Did Aum Shinrikyō Really End?

revived media attention for the group founded by Asahara Shōkō (born Matsumoto Chizuo, 1955–2018) that became notorious in 1995 when some of its members perpetrated a sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway. Started as a small yoga center in 1984, in the span of a decade Aum developed into a hierarchical organization that encouraged members to become renunciants (shukkesha) and live communally. Its teachings, influenced by Buddhist doctrine, extreme ascetic practices, and catastrophic end-of-time thoughts resulted in visions of a cosmic struggle with evil forces, manufacture of chemical and biological weapons, and violent crimes toward perceived enemies and the larger society. In the weeks following the Tokyo sarin gas attack on March 20, 1995, the police raided Aum facilities throughout the country and arrested hundreds of members. On May 16, Asahara was arrested at the group’s compound in Kamikuishiki, a village near Mt. Fuji. The group’s assets were frozen, weapons seized, material and documents confiscated, and the organization put under strict surveillance not only by the police, but also by citizen organizations and the media. In October of the same year, Aum lost its status as a registered religious organization under the Religious Juridical Persons Law (shūkyō hōjin hō) and in early 1996 Aum was declared bankrupt. In the months following the sarin gas attack in 1995, when facilities and private houses were searched, members interrogated and arrested and several criminal charges were laid against the group, many members defected. From around 10,000 members living communally before March 1995, the membership decreased to about 500 renunciants by April 1998 (Maekawa 2001: 181). The group was therefore severely weakened after 1995, a process that resulted in Aum dropping its name in 1999.

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The aim of this chapter is to contribute to a discussion about the demise of religion and about how and when religious groups dissolve (de Jong 2018; Robbins 2014), by asking the question of what does it mean for a religion to end when a religion or a religious organization ends as a consequence of a traumatic experience, in this case violent acts perpetrated by members of the organization itself. This article does not discuss the demise of a tradition as a whole, but it focuses on a relatively small and short-lived new religion, whose actions, however, had a profound and long-lasting impact in Japan (Baffelli and Reader 2012; Reader 2000; Kisala and Mullins 2001). Despite the limited years of activities of the organization and the relatively small membership, this chapter argues that in order to fully address the question “What did it mean for Aum to end?” several perspectives need to be taken into consideration and that the question cannot be fully answered without also understanding what is still lingering.

Relatively little information and few academic studies were available on Aum before 1995, but after its crime became evident the group has received extensive and continuous media attention and coverage (Baffelli 2016; Gardner 2001; Hardacre 2007). It has also been investigated by several academic publications, looking in detail at its organizational structure, teachings and activities (Reader 2000; Inoue and RIRC 2011, 2015; Shimazono 1995, 1997), the consequence and aftermath of the Aum Affair (Baffelli and Reader 2012; Kisala and Mullins 2001; Wilkinson 2009), and its memorialization (Pendleton 2011; Ushiyama 2016). Previous publications (Baffelli 2012, 2016; Maekawa 2001) have also discussed the attempts by ex-Aum members to continue as a group after 1995 by either staying in Aleph (the new name of Aum since 2000) or joining a new organization called Hikari no Wa (literally “Circle of Light”) established in 2007 by a small group of members led by Jōyū Fumihiro, ex-spokesperson of Aum and ex-representative of Aleph. This chapter offers a new perspective on Aum by looking at its demise and dissolution after 1995.