Source of book: Borrowed from the library
This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. One of the things I enjoy about this club is that I end up reading interesting books that I never would have discovered on my own. I wasn’t able to attend this discussion, unfortunately, because I was at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, but I really wanted to read it anyway, so I did.
I have read some Murakami before, and really enjoyed his writing, but I had no idea he had written a non-fiction book about the Aum sarin attacks. So, definitely wanted to give it a try.
Previous Murakami reads:
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
***
The facts of the attack are pretty well known. Aum Shinrikyo, now calling itself Aleph, is a doomsday religious cult in Japan. After a smaller attack in 1994, Aum released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway, killing 13 and injuring thousands.
The attack blindsided Japanese society, who considered themselves immune from domestic terrorism. While the perpetrators were arrested, tried, and convicted, the illusion of safety was shattered, and, if Murakami is to be believed, something profound changed that day.
Murakami was living in Japan again, after being absent for nearly a decade while living in Europe and the United States. The event affected him deeply, and he decided he needed to try to get to know his native country better. He also wanted to investigate and create a picture of the effect of the attack on the everyday people who were the victims.
To this end, he interviewed dozens of survivors and the families of those who lost loved ones, utilizing these interviews for first-person stories of the events of that day. This part of the book was released in 1997 as Underground.
Underground parallels, to a degree, John Hersey’s monumental and influential work, Hiroshima. For the most part, Murakami just lets his subjects talk, and avoids making specific judgments about the attacks. The victims speak for themselves. Some are angry at Aum, others feel nothing. For all, the trauma (and often lingering chronic illness) remain with them, their lives changed in ways large and small.
I would say that a significant difference between the two works is that while Hersey focuses on a handful of survivors, Murakami strives for a complete picture - he sought out hundreds, and interviewed dozens - so this book is longer and somewhat more repetitive. Although, as a lawyer, it is fascinating how stories by different people who were in the same place at the same time differ in the remembered details.
One kind of amusing detail is that, although the overwhelming number of interviewees were Japanese, there was one - Michael Kennedy - who was, of all things, an Irish jockey, who was there for a temporary coaching job. His experience was particularly bewildering, because his Japanese was extremely limited, and he had no easy way of making sense of what was happening to him.
I was impressed by a number of things about Murakami’s interviews. First, the level of journalistic detail is incredible. He combines an ear for the essential in a story with a love of personal uniqueness, lending an empathetic realism to how he brings each of the many characters to life.
Second, as a lawyer, the care he used to obtain consents, and make sure all his subjects were okay with the final product was impressive. And this was done without losing the truth of the story - not everything is complementary to every speaker, but it is true and human and empathetic.
In addition to the victims, Murakami talked to a handful of medical professionals who were on the front lines of treatment, and their stories of trying to identify the toxin and standardize treatments was fascinating - my wife is an ICU nurse with training (and responsibility) for disaster response, so many of the issues match discussions we have had during her FEMA training and the ensuing pandemic mere months after that.
After Underground came out, there was some criticism of Murakami, that he had only used the perspective of the victims, with no real discussion of Aum. I think this was a bit unfair, and Murakami himself noted that this wasn’t exactly a “both sides” situation. However, he decided to take a deeper dive into Aum, to find out why a cult would attract so many intelligent and thoughtful people. He interviewed past and present Aum members, and let them tell their stories. However, he asked more pointed questions, and re-directed away from theological arguments, focusing instead on personal experiences and the psychological draw of the cult. Again, detail and empathy are at the forefront, but Murakami never excuses the evils that Aum perpetrated, or lets his subjects do so. However, as in every cult, most of the devotees are ordinary, decent people, looking for a deeper meaning to life. As a former cult member, this strongly resonates both about myself and the people I know who were and are involved.
This was then released as The Place That Was Promised, in 1998. In many ways, this part of the book hit closer to home, with my own cult experience. So many of the things that attracted people to Aum are the same that attracted people to Gothard, and to authoritarian fundamentalist religion in general. I’ll discuss this a bit throughout the post.
Murakami takes it further, however, and also explores how death cults like Aum are connected to the culture in which they arise, and argues that a simplistic narrative of "good versus evil" is unhelpful in addressing the underlying societal malaise that makes cults like Aum attractive to those seeking a better way. This too resonates a lot for me - our own materialistic, money-worshipping, white supremacist culture disgusts me, and made it easier to go along with the cult, even though I saw through many of the lies.
Essentially, this English language edition is two books in one, plus an afterword that was a magazine essay reviewing a book by a former Aum member, reworked slightly to fit the book. Yeah, it’s a whole bunch of stuff - which is a good thing.
