6 Public Intellectuals and the Struggle Over Mind Control

The Aum Affair reverberated across all aspects of civil society. On public transport, trash cans initially disappeared before eventually being replaced with cans with see-through casing. As Japan entered the panoptic age, CCTV cameras were installed in public spaces in greater numbers than ever before. Religions, whatever the tradition, found themselves navigating a perilous landscape in which any perceived infractions of social norms risked being tarred with the same brush as Aum amidst a general apathy – or even antipathy – towards organised religion. In short, what occurred in Aum’s wake was a ‘securitisation’ of minority religions as dangerous ‘cults’, reinforced by widespread negative cultural stereotypes of charismatic leaders, zealous followers, and litigious organisation representatives.

The Aum Affair dramatically and permanently altered the contours of academic and public debates about religion. In the aftermath of the attack, many academics and scientists played important roles as public intellectuals in communicating the causes and consequences of Aum Shinrikyō in public debate, as experts from fields as diverse as social psychology, sociology, medicine, chemistry, criminology, security studies, history of religion, and religious studies took part in these extensive media debates. At the same time, the Aum Affair exposed a rift between public discourse and academic discourse, raising meta-discursive questions about the relationship between the two domains. On the one hand, anti-cult activists and public intellectuals successfully disseminated theories about ‘brainwashing’ and ‘mind control’ in public discourse to explain the submissive behaviours of Aum’s most senior adherents. On the other hand, academics were generally sceptical that religious leaders could manipulate followers into submission through such psychological techniques. Nevertheless, many academics – especially scholars of religion – struggled to make an impact on these debates as it emerged that some academics had previously made remarks that appeared to endorse Aum. As a result, public discourse surrounding ‘cults’ – fuelled by a moral panic towards minority religions – became increasingly decoupled from academic debates, which urged caution before branding certain religious movements as dangerous and anti-social.

This is not to suggest, however, that the validity of the mind control thesis was universally accepted at face value in public discourse. Even amidst the media hysteria and ‘moral panic’ surrounding Aum, there were some public intellectuals who questioned these mainstream depictions of Aum as a murderous brainwashing cult plotting to take over Japan; instead, they offered more nuanced interpretations of Aum’s growth and eventual turn to violence. This chapter focuses on two of these figures, the novelist Murakami Haruki and the filmmaker Mori Tatsuya, whose works explicitly complicated and destabilised simplistic understandings of the Aum Affair by talking to participants directly affected by it. While coming from relatively privileged cultural positions, both Murakami and Mori spoke in opposition to the dominant narrative of Aum as an imminent threat to society and its members as brainwashed followers. Instead, both figures produced ‘centrifugal’ narratives that ran against the grain of state and mass media representations of the Aum Affair, introducing the public to the voices of those who had hitherto remained at the margins of these public debates by including both sarin attack survivors and Aum members.

To understand the significance of Murakami and Mori’s public interventions in relation to the wider cultural debates surrounding Aum, this chapter introduces the dichotomy of ‘authoritative intellectuals’, who pose narratives from a position of cultural, academic, and political authority, and ‘dialogical intellectuals’, who rely on dialogue with local participants to produce polyphonic narratives without necessarily appealing to their own intellectual authority. Whilst authoritative intellectuals have a preference towards unifying, ‘monological’ narratives – whether for or against elite ‘official’ speech genres – dialogical intellectuals are predisposed to the creation of ‘polyphonic’ narratives. This chapter argues that both Murakami’s Underground series and Mori’s series of movies and non-fiction works are examples of dialogical intellectual works which value the presentation of diverse worldviews as a goal in itself.

Public intellectuals have historically occupied a central position in the creation and dissemination of trauma narratives. A public intellectual can be defined as anyone who speaks to a public audience on a range of issues considered to be of social and political importance. In the Western world as well as in modern Japan, public intellectuals have tended to be comprised of male, highly educated cultural elites from professions such as artists, writers, novelists, journalists, scientists, and academics. For example, contemporary Japanese novelists such as Ōe Kenzaburō, Takahashi Genichirō, and Ikezawa Natsuki have written and spoken extensively on issues including social crisis, war memory, and natural disasters through various media using accessible language.

Whatever their professional background, intellectuals often play a pivotal role in narrating the moral significance of events to wider public audiences (Eyerman 2011). Through various media – such as artwork, reportages, newspaper opinion pieces, film and television – public intellectuals function as an important ‘carrier group’ for narrating the traumatic impact of particular events on affected communities.

This is not to say, however, that all public intellectuals engage in public discourse using the same strategies. This chapter develops a dichotomy of ‘authoritative intellectuals’ and ‘dialogical intellectuals’ who participate in civil discourse through different methods of knowledge production and performative strategies. Authoritative intellectuals narrate trauma from an assumed privileged social position, speaking from ‘above’ society. Often benefiting from a privileged parcours and from having been trained in high-status disciplines such as philosophy, mathematics, and increasingly, the natural sciences, they presume superior knowledge of history and politics, or they may even claim to have philosophical insights into the human condition which explain the causes and consequences of traumatic events to the general public. Generally, authoritative intellectuals are averse to associating with external sources of authority such as the state or party (Baert and Shipman 2012: 189), although they may rely on other forms of cultural capital such as professorial titles and artistic prizes as sources of authority and respect. Authoritative intellectuals often provide ‘monological’ trauma narratives; these are close-ended interpretations, often involving moral judgements whereby the intellectual speaks as an objective arbiter of truth (Baert 2015).

