as the site has become the de facto official commemorative site (Figure 5.2).³³ Aum and Aleph representatives have also visited Kasumigaseki on a regular basis to issue apologies and to offer flowers to the dead (but only after 2000), adding to its symbolic significance as a temporary, but sacred, site of memory.³⁴ In 2015, on the twentieth anniversary, over a thousand people attended the event to offer flowers.³⁵

There has also been an altogether different form of commemoration and therapy organised by the Recovery Support Center (RSC). The RSC is a not-for-profit organisation founded after the Tokyo sarin attack to assist victims of terrorism and natural disasters. The charity offers regular health checks and psychological care to patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at no cost to the patients. In 2005, marking the tenth anniversary of the Tokyo sarin attack, the charity organised an event called Memorial Walking Care, a combination of therapy and commemoration. The event allowed survivors to retrace their footsteps on the day of the sarin attack in the hope of overcoming the traumatic experience by visiting different subway stations (Pendleton 2011). According to the RSC, 55 survivors and their family members participated under the supervision of doctors and nurses.³⁶ The post-event survey by RSC found that most people reported the walk as a positive experience.³⁷ It is evident that the event was a significant milestone for many survivors. One survivor, who stepped on the platform of Kodenmachō Station for the first time in ten years, commented, ‘there was cold sweat from all over my body, and my heart was pounding, but I think I was able to overcome it. I could remember the day of the incident, and I couldn’t help but cry.’³⁸ The RSC’s Memorial Walking Care illustrates the diverse goals of commemorative events: if the commemorative events by the Tokyo Metro and the Victims’ Society were intended to preserve the memory of the Tokyo attack at a public, collective level, the memorial walk provided a path for individuals to overcome their trauma and to move forward with their lives at a personal level.

On a smaller scale, separately from the commemoration of the Tokyo and the Matsumoto attacks, relatives and friends of the Sakamoto family have organised regular ‘memorial concerts’ in their memory in Nagano, Niigata, and Toyama Prefectures, where their bodies were found.³⁹ These localised, regional practices demonstrate the endurance of commemorative practices outside of elite practices, even if they do not necessarily have a geographically wide-reaching effect.

One of the most puzzling phenomena surrounding the commemoration of the Aum Affair is the contrast between the relative preponderance of mediated discourses about Aum Shinrikyō and the relative scarcity of permanent physical objects that serve as reminders of the event, such as memorials, museums, and buildings used by Aum. Neither the Matsumoto nor the Tokyo attacks led to notable efforts to construct physical monuments or memorials. In fact, the predominant trend across the country has been for stakeholders to erase visible reminders of the Aum Affair wherever possible.

Perhaps the most telling example of this is the commemorative plaque placed at Kasumigaseki Station. Despite becoming a major memorial site on the anniversary of the attack, the station has hardly any reminders that the attack ever took place, except for a small, black plaque on a wall near the ticket barriers. The black, metal plaque with gold lettering was installed in March 1996 by the Tokyo Metro Company to commemorate the two station employees killed at the station as well as the other victims killed in the attacks (Figure 5.3). Adjacent to either side of the plaque are some potted plants, which provide a sense of spatial distinction by diverting the normal flow of foot traffic away from the area. The plaque constitutes only an inconspicuous backdrop to the daily function of the station as a major transport hub. Although there have been some discussions about constructing permanent monuments in memory of the Tokyo attack (Pendleton 2014), such plans have not been realised, possibly due to limitations of cost, space, and public support.

