Aum Shinrikyō 193
Chapter 12 Aum Shinrikyō
Erica Baffelli
Introduction1
Aum Shinrikyō オウム真理教 (Ōmu Shinrikyō; literally, Aum Supreme Truth) was founded in 1984 by Asahara Shōkō 麻原彰晃 (b. 1955). The group started as a small yoga centre and developed into a complex organisation influenced by Buddhist teachings and catastrophic millenarian thought. In 1986, a double system of membership was introduced, with lay members who took part in activities on a more or less regular scale, and shukkesha 出家者 (literally, per- son who left her/his house; a term used in Buddhism to indicate renunciants), that is, members who had ‘left the world,’ cutting their ties with their families and friends, leaving their jobs or schools, and starting a communal life with other members (Reader 2000: 8). The number of members increased rapidly during the group’s first few years of activities. In 1989, Aum Shinrikyō reached around 4,000 members, 380 of them being shukkesha. In 1995, the group claimed around 10,000 members in Japan (Reader 2000: 63). Among them, around 1,100 were living in communes. In 1995, some members, including the founder, were involved in a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, during which thirteen people were killed and thousands injured. The Aum Shinrikyō Incident (Ōmu Shinrikyō jiken オウム真 理教事件) not only had dire consequences for the victims and the develop- ment of the group, but also affected how religion is defined and perceived in contemporary Japan (Baffelli and Reader 2012). Many Aum Shinrikyō members were young, 47.5 per cent in their twenties and 27.9 per cent in their thirties (Shimazono 2001: 21). The average age of the shukkesha was 30.1 years. Some members were very well educated having graduated from high-ranking univer- sities. These members’ characteristics were often emphasised by media and critics in the aftermath of the 1995 sarin gas attack. Feelings of emptiness and loss of meaning in Japanese young people’s lives were seen as the reasons why young men and women with a very promising career ahead of them were attracted to Asahara’s teachings (Metraux 1999).
1 This book chapter is a revised version of Baffelli and Staemmler 2011.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004362970_013 194 Baffelli
Aum Shinrikyō changed its name into Aleph in 2000,2 and in 2007 a group of ex-members led by Jōyū Fumihiro 上祐史浩 (b. 1962) founded a new group called Hikari no Wa ひかりの輪 (Circle of Light).
History and Development
The history of Aum Shinrikyō, as for many Japanese new religious movements, is strictly interconnected with the biography of its leader, Asahara Shōkō. In this case, however, the autobiographical details published by the leader him- self or by members of the group, have been outnumbered by vast amount of material published after 1995 that meticulously reconstructed Asahara’s early childhood, education experiences, and his path from acupuncturist to reli- gious leader. Asahara was born as Matsumoto Chizuo 松本智津夫 on March 2, 1955, one of seven children of an extremely poor family in Kumamoto 熊本, in the Southern Island of Kyūshū.3 His father was a tatami 畳 maker. Besides being poor, Asahara was also born partially blind. He had no sight in one eye and only thirty per cent vision in the other. The discrimination he was met with may, perhaps, be considered one of the sources of his anger towards Japanese society. Because of his disability, Asahara was sent to a special boarding school for the visually impaired from the age of six. The sense of loneliness and rejec- tion he suffered during that period was also mentioned in court during trials as defining his personality (Reader 2000: 40). In 1975, after graduating from high school, he studied massage therapy, acupuncture, and moxibustion. In 1977, he moved to Tokyo hoping to enter Tokyo University, but he failed the entry exam- ination and carried on working as an acupuncturist. In 1978, he married Ishii Tomoko 石井知子 (b. 1958)—they were to have two sons and four daughters—and opened a Chinese medicine business in Funa bashi 船橋 in Chiba 千葉 prefecture. The business failed in 1982 after some legal issues related to a product Asahara was trying to sell. Between 1980 and 1984, Asahara for some time became a member of Agonshū 阿含宗, a new reli- gious movement founded in the late 1970s by Kiriyama Seiyū 桐山靖雄
2 Since 2008, Aleph usually refers to itself as ‘Aleph’ in Roman letters. From 2000 to 2003, the Japanese transcription officially used was Arefu アレフ and, from 2003 to 2008, Arēfu アレー フ. Aleph was chosen as the group’s name because it implies a new beginning, the creation of something ‘new’; see