Underground (46 page)

The solitary-confinement cell was the size of one tatami mat. The door was locked. It was summer, hot all the time, but they had a heater going. I was forced to drink gallons of a special Aum drink in a plastic bottle and sweat it out in the heat. Like they were trying to rid me of something bad. Of course I couldn’t take a bath and the grime dripped off me. No toilet, just a chamber pot inside my cell. My head zoned out and I couldn’t think straight.

MURAKAMI:
It’s amazing you didn’t die
.

It would have been easier if I had, and frankly at the time I think I really wanted to. But you know, when people are put in situations like that they prove remarkably resilient. Most of the people in solitary were wavering in their faith or were no longer useful to Aum. We had no idea when they would let us out. So I told myself, “Okay, I’ll use this to my advantage to do some serious training.” Keep on complaining and you’ll never get out. The only thing to do was think positively, put up with it, then move on.

Part of our daily training consisted of an initiation called Bardo Leading. They’d take you to another room, blindfold you, handcuff your hands behind you, and make you sit up straight. Then they’d bang on a drum, ring a brass bell, and scream in a loud, crazed voice something like “Train! Train! There’s no turning back, so we have to do our best!”

One day, though, when they took me over, I was suddenly pinned down by Siha
[Takashi Tomita]
and Satoru Hashimoto, and Niimi plugged up my nose and mouth. I couldn’t breathe. “You think your superiors are fools, don’t you?” they asked me. They were trying to kill me, but I used all my strength and was able to break free. “I’ve been doing my damnedest,” I shouted, “so why are you doing this to me?” Things settled down after that and I was able to go back to my cell, but I felt I was finished with Aum. How could they treat me like this, I thought, when I was doing my best?

Later I underwent what they called “Christ Initiation” a number of times. This was like an experiment using human beings. Whenever Niimi gave me drugs to take he looked at me like I was a guinea pig. “Drink it!” he said, his voice cold and detached. I saw Jivaka
[Seiichi Endo]
and Vajira Tissa
[Tomomasa Nakagawa]
come by to check out the solitary cells. My mind was messed up because of the drugs,
but I recall that quite clearly. They came to see our reaction to the drugs. I realized that the people in solitary were being used in drug experiments. We weren’t worth much to them alive, so they must have thought that using us in human experiments was the only way we’d build up spiritual merit. That made me ponder long and hard where fate had led me.

“Can I just die like this?” I wondered. “A guinea pig in a human experiment? If that’s my fate then the only way out is to return to the secular world. This is too inhuman, too terrible …” I was shocked, wondering where Aum had gone wrong.

After the drug initiation everyone was dead tired, so the door was left open for a time. I wasn’t too zonked out by then so I prepared a change of clothes and after making sure the coast was clear, dressed and crept out of the building. There were guards, but I managed to give them the slip.

[Mr. Masutani borrowed the bus fare from someone he bumped into on the street and returned to his parents’ home in Tokyo. A few months after his escape he learned that he had been excommunicated. The reasons given for this, he says, are groundless.]

So that’s how I went back to living in the secular world—not because I wanted to live an ordinary life, but because I couldn’t follow Aum any longer. The truth is I had nowhere else to go, so I went back to living with my parents. My family was so happy and said, “Thank goodness you’re back!” but since I’d lived five years already with no emotional attachments to them it just didn’t feel like a family anymore. I could never be satisfied with ordinary life; my parents couldn’t understand this, however, so it all fell apart. We began to fight and I moved out.

MURAKAMI:
Before that, in March 1995, there was the gas attack. What are your feelings about that?

At first I didn’t think Aum had done it. They preached about Vajrayana Tantra, of course, and the atmosphere within Aum had taken a bizarre turn, but I couldn’t imagine they’d go so far as to use sarin. We’re talking about a group that wouldn’t even kill a cockroach. When I was still in Aum I often heard from the staff how the Ministry of Science and Technology had made some comical blunder, so I couldn’t imagine them carrying out something this complex.
The media reported it as definitely the work of Aum, but Aum and Fumihiro Joyu denied any connection with it. At first I was inclined to believe them. As the investigation continued, though, some facts emerged that contradicted Aum’s claims, and I had my doubts. I reread my diary and it seems that it was around August of that year [1995] that I began to feel alienated from Aum. After that I was convinced that Aum carried out the attack.

Although I ran away from Aum because I could no longer agree with it or carry out its wishes, I couldn’t readjust to secular life. Aum’s stance of trying to overcome worldly attachments still struck me as more laudable than ordinary society. I began to reconsider what Aum—which I had devoted myself to—was all about. Trying to establish what was good about it, and what was wrong.

After leaving home I worked in a convenience store and did part-time jobs to get by. I stay in touch with my friends from Aum days, and we get together. Some of them still fully support Aum, and some admit that the gas attack was wrong, but think Aum doctrine is still sound. As many viewpoints as there are people. Even so, there are very few who have severed all ties to Aum and are living according to secular values.