By contrast, dialogical intellectuals rely not so much on their intellectual authority as the process of creating knowledge through conversations with local actors as the foundation for their intellectual claims. Unlike authoritative intellectuals, dialogical intellectuals operate ‘alongside’ the public, engaging in dialogue with participants directly to produce knowledge. Dialogical intellectual action can take three primary forms. Firstly, they can engage in dialogue and direct exchange of knowledge with local actors and communities, resulting in mutual understanding and education. Secondly, the intellectual work itself can be dialogical in content and argument, as it seeks to produce polyphonic, open-ended interpretations of a particular social phenomenon. For example, the work could consist of interviews which contain contradictory or inconsistent accounts and perspectives without resolving the accuracy or truthfulness of those statements. Thirdly, the intellectual product can be a record or collection of dialogue among local participants, which is disseminated for public consumption. In this example, the intellectual situates herself as a participant observer standing alongside local actors collecting and disseminating dialogical encounters without necessarily taking part in the conversation. As discussed below, Murakami engages in the second type of dialogue, while Mori displays both the second and third types of dialogue. Because of their mode of public engagement, dialogical intellectuals can create dialogical and polyphonic trauma narratives which, instead of imposing authoritative interpretations, can help to introduce nuance, uncertainty, and contradictions to trauma narratives, while potentially helping to alleviate the polarizing distinction between sacred and profane, pure and impure, and victims and perpetrators.

The distinction between ‘monological’ and ‘dialogical’ trauma narratives is an obvious analogue to Bakhtin’s distinction between the ‘epic’ and the ‘novel’. However, the dichotomy extends well beyond the content of public intellectuals’ interventions. These public intellectuals differ not just on the basis of the content of their outputs, but also on the basis of their investigative strategies for collecting information, as well as their performative strategies for communicating their ideas to the public. For example, authoritative intellectuals may make claims based on their areas of expertise without personally collecting primary data such as interviews. They may prefer to give public lectures, write in newspaper columns, or appear on television, in short, speaking to an audience. In contrast, dialogical intellectuals may choose to conduct interviews and ethnographic fieldwork as the basis for their work, and to perform using a different strategy, such as by publishing interview transcripts, co-authoring publications with informants as collaborators, and by engaging in more interactive media outlets such as social media. As such, it is important not simply to highlight the content of intellectual interventions, but also the social processes through which such works are created and disseminated.

Besides the investigative, performative, and narrative dimensions of public intellectuals, the social location of their utterances vis-à-vis official, centripetal speech genres and vernacular, centrifugal speech is also important. Within any given discursive landscape, public intellectuals often navigate the intermediary space that is neither completely ‘official’ nor ‘vernacular’. To reach out to large public audiences, public intellectuals must escape the narrow confines of specialised professional jargon that is characteristic of elite academic speech genres; at the same time, they must command some degree of authority to demonstrate that they are worth being listened to. Moreover, independence – or the perception of independence – is crucial to their credibility. Public intellectuals often appeal to their own autonomy and separation from quotidian interests and ideological biases. This means they usually resist co-option or suppression by ‘official’ elite representations – without becoming yet another ‘lay’ voice at the margins.

As a result, both authoritative and dialogical intellectuals produce narratives that mix ‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ dimensions. On the one hand, authoritative intellectuals are more likely to produce ‘centripetal’ discourse that commands respect for their intellectual authority. At the same time, they must be sensitive to public moods and topical themes and eschew technical jargon to reach the public. On the other hand, dialogical intellectuals are better placed to produce ‘centrifugal’ narratives that disrupt and challenge established systems of meanings as they seek to introduce a multitude of voices into public discourse. Nevertheless, dialogical intellectuals are also constrained by the need to appeal to some sense of intellectual authority – for example, claiming mastery of an academic field or medium of art – and therefore cannot eliminate ‘centripetal’ elements from their interventions entirely. Of course, this is not to suggest that authoritative intellectuals are incapable of challenging elite narratives, or that they do not engage in dialogue. The very act of narration, whether authoritative or dialogical, can help to disrupt established discursive structures that impose silence on suffering past and present (Kurasawa 2009; Eyerman 2004: 162–3). For example, Edward Said was committed to supporting Palestinian independence as an intellectual, activist and citizen, engaging dialogically with Palestinians throughout his career. Nevertheless, he largely adhered to a monological form of intellectual intervention by writing essays and opinion pieces and delivering public lectures (Said 1994; 1995). In such cases, authoritative intellectuals may challenge the centripetal narratives of ‘official’ discourse by presenting an alternative centripetal narrative that focuses on the intellectual and moral authority of the speaker: in Said’s words, by ‘speaking truth to power’. If the aim of authoritative intellectuals is to replace what lies at the political centre of social discourse, the aim of dialogical intellectuals is to subvert the very structure and flow of social discourse by introducing heterogenous interpretations and perspectives.

The following sections discuss how Murakami Haruki and Mori Tatsuya produced dialogical trauma narratives through the medium of print media and film respectively. Although they hail from contrasting social and professional backgrounds, their dissatisfaction with dominant cultural representations of Aum led them both to engage directly with individuals personally affected by the Affair, including victims of the attack and both current and ex-members of Aum. As a result, they disrupted the exclusionary boundary between ‘victims’ (‘Japanese society’) and ‘perpetrators’ (‘Aum’), with two major effects. Firstly, they located the social problems that led to Aum within Japanese society, rather than isolating Aum as a foreign enemy threatening civil society. Secondly, by trying to find what Aum members had in common with the wider society, they suggested new interpreting categories that transcended those of ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ without underplaying or condoning Aum’s violence.

Throughout the initial period of intense media coverage after the Tokyo attack, public intellectuals played an instrumental role in attributing moral meanings to the perceived social crisis. Some authoritative intellectuals such as the philosopher Umehara Takashi provided relatively straightforward readings of the Aum Affair, attributing the causes of Aum’s violence to Asahara’s personal grudge against Japanese society (Umehara and Yamaori 1995). A different subset of authoritative intellectuals displayed partisan interests by collaborating with anti-cult movements to propagate an explicitly ‘anti-cult’ public agenda.

This team of ‘anti-cult’ public intellectuals championed mind control theory, drawing on pre-existing theories propounded by American anti-cult movements. Steven Hassan, a former Unification Church member who became an anti-cult activist and an ‘exit counsellor’ – a self-styled expert who encourages ‘cult’ members to quit movements through intensive counselling sessions – had an indirect but formative impact in bringing mind control theory into the popular lexicon. The Japanese translation of Hassan’s book Combatting Cult Mind Control, published in Japan as The Horrors of Mind Control (Maindo Kontorōru no Kyōfu) in 1993, became a standard reference point for intellectuals to explain how ‘cults’ manipulated believers into subservient subjects (Hassan 1993; Watanabe 1999). Hassan argued that, while brainwashing and mind control are similar concepts, mind control is more pernicious because it is non-coercive and difficult to differentiate from normal social interaction. Although both concepts aim at permanently altering a person’s identity and beliefs, brainwashing is coercive in nature, often conducted under physical constraint. By contrast, mind control is a subtler form of social control because many do not realise they are being manipulated (Hassan 1993: 107–9).

