Take the cult out of Nippon culture

No one who was in Tokyo in the days and months following the poison-gas attack on the subway system in spring 1995 will forget the atmosphere of fear and anxiety that permeated every aspect of life in the city. At Kasumigaseki, the station that serves the Japanese equivalent of Whitehall, 12 people died and thousands were injured when sarin gas was released. The symbolism could not be ignored: a nerve gas with which to attack the nerve centre of Japanese government.

How was it that in Japan, one of the most highly policed developed countries with the lowest crime rate in the world, the police had failed to know that such an organisation with such capability existed? Fuelled by frenzied and sensationalist media coverage, confidence in the government and police was seriously undermined.

Eventually, it emerged that a religious organisation called Aum Shinrikyo with a partially blind and psychologically unbalanced leader, Shoko Asahara, was responsible for the atrocity. As the investigation progressed, it became clear that the group was responsible for crimes dating back to 1988, ranging from beatings to kidnap and murder.

In an effort to understand the situation, the media focused on Aum as a cult rather than a religion, characterising it as a fanatical and deviant group with a charismatic, evil leader. Since all the participants were Japanese, discussion focused on the breakdown of modern Japanese society and socio-cultural displacement as a reason for people joining Aum. In essence, it was a Japanese phenomenon.

Ian Reader challenges these views by asserting that Aum was a religious organisation, not a cult, and that to view it as a uniquely Japanese phenomenon is to deny its significance in the history of new religions generally. Reader provides a scholarly and gripping account of the growth of the movement, from a yoga meditation group to a paranoid organisation with an apocalyptic vision. In so doing, he demonstrates that violence and religion are not limited to new religions, but that fighting the forces of evil is central to many mainstream religions. Moreover, rather than being uniquely Japanese, Aum is the Japanese affirmation of various scholarly theories on the relationship between religion and violence generally.

Reader's chronicle of the complexities of the Aum belief system puts the story back on track as part of the discourse on modern religious movements. His detailed research, including unrivalled access to Aum members and texts, illuminates a fascinating, if frightening tale. This is an outstanding contribution to the study of religious movements as well as a challenge to the idea that, in Japan, the difficult and inconvenient can be explained by reference to the idea of Japanese uniqueness, or nihonjiron .

Meryll Dean is senior lecturer in law, University of Sussex.