That’s about as good of a summary as I can give - there is too much detail to do more than that.
Let me start with Murakami’s introduction, which is excellent. He carefully explains how he approached the project, and why he made the decisions he did. It is an eloquent defense, and adds to what will come.
I was particularly struck by a line that seems to me to apply to every human tragedy. In recent times, this applies to the Covid pandemic, I think.
One cannot overlook someone simply because they exhibit only “minor symptoms.” For everyone involved in the gas attack, March 20 was a heavy, grueling day.
As readers know, my wife is an ICU nurse, and was on the front line throughout Covid. We also live in a fairly Red area of California, with a lot of the “Confederate Flags ‘n’ Truck Nutz” crowd, who naturally went all-in on conspiracy theories and went on to brow-beat and borderline assault medical professionals over the last few years over everything from masks (my wife had a nasty incident while shopping in uniform and many co-workers had worse), to the Ivermectin hoax - accusing professionals of withholding the One True Treatment promoted by the Orange Messiah and thus killing their loved ones.
Every medical professional who lived through this has some degree of trauma. But so do the rest of us. Even though Covid hasn’t struck my immediate family (that we know of) - thanks to the vaccines - the stress and uncertainty, the economic stress, the worry about my wife as she put her life on the line, the never-ending dumbfuckery by the Orange Messiah that made everything worse, the dismissal of our pain by right-wing friends and family - it all takes its toll. “Minor symptoms” still matter.
Not all symptoms were minor, of course. Some of the most heartbreaking are the stories of those who have long-term problems ranging from ongoing neurological deficits to PTSD. Many of the survivors will never be “cured” - and will have to live with the damage that Aum inflicted on them in the name of religion.
And then, there were so many stories of people who had serious symptoms, yet who kept trying to work, insisting they were fine. As Murakami notes, this is partly a Japanese cultural thing. But honestly, many of us have gritted through illness and injury when we should have gone home.
As I mentioned, every victim Murakami interviews is asked about what they think of Aum, and the answers vary a lot. One of them was particularly interesting to me:
“I’ve been to the Aum headquarters’ Kamikuishiki Village lots of times on the job. Most of the cultists there, they look spaced out, like their souls have been sucked away. They don’t laugh or cry.”
This flat emotional aspect is highly prized in cultic groups, including the one I was in. “Don’t have negative emotions.” Or you will be labeled as “rebellious” - I definitely was.
But deeper than that, cultists are trained to lose their sense of empathy and connection to outsiders. (This is a big theme in the second part of the book - and is the calling card of Christian Fundamentalism in our own country.)
For my own parents, I truly feel that their souls were sucked out somehow by Gothardism (and the related teachings of James Dobson and others), carefully trained to lose their empathy for their own children, and see ones like me as valuable only to the degree that I shared the religious beliefs - and the political commitments. It still hurts to have been thrown away like I was, but understanding that they are still in the thrall of a cult at least gives an explanation.
Another victim had a different, but thoughtful take.
“Maybe it sounds strange, but it’s not like I don’t understand all this religious fanatic stuff. I’ve always had a feel for that side of things. I don’t want to reject it straight out. I’ve always enjoyed the constellations and myths from the time I was small, which is why I wanted to be a sailor in the first place. But when you start organizing and forming groups, I don’t go in for all that. I have no interest in religious groups, but I don’t believe taking that sort of thing seriously is necessarily all bad. I can understand that much.”
This will be echoed by a number of Aum members, who also had the kind of mysticism and deep philosophical thinking that this victim had. And I myself strongly identify with this. The thing is, I get the appeal of cults, and I really tried very very hard to believe. (Something my parents have never understood.) But I too feel that once you start building organizations (and especially hierarchies) you go wrong. At this point, I have zero interest in organized religion, although I am still fascinated by ideas and feel a connection to the divine.
Murakami talked about the insufficiency of “justice,” after one of the last perpetrators was captured on the same day he was to visit a victim who lost most of her memory and function.
“Hayashi’s capture would do nothing to reverse the damage he’d already done, the lives he had so radically changed. What was lost on March 20, 1995, will never be recovered. Even so, someone had to tie up the loose ends and apprehend him.”
Murakami would also consider the underlying problem with toxic religion.
“People the world over turn to religion for salvation. But when religion hurts and maims, where are they to go for salvation?”
I myself, one maimed and deeply hurt by religion and those who justified their abuse of me and my family using the language of religion, ask this question all the time. I, like many, feel that humankind is in need of some sort of salvation - we are a deeply flawed race, given to hate and fear and unspeakable violence - but if what promises transcendence becomes just another justification for violence, what then? Christ’s teachings and example seem so impossibly far away from any actual practice of religion in our world. Where then do we go?
