「Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy」は日本の近現代史を英語で学ぶために参考になると思います。
Selected Events in Japanese History Prior to April 1941
Here and throughout the book, the dates are indicated in local times.
1853 July Commodore Matthew Perry presses Japan to end its isolationist policy.
1854 March 31 The Tokugawa shogunate signs the unfavorable Treaty of Peace and Amity with the United States, ending its isolationist policy and leading to the opening of Japanese ports to the rest of the world.
1868 January 3 The shogunate falls and the Meiji Restoration is proclaimed.
1882 January 4 The Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, a code of military conduct that will form a vital part of Japanese nationalism, is issued.
1889 February 11 The Meiji Constitution is promulgated.
1890 July 1 Japan holds its first general elections.
November 25 The first session of the Diet, Japan’s bicameral parliament, is summoned, and held four days later.
1894 August 1 Japan declares war on Qing China, beginning the Sino-Japanese War.
1895 April 17 Japan defeats China, concluding the war with the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, placing Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula, strategically located to access northeastern China (Manchuria), under Japanese control.
April 23 Russia, Germany, and France pressure Japan to return the Liaodong Peninsula to China (the so-called Triple Intervention), which it does on May 5.
1898 March 27 Russia secures a leasehold on the Liaodong Peninsula.
1902 January 30 The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, a treaty between equals, is formed.
1904 February 8 Japan attacks czarist Russia at Port Arthur, declaring war two days later.
1905 May 27–28 The Japanese navy scores a major victory in the Battle of Tsushima.
September 5 The Russo-Japanese War ends with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth, through the mediation of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt.
November 17 Korea becomes a Japanese protectorate.
1906 August 1 Japan forms the Kwantung Army to protect its Manchurian possessions, newly acquired from Russia.
1910 August 29 Japan annexes Korea.
1912 July 30 Mutsuhito, the Meiji emperor, dies, succeeded by his son, Yoshihito.
1914 July 28 World War I breaks out.
August 23 Japan goes to war with Germany, enabling it to take over German possessions in China and the Pacific by November.
1915 January 18 Japan issues the Twenty-One Demands to Yuan Shikai’s China, but fails to win diplomatic concessions while antagonizing the Chinese.
1918 November 11 World War I ends, followed by the convocation of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
1922 February 6 Japan ratifies the Nine-Power Treaty and the Washington Naval Treaty, commencing the era of Japan’s liberal internationalist foreign policy.
1923 September 1 The Great Kanto Earthquake and the ensuing fire destroy much of Tokyo.
1926 December 25 Yoshihito dies and Crown Prince Hirohito becomes the emperor.
1929 October 29 Black Tuesday marks the beginning of the Great Depression.
1930 January 21 The London Naval Conference begins.
November 4 Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi is gravely wounded by an ultranationalist for supporting Japan’s ratification of the London Naval Treaty.
1931 September 18 The Kwantung Army launches the Manchurian Incident, a Japanese invasion of northeastern China, after blowing up a railway line near Mukden and blaming the act on the Chinese.
September 24 Prime Minister Wakatsuki Reijiro’s cabinet condones the military insubordination by accepting the Kwantung Army’s takeover of the Manchurian province of Jilin.
1932 March 1 The establishment of Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state with nominal Chinese leaders, is proclaimed by the Kwantung Army.
October 2 The Lytton Commission issues its report condemning the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
1933 January 28 The Kwantung Army occupies Rehe, a buffer province between Manchukuo and China (in today’s northern Hebei Province), with a view to establishing a stronghold in North China.
February 24 Matsuoka Yosuke, Japan’s ambassador plenipotentiary, announces his country’s intention to withdraw from the League of Nations over its adoption of the Lytton Report.
May 31 Japan successfully pressures the Guomindang (a.k.a. Kuomintang, often referred to as the Chinese Nationalist Party) leader Chiang Kai-shek to agree to the Tanggu Truce, creating a demilitarized zone in eastern Hebei, near Manchukuo’s borders.
1935 June Japanese pressures on Chiang Kai-shek increase, prompting him to withdraw his troops from Hebei, and Chahar, Inner Mongolia, enabling Japan to secure its sphere of influence around Manchukuo.
1936 February 26 A coup attempt in Tokyo instigated by young army officers almost succeeds, but Hirohito’s decisive intervention quells it.
December 12 Chiang Kai-shek is kidnapped by the anti-Japanese warlord Zhang Xueliang, who forces Chiang to reassess his policy, eventually making him agree to join a united front against Japan, in cooperation with Chinese Communists.