I have no more interest in Aum, and am leaning now toward primitive Buddhism. All the people who’ve left Aum have incorporated some religious aspect into their lives.

MURAKAMI:
Of course, the individual is free to try to overcome desires and attachments and so on, but from an objective point of view it seems extremely dangerous to allow another, a guru, to take control of your own ego. Are there still many believers or ex-believers who don’t recognize this?

I don’t think many have thought about it properly. Gautama Buddha said, “The Self is the true master of the Self” and “Keep the Self an island, approaching nothing.” In other words, Buddhist disciples practice asceticism in order to find the true Self. They find impurities and attachments, and attempt to extinguish these. But what Mr. Matsumoto
[Asahara]
did was equate “Self” and “attachments.” He said that in order to get rid of the ego, the Self must be disposed of as well. Humans love the “Self,” so they suffer, and if the “Self” can be discarded then a shining true Self will emerge. But this
is a complete reversal of Buddhist teachings. The Self is what should be
discovered
, not discarded. Terrorist crimes like the gas attack result from this process of easily giving up on the Self. If the Self is lost, then people will become completely insensitive to murder and terrorism.

In the final analysis, Aum created people who had discarded their Selves and just followed orders. Therefore enlightened practitioners in Aum, those most steeped in Aum doctrine, are not truly enlightened people who have mastered the truth. It’s a perversion for believers who supposedly have renounced the world to run around collecting donations in the name of “salvation.”

I don’t believe that Mr. Matsumoto
[Asahara]
gradually turned strange. He had those ideas in mind from the start. What he did was push them forward in stages.

MURAKAMI:
So from the beginning he had the pian to go in the direction of Vajrayana Tantra? It wasn’t that somewhere along the way he became deluded and the direction of Aum changed?

There’s some truth in both. One element was there from the start, and as he surrounded himself with yes-men his sense of reality faded and delusions took over.

However, I think that, in his own way, Asahara was seriously considering the question of salvation. Otherwise, no one would have renounced the world to follow him. To some extent there
was
something mystical about it all. The same thing holds true for me—yoga and ascetic practice led to some mystical experiences.

MURAKAMI:
Now Aum is attempting to continue with the same doctrines—minus Shoko Asahara and the Vajrayana Tantra. How do you feel about that?

Since nothing about Aum has changed, there’s a distinct danger that new crimes will occur—maybe not soon, but eventually. Also, people who remain in Aum have accepted the gas attack on a subconscious level, so they’re not aware of the dangers of carrying on the same teachings. All they think about are the good points of Aum and the benefits they’ve received.

When I think about the victims of the gas attack and those colleagues of mine who were directly involved in carrying out the crime, I want to grab the people who still believe in Aum and shout at them:
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”—but they’d probably just withdraw deeper into their shells. All we can do is slowly show them the truth and make them aware of it.

How I can come to terms with the secular world is a difficult question. I’ve had enough of belonging to organizations—I just want to try to make it on my own. A part of me wants to extinguish the desires within me, but all I can do now is take one step at a time under my own steam.

MURAKAMI:
Since you were a freshman in college you spent at least seven years in Aum. Do you feel like that time was lost to you?

No, I don’t. A mistake is a mistake, but something of value comes from overcoming that. It can be a turning point in your life.

Some former Aum members have completely discarded the Aum experience and don’t read the papers or watch any reports on it. They close their eyes to it, but that doesn’t help you learn anything from your mistakes. It’s like when you do badly in a test and you really examine where you went wrong. If you don’t, the next time you’ll make the very same mistake.

Ever since I was little I’ve had mystical experiences. For instance, when I dreamed it was no different from reality. I’d call them stories
rather than dreams—they were long and distinct, and after I woke up I could remember every detail. In my dreams I visited all sorts of worlds, had astral-projection-type experiences. I had them over and over, almost every day. In astral projection your body is fixed, your breathing stops, and you can fly. This happened most when I was very tired.

It was different from what you usually call dreams. Everything was extremely realistic. It would have been easier if you could make a clear-cut distinction, and say, “Okay, this is a dream and isn’t the same as reality,” but things very much like those in reality appeared in my dreams and confused me. “Is this reality? Or isn’t it?” Gradually I couldn’t distinguish between the two, or maybe I should say that my dreams became more real than reality. This bothered me. “So what is reality?” I asked myself. “Where is my true consciousness?”

These experiences influenced me a lot. I talked to my parents about them, but they couldn’t understand what I was trying to say. I was a bit on the introverted side, but I had friends and went to school like everyone else. I wasn’t particularly fond of school, though I worked hard at subjects I enjoyed. I loved to read, too, especially science fiction and fantasy. I read a lot of comics and watched cartoons. Math I was terrible at, and I didn’t like sports very much.