I am also on board with the strong criticism of the media coverage of the disaster. Television in particular feels a need to create some sort of coherent narrative, which means forcing the facts and the messiness of reality into a narrow box, often misleading and always incomplete. Here is how one of the victims talks about it.
“What I find really scary, though, is the media. Especially television, it’s so limited as to what it shows. And when that gets out, it really makes people biased, and creates and illusion that the tiny detail they focus on is the whole picture.”
I’ll briefly digress from the more serious stuff to mention an amusing aside from Murakami, describing a victim who worked for a clothing designer. Murakami notes that he actually bought a tie at the store, which proves that it isn’t anywhere near radical fashion. (Murakami is delightfully self-deprecating throughout - just like so many of his protagonists.)
At the end of the first book, Murakami reflects on the issues that made the attack possible, and the response so flawed. Many of these things are universal to all societies, and thus offer lessons for us all.
One discussion I thought was particularly interesting is how Murakami links Aum to the Unibomber, and more generally to the problem of cultural alienation. (More on this in the second book.)
The argument Kaczynski puts forward is fundamentally quite right. Many parts of the social system in which we belong and function do indeed aim at repressing the attainment of individual autonomy, or, as the old Japanese adage goes, “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”
Nonetheless, Kaczynski - intentionally or unintentionally - overlooked one important factor. Autonomy is only the mirror image of dependence on others. If you were left as a baby on a deserted island, you would have no notion of what “autonomy” means. Autonomy and dependency are like light and shade, caught in the pull of each other’s gravity, until, after considerable trial and error, each individual can find his or her own place in the world.
This is where cults - and fundamentalism more generally - end up getting things exactly backwards. They stifle - by violence if necessary - the good parts of individual autonomy, while denying that they have any need to depend on outsiders or care for their well-being. The hierarchy requires vicious control, but makes no provision for care for those viewed as “lesser.”
A healthy society, in contrast, allows for autonomy in the sense of people being allowed to find their own place in the world based on gifting and interest, while maintaining mutuality of care and responsibility.
Murakami goes on to discuss the false promise that Asahara made to his followers - and indeed what all cult leaders promise:
In order to take on the “self-determination” that Asahara provided, most of those who took refuge in the Aum cult appear to have deposited all their precious personal holdings of selfhood - lock and key - in that “spiritual bank” called Shoko Asahara. The faithful relinquished their freedom, renounced their possessions, disowned their families, discarded all secular judgment (common sense). “Normal” Japanese were aghast: How could anyone do such an insane thing? But conversely, to the cultists it was probably quite comforting. At last they had someone to watch over them, sparing them the anxiety of confronting each new situation on their own, and delivering them from any need to think for themselves.
There is a lot of this I have seen in my parents. Although they no longer are part of Gothard’s particular system, the overarching theopolitical ideology of authoritarian fundamentalism and idolatry of a mythical golden past still holds them in thrall. They have, in a very real sense, discarded part of their family, and relinquished the ability to think outside of the ideology - to think for themselves. And this is indeed very comforting in a time of cultural, social, and economic change. No need to wrestle with racism, misogyny, homophobia, inequality, climate change - the cult already gave them the answers. (Terrible, hateful answers, but answers nonetheless.)
This is ultimately why cults have such an appeal. They promise certainty. They promise that there are clear answers so you don’t have to live with complexity or ambiguity or - worst of all - uncertainty.
Follow the formula (and usually the cult leader too) and you attain your dreams: enlightenment, “God’s best,” healthy relationships, wealth, success - whatever it is you want. Of course, it is also all lies - the real results are broken relationships, stunted spiritual and moral development, wealth for the cult leader only, estrangement from mainstream society. And often, hate and violence toward “the world.” Other perspectives threaten the certainty.
Murakami opens the second book with a poem by Mark Strand.
An Old Man Awake in his Own Death
This is the place that was promised
when I went to sleep,
taken from me when I woke.
This is the place unknown to anyone,
where names of ships and stars
drift out of reach.
The mountains are not mountains anymore;
the sun is not the sun.
One tends to forget how it was;
I see myself, I see
the shore of darkness on my brow.
Once I was whole, once I was young…
As if it mattered now
and you could hear me
and the weather of this place would ever cease.
After that, he dives into the reasons why he excluded the perspective of Aum from the first book. Quite simply, the victims were innocent, and muddying the water with a distraction from their experiences was disrespectful.
Above all I wanted to avoid the kind of wishy-washy approach that tries to see the viewpoint of both sides.