In his book, Hassan (1993) presents four types of mind control. First, ‘behavioural’ control restricts the daily regimen of individual members, including diet, clothing, and social interactions. Second, ‘informational control’ exposes members only to pre-approved information with limited access to outside information. Third, ‘thought control’ restricts members’ thoughts with reference only to the group’s moral and linguistic system, making any criticism of the group impossible. Last, ‘emotional control’ defines certain needs as evil or unnecessary and instils a fear of outsiders and leaving the movement. Hassan argues anti-social ‘destructive cults’ can be distinguished from religions proper by whether they engage in these modes of mind control. Subjects under the influence of mind control would need to undergo ‘exit counselling’ to overcome these obstacles and begin to think rationally for themselves. Hassan distanced his own approach from coercive practices of ‘deprogramming’ as advocated by activists such as Ted Patrick, in which anti-cult groups would kidnap and imprison adherents and forcibly deconvert them (though Hassan was himself involved in coercive deprogramming in his early career). Hassan travelled to Japan to expound his ideas to the public in the aftermath of the Aum Affair (Watanabe 1999). In an interview with the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, Hassan urged the public not to demonise low-ranking members; in his view, they had been manipulated into their beliefs and blanket criticism would only further strengthen the bonds between believers.²

Hassan himself did not become a popular figure on the Japanese media circuit. However, many public intellectuals quoted and reproduced Hassan’s claims extensively throughout the public debates on Aum. The ‘breakout star’ from these debates was undoubtedly Egawa Shōko, a freelance journalist who had been consistently critical of Aum as an anti-social cult since the late 1980s and had continued to write on Aum during the 1990s despite low levels of public interest (Egawa 1991; 1995). Drawing on her extensive knowledge of the group’s history and practice, Egawa received universal acclaim for her incisive critique of Aum’s recruitment strategies, strenuous training methods, and members’ blind obedience. In her commentaries, Egawa frames Asahara as a false prophet who tricked vulnerable youths for money and personal vainglory, making them into obedient ‘robots’ by using various mind control techniques (Egawa 1995: 500–03). Egawa received the prestigious Kikuchi Kan Prize in 1995, awarded by the literary magazine Bungei Shunjū to people that have made significant contributions to Japanese culture.

Similarly, anti-cult lawyer Takimoto Tarō, the representative for Aum Shinrikyō Victims’ Society (renamed to Aum Shinrikyō Families’ Society after the Tokyo attack; see Chapter 7), composed mainly of Aum members’ parents, also played an active part in explaining Aum’s internal structure and practices to the general public. On television, Egawa and Takimoto both played the role of prosecutor, cross-examining senior Aum members who appeared on television daily to deny responsibility and accuse the state of religious persecution (Gardner 1999: 222). It is worth noting here that both Egawa and Takimoto were targets of ‘poa’.³ Yet, they largely refrained from speaking as ‘victims’ or ‘survivors’ of the Aum Affair, instead positioning themselves as authoritative sources of knowledge on Aum. Some academics, such as the social psychologist Nishida Kimiaki, theologian Asami Sadao (the translator of Hassan’s influential text), and computational linguist Tomabechi Hideto, were strong proponents of brainwashing/mind control theories.⁴ These intellectuals performed a pivotal role in challenging Aum’s senior disciples who frequently appeared on television to feign innocence and accuse the government of religious persecution. In late 1995, these anti-cult intellectuals formed the advocacy group Japan De-Cult Council, bringing together figures including Takimoto, Nishida, and Asami.⁵ The advocacy group later changed its name to Japan Society for Cult Prevention and Recovery in 2004.⁶ Although the group does not endorse coercive deprogramming or exit counselling, such practices remain widespread today (Richardson 2011: 326). In a particularly egregious case, Gotō Tōru, a Unification Church member, was imprisoned by his family in solitary confinement and subjected to deprogramming by a Christian pastor for 12 years (Human Rights without Frontiers 2011). However, because these cases are often treated as familial disputes, the police have been reluctant to investigate these cases and they have rarely resulted in criminal prosecution.

In this context of general anxiety and antipathy towards cults, anti-cult intellectuals and activists have generally maintained their antagonistic stance towards Aum as well as other religions accused of being cults more broadly. In the afterword to an edited collection of ex-believers’ testimonies, Takimoto expands his object of criticism beyond Aum to include a more expansive category of ‘destructive cults’, which, in his view, were on the rise in contemporary Japan. He alleges that these groups ‘accumulate and systematically use mind control techniques, frighten those trying to leave, exploit labour, collectively use psychological harassment, use violence, lynch, wiretap, and sue frequently’ (Kanariya no kai 2000: 259–60). In a newspaper comment marking the tenth anniversary of the Tokyo sarin attack, Takimoto reiterated his position that ‘Aum must be eradicated.’⁷ Reasserting the similarities between Aum and Nazis as totalitarian movements, Takimoto argued that ‘like Nazis in Germany, the nation must not give recognition to a religious group that has committed indiscriminate murder under a set of beliefs. The [current] situation, in which reparations for victims gives an excuse for the group to survive, is a contradiction similar to permitting Nazis to survive so that they pay reparations for the Holocaust.’⁸ The mass media have largely accepted and reproduced these narratives without challenging or criticising their overtly partisan interests against certain new religions, consistently providing them with airtime and column inches amidst heightened levels of public interest in new religions. The strong moral drive of the argument, which isolated Aum as an enemy and a cultural ‘Other’ invading the core of civil society, became so predominant in media discourse that it ‘all but drowned out alternative voices and perspectives’ (Reader 2001: 229).

