Underground (53 page)

There were a lot of very appealing people in Aum. Completely different from the people I’ve known in the outside world. Relationships in society are always so … superficial, but in Aum we all lived together in one place, almost like a family.

I love children. My younger sister’s children are adorable, but for
me to get married, have a family, children—it’s difficult, having been a member of Aum. When I think about talking about my Aum background on a date, I don’t think I could … A big factor has got to be the fact that my own family was so dysfunctional. People raised in happy families probably wouldn’t join Aum.

At college I felt a deep alienation between my outer and my inner Self. I was a cheerful, enthusiastic person with lots of friends, but once I was alone in my room, I was engulfed by loneliness and there was nobody I could share that world with.

I’ve been that way since childhood. I remember always going inside the closet when I was a child. I didn’t want to see my parents, and even in my own room I didn’t feel like I had my own space. When you’re a child it feels like your parents are always interfering. For me the only place to escape to and find peace was the closet. Granted it’s a strange habit, but alone there in the darkness I could feel my consciousness grow razor sharp. It’s just you alone, face-to-face with yourself in the dark. In a sense, then, I was drawn to something like the Aum retreats since I was little.

In junior high I liked to listen to progressive rock. Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
, for example. Definitely not the sort of music I’d recommend unless you want something to bring you down
[laughs]
. I found out about Gurdjieff through King Crimson. Their guitarist Robert Fripp was a follower of Gurdjieff. After he got into that his music changed drastically. I think much of my outlook on life was influenced by that kind of music.

At high school I was into sports, basketball and badminton, but after entering college I felt I had to draw a line between myself and society. I was what we call a “Moratorium Person”: someone who doesn’t want to grow up. Our generation grew up after Japan had become a wealthy country and we viewed society through this lens of affluence. I just couldn’t adjust to the “adult society” I saw outside. It seemed warped to me somehow. Wasn’t there some other way to live your life, some other way of viewing the world? During my college days I had a lot of free time, and was preoccupied with these questions.

When you’re young you have all kinds of idealistic notions in your head, but coming face-to-face with the realities of your own life makes you see how immature you are. I felt very frustrated.

To free myself, to make a fresh start, I poked my nose into all sorts of things, hoping to find the energy I needed to live. Life is full of suffering, and the contradictions in the real world irked me. To escape these, I imagined my own sort of utopian society, which made it easier for me to be taken in by a religious group that espoused a similar vision.

When the Aum question comes up, people always start talking about relations between parents and children going sour, and family discord, but it can’t be reduced to something so simplistic. Certainly one of the attractions of Aum lay in people’s frustrations with reality and unrest in the family, but a much more important factor lies in apocalyptic feelings of “the end of the world,” feelings all of us have about the future. If you pay attention to the universal feeling of all of us, all Japanese—all humankind, even—then you can’t explain Aum’s appeal to so many people by saying it’s all based on discord in the family.

MURAKAMI:
Hold on a second. You really think all Japanese have a vision of the end of the world?

It might be hard to generalize and say that all of them do, but I think inside all Japanese there is an apocalyptic viewpoint: an invisible, unconscious sense of fear. When I say that all Japanese have this fear I mean some people have already pulled aside the veil, while others have yet to do so. If this veil were suddenly drawn back everyone would feel a sense of terror about the near future, the direction our world’s heading in. Society is the foundation stone for people’s lives, and they don’t know what’s going to happen to it in the future. This feeling grows stronger the more affluent a country becomes. It’s like a dark shadow looming larger and larger.

MURAKAMI:
Somehow the words “decline” or “collapse” seem to hit the mark more than “the end.”

Maybe so, but remember that when I was at school Nostradamus’s
Prophecies
became famous, and that sense that “The End Is Nigh” wedged itself deep into my consciousness through the mass media. And I wasn’t the only one to feel like that. I don’t want this to
deteriorate into some simplistic theory about “my generation,” but I feel very strongly that all Japanese at that time had the idea drilled into them of 1999 being the end of the world. Aum renunciates have already accepted, inside themselves, the end of the world, because when they become a renunciate, they discard themselves totally, thereby abandoning the world. In other words, Aum is a collection of people who have accepted the end. People who continue to hold out hope for the near future still have an attachment to the world. If you have attachments, you won’t discard your Self, but for renunciates it’s as if they’ve leaped right off a cliff. And taking a giant leap like that feels good. They lose something—but gain something in return.

Therefore the idea of “the End” is one of the axes around which Aum Shinrikyo revolved. “Armageddon’s coming, so become a renunciate,” they urged, “donate all your money to Aum”—and of course that became their source of income.

