9 Conclusions

Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all)—they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue.

Bakhtin 1986: 170

In the last quarter-century, the Aum Affair has resurfaced time and time again as a cultural leitmotif in public debates around cults, religious terrorism, and organised violence in Japan and elsewhere. Most recently, Aum Shinrikyō returned to newspaper headlines, television news, and trending words on social media when the executions of Asahara and six of his former associates – Endō Seiichi, Hayakawa Kiyohide, Inoue Yoshihiro, Nakagawa Tomomasa, Niimi Tomomitsu, and Tsuchiya Masami – were carried out on 6 July 2018. Less than three weeks later, on 26 July, a second round of executions ended the lives of six other convicts – Hashimoto Satoru, Hayashi (Koike) Yasuo, Hirose Ken’ichi, Okasaki (Miyamae) Kazuaki, Toyoda Tōru, and Yokoyama Masato – completing the executions of all 13 convicts sentenced to death in relation to Aum Shinrikyō’s organised acts of criminal violence.

Following the conclusion of the Aum trials, the timing of the executions was meticulously calculated by key governmental decision-makers (RIRC 2018). Since Emperor Akihito’s announcement in 2016 that he intended to abdicate – bringing an end to the imperial Heisei Era that began in 1989 – there had been widespread speculation that the executions would be carried out in the months before the abdication and the coronation of the new emperor in April 2019. Various observers had suggested that, as the Aum Affair was a defining event of the Heisei Era, the state would seek to bring closure to the Affair through the executions of the convicts before the coronation of the new emperor. The timing, however, was a delicate matter, as holding the executions too close to the coronation would tarnish the auspiciousness of the occasion. Anticipating that the executions might be carried out soon, in the spring of 2018, the filmmaker Mori Tatsuya and the sociologist Miyadai Shinji formed the Society for Pursuing the Truth of the Aum Affair (Oumu Jiken Shinsō Kyumei no Kai), calling for a stay on Asahara’s execution. They argued that medical evidence gathered by the defence team suggested that Asahara was too mentally ill to be executed, and that medical treatment was necessary to extract a full confession from him before he was to be executed.¹ Separately, the anti-cult activist Nagaoka Hiroyuki and the lawyer Takimoto Tarō had campaigned for the sentences of the 12 convicts excluding Asahara to be commuted to life sentences. Much to the dismay of both camps, their calls were not heeded by the government. The executions were condemned as failing to deliver justice by Amnesty International and by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, a national body representing attorneys in Japan.² Beyond these protestations, the executions seem to have been welcomed, or at least taken as inevitable, by much of the Japanese population.

Neither the timing of the executions nor the high levels of interest that the executions generated were themselves surprising. Nonetheless, there were some unexpected social reactions to the mass executions. In a macabre spectacle, during the initial hours of reporting the first round of executions, the national television broadcaster Fuji Terebi ran a live news programme in which presenters held up boards showing portrait photographs of the convicts’ faces, placing stickers labelled ‘executed’ on them as the news of their deaths rolled in. On the Internet, anonymous posters bombarded a blog run by Asahara’s third daughter Matsumoto Rika, posting insulting comments that celebrated her father’s death. While the executions may have brought a sense of closure to many of the victims affected by Aum’s violence, they also laid bare the nation’s deep-seated trauma of the Tokyo attack and the intense hatred that a proportion of the population held towards Asahara and Aum as quintessential signifiers of evil.

The Aum Affair may appear to much of the Japanese population as a thing of the past, but there are still unresolved legal and social issues. As Aum’s successor organisations continue to be active, there remain social tensions between the groups and local residents. As annual reports by the Public Security Intelligence Agency (2017, 2018, 2019) have repeatedly emphasised that the remaining members pose a continued threat to public safety, the potential for remaining members – who remain under state surveillance – to engage in organised crimes or in future terrorist activities is likely overstated.

Indeed, the future direction of Aleph has become even more uncertain since the founder’s demise. Asahara’s family members, some of whom were instrumental in deciding Aleph’s trajectory, are split more than ever, as demonstrated not only by the rift between Rika and Satoka, but also by the successful legal action brought by Asahara’s elder son to stop Aleph from acclaiming him as its spiritual leader.³ While Asahara’s wife and second son are said to continue to be involved in the organisation, how the group will evolve in the future amidst an ageing membership remains opaque to external observers, if not to the members themselves (Baffelli 2020). As the core membership has now entered their fifties and sixties, there are questions over its durability over the coming years and decades. Nevertheless, as opportunities for gainful employment outside of the organisation become increasingly difficult as the members age, the practical ‘exit costs’ of disaffiliation may prove too high for many.