Although authoritative intellectuals speaking from an explicitly ‘anti-cult’ perspective dominated public discussions, religious scholars in Japan – much like their counterparts in North America and Europe – were sceptical of the idea that ‘cults’ could psychologically manipulate members to become as docile and obedient as proponents of mind control claimed (Anthony and Robbins 2008; Barker 1984; Shupe et al. 2008; Ushiyama 2019a). In the months after the Tokyo attack, various religious scholars challenged the simplistic frame of Aum as a ‘death cult’ and sought Aum’s origins in changes in youth culture (Inoue et al. 1995). Some disagreed with the characterisation of Aum as a ‘foreign species’ and a cultural anomaly by arguing that Aum was indeed ‘born of and nourished in the soil of contemporary Japan’ (Shimazono 1995: 382).

Given Aum’s unique history as a religious movement, one might expect that religious scholars, such as historians, sociologists, and philosophers of religion, as well as religious practitioners, would play a leading role in offering authoritative trauma narratives. However, religious scholars were relatively marginal in these public debates: ‘alternative accounts of Aum [to the mind control narrative] … had little if any impact upon television coverage’ of the Aum Affair (Gardner 1999: 222). To understand why, it is necessary to look at the wider socio-cultural environment in which religious scholars faced a public crisis of confidence.

From the moment that Aum’s culpability became public knowledge, religious scholars faced public criticism on two fronts. Firstly, they had appeared to be entirely oblivious of the rise of Aum throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, despite Aum’s involvement in a number of social controversies, thereby putting their supposed ‘expertise’ of new religions into question (Dorman 2012b: 158). Secondly, and more seriously, it emerged that some writers with backgrounds in religious studies had spoken out in favour of Aum in the past, forming an impression among the public that religious scholars were too lenient about, or possibly even in collusion with, anti-social religious movements.

There were two figures who faced intense criticism for their prior comments on Aum: Nakazawa Shin’ichi and Shimada Hiromi. A philosopher of religion, Nakazawa Shin’ichi was a former graduate student at Tokyo University who had studied Tibetan esoteric Buddhism. As an ascetic, he had personally trained under a Tibetan lama and published The Rainbow Ladder (Niji no Kaitei) in 1981, a text that later became foundational for popularising Tibetan Buddhism among aspiring practitioners in Japan, including individuals who eventually joined Aum (Sanpo and Nakazawa 1981). Furthermore, and more problematically, Nakazawa had engaged in several magazine interviews with Asahara during the early 1990s, in which he had praised Asahara as a true practitioner of Buddhism (Hirano and Tsukada 2015). Separately, the sociologist of religion Shimada Hiromi had spoken positively about Aum prior to the Tokyo sarin attack. As a graduate student in sociology of religion, also at Tokyo University, he had studied a rural commune-based movement called Yamagishi-kai as a covert member (Shimada 2012). His interactions with Aum started when he was invited by an acquaintance to contribute a piece to a contemporary affairs magazine, which resulted in him conducting an interview with Asahara.⁹ Although he did not study Aum systematically, Shimada continued to write about Aum, countering accusations that it was a dangerous cult (Hirano and Tsukada 2015). At the start of 1995, reacting to the first media reports of suspected links between Aum and sarin production, Aum invited Shimada personally to inspect the Kamikuishiki headquarters. Shimada accepted the invitation and visited the sarin chemical plant, which had been hastily disguised as a shrine to Shiva days before his visit. Shimada went on the public record to deny that he saw any evidence of sarin production, and that another group was likely to be behind the Matsumoto sarin attack the previous year (Reader 2000b: 371).

Although these instances of praising or defending Aum were by no means widespread, Nakazawa and Shimada’s actions significantly weakened the epistemological authority of religious experts in commenting on the Aum Affair and about controversial new religions more generally. Consequently, scholars who ‘discuss[ed] movements such as Aum in any terms other than those of cultic deviance and evil’ were viewed as ‘little more than apologists’ (Reader 2001: 232). This, in turn, created a discursive space in which anti-cult intellectuals and activists could take centre stage without encountering strong resistance or criticism from scholars.

Although religious scholars had a relatively marginal role in informing public opinion, there were some examples in which other public intellectuals offered alternative trauma narratives from an authoritative position. Furihata Ken’ichi, a journalist and editor at Asahi Shimbun who had extensively covered the Aum trials, characterised Aum as a uniquely Japanese phenomenon that arose out of various structural ailments in contemporary society. In his view, the believers’ willingness to carry out horrific crimes should be explained as ‘obedience to authority’, but not necessarily mind control (Furihata 2000). Reiterating media characterisations of Aum as a social illness, Furihata situates Aum as a pathological iteration of rigid, irrational, vertical structures which have characterised Japanese organisations at various historical junctures. Furihata argues that a parallel to Aum’s ‘totalitarian’ organisational structure could be found in fascist Japan; just as Aum members valorised total devotion to Asahara as an end in itself, the Imperial militarist regime justified and aestheticised absolute obedience to superiors’ orders as a virtue, emphasising the primacy of putting the collective above the individual. Even after Japan’s defeat, the vertical organisational structure – and with it, moral justifications for group unity and absolute loyalty – survived through corporations, which produced their own ‘soldiers’ and ‘warriors’ (ibid.: 221–5). Once the post-war period of high economic growth ended and uncertainties grew about where Japan was heading, the ‘spectre’ of totalitarianism reappeared and reproduced itself under the guise of Aum Shinrikyō (ibid.: 224). Echoing Erich Fromm’s (2001) thesis in Fear of Freedom that totalitarianism is the result of existential angst created by modern individualism, Furihata suggests that Aum’s members had not been ‘mind controlled’ but rather had ceded the will to think independently and refused to reflect on the moral consequences of their actions (Furihata 2000: 225–30). Furihata accepts mind control as only a partial explanation for the escalation of violence (ibid.: 242–4), stating, ‘I do not consider this group as simply an enigmatic and incomprehensible [makafushigi] cult. I don’t consider the people who belonged to the religious organisation to have been particularly peculiar either. But they were a little selfish and pretentious, suggestible but also conceited, and unable to be independent, in the true sense of the word’ (ibid.: 245).

