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The huge burst of "new religions" in Japan's postwar years may have had its primary impulse in the end of the God-Emperor. But it also owed quite a bit to the fact that the new legal system made it very simple to receive official recognition as a religious movement, and the tax-free status accompanying recognition was attractive to many whose motives were as much financial as holy. As of this year, 183,581 groups are registered. According to Robert Marra, executive director of the National Association of Japan-America Societies, most of the groups are made up of "very gentle, harmless people." But as in the U.S., which saw a similar flowering in the 1960s, gentle did not always stay that way.
When Shoko Asahara founded Aum Shinrikyo in 1987, he synthesized an amalgam of Buddhist and Hindu theology around the practice of yoga. Devotion to his teachings, he claimed in his writings, could lead adherents not only to a state of enlightenment but also to superhuman feats like levitation.
With the passage of time his vision grew darker. He spoke ever more frequently about an imminent apocalypse. In his book Disaster Approaches the Land of the Rising Sun, published this year, Armageddon arrives in a gas cloud from the U.S., which is said to be ruled by Freemasons (elsewhere he has added those other stock villains, the Jews). The world's end, placed variously in the years 1997, 1999 and 2000, would leave behind enlightened followers of Aum and 10% of everyone else.
The increasing grandiosity of Asahara's doctrine, as well as its increasing paranoia, may have been prompted by the changing fortunes of his temporal empire. Recruiting heavily at universities and attracting a wealthy and educated membership, the cult had a meteoric rise. It became rich, bankrolling chains of discount stores, coffee shops and a personal-computer assembly factory. Aum was wealthy enough to survive an estimated $1 million loss on a foolhardy hunt for Australian gold in 1993.
By 1994 Aum boasted 36 Japanese branches with 10,000 members and a raft of international offices. Some, like the one in midtown Manhattan, offer little more than cheap videotapes of the master's lectures to fewer than 100 members. But in Russia, another country experiencing a spiritual land rush, the cult has been successful: it has six offices and somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 adherents. It broadcast (until this week) an hourlong program on a popular Russian radio station.
But all the time, there were intimations of trouble. The downside of recruiting the best and the brightest was that their relatives were articulate about losing them to the cult. Almost from the beginning, there were complaints that Asahara engaged in psychological manipulation, brainwashing and even coercion. Former group members describe fairly standard indoctrination practices like banning sex and limiting reading matter to Asahara's books, as well as real rigors: self-starvation, immersion in hot or cold water and drug ingestion, some of it involuntary. Acolytes wearing helmets equipped with electrodes, supposedly to increase their alpha waves, were sighted during the Kamikuishiki raid.