1937 June 4 Konoe Fumimaro becomes prime minister.
July 7 The China War begins with a Sino-Japanese clash at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing.
December 13 Japanese forces conquer the Guomindang capital, Nanjing, followed by weeks of mass killing and rape.
1938 January 16 Prime Minister Konoe declares that Japan will not “deal with” Chiang Kai-shek.
March 24 The National Mobilization Law is passed in the Diet, followed by a series of emergency centralization measures to carry out Japan’s effective war mobilization.
July 1 The United States begins its “moral embargo” on aircraft and aircraft parts against Japan.
November 3 Konoe announces that Japan’s aim in the war against China is to help create a “New East Asian Order.”
1939 January 5 Konoe’s cabinet resigns.
February 10 The Japanese occupation of Hainan Island begins.
July 26 The United States announces its intention to abrogate the 1911 Treaty of Commerce and Navigation with Japan.
1940 March 30 Wang Jingwei forms a pro-Japanese government in Japanese-occupied Nanjing.
May 7 Pearl Harbor is made the main base for the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
June 4 The United States embargoes exports of industrial equipment to Japan.
June 14 German forces begin to invade Paris, leading to the fall of France.
July 22 Konoe becomes prime minister for the second time; Matsuoka Yosuke becomes foreign minister.
From late July to early August U.S. exports of metals, aviation gasoline, and lubricating oil to Japan come under strict federal control.
August 1 Matsuoka uses the term “Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere” to sum up the government’s ambition to build a self-sufficient regional bloc under Japan’s leadership.
September 23–29 Japan occupies the northern half of French Indochina.
September 25 The United States increases its financial assistance to Chiang Kai-shek.
September 26 The United States embargoes the sale of steel and scrap iron to Japan, to go into effect on October 16.
September 27 Japan signs the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.
October 12 The Imperial Rule Assistance Association is formed under Konoe’s presidency, putting an end to Japan’s party politics and beginning the New Order Movement.
October 31 Dance halls are closed and jazz performances become illegal in Japan.
November 10 The twenty-six-hundred-year reign of the Japanese imperial house is celebrated nationwide.
1941 January 8 Army Minister Tojo Hideki issues “Instructions for the Battlefield,” commanding soldiers to die a soldier’s death rather than become captives; this code, glorifying heroic death, will form the basis of Japan’s wartime credo.
February 11 The Japanese ambassador to the United States, Nomura Kichisaburo, arrives in Washington, D.C.
March 12 Matsuoka leaves for his grand tour of Europe to meet Japan’s Axis partners, Hitler and Mussolini.
This hymn was recorded live during a service at the Plainfield Christian Science Church, Independent, located in Plainfield, NJ.
We are located online at http://plainfieldcs.com.
2018/04/29 に公開
Michelle Nanouche, Speaker. This lecture tackles the essentials of Christian Science – its theology, its Christianity and its role in healing – giving an insider’s look at Christian Science treatment through prayer for physical cure. The speaker is a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science healing. The talk was sponsored by the Christian Science Churches in Orange County.
View amazing, verified healings of physical, emotional, financial problems & more. Prayer that Heals is based on The Bible and teachings of Jesus Christ. The Christian Science religion was founded by Mary Baker Eddy who wrote Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, first published in 1875. View more talks on PrayerThatHeals.org.
A talk by Rob Gilbert, a Christian Science healer and teacher. More talks about prayer and healing at www.PrayerThatHeals.org . He has found that prayer and a deep understanding of God are reliable way to maintain health and experience healing.
Dear Mr. Gilbert ~ Your Lecture on God and Health is most inspiring and appreciated.
Your calm and assuring tone, along with your obvious deep conviction about the topic
are truly...wonderful, healing, so Love-given! Thank you very much.
“So, what is your heart beating for?” was a question I faced in my late twenties. I was a struggling filmmaker in Los Angeles, experiencing some problems with my heart after a failed marriage and an unsuccessful business venture. On my mental knees in prayer, I opened to a passage in Mary Baker Eddy’s writings that instantly got my attention: “The heart that beats mostly for self is seldom alight with love.” * I realized that the function of the heart is to beat for God; it’s a reflection of divine Love itself. This glimpse of the Christ—the pure love of God embracing humanity—transformed my life and my health. From that day to this, I’ve been doing everything I can to share the healing message of Christian Science with the world.