In many ways, the Aum Affair was a product of the specific cultural, historical, and religious landscape of Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. From its inception, Aum benefited from a broader ‘boom’ of charismatic new religions, expanding youth subcultures, and a growing discontent among young people that conventional career paths were unappealing and undesirable. Beneath the glitzy surface of Japan’s bubble economy in the 1980s, there flowed a consistent undercurrent of social frustration and dissatisfaction that material wealth could not provide satisfactory answers to questions about life, death, and one’s purpose in the world: questions to which Aum and many other religious movements claimed to have found ultimate answers.

Whereas the factors that contributed to Aum’s growth could be located in Japan’s religious and cultural milieux of the time, the factors for Aum’s turn to violence lie primarily in Aum’s intra-group dynamics and its frictions with external stakeholders. Over the course of several years prior to the Tokyo attack, Asahara’s increasing paranoia pushed Aum to pursue violence as a legitimate method for achieving religious ends. Asahara’s closest aides were only too eager to carry out these orders. Given these unique characteristics that made Aum far more violent and dangerous than many other minority religions and controversial cults, it would be difficult if not contrived to reach general conclusions about religious terrorism or religious violence from this case alone. Nevertheless, by examining the social consequences of the Aum Affair, it is possible to suggest some general theoretical observations about the societal aftermaths of religious terrorism that have implications for fields including memory studies, the sociology of religion, and cultural sociology.

Firstly, violent events such as the Tokyo sarin attack become cultural traumas when stakeholders make concerted attempts to narrate the incident as a collective experience in relation to their shared identities and memories. As the initial aftermath of the Matsumoto attack showed, not all events that have the potential to become cultural traumas achieve this symbolic transformation. Whether this narration process occurs immediately, latently, or not at all, is contingent on a number of social factors, such as the availability of factual information relating to the nature of the attack, the skills of different ‘carrier groups’ (including but not limited to journalists, public intellectuals, artists, and academics) in being able to present morally compelling narratives, and the narrators’ access to means of communication.

The Aum Affair demonstrated that an event becoming a cultural trauma does not mean that there is a singular narrative or meta-narrative of the event. Rather, cultural traumas are borne out of a competition between multiple narratives, some of which become more successful than others. In the quarter-century since the Tokyo attack, the Aum Affair has produced numerous conflicting interpretations, ranging from whether Aum was a ‘religion’ or a ‘cult’, whether followers were brainwashed, and whether remaining groups constituted continuing security threats. While the orthodox narrative of Aum as a brainwashing cult has been reproduced by the state and the mass media alike, other actors have posed counter-narratives to this hegemonic frame by offering alternative perspectives for understanding the causes and consequences of Aum’s violence.

This book has stressed that the ability to narrate and to commemorate past events as cultural traumas is shaped by hierarchies of social power and resources within and across societies. The uneven distribution of material and symbolic resources that actors have access to in modern societies indirectly functions as a selection mechanism for who partakes in public struggles over meaning. The Aum Affair, above all, demonstrated the overwhelming power of the mass media – especially television – to mobilise national public opinion against the ‘public enemy’, the result of which was a moral battle against an ‘enemy force’ on a scale scarcely seen since the Second World War. By contrast, actors with fewer social resources had to turn to other methods to disseminate their narratives to the public, such as the Victims’ Society self-publishing a collection of memoirs, or Mori Tatsuya self-financing an independent film after being turned down by multiple television production companies. The central role of television as the primary medium for news reports, which was the case in the latter half of the 20th century, seems to have declined in the age of social media. As social media companies like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok occupy a greater share of people’s attention space, the ways people witness and respond to news events have changed dramatically since the immediate aftermath of the Aum Affair. While the rise of social media may have ‘democratised’ the playing field somewhat in terms of lowering the barriers to entry for ordinary people to engage in public discourse, however, the dominance of these companies in shaping public opinion have also arguably fuelled social division with the global rise of populism and ‘fake news’. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to reduce cultural patterns to economic or political power; cultural discourse is and always will be a matter of struggle, even if some actors are more powerful than others.

These are all, of course, general theoretical arguments about the nature of collective memory and the politics of commemoration. But what can a study of the Aum Affair reveal about Japanese culture more specifically? The book has argued the following points.

Above all, the aftermath of the Tokyo attack revealed and strengthened a national aversion to ‘religion’ (shūkyō), as a phenomenon to be approached cautiously and at arm’s length. Unlike other cultural contexts in which religions or religious symbols can provide solace and moral guidance in the face of collective adversity, Japan does not consider religion to be part of the civil sphere. Even when religion serves a cultural function – such as visiting temples and shrines, local festivals, Imperial rituals, and visiting family graves – these practices are often framed in the language of ‘culture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘family traditions’, rather than as explicit expressions of faith and religious affiliation. While the transition of Japan to an increasingly ‘non-religious’ (mushūkyō) society did not begin with the Aum Affair, it certainly intensified people’s aversion to organised religion as a potential danger to society.

