The Shadow of Aum Shinrikyo

Today was a national holiday here in Japan.  It's nice to get a day off for each of the two equinoxes every year, if only because it gives us a moment to envision the Earth spinning on its axis and feel personally dwarfed by the forces of the universe.

Today is also the 13th anniversary of the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system. 

In this city, it is hard to ride the subway without being constantly reminded of the domestic terrorist attack carried out by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult on March 20, 1995.  That's because there are pictures of three escaped cultists in hanging up somewhere in almost every station. 

At Kasumigaseki (where a couple of train workers were killed) the pencil sketches of the perpetrators are larger than life-size.  And every few years or so, someone redraws the sketches of the culprits to make their faces look older.

When I first moved to Tokyo, I had no idea who these three people were.  For a few months, I honestly assumed that they were three Japanese citizens who had been abducted by the North Koreans, as this was another run-on-mega-issue inside of Japan (and my kanji wasn't so hot either.) 

Then one day, I was taking the metro with a Japanese friend who pointed out one of the posters and simply said "AUM".

Over five years of commuting later, I feel as if I know these pencil-sketched people.  It's almost as if they are old friends, greeting me with the same expressions every morning.  How creepy is that??

In Haruki Murakami's nonfiction work Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and The Japanese Psyche, he offers some pretty compelling thoughts about what may occur inside the minds of some cult members.

"If you lose your ego," he writes, "you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self.  Humans, however. cannot live very long without some sense of a continuing story.  ...Now narrative is a story, not logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy.  It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. ...At this point you receive a 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 13 years later, the shadow of these cult members remains.