Elsewhere, there have been concerted efforts to remove any physical evidence of Aum’s former presence. In Matsumoto, a company dormitory building in which multiple employees died was dismantled, as was Aum’s building at the heart of the legal dispute which led to the attack on Matsumoto.⁴⁰ In its place, there is a small public park with little visible evidence that the attack ever took place.⁴¹

The near-total elimination of material reminders of Aum is most conspicuous at Kamikuishiki village, where Aum built its largest building complex. The site was also home to Satyam (satian) No. 7, the notorious building which was constructed to mass manufacture up to 70 tonnes of sarin (the chemical plant was never completed). After Aum was declared bankrupt in early 1996, a trustee took control of its assets, after which point public authorities tore down all the building structures at the Kamikuishiki commune except Satyam No. 7, which was kept for several more years as evidence. The erasure of Aum from the local landscape was a long-awaited victory for Kamikuishiki’s villagers, who had campaigned against Aum for years, and had united under the motto ‘Not a single [Aum] believer or a building left in the village’.⁴²

Local authorities eventually turned the former commune site into a publicly maintained park, where a memorial was erected to commemorate the dead; however, the memorial stone itself only reads ‘cenotaph’ (ireihi), with no explanation of the purpose of the memorial. There are conflicting accounts of why the meaning of the cenotaph remains so ambiguous. Some have reported that the lack of explicit references to the Aum Affair was to dissuade remaining Aum believers from visiting the memorial site.⁴³ One villager has contradicted this account, suggesting that the cenotaph was intended for Aum believers who died or were killed in Kamikuishiki, not specifically for members of the public killed by Aum.⁴⁴ The lone memorial, devoid of epigrams denoting its significance, illustrates the precarious interaction of the opposing social pressures to remember and to forget.

While the demolition of Aum’s buildings effectively erased visible traces of Aum, for Kamikuishiki, the village’s association with Aum’s infamy proved much more difficult to efface.⁴⁵ One inventive, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to reverse this fortune was the construction of a theme park several kilometres away from Aum’s commune. The theme park, named Gulliver’s Kingdom (Gulliver Ōkoku), was based on Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and featured a 45m-wide giant statue of the eponymous character lying on the ground. The park opened in 1997 but closed in 2001, as it struggled to stay afloat amidst an economic downturn. The unsuccessful attempt to reverse Kamikuishiki’s fortunes ultimately ended in the dissolution of the local authority and the erasure of the village itself. In 2006, as part of a national restructuring policy of municipal councils, the northern half of the village was absorbed by Kōfu City while the southern half was incorporated into the town of Fujikawaguchiko (Pendleton 2014: 80–81).

In recent years, there have been some attempts by residents of Kamikuishiki to reverse the process of social amnesia and to restore and preserve the region’s difficult past. Takeuchi Seiichi, who was a leading figure in the village’s anti-Aum movement, expressed regret in 2010 that nearly all traces of Aum had been effaced. He commented, ‘we should have left even just the Satyam No.7 [the planned sarin plant] for future generations as a historical and moral lesson of the evil crimes.’⁴⁶ Other villagers have also proposed the creation of private and public archives to preserve and pass on the difficult past experienced by the local community, though there is currently no public archive of this kind.⁴⁷

The impetus to erase all traces of Aum has extended to existing locations of Aum communes around the country. Since 1995, numerous resident groups and municipal authorities have made sustained efforts to drive out Aum believers through protests and social ostracism. Residents living near Aum’s communes have organised demonstrations calling for the group’s expulsion from their community, fearing another terrorist plot. In some areas, local committees set up surveillance tents outside Aum buildings and demanded to inspect any goods entering the premise. The groups enforced a rule of ‘no engagement’ by banning residents from speaking to Aum members, and vice versa.⁴⁸ This is similar to a historic form of community-wide ostracism known as ‘mura hachibu’. Only in rare cases has this tension between residents and Aum members resulted in reconciliation, a phenomenon that documentary film-maker Mori Tatsuya has captured in his documentary film A2 (see Chapter 6).