Furihata also takes a critical stance towards public attitudes towards surveillance and national security in the post-Aum landscape. He warns that in the post-Aum climate, people have become too dependent on state power to ensure public security, at the expense of fundamental civil rights and liberties (ibid.: 16–17).¹⁰

Furihata’s authoritative counter-narrative highlights how authoritative counter-narratives who questioned the mind control narrative emerged not from religious scholars, but from journalists, who were arguably seen by the public as having a critical distance from new religions. In this cultural context, where opposition to mind control was – and to an extent still is – a minority position, Murakami and Mori are notable for taking up a dialogical approach to create alternative trauma narratives.

Murakami Haruki was already an established author by the late 1990s, having published a string of commercially successful novels since the late 1970s. Compared to his fictional works, which often featured young protagonists, sometimes in surreal settings, the two-volume work, Underground (Murakami 1997) and Underground 2 (Murakami 2001) marked a radical change in tone and subject matter. The Underground series is an edited collection of interviews carried out by Murakami with victims and families of victims of the Tokyo sarin incident (in the first volume) and current and ex-Aum members (in the second volume). Explaining his decision to write his first non-fiction work, he states that it was necessary to revisit a question that, to him, was never answered satisfactorily: ‘what actually happened in the Tokyo subway the morning of 20 March, 1995?’ (Murakami 2003: 196).¹¹ Keeping his distance from existing narratives, he seeks ‘words coming from another direction, new words for a new narrative. Another narrative to purify this [existing] narrative’ (ibid.: 196) by interviewing individuals with first-hand experience of Aum and the Tokyo attack. Methodologically, he begins by collecting the experiences of those whose lives were directly affected by the terrorist attack, rather than relying solely on his areas of expertise. As Murakami states,

At the beginning of every interview I would ask the interviewees about their background – where they were born, their upbringing, their family, their job (especially their job) – in order to give each a ‘face’, to bring them into focus. What I did not want was a collection of disembodied voices. Perhaps it’s an occupational hazard of the novelist’s profession, but I am less interested in the ‘big picture’ as it were, than in the concrete, irreducible humanity of each individual.

(Ibid.: 6)

The result is a complex and nuanced collection of individual stories that do not necessarily present a coherent or singular picture. In the first volume, he is concerned with the victims: he interviews those commuters who survived the attack, as well as grieving families and family members of survivors. Individual memories of the event vary greatly. Some suddenly experienced their vision darkening and found it hard to breathe; others smelled a noxious smell and reacted immediately to escape. While some suffered from lasting psychological and physical trauma, others moved on quickly to resume their ordinary lives, seemingly relatively unaffected by the attack. Some experienced irreversible loss. In one interview, a widow relates the shock of losing her husband while heavily pregnant with his baby (ibid.: 165–74), while in another interview the brother of a woman who was severely disabled by the attack recalls the sorrow of looking after his sister in a near-vegetative state, but celebrates her gradual recovery (ibid.: 76–83). Throughout the volume, Murakami favours fragmented individual narratives over a singular trauma narrative. He states, ‘[w] hat transpired was more profound, more compounded with meanings than anything I could have imagined’ (ibid.: 205). Unravelling and isolating the individual psychological traumas of victims from the singular orthodox trauma narrative, Murakami attempts to represent the actual suffering of individual victims as told to him, rather than understanding the symbolic wound that ‘Japan’ collectively suffered as a nation.

Although Murakami displays the second dimension of dialogical intellectual action – producing a work which is dialogical in content – and uses dialogue with local participants to deconstruct the orthodox trauma narrative, he is not a purely dialogical intellectual. He also acts authoritatively as he constructs and advocates a new, alternative trauma using his cultural authority and expertise. In the afterword, employing his command of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, he offers a new trauma narrative, placing Aum not as an outsider, ‘an alien presence viewed through binoculars on the far shore’ (ibid.: 197), but as a return of the repressed subconscious of the Japanese psyche (‘the underground’), which attacked the conscious, surface world (ibid.: 197–9). Although Aum constructs a different cognitive, linguistic, and symbolic universe to that of Japan, Murakami sees certain resemblances between the Japanese psyche and Aum’s beliefs; similar to Furihata’s comparison of Aum and Japanese corporations, Murakami points out that blind obedience to an existing structural order is not unique to Aum, but is present in Japanese society as a whole (Ibid.: 206–8).

The second volume, Underground 2, originally serialised in the literary magazine Bungei Shunjū in 1998, directly follows the concerns he raised in the first volume, as he tries to understand why Aum Shinrikyō came into being: his intention is to open up the ‘“black box” … which suddenly, from out of nowhere, made an assault on the everyday’ (ibid.: 213). Though he does not interview the actual perpetrators of the attack, Murakami speaks to rank-and-file believers, many of whom were full-time devotees (samana) at the time. Many of them had already left the group, but some of his interviewees were still members at the time of the interview (some also quit Aum following the interview). As with the first volume, he adheres to a novelistic and polyphonic approach that values diversity. His goal is to convey ‘not one clear viewpoint’ but to gather ‘flesh-and-blood material from which to construct multiple viewpoints’ (ibid.: 215, emphasis in original). Instead of condoning or condemning members’ actions, Murakami listens to their motivations for joining, enquires what life was like at the commune, challenges their views on guilt and responsibility, and asks why they left (if they did and, if not, why not).

