Jana J. Monji

‘AUM: The Cult of the End of the World’: Cults and Culture ⭐️⭐️

There’s a comment at the beginning of the documentary, “AUM: The Cult of the End of the World,” that stopped me and played in my mind throughout. The quote comes from investigative reporter, Andrew RC Marshall, who, with David E. Kaplan, wrote the 1996 book this film is based upon: “The Cult at the End of the World.” Those comments and how they would influence the interpretation by an English-speaking audience who likely had never lived in Japan are deeply problematic, particularly considering recent events.

“AUM: The Cult of the End of the World” might jog a few memories if you were an adult in 1995. That’s the year five trains on three different Tokyo Metro subway lines were the subject to an act of domestic terrorism: coordinated attacks during rush hour. On 20 March 1995, 13 people were killed and 50 were severely injured and about 1,000 others affected. The leader Shōkō Asahara, born Chizuo Matsumoto (松本 智津夫) was convicted and along with other members of his Aum Shinrikyo cult were executed in 2018. Yet the documentary notes if police had connected the dots this attack could have been prevented. Those dots included the murder and assassination attempts .

Kaplan has also written about the yakuza (“Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld,” 2012) and yet I can’t easily find any reference to Kaplan’s educational background. Mainly I wondered if Kaplan was fluent in Japanese.

Marshall  won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2014 for writing about the persecution of the Muslim minority, the Rohingya, in Myanmar with Jason Step. He also won a Pulitzer shared with Clare Baldwin and Manuel Mogato in 2018 for reporting on the police killing squads in the Philippines during President Rodrigo Dutertes war on drugs. Is Marshall, who graduated in 1989 from the University of Edinburgh with an MA in English Literature,  fluent in the languages of Myanmar, the Philippines and Japan? I’m doubtful.

Marshall, who often functions as a narrator for this documentary, sets the scene. He was at a crossroads and a girlfriend invited him to Japan. This unnamed woman was teaching English.

I was born in London, I moved up to Scotland quite early in my life and I came to journalism really quite late.

And then there was a kind of crossroads. I got a call from my girlfriend at the time who was just been offered a teaching job in Japan. And she said, uh, do you wanna come along? It’s well paid.

And I tagged along…I got a job as the deputy editor of a Tokyo City magazine called Tokyo Journal, which was this kind of very eccentric mix between hard hitting political profiles and practical jokes.

The documentary shows us that one of the articles is “Tokyo Types: The Office Lady.”  Marshall characterizes Japan, and he was living in Tokyo, as both “futuristic and backwards.”  Why? It was backwards because at his apartment one could blow up the fuses when plugging in too many electrical devices. That’s the example we’re given.

Yet, one wonders what kind of apartment and where did Marshall live because not all apartments would rent to foreigners. I was, in 1989, living in a Yokohama home and attending the Stanford Research Center. I would, by the end of the year, move to Sheffield, England where I would live in a student housing apartment and study at the University of Sheffield. I lived in London for three months in 1991. It was England that I found was lacking in technological advances because of the services available at the university, the telephone system, the train and public transportation systems in Sheffield and London, and the lack of easy access to computer products. I had a Toshiba laptop. I had to order supplies from London.

Marshall then goes on to say, “I think it was the very time to be in Japan, because viewed from the West, this was a time where Japan was approaching the end of its missions of total global domination.”

Yet the documentary doesn’t qualify the reality of the situation. That was a time of Japan-bashing in the US, when the Japanese acquisition of properties and companies was being viewed negatively, even though Japan didn’t own that much compared to British interests. There was vandalism at Japanese car dealerships and a Chinese American man, Vincent Chin (1955-1982), was brutally murdered when his attackers thought he was Japanese.

AUM Shinrikyo was one of what Japan calls new religious movements, shinshūkyō (新宗教) or shinkō shūkyō (新興宗教). These are religious organizations founded since the 1800s. Along with Marshall’s personal narrative, the documentary, directed by Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto, uses montages to give the audience a feel for the era.

The documentary shows a young Donald Trump saying of the Japanese, “I’m a big beneficiary of Japan. They buy my apartments in spades,” and declaring himself a beneficiary of the Japanese and it does show his criticisms.

He declares, “I was tired and I think a lot of people are tired of watching other countries ripping off the United States.”

With Trump, one should always fact check. That’s something this documentary does not do, here and elsewhere.

The 1980s-1990s was also a time when the UK was attempting to attract Japanese car companies.

The concept of Japan approaching world domination is also used in World War II films, but that’s propaganda. If you watch the 2010 miniseries “The Pacific,” you’ll hear that rhetoric.

We’re told early on in “The Pacific that “The Japanese are in the process of taking half of the world” but the truth was actually different. Even the article “500 Years of European Colonialism” notes that “The Japanese empire was pretty huge in 1938.” Yet what is true is that in 1920, the British Empire was about 26 percent of the world. Compare that to the Empire of Japan in 1942 which only had about 6% of the world.

While regurgitating the World War II rhetoric about Japan and remembering an era of Japan-bashing, the documentary does nothing to address the reality for its Western audience.