Moreover, the Aum Affair brought to the surface Japan’s cultural tendency to employ social ostracism as a primary response mechanism against potentially threatening people and objects. Like many other societies, Japan has historically responded to the cultural ‘Other’ through social ostracism and the imposition of a physical and social barrier between the majority population and minority groups. Historically, a practice known as ‘mura hachibu’ has been a major mechanism for punishing normative transgressions in village communities in which the transgressors are shunned and excluded from communal activities. Mura hachibu is a practice that continues in some rural communities today. Similarly, social ostracism has been a major component of racialised discrimination against burakumin, an underclass of people who historically engaged in occupations associated with ritual pollution, including executions, undertaking, butchery, leather tanning, and leather crafts. Burakumin historically lived in segregated areas, known as ‘discriminated settlements’ (hisabetsu buraku), and in spite of decades of assimilation policies and public works (dōwa seisaku) in the 20th century, socio-economic disparity between buraku and non-buraku communities has remained and discrimination against burakumin has persisted in various areas of social life, including hiring and marriage.

To be sure, the point here is not to suggest that Aum members are in any way related or similar to burakumin nor that they deserve any sympathy as victims of discrimination. Rather, the point is that many actors’ responses to Aum in the aftermath of the Tokyo attack are illustrative of wider patterns of societal reactions to perceived threats and sources of symbolic pollution. In the years following the Aum Affair, many local authorities and resident groups near Aum/Aleph’s communes instituted a modern-day mura hachibu. For the first several years after the passing of the Organisations Regulation Act in 1999, authorities illegally refused to process resident records submitted by Aleph members, while residents often enforced ‘shunning’ by refusing to engage in conversations with Aleph members beyond what was absolutely necessary. Aum and Aleph, whose teachings already prohibited contact with outsiders, continued to minimise contact and maintain its ‘world-rejecting’ stance, contributing to their own isolation in the neighbourhoods they inhabited.

Finally, the Aum Affair has shown that restorative justice remains inchoate and underdeveloped in a cultural context which sees capital punishment as both desirable and necessary. The enduring public support for the death penalty in public opinion has rested on two assumptions: first, that the state is responsible for avenging victims and their families, and second, that offenders who commit serious crimes are beyond moral redemption and must pay for their crimes with their lives. Following the terrorist attacks and during the trials, many bereaved families and survivors expressed their wish that the culprits be put to death. The death sentences for Asahara and the twelve aides were seen as inevitable, if not desirable. Although organisations including the Japanese Federation of Bar Associations and Amnesty International have repeatedly called for an end to the practice, it continues to be defended as a necessary mechanism for delivering retributive justice. Furthermore, because of this strong moral impetus to ‘punish’ transgressors, there are few institutional opportunities whereby victims and perpetrators can reach any reconciliation. Despite the best efforts of figures such as Kōno Yoshiyuki, who has been a steadfast advocate for greater dialogue and reconciliation between perpetrators and victims, these actions do not seem to have been considered in any serious way by many other victims, public intellectuals, the mass media, and, most importantly, the state. In a cultural climate in which the death penalty is justified for murderers and terrorists, and in which any negotiation or compromise is seen as a breach of the norm of social ostracism, reconciliation remains a distant, if not unachievable, possibility.

Collective memory necessarily evolves as societies encounter new challenges and past events regain a new significance in the light of emerging events. Since the Tokyo sarin attack, Japan has encountered multiple events which have become cultural traumas on a scale perhaps even greater than the Aum Affair, including the 2009 global financial crisis and recession, the 2011 East Japan earthquake and the subsequent tsunami and nuclear disaster, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Each of these momentous events has had a fundamental impact on how Japan sees itself and how Japan relates to the world. Just as the Aum Affair raised questions about structural faults and dysfunctions in society, these cultural traumas have prompted fundamental questions about what constitutes a ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ society, from the reliance on nuclear energy to the risks that the most vulnerable people face from unemployment, natural disasters, and pandemics. As the perceived social significance of the Aum Affair relative to these more recent cultural traumas gradually declines, and as the core stakeholders such as victims and ex-members age, it appears inevitable that the frequency and intensity of commemorative speech acts surrounding the Aum Affair will only reduce with the passage of time.

The rise of new cultural traumas does not mean, however, that old traumas disappear. Even in the present day, older historical traumas of the atomic bombings, the remembrance of the war dead, and Japan’s colonial and wartime actions continue to stir intense domestic and international debates. As those with first-hand experiences of the Second World War inevitably pass away, these issues have become, first and foremost, about inter generational memory and ‘post-memory’. Progressive and conservative memory narratives by children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of those with first-hand experience of Japanese colonialism and the Second World War are constantly emerging and re-emerging (Ushiyama 2021). Likewise, just as the past several years have seen the interventions of Asahara’s daughters, discourses of the Aum Affair are increasingly contested as ‘post-memory’, as children of victims and perpetrators inherit the trauma of their parents, producing new interpretations in new contexts. In this sense, the Aum Affair has not truly ended. Even as collective memory has a structural and long-term effect on how a society views itself, it is always open to revision and challenge.