The interviewees’ accounts confirm that Aum relied on training techniques that its critics identified as mind control, including solitary confinement, and forcible administration of LSD in an initiation ritual (ibid.: 251–60; 298–304). Multiple accounts corroborate Aum’s sinister characteristics; a young woman recalls that she refused sexual advances by Asahara, and later had two years of her memory erased by electro-shock (ibid.: 285–94). Still, Murakami breaks down the stereotypical image of the ‘crazed’ cult worshipper by introducing the interviewees as varied and interesting characters. Some were never fully convinced of Aum’s claims in the first place and had doubts about Asahara’s teachings, while others, who were not involved in Aum’s militarisation programme, still held mixed feelings towards their guru despite admitting that the Tokyo sarin attack was abhorrent (ibid.: 239–50). Unlike the sensational media reports which emphasised brainwashing practices and torture methods, the interviews show Aum to be far less restrictive and ‘cult-like’ in some respects. One believer commented that it was possible to suggest changes to the guru’s initial orders (ibid.: 244), while another wryly remarked that Aum was ‘[n] ot much different from the secular world’, as Asahara treated Tokyo University graduates and beautiful women better than other members (ibid.: 255).¹²

As with the first volume, Murakami’s dialogical method deconstructs and challenges the orthodox trauma narrative before he offers a new, authoritative interpretation of why so many intelligent youths with bright prospects joined Aum. According to Murakami, the Aum elites, with high levels of education and technical expertise, ‘couldn’t help having grave doubts about the inhumane, utilitarian grist mill of capitalism and the social system in which their own essence and efforts – even their own reasons for being – would be fruitlessly ground down’ (ibid.: 307). The sense of anomie and powerlessness of those individuals on the corporate ladder pushed them to Aum, a (false) sanctuary that provided the possibility for self-improvement, on the condition that they followed Asahara’s words as truth and abandoned the capacity for self-criticism. As he suggests in the conclusion of both volumes, Aum is an unwanted outcome – the return of the repressed – of an excessively materialist society which excludes those who do not endorse capitalism, but it is not a foreign enemy to be rejected. The people who joined Aum are ‘not abnormal; they’re not disadvantaged; they’re not eccentrics. They are the people who live average lives … who live in my neighbourhood’ (ibid.: 309).

The Underground series was reviewed positively by critics, although some critics such as Ian Hacking (2000) questioned whether it was ultimately successful in uncovering anything specifically ‘Japanese’ about the terrorist attack.¹³ There are also methodological weaknesses in Murakami’s works, as the interviewees for both volumes were arbitrarily and unsystematically selected by his assistants and editors. The abstractions he makes from interviewing low-ranking believers are also problematic, as many of them were ignorant of the militarisation process. As such, his interviews provide relatively little insight into what life was like for higher-ranking disciples chosen to participate in Aum’s criminal activities. The result is a disjuncture between the dialogical content of his interviews, and the monological conclusions he draws; if some believers were capable of being detached from Aum’s apocalyptic claims, why did the high-ranking members seem so obedient in carrying out such abhorrent crimes? Whilst privileging the interpretive authority of low-ranking members for making sense of their own biographies, Murakami neglects to consider the possible variance between low-ranking and high-ranking disciples who were engaged in very different types of devotional work: ordinary members were engaged in mundane tasks such as construction, recruitment, and cooking, as opposed to illegal, ‘secret work’ of weapons development research, kidnapping, and murders in which Asahara’s aides were selected to participate.

Mori Tatsuya’s public interventions differ significantly from Murakami’s, both in context and content, despite their similar methodologies of talking to ‘perpetrators’. Unlike Murakami, Mori was unknown in public discourse before his directorial debut with the documentary film, A (Mori 1998). A follows the daily life of a young believer called Araki Hiroshi, who is entrusted with the organisation’s public relations after the arrests of the leadership. Gaining the trust of Araki and his fellow members, Mori captures the daily life inside the organisation, thereby dispelling some myths surrounding Aum believers and challenging the Manichaean frame separating Aum and Japanese society. As Mori states in a subsequent commentary book (Mori 2002), he envisaged revealing a side of Aum that was previously inaccessible through conventional television coverage.

Unlike Murakami, whose international career as a novelist had given him access to a large publishing house and, later, a serial in a premier literary magazine, Mori initially struggled to find an outlet for his vision. As a freelance television director, he initially pitched the idea of a television documentary to various producers, arguing that it was necessary to go beyond the hackneyed trope of Aum as a ‘dangerous cult’ to better understand the motivations behind the group’s actions. However, according to Mori, no television production company was willing to commission the project, as they deemed it too controversial, and simply did not fit well with the condemnatory tone required of Aum-related coverage (Gardner 1999; Mori 2002). Denied access to television as a medium of expression, Mori opted to self-finance the project as an independent film, and eventually completed the film with the help of the producer Yasuoka Takaharu, who frequently doubled as second cameraman.

Throughout the film, Mori challenges the supposed objectivity of the camera, that whatever is captured on film must be ‘true’ and ‘factual’. Speaking from experience, Mori argues in his accompanying commentary book that any video footage can be edited in post-production to induce multiple impressions (Mori 2002: 215–16). In his experience, all camera footage, presented as ‘fact’, is merely a manipulated representation of reality. By rejecting the false objectivism of the camera, Mori adopts a perspectival shift which is central to the film. Itself a subject with limited horizons, Mori’s camera captures life in Aum from within the organisation, as well as on the level of its participant subjects. Rather than seeking to produce an ‘objective’ bird’s-eye view depiction of Aum, Mori implicitly endorses Weber’s spirit of verstehen through an attempt to understand how Aum members see the world. Although Mori does not fully embed himself into Aum’s lifestyle, he builds up enough trust with believers to engage in candid conversations about why they continue to believe in Asahara as an omniscient guru, and whether they still believe in Aum’s doctrines. By treating Aum believers as legitimate sites of knowledge and information, Mori shows Aum believers to be reflexive and much less ‘brainwashed’ than media reports suggest.

The deliberate perspectival shift also enables Mori to reveal disingenuous and questionable practices by some media personnel behind the camera. In a scene near the beginning of the film, a reporter from a national television network approaches Araki for permission to film. As Araki asks whether he is being filmed at the moment and denies permission for the footage to be used, the reporter replies that she does not know if he is being filmed and asks whether they can use the footage anyway if the camera was running, citing ‘journalistic freedom’ (shuzai no jiyū). In another scene, outside the Kamikuishiki headquarters, a news reporter approaches Araki, claiming he has secured permission to film inside Aum’s buildings from the bankruptcy trustee (an external auditor appointed to manage Aum’s finances after it was declared bankrupt), and that Araki’s consent is unnecessary. As Araki rebuffs the claim to say the news crew cannot film without the permission of Aum residents living in the commune, the reporter changes his tune to admit he was there to secure Araki’s permission, and that the trustee’s agreement was insufficient by itself.

