Why Spirituality Became Taboo in Japan

As I noted in my previous piece, after the Exhibition of Jomon Clay Figurines in 1986, Japanese interest in the Jomon period dropped off sharply. More than thirty years would pass before another major Jomon exhibition was mounted in 2018.

At that very peak, Aum carried out its most infamous atrocity: the Tokyo subway sarin attack of March 20, 1995. At eight o'clock in the morning, as commuters poured into the heart of the capital, cult members simultaneously released sarin nerve gas aboard multiple subway trains, killing fourteen passengers and station staff and injuring roughly 6,300 people in an act of mass terrorism.

Exposing a dark underbelly of Japanese society that many called the shadow of the bubble economy, the cult's terrorist attack — amplified by relentless, sensationalized media coverage — set off a nationwide backlash against spirituality itself. In the wake of the crimes committed by Asahara and Aum Shinrikyo, the equation "spirituality = danger" took hold across Japan, hardening into the mistaken belief that spirituality itself led straight to terrorism.

The fallout was felt everywhere. Yoga, though widely practiced today, was shunned for years; and under the weight of this same misconception, the postwar exploration of Jomon spirituality was effectively shut down. At first glance, a terrorist attack by a 1990s cult and the spiritual world of prehistoric Jomon culture might seem to have nothing to do with each other. For the Japanese at the time, however, the link was all too real.

And so the crimes of a single cult leader became a decisive factor in turning the public away from the Jomon period, bringing the twentieth-century Jomon boom to an abrupt end. Entering a long winter, Jomon scholarship retreated into occasional regional displays, and for decades the subject ceased to command attention in major metropolitan centers like Tokyo.

More than twenty years later, however, another upheaval ushered in a new era in which interest in Jomon culture surged back to life: the Fukushima nuclear disaster triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011.

Seen in the large, the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995 marked the end of the bubble economy, and the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 marked the end of faith in modern science.

This renewed interest takes many forms — seeking harmony and coexistence with nature in the face of environmental ruin, rebuilding communal bonds in a society that breeds isolation and loneliness, and turning to inner richness and spirituality amid pervasive mental stress — yet where we stand today is clear: more and more people sense a vision of the future in the Jomon way of life.