Municipal governments sided with local residents in such disputes, even at the risk of breaking the law. Concurrent with the government’s application of the ORA to Aum, many municipal governments enacted a policy of refusing resident registration records (jūminhyō) submitted by Aum believers. Resident records are vital for exercising civil rights and legal duties, such as submitting tax returns and voting in elections. The refusal to accept submitted resident records lacked a legal basis. In 1989, when the same tactic was used by Namino village, Kumamoto Prefecture, the dispute resulted in a costly lawsuit and a settlement that resulted in the village purchasing the estates from Aum for ¥920 million (approx. US$9.2 million).⁴⁹ Despite this precedent, many municipal governments followed Namino’s example, spurred on by community demands to keep Aum out at whatever cost. Aum promptly sued these councils to annul the decisions and claim damages. The Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that the annulment and refusal of Aum believers’ resident records was illegal.⁵⁰ Most district courts also ruled in Aum’s favour and all municipal governments were eventually forced to accept and process resident records.⁵¹

Perhaps the only exception to the prevailing impulse to erase and forget physical manifestations of Aum’s actions has been the remembrance of the Sakamoto family, whose friends and family have been committed to preserving their legacy. In 1997, eight years after their ‘disappearance’ and two years after the discovery of their bodies, friends and family raised funds to construct three identical cenotaphs at each of the locations where their bodies were buried. The memorial, composed of a small stone ring sitting atop two larger ones, represents the symbolic reunion of the family across disparate spaces. The memorials have acted as sites for friends, family, and the local community to remember the victims through regular remembrance ceremonies, albeit on a much smaller scale than the commemorative event at Kasumigaseki Station.⁵²

The commemoration of the Aum Affair has been a complex and at times divisive issue, as some stakeholders’ interests to remember the Tokyo attack in particular ways have clashed with others’ wishes to forget the event whenever and wherever possible. For the political elites, legislation has been used to inscribe institutional responses to the Aum Affair with reference to the nation-state’s norms and values. Notwithstanding the public debates over the legal reforms, during which some media outlets were critical of government plans, mass media outlets have commemorated the Aum Affair in relative consonance with the state by representing Aum’s successor organisations as perennial threats to the body politic. At the same time, mass media have provided some discursive space for victims to express their views about the ‘weathering’ (fūka) of memories of the Aum Affair that diverge from predominant, elite representations that are critical of state responses.

Different civil actors have used diverse methods to commemorate the Aum Affair. While some have sought to fight the perceived ‘weathering’ of public memory through grassroots commemorative speech acts through self-publishing, others have sought to erase remaining reminders of Aum altogether by destroying physical structures associated with Aum’s negative legacies and seeking to drive out remaining Aum members from the local community. This adversity to physical reminders of the Aum Affair resurfaced most recently during the disputes over the custody of Asahara’s ashes after his execution in 2018. Following the execution, the government announced that his ashes and belongings would be handed over to Asahara’s fourth daughter Satoka, who had previously publicly denounced Asahara and cut legal ties with her family (see Chapter 8). Days later, releasing a statement through her legal representative Takimoto Tarō, she expressed her wishes for the remains to be scattered over the Pacific Ocean to prevent his burial site from becoming a sacred site for remaining worshippers, and requested state assistance for a burial at sea (although it bears mention that his remaining followers never specified what they intended to do with Asahara’s ashes had they had access to them). Asahara’s surviving family members including his wife and other children have disputed whether Asahara explicitly designated Satoka to inherit his remains. The case was further complicated by the absence of formal documentation signed by Asahara himself, which would normally specify the recipient of the body and personal belongings. His third daughter argued that the absence of such documentation was evidence that he was not mentally fit to be executed. In a blow to the Ministry of Justice, the family court concluded in 2020 that Asahara’s remains should be given to his second and third daughters, ruling that there was insufficient evidence that he had explicitly directed his remains to be given to Satoka.⁵³ The fourth daughter appealed this decision, but the Supreme Court upheld the ruling in 2021, awarding custody to the second daughter.⁵⁴ The ruling is significant, as the courts have repeatedly ruled against the Ministry of Justice’s argument that Asahara had orally specified his fourth daughter to be the custodian of his remains. This raises further questions about the state of his mental health at the time of the execution. How this dispute might continue, however, remains to be seen.