In a sequence that has gained a central significance in the film, Mori unexpectedly captures a scene of false arrest. In this scene, a group of believers leave the commune and go into the street, whereupon several policemen interrogate Araki and his companions. As they refuse to show identification and attempt to walk away, a police officer tackles a member down to the ground, himself falling to the ground in the process. The officer claims to be hurt, and as the member lies apparently concussed on the ground, he is arrested promptly for assault and obstruction of justice. On the sidelines, members of the public watch the incident and later try to talk Araki and others out of Aum. In the following scene, breaking his principle of non-interference, Mori hands the tape over to Aum’s defence lawyer as evidence; the man is later released without charge.

Throughout the film, Mori questions the dualistic codes imposed upon Aum – of society as good, civil, morally upright, and rational, and Aum as evil, barbaric, immoral, and irrational – without condoning or defending Aum’s crimes. Mori shows Aum first and foremost as a religious organisation; devoted to a moral order different to Japan’s, but hardly resembling a dangerous terrorist group intent on destroying Japan at all costs. Although the film itself lacks a clear narrative direction and thus does not impose an authoritative interpretation of the Aum Affair, Mori provides an exegesis of his motivations behind the film in his commentary book. Like Murakami, Mori questions the boundary drawn between Japanese society and Aum by asking whether the Japanese people might be as obedient to rules and norms as some Aum believers are, as Japanese society hatefully and vengefully attacks Aum – the evil ‘perpetrators’ – on behalf of the reified ‘victims’ (Mori 2002: 157; 175–6).

In terms of cultural impact, Mori was largely excluded from mainstream media outlets, probably as a result of his provocative message that was much more directly critical of the police and the media than other existing counter-narratives. Mori’s limited financial resources also meant A was shown only at a small number of independent cinemas. Attendance was approximated at 10,000 people nationwide as of 1999 (Mori and Yasuoka 2001: 11). While some critics reviewed the film positively (Gardner 1999: 231–2), mainstream media also criticised Mori as being too sympathetic to Aum (Koike 2011). Unsurprisingly, Takimoto Tarō criticised the film, claiming Mori was too kind to Aum believers and neglected to capture the suffering of Aum’s victims; the film did not properly address Aum as ‘perpetrators’ and Japanese society as ‘victims’, and neglected to address questions of ‘mind control’ (Gardner 1999: 233–4; Mori 2012 (v. 2): 110–16).

Undeterred by these criticisms, Mori made a sequel titled A2, which was released in 2001. Whereas the first work fits with the second dimension of dialogical intellectual action as content and argument, A2 serves also as an illustration of the third dimension of dialogical intellectual action as a record of dialogue among local participants. Throughout A2, Mori shuttles back and forth between Aum and the surrounding world as a participant observer.

A2 features less of Mori as a talking participant and foregrounds the conversations between Aum members and local residents. A2 focuses on the interaction between Aum members living in a small shared house and local resident groups campaigning for their eviction, exploring the potential for reconciliation and mutual understanding through these daily conversations. In one instance, a local community-based Aum surveillance group – similar to a ‘neighbourhood watch’ group – agrees to disband after befriending and reconciling with Aum members, concluding that they no longer pose a threat to the community. While the residents dismantle the surveillance tent next to the commune building, they seem to give a qualified endorsement of the adherents’ religious commitments. Nonetheless, reconciliation with Aum members seems a distant possibility for the rest of Japanese society. In one scene, a real estate broker comes under public scrutiny for employing Aum believers. As crews wait outside, an Aum representative heads to the company to apologise to company executives and local government officials, promising that the members will quit and never return to their town. As a reporter approaches the representative and Mori for comment, Mori leaves the site, apparently exasperated. A2 received a wider theatrical release than A did, was critically acclaimed, and won an award in the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, subsequently securing Mori’s position in the Japanese civil sphere as a progressive public intellectual (Gardner 2002a: 340; 343).

Like Murakami’s interviews, Mori’s exploration of the daily lives of Aum believers is not without limitations. Like an early 20th-century ethnographer on fieldwork, Mori is reliant on informants who guide and define what and whom he is allowed to see. However, unlike an ethnographer, who can question and exclude things or information which he or she sees as untrue or irrelevant, Mori’s suspension of his epistemological authority limits his critical capacity to challenge the veracity of his interviewee’s claims. Moreover, like Murakami’s interviewees, Mori’s informants are all low-ranking ones who were not involved in the militarisation process, and his ahistorical method reveals very little about Aum’s gradual turn to terrorism prior to the Matsumoto and Tokyo attacks. The decision to talk with Aum members also came at the cost of excluding dialogue with the victims, whose perspectives are patently absent from A and A2.

Since directing A2, Mori has turned to writing non-fiction. A3 (Mori 2012) is a series of essays originally serialised in the Japanese edition of Playboy magazine between 2005 and 2007. The book challenges the demonisation of Asahara as a psychopathic and manipulative leader and seeks to uncover the ‘true’ version of Asahara. He continues to employ a broadly dialogical method, interviewing people who knew Asahara during childhood or in the years before he established himself as a guru. Speaking to and exchanging letters with Asahara’s closest aides in jail, he contests the orthodox representation of Asahara as the source of evil and a master manipulator, instead suggesting that Aum’s turn to violence was the result of complex social dynamics within the organisation. Mori argues that Aum turned violent not because Asahara brainwashed and controlled his disciples to enact his destructive vision, but because his disciples, eager to please Asahara, presented him with possible solutions to his paranoid fears and delusions, and executed them with his approval and consent.

