オウム真理教事件とスピリチュアリティの否定The Aum Shinrikyo Incident and the Rejection of Spirituality

This time I consider, through a taboo of Japanese society not generally talked about, the mystery of the 1980s and '90s, when the interest in Jomon spirituality that had grown through the postwar years declined rapidly. A great incident then set off an extreme rejection of, and aversion to, spirituality, and people's interest in Jomon culture faded.

As I showed in an earlier article, interestingly, after the 1986 exhibition Jomon Dogu Exhibition, Japanese interest in the Jomon period fell rapidly. No large Jomon exhibition was held again until 2018, more than thirty years later.

What, then, happened to the interest in the Jomon period nurtured through the postwar years? Deeply involved are conditions of that time in Japan that are now unthinkable. An important part of the background is that Japan entered the bubble economy after the Plaza Accord of 1985. In the bubble years, a practical worship of the material rose excessively, the mystery and spirituality of Jomon culture were made light of, and attention turned to satisfying one's own desires.

The result of this excessive pursuit of desire was a distorted social structure in which a certain presence arose: the cult. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, the height of the bubble when all Japan was swept up in it, the exploration of human nature was belittled and scorned to the extreme, and people who had doubts about this reactively sought spiritual salvation in cults.

Emerging inevitably from this background was Aum Shinrikyo, founded in 1987 with Shoko Asahara (real name Chizuo Matsumoto) as its leader. It drew great attention at the time because it was not a cult gathering mainly the poor, as before, but one that young people of high education and advantaged social position joined in droves. Asahara appeared under the banner of “saving the souls of modern people,” and expanded his mission by appearing in the media himself. It began as a small circle studying yoga, but under a charismatic leader who called himself a person of supernatural powers, the number of followers grew rapidly.

Aum raised large sums of money, invested most of it in facilities and the acquisition of specialist skills, and went as far as manufacturing the deadly nerve gases sarin and VX, and even LSD and stimulants. It also procured weapons from Russia and plotted to obtain uranium ore in Australia; its activities were wide-ranging.

From 1989 on, it gradually grew more extreme and committed one great incident after another that shook Japanese society.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russian society fell into confusion and signs appeared of people seeking a spiritual home, so Aum moved into Russia and carried out active mission work. As a result, the number of followers once reached 30,000 in Russians alone, exceeding the number of Japanese followers.

By this point Aum's name was already widely known in Japan, but when the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake struck on January 17, 1995, a symbolic omen of the bubble's collapse, many Japanese changed their attitude completely. Waking from some ten years of fever, they came up against the reality that the boom of the bubble economy had been an illusion. But because many had by then already lost themselves in the process, the Japanese reactively sought the spirituality they had lost and joined Aum one after another. The power of the leader grew swollen, and many were brainwashed. In March of that year, after the earthquake, it reached its peak with as many as 15,000 followers in Japan.

At that peak came the great incident Aum caused: the Tokyo subway sarin attack of March 20, 1995. Sarin was released simultaneously in several subway cars at 8 a.m., when workers in the big city of Tokyo commute, killing 14 passengers and station staff and injuring about 6,300 in an act of terror.

This act of terror by a cult, which exposed a dark side of Japanese society said to be the shadow of the bubble economy, was fanned by excessive media coverage and turned toward a strong rejection of spirituality on a national scale. As a result of the several incidents caused by Aum under Asahara, a general perception spread among the Japanese that “spirituality = danger,” and the mistaken perception that “spirituality = terror attack” took hold.

The effects were wide. The best-known example is the rejection of yoga, now widely practiced, but as a result of this mistaken perception, the exploration of the spirituality of Jomon culture, nurtured through the postwar years, was in fact closed off. At a glance, a terror attack by a 1990s cult and the spirituality of ancient Jomon culture seem unrelated, but for the Japanese of that time it was an extremely serious matter.

An incident caused by the leader of a single cult thus became a major cause of the decline in people's interest in the Jomon period, and the twentieth-century Jomon boom ended then. Jomon research, entering a long winter, shrank to an occasional exhibition in the regions, and drew attention again in the big cities such as Tokyo only after a long time.

But some twenty years later, another great event brought a new age in which attention to Jomon culture revived. That event was the Fukushima nuclear accident that followed the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011.

Until then it had been believed that modern science was all-powerful and would make people's future better, and this was the moment when every Japanese experienced that it had all been an illusion. A nuclear power plant, gathering the modern science that people had built working single-mindedly through postwar history, exploded miserably, by natural disaster and not by human hand. This may be hard to feel for anyone who is not from Japan, known as an earthquake country, but the Japanese have a distinctive habit of always regarding a great earthquake as a turning point of an age.

Broadly speaking, the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995 was the end of the bubble economy, and the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 was the end of modern science.

Next time, taking this symbolic event as the turning point, before the Jomon boom of the 21st century arrived, I will look at the commemorative book series of the 2010s, in which earlier research was gathered over a wide range for the first time, in order to reflect on the problems of the twentieth century and integrate the subdivided academic research of archaeology.