I feel like mainstream media often needs to remember this. There are no “two sides” to things like Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, or his stealing of classified documents. Or, for that matter, to Nazis marching in the streets. This wishy-washy approach does no service to anyone except the cause of evil. I appreciate that in his attempts to understand Aum, Murakami refuses to concede in any way that the attacks were justified - they were evil and he insists on that.
This is why, unlike in the first book, Murakami argues with those he interviews, pushing back on certain issues.
Here is one fascinating conversation, with a man who took a very mathematical approach to life - he didn’t care about things that couldn’t be measured. (Hence why both the promise of certainty from Aum and the highly structured, reward-based hierarchy appealed to him.) Murakami strongly disagreed with that idea.
“Since I’m a novelist I’m the opposite of you - I believe that what’s most important is what cannot be measured. I’m not denying your way of thinking, but the greater part of people’s lives consists of things that are unmeasurable, and trying to change all these to something measurable is realistically impossible.”
This person later goes on to describe why he loved being in Aum.
“No doubts remained, because all our questions were answered. Everything was solved. We were told, ‘Do this, and this will happen.’ No matter what question we had, we got an answer straightaway…They label it mind control. But it actually isn’t.”
This too feels so familiar. The formula, the guarantee of results, all questions having answers. And yes, cults don’t really engage in “mind control” the way the media tends to think. People brainwash themselves first.
Another former Aum member pointed out something that generally holds true for cults: they cost money. After all, since they aren’t providing goods or services to outsiders, they need their members to support the organization. Also noted by yet another former member is that advancement was directly tied to how much money you donated. (Something VERY true about Gothard’s organization too.) And also, pretty young women were often given advancement (particularly if they were willing to fuck the cult leader - another parallel to Gothard, who preyed on young women and teen girls.)
Murakami enters some interesting territory when he talks about former members who got into Aum for good reasons. He eventually concludes that Aum promises something to thoughtful and poetic people hungry for meaning in life that mainstream society does not. The fact that Aum is selling snake oil is true, but the appeal is real and understandable. He describes one woman who joined as a teen in this regard:
“Of course one could view a case like hers - a 16 year old girl raised in Aum - as a kind of abduction or brainwashing, but I tend to feel, more and more, that having people like her in the world isn’t such a bad thing after all. Not everybody has to line up with everybody else, jostling shoulder to shoulder, struggling to make a go of it in ‘this world,’ do they? Why shouldn’t a few people be able to think deeply about things that aren’t directly relevant to society? The problem lies in the fact that Aum Shinrikyo was one of the few havens for such people, and in the end it turned out to be corrupt. Paradise was an illusion.”
I feel like you could put my name in there, and substitute my cult experience, and it would be true. I am a divergent thinker, and hunger for transcendence. Gothard promised that, but it was all lies - and his own need for power and control. Paradise was an illusion.
This woman also describes her experiences even as a child with mystical stuff, including astral projection. There’s a New Age term I hadn’t heard in years. It was always used as a pejorative, as some demonic supernatural thing. But, like biofeedback (which I myself have used), it is actually a normal psychological thing for many people. In fact, I too have experienced it (like the woman, particularly when on the borderline of sleep), and during dreams. It is also described by some of the Old Testament prophets, if you think about it.
Anyway, interesting to read about similar experiences by other people who share my interest in mysticism and philosophy.
Another former Aum member - who never entirely bought into things, but was focused on his own enlightenment - had an interesting observation about fundamentalist practices.
“The unenlightened” - that was their term for people who lived normal lives. Since these people were heading straight for hell, the samana had some choice words for them. For example, they didn’t worry if they banged into a car belonging to someone from the outside. It was like they were practicing the truth, looking down on everyone else.”
Honestly, this is a huge problem for religious people generally. When I see someone advertise their piety, I assume they are doing the same thing as bragging about their honesty or humility. If you have to advertise, it is because you don’t have it. I know when someone walks into my office talking about how religious they are, they will cheat me out of my fees. Straight up.
I also have written about the phenomenon that legalism leads to unethical behavior, because it feeds the feeling of self-righteousness without requiring good behavior. And, like Aum and every other cultic group, looking down on outsiders is the point.
One final observation, this time from a former Aum renunciate, who Asahara pressured to have sex with him - she refused - is about another expression of the hypocrisy inherent in cultic groups. She was attracted to Aum because of the promise that attachments could be jettisoned, and that this would lead to greater harmony - hatred and social climbing would go away. In practice, the opposite happens.