Another thing that the documentary does not provide is an understanding of how religion, particularly new religions in Japan work.

Here in California, there are branches of these new religions such as Soka Gakkai (創価学会)  and Happy Science (幸福の科学). While Soka Gakkai which draws from Nichiren Buddhism was founded in 1930; Happy Science was founded in 1986, a year before AUM Shinrikyo was founded by Shōkō Asahara. Happy Science’s founder and leader, Ryuho Okawa (1956-2023) was still alive while this 2023 documentary was being made and he was the target of an assassination attempt by AUM.

Furthermore, Takeshi Kitano (北野 武 also ビートたけし), the Japanese actor/comedian, who is shown in the documentary, is also still alive and one wonders what he thought of Shoko Asahara.

While the documentary does use Japanese reporters such as journalist Shoko Egawa and Yoshiyuki Kōno. Egawa wrote a book on Asahara and his religious movement. Kōno was the target of the investigation for the Matsumoto sarin attack which occurred nine months (27 June 1994) before the Tokyo subway attack. The residents had complained and petitioned against the AUM cult. Eight people were killed. Kōno’s property the the point of origin of the sarin. The former spokesperson and public relations manager of AUM Shinrikyo, Fumihiro Joyu (上祐 史浩), is also interviewed. Although he declares himself to most hated many in Japan, we aren’t really shown this is true.

I couldn’t help but wonder what Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹) thoughts might be. The award-winning Kyoto-born novelist wrote a 1997 non-fiction work, an oral history of the Tokyo subway sarin attack as a reaction to what he felt were sensationalized Japanese media accounts.

In addition, the documentary doesn’t put the AUM doomsday cult in perspective globally. The documentary does note that AUM came at a time of a new religion boom. The Japan Times noted essentially the same thing in 2018:

Asahara’s emergence came amid a boom in new religions in the 1980s. In the period, many young people felt alienated by the culture of consumerism and success generated during the country’s asset-inflated bubble economy years.

“Those who sought spiritual happiness, instead of the material abundance during the bubble economy period in the late 1980s were drawn to Aum,” Hiromi Shimada, a scholar of religion who researched Aum extensively, said in a speech in 2015.

AUM had an international reach, but there were other doomsday cults during that time period such as the Branch Davidians. As led by David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, originally founded in 1955, were involved in the Waco siege in 1993. The Heaven’s Gate new religious movement which was founded in 1974, and headquartered in New Mexico (1995-1996) and then Rancho Santa Fe, California (1996-1997), committed mass suicide in in 1997.

As AUM started as a yoga and meditation class, it might have been informative to look at the 2018 documentary, “Wild Wild Country,” about the religious intentional community, Rajneeshpuram in Wasco County, Oregon. Led by spiritual leader Rajneesh (born Chandra Mohan Jain) who advocated “dynamic meditation,” the population of his followers, known as Rajneeshees, plotted bioterror attacks in 1984 and plotted to assassinate the District of Oregon US Attorney, Charles Turner in 1985.

Turner had been appointed to investigate the illegal activity at Rajneeshpuram, including immigration fraud and sham marriages. He also headed the prosecution of the bio terror attack at The Dalles, Oregon.

That eerily parallels what we know AUM was involved in. The AUM group murdered the anti-cult lawyer, Tsunami Sakamoto, his wife and child, abducting them from their Yokohama home in 1989.

The Japan Times reported the leader of AUM, Asahara, had made trips to the Himalayas and “told his followers he was the reincarnation of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and regeneration.” Is there a connection between Rajneeshpuram and AUM outside of Hinduism? Or was this a sign of the times as suggested by the “Aum: The Cult of the End of the World” documentary.

Overall, “AUM: The Cult of the End of the World” isn’t as informative as one would hope. It seems to be formulated for a Western English-speaking audience who might not know a lot about Japan, but without really giving a perspective of how Shoko Asahara fitted in with other new religions in Japan or even similar Doomsday cults in the English-speaking world like the US although it acknowledges that AUM’s reach went outside of Japan, including a New York City chapter.

The limited series “Wild Wild Country” is one of the better documentaries out of Netflix and is currently streaming on Netflix. It shows just how far a cult can go and that includes bussing in people in order to support their agenda, something that I originally thought was only a conspiracy theorist imaginings.  That makes some of the political paranoia we see today seem more relatable although not necessarily reasonable.

Yet the same cannot be said for “AUM: The Cult of the End of the World.” If we can consider the supporters of President Donald Trump as a cult or cult-like, then “AUM: The Cult of the End of the World” doesn’t address this cult of personality nor give us any perspectives. This is an inescapable problem because the documentary came out in 2023 after Trump’s first presidential administration (2017-2021) and includes Trump in its era-defining montage. Being released during this chaos caused by Trump’s second administration, the documentary’s lack of cohesiveness in constructing a meaningful connection with Trump seems underwhelming at best. It offers no insights and might have been better off leaving the segment with Trump out.

“AUM: The Cult at the End of the World” had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2023. It is currently in limited release in the US.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.