In the book, Mori focuses on Asahara’s mental condition during the trials. During the trial hearings, Asahara’s behaviour became increasingly erratic, speaking broken English and gibberish on occasion before eventually falling silent. Towards the end of the trial, his defence argued the trial should be halted on the basis that Asahara was not mentally fit to stand trial. Several psychiatrists appointed by the defence team concurred that Asahara was in a state of mental confusion and required treatment. The court-appointed psychiatrist, however, reached the opposite conclusion: that Asahara was faking illness and that he was fit to stand trial. In a further turn of events, after the initial verdict, the Tokyo High Court dismissed the appeal on purely procedural grounds (for the defence’s failure to file documents on time). Subsequent special appeals to the High Court and the Supreme Court were also dismissed, thereby finalising the first trial’s death-sentence verdict without the case advancing to a higher court of appeal. Following these developments, Mori criticises the series of judicial decisions as politically motivated, and reflective of Japan’s moral impulsion to sentence Asahara to death regardless of his current mental condition (Mori 2012 (v. 1): 329–39). Although Mori continues to rely on dialogical methods to inform his views, unlike A and A2, A3 is driven by an authoritative counter-narrative which directly challenges the image of Asahara as the evil mastermind. A3 won the 2011 Kōdansha Non-Fiction Award, and Mori continues to write mainly non-fiction books on an array of social issues such as the critique of Japanese media, the death penalty, and the discrimination of minority groups.

Mori has continued to speak publicly about the Aum Affair on a number of occasions since then. In 2018, amidst media speculations that Asahara and his accomplices were likely to be executed before Emperor Akihito’s abdication in 2019, Mori founded the group Society for Pursuing the Truth of the Aum Affair (Oumu Jiken Shinsō Kyumei no Kai) alongside sociologist Miyadai Shinji. The Society attracted the support of several dozen public intellectuals, journalists, and writers who – like Mori – were convinced that Asahara’s mental condition required medical treatment, and that due process was being sidelined in favour of a speedy execution. The website – which closed after the executions were carried out – reproduced sections of texts taken from reports written by psychiatrists appointed by the defence to argue that Asahara was likely suffering from mental illness caused by prolonged confinement. Despite their protestations, the government carried out the executions in July 2018. In August 2018, the Society held its first and final symposium, inviting speakers to reflect on the executions. Among the speakers was Kōno Yoshiyuki (see Chapters 3 and 7), a survivor of the Matsumoto sarin attack.¹⁴ Although the Society for the Pursuit of Truth of the Aum Affair lasted for a mere few months before disbanding, the event was demonstrative of Mori’s transformation from a dialogical listener to a more authoritative opinion leader in seeking to shape public understandings of the Aum Affair.

Whether or not Murakami and Mori’s polyphonic narratives as dialogical intellectuals have been successful in changing prevailing social attitudes towards Aum is debatable. On the one hand, Murakami’s case demonstrates how a high-status writer and novelist with privileged access to national media outlets can pose centrifugal, polyphonic counter-narratives that challenge established frames of meaning to a mass audience. Published by Kōdansha, one of Japan’s largest publishing houses, Underground was a national bestseller that sold 270,000 copies within the first two months of its release (Kavitha and Murakami 1997), and the sequel Underground 2: The Place That Was Promised was also a bestseller.¹⁵ The commercial success of the works suggest that Murakami’s works resonated with the public to a certain extent. On the other hand, Mori’s unsuccessful bid to create a television documentary illustrates how Mori’s creative vision – to portray Aum in a more nuanced way beyond the sensationalist caricatures – conflicted with mass media interests that defined the discursive rules of what could and could not be said publicly. Barred from using television as a medium of expression, Mori was forced to turn to independent film-making, and the resulting productions were watched by a much smaller audience: in Mori’s words, he was completely ignored by the mass media.¹⁶ Nevertheless, this fortuitous turn also paved the way to his emergence as a maverick film-maker, enabling him to write for established newspapers and magazines in his later career.

Whatever the cultural impact of these counter-narratives, however, it is difficult to deny that authoritative anti-cult intellectuals’ explanations of mind control as the central mechanism by which religious followers lose autonomy, as well as representations of ‘cult’ leaders as essentially malevolent and self-interested villains, have been reproduced not only in media discourse but also in other areas of public life. For instance, many universities in Japan today regularly warn students against ‘cults’ recruiting new members on campuses through public service announcements, leaflets, and classroom seminars.¹⁷ In other words, these universities actively discourage students from joining controversial religious movements on the grounds that they pose a danger to mental, financial, and familial well-being. After the perceived blunders of Nakazawa and Shimada, which turned public opinion against religious scholars, few scholars have explicitly challenged these generalised cultural biases against minority religions in the post-Aum world, as compared with religious scholars in European and North American contexts who, in general, have been unafraid to criticise policies which single out certain new religions as harmful. To this end, the representation of Aum as a ‘destructive cult’, embedded in wider anxieties about religions as potential threats to civil society, remains central to the ‘official’ and ‘elite’ centripetal discourses supported by anti-cult activists, mass media, security agencies, universities, and some public intellectuals.

Despite the modest public impacts of Murakami and Mori’s dialogical trauma narratives, indirect effects of their works may be found in other cultural products. As the following chapters will discuss, in parallel with, and following the release of their works, there has been an emergence of narratives that take a distance from, or directly question, the dominant centripetal, meta-narrative of the Aum Affair as a traumatic moment for the nation. For instance, the Subway Sarin Incident Victims’ Society has published several works narrating victims’ experiences to mark anniversaries of the Tokyo attack (see Chapter 7). In 2010, book editor Aoki Yumiko, who had previously worked with the Victims’ Society, published an edited collection of autobiographical interviews with ex-members titled Having Lived Aum (Oumu o Ikite),¹⁸ which followed a methodology similar to Murakami and Mori’s (Aoki 2010). Publishing the autobiographical accounts with minimal comment, the volume dispels the myth that there is a ‘typical’ background of Aum believers and their subsequent trajectories, including their motivations for their continued membership or disaffiliation. Whether or not Murakami or Mori had a direct impact on these works, it is evident that there are many narratives, from the perspectives of both ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ that make sense of the Aum Affair beyond the ossified meta-narrative of Aum simply as an external enemy attacking the Japanese state and civil society. The following chapters discuss and explore some of the most important interlocutors in these discursive battles.