“But once I entered Aum I found it was no different from ordinary society. Like someone would say ‘So-and-so has a lot of hate inside him,’ well - that’s no different from the backstabbing that goes on outside, is it? Only the vocabulary has changed.”
Oh so very much so. “You have a spirit of bitterness.” “You are defrauding others by dressing like that.” “You lack discernment for letting your kids read that book.” In fact, the mean girl bullying is horrible within cults. I wrote about my wife’s experience as a teen, being targeted as a “jezebel.” But also, within my birth family, being targeted for bullying by my mom and sister because she failed to conform to the cult expectations. Only the vocabulary changes. The hate and viciousness remain.
I’d like to end with an observation in the Afterword by Murakami that really sums up my own feelings about my cult experience. And I include not just Bill Gothard, but the other leaders that poisoned my parents’ thinking: James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly, John MacArthur, and others.
“The leader they revered turned out to be nothing more than a false prophet, and they understand now how they were manipulated by his insane desires.”
I am not optimistic, but my sincere hope for my parents and for all those who are still believers in the cult and its ideology is that they will eventually come to the same realization. They were manipulated, they were used. They sold their souls, their relationships, and their own morality for the promise of certainty, of easy answers.
And those who demanded these things from them were just false prophets, telling lies and making false promises they had neither the ability nor the intent to fulfill.
***
About Aum Shinrikyo:
I confess I wasn’t particularly familiar with Aum before reading this book. I mean, “Japanese cult” and all, but whatever. I may even have assumed they were like the Filipino Islamic terrorist group, or the pseudo-Christian cult that cuts members with machetes for enlightenment - in essence, religions imported from the West or Middle East.
But, not so much. Aum is a homegrown cult, with its basis in Buddhism. Well, that actually makes sense, considering that the American cult thing (and we got a LOT of weird cults during the 19th Century) has always been an outgrowth of current religious and cultural currents.
That said, Aum is….weird.
I think to understand this, it is best to understand cults in general as being kissing cousins to Fascism. Both sell themselves as a return to “the good old days” - a more pure, more original form of religion in the one case, or politics in the other. Although Fascism has always collaborated with conservative religion wherever it has arisen, and the line between conservative religion and fascist politics is both blurry and based on power. If a group has sufficient political power, it becomes fascist; if it lacks power or numbers, it becomes a cult.
As Umberto Eco pointed out in his excellent essay on Ur-Fascism, by its nature, Fascism is syncretistic.
Cults too, by their very nature, are also syncretistic. In the case of Aum, this is fully the case, but also in a weird and unpredictable way.
Aum starts out by taking two different strands of Buddhism - Indian and Tibetan - and claiming to be restoring the original, ancient form of the religion before it got corrupted. (Again, parallels to Christian cults as well as Fascism.) Then, it mixes in some strands from Hinduism - in fact making Shiva the main deity of worship. Yeah, this is already getting strange.
But where it really gets weird is that it incorporates Millennialism from Christianity - the idea of an apocalypse and thousand years of utopia that is nowhere found in Buddhism. And not just the idea, but a lot of the details of the most paranoid versions of this Christian belief. Asahara taught about a nuclear Armageddon with an attack by the Beast/Antichrist (the United States) that sounds a lot like American Dispensationalist eschatology. Oh, and only the few chosen sorts - the ones following Asahara - would survive the End Times.
And then, there is Nostradamus. Again, WHAT? A French astrologer who wrote enigmatic poems that have been used as “prophesies” despite being so vague as to mean literally whatever you want them to? Yeah, that’s definitely a stretch for Buddhism.
These all make it into the book a bit, although I read outside to try to figure out how it fit together.
Also in the book are references to the various groups and people that Aum considered threats. And guess what? They turn out to be the usual scapegoats for conspiracy theories here in the West: the Freemasons, Jewish people, European royalty. I mean, it’s kind of predictable, isn’t it?
And I guess one final weird yet predictable thing: Asahara eventually started claiming to be the “Lamb of God.”
As a whole, it appears that Aum combined enough Buddhism to appeal to many Japanese with the very worst elements of Western - especially American - religion. Syncretism at its absolutely most toxic.
Since the attack, the leaders were arrested and either executed or imprisoned for life, and the group splintered. At this time, it no longer appears to be a terrorist threat, or, for that matter, much of a cult anymore. There is no central leader now that Asahara is gone, and all that is really left is some religious ideas and a handful of people still trying to find salvation through following Asahara’s teachings.
In the end, this is the legacy - dozens of deaths, thousands of injured, and little else to show for it. Thus is the end of every doomsday cult eventually. And, for that matter, of every Fascist movement. Death, destruction, and ultimately oblivion.
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