MURAKAMI:
But there are lots of other religious groups that have used an apocalyptic vision as their selling point. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, the Branch Davidians at Waco. What makes Aum different?

Robert Jay Lifton has said that there are many cults that have an apocalyptic creed, but Aum is the only one that marched straight toward it as part of their program.
^*
That makes sense to me.

Even now there’s an element about Aum, its driving force and direction, that I can’t fully understand. It had such tremendous energy, and pulled in so many people—including me, of course. But how did it do this?

When I was at college many new religions tried to convert me, but in terms of grappling with the direction the world had taken, seriously formulating a religious worldview, searching earnestly for a lifestyle that fit this view, and then rigorously putting it into practice, Aum stood out head and shoulders above the rest. Aum was the most amazing group of all. I really admired them for the way they practiced what they preached. Compared to them, other religions were resigned, cozy, comfortable, passive. Aum training was very, very tough. Their religious view—that you must transform your own
body before you can transform the world—had a hard-hitting realism. If there’s any chance for salvation, I thought, it has to begin like this.

To give you an example, with the shortage of food in the world, if only everyone, bit by bit, reduced their consumption the way the Aum diet does, then this food problem would be solved. Not by increasing the supply, but by changing the body, because Aum people eat only a tiny amount of food. If mankind is going to live in harmony with the earth, we’ve reached the age when we have to start thinking in this way.

MURAKAMI:
That reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel
Slapstick,
in which the Chinese shrink themselves to half their usual size in order to solve the world’s food shortage
.

That’s kind of funny. Actually I joined Aum twice. The second time I could already sense the violence that overshadowed Aum. The very first day back I thought: “Uh-oh. I’ve made a big mistake.” Aum wore a cheerful mask at the branch offices, since the people there were all still living ordinary lives. But go to Kamikuishiki where it was just renunciates, people who have discarded everything, and you could already feel this urgent sense of desperation.

When I joined I was put to work straightaway making Cosmo cleaners. Aum was already claiming that it was being attacked from the outside with sarin gas, and Cosmo cleaners were designed to reduce the toxicity. Just prior to my taking vows the Leader gave a sermon. “I’ve been hit with poison gas,” he told us, coughing and coughing. He was as limp as a rag doll, and his face was all dark. It seemed tremendously real. “I can only last another month,” he said, “and at this rate Aum will be destroyed. Before this happens, I want those who believe in me to gather around me. All of you will serve as my shield.” It was a powerful sermon. It forced lay followers to question their faith: here is the Leader in such dire straits and you’re just sitting around? How can you call this faith? All at once about three hundred people took vows, and I was one of them, caught up in this wave. Things started to look strange to me when I was forced to undergo what they called “Christ Initiation.” All the followers were made to take drugs. Any way you look at it, the whole thing was carelessly done. Using drugs in the name of religion, in order to enter some elevated state, is suspect in itself, but even supposing you
accept it as a legitimate means, at the very least you’ve got to do it in an organized fashion. What they gave us was something close to LSD, I suspect, and for almost everyone it was their first such experience. Some people went crazy and were just left to their own devices. That really troubled me. Even if the Leader had planned this as a method of elevating our spiritual state, the way it was handled left a lot to be desired.

I felt a great deal of resistance to this whole “Christ Initiation,” and after I went through it I struggled with whether or not I should leave Aum. It was such a shock it drove me to tears. “What the hell do they think they’re doing?” I wondered. It wasn’t just me—even a few of the leadership wavered over this initiation, some of the enlightened practitioners who hung on Asahara’s every word. It felt like Aum was starting to fall apart.

I think I joined Aum as a kind of adventure. You have to be a bit forgiving of a system organized to open up an entirely unknown world for you—when in Rome, and all that—so I did accept that system. On the one hand I wanted to adjust to the Aum lifestyle and plunge ahead, while a part of me took a step back and watched it all with a sober eye.

So anyway, after this “Christ Initiation” I had too many doubts about Aum and I couldn’t do the work I was assigned. I couldn’t easily swallow the doctrine of Vajrayana. There weren’t any other followers I could express my doubts to, and the Leader was too high up for me to talk to him directly. Even if I did say to someone I thought Aum was into some questionable things, I’d just get a stereotypical response: “Mr. Takahashi, all we can do is follow Aum.” I decided I had to talk to one of the leaders if I wanted to get anywhere.

While all this was going on Mr. Niimi, Eriko Iida, and Naropa
[Fumihiko Nagura]
asked me to see them, and as another kind of initiation they tied me up and yelled all kinds of things at me: “Why can’t you follow the life we lead in Aum?” “You’re neglecting your training, aren’t you?” “You’re not devoted to the Guru!”