I recently wrote an essay for a Japanese film class I took last semester which somehow led me to researching the Aum Shimrikyo cult. What's crazy is that a lot of the members of that cult seemed like very normal people; one was a surgeon, many had high quality university educations, and still they managed to be brainwashed!

After the Tokyo Subway Gas Attacks by Aum, Haruki Murakami chose to write a nonfiction book in which he interviews BOTH survivors of the Tokyo Gas Attack and the Aum cult members. In these interviews Murakami basically attempts to answer the question, “What leads normal people to commit such terrible acts of terrorism and how can we prevent it?" The few interviews I read from both victims and cult members were interesting, but the part I found most insightful was an essay in the middle of book (which is divided into 2 sections) in which Murakami ruminates on how people can do such fucked up shit to each other.

“I was motivated by a strong sense of fear that we still had not begun to deal with, let alone solve, any of the fundamental issues arising from the gas attack. Specifically, for people who are outside the main system of Japanese society (the young in particular), there remains no effective alternative safety net. As long as this crucial gap exists in our society, like a kind of black hole, even if Aum is suppressed, other magnetic force fields—‘Aum-like’ groups—will rise up again, and similar incidents are bound to take place.” [p. 248]

this last one is an excerpt from my paper to contextualize the next quote. (also hikikomori is a word to define the phenomenon of individuals that lead extremely reclusive lives in Japan, never leaving their home, spending time online all day.)

...nearly every individual interviewed sounded like they suffered from the same issues as hikikomori; they were described as generally intelligent, capable, young men, who experienced existential anxieties over the apparent meaninglessness of life living in postmodernized Japan, and chose to withdraw from society. These were individuals with such a low sense of self-value, and complete lack of intimate relationships with others, that they sought meaning through a religious cult, one that acknowledged postmodern society’s lack of a “grand-narrative,” and therefore sought to bring forth the apocalypse as a bizarre method of restoring truth to reality. Murakami writes how those that joined Aum were, “Not passive victims, they themselves actively sought to be controlled by the leader Asahara. ‘Mind Control’ is not something that can be pursued or bestowed just like that. It’s a two-sided affair.” [p. 231] Murakami goes on to describe how members of Aum allowed themselves to lose their ego, choosing to discard their personal “narrative thread” that makes up the Self. “At this point you receive a new narrative from the person to whom you have entrusted your ego. You’ve handed over the real thing, so what comes back instead is a shadow. And once your ego is merged with another ego, your narrative will necessarily take on the narrative created by that other ego.” [p. 232] It seemed Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum, realized that hikikomori personality types would be the ideal tools for terroristic violence.