Http://unitymedford.org - What is Unity? In this video we answer the most frequently asked question about the Unity Movement and Unity Churches. We could be your Spiritual Home in the Rogue Valley as we are located in Medford. So if you live in Ashland, Talent, Phoenix, Central Point, Gold Hill, Rogue River, White City, Eagle Point, Shady Cove, Trail or Prospect you're just a few minutes away. Come take a look... Connect with Spirit ! http://www.unitymedford.org
Fujiko Signs, speaker. This talk is for anyone looking for healing and for communities moving forward after the Thomas Fire and floods. Signs is an international speaker and a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science healing. She talks about the healing power of prayer. Discover how you can overcome fear and feel a deep sense of God's limitless love. The talk was sponsored by the Christian Science Churches in Ojai and Ventura, CA.
View amazing, verified healings of physical, emotional, financial problems & more. Prayer that Heals is based on The Bible and teachings of Jesus Christ. The Christian Science religion was founded by Mary Baker Eddy who wrote Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, first published in 1875. View more talks on PrayerThatHeals.org.
If time, as Einstein declared, is merely an illusion of consciousness, then linear time itself is a metaphysical fiction; everything that has happened, is happening, or will happen, is happening now. There, in that realm of the eternal now, is the true “I am.”
Who you are in this moment, therefore, is who you truly are. And from that essential point of perfect being―created anew by God in every instant―miracles flow naturally.
Thoughts of love interrupt the past and open the future to new probabilities.
No matter who you are, no matter how old you are, in the present, all things are possible.
2018 World Day of Prayer September 13, 2018
Courage to Heal
I am a healing presence.
World Day of Prayer is a 24-hour prayer vigil and meditation.
September 13, 2018, marks the 25th anniversary of the event, and thousands of individuals and communities around the world will come together to affirm and celebrate the true spiritual nature of healing.
The live event will be held at Unity World Headquarters at Unity Village and broadcast to Unity and New Thought communities and homes around the world.
Join us for music, prayer, and meditation as we support and strengthen our courage to heal ourselves, our communities, and our world, guided by the affirmation: I am a healing presence.
Paramahansa Yogananda: As I Knew Him -- Experiences, Observations & Reflections of a Disciple (英語) ペーパーバック – 2018/5/31
Roy Eugene Davis (著)
Frances Fayden
5つ星のうち5.0
If you love Yogananda, this is a treasure!
2018年6月28日 - (Amazon.com)
This is a wonderful first-hand account of life with the great master, Paramahansa Yogananda. Mr. Davis' stories of his time with Yogananda made me feel even closer to this great saint. I always recommend reading books about a great master written by their disciples, as they give you great insight about the guru-disciple relationship. Also included are an expanded Q&A section about yogic living, which is especially helpful for aspiring yogis like me.
Roy Eugene Davis met his guru, Paramahansa Yogananda on Christmas eve 1949. It is rare that a direct disciple of a master of yoga shares an intimate account of that relationship and describes the psychological and spiritual transformations that can occur. In this informative book the reader is introduced to a realm of experience and knowledge that is not ordinarily accessible. Mr. Davis has taught meditation and spiritual growth processes in North and South America, Europe, West Africa, Japan and India for more than 50 years. His books have been published in 10 languages. He is the founder and spiritual director of Center for Spiritual Awareness with International Headquarters in north Georgia.
著者について
Roy Eugene Davis has taught meditation and spiritual growth processes in North and South America, Europe, West Africa, Japan, and India for more than 50 years. Some of his books have been published in 10 lanuguages and 11 countries. He is the founder and spiritual director of Center for Spiritual Awareness.
Roy Eugene Davis is one of the last of Paramahansa Yogananda's personal disciples still living. He was ordained by Yoganandaji with the directive to "Teach as I have taught, heal as I have healed, and initiate sincere seekers in kriya yoga." In this video he recalls his time with the great kriya yoga master, the example he set, his open sharing of spiritual practices and his enlightened consciousness.
Potal Site : http://quaneko.net
昔から、中沢氏はどうしても胡散臭く見えてたし、いま映像を見ても怪しい。しかしながら、オウムでのバッシングの時はヒドイなあと思ったし、以降、表舞台から消えてしまった。しかし、昨年、いやもう一昨年になるが、浅田彰とゲンロンカフェで対談し、良かったなあと思った。東浩紀氏には大いに感謝するとともに、その功績は絶大であったと思います。
It is not true that there is nothing new under the sun. To be sure, the oldest human emotions continue to haunt us. But they do so in new settings with new technology, and that changes everything.
On March 20, 1995, Aum Shinrikyō, a fanatical Japanese religious cult, released sarin, a deadly nerve gas, on five subway trains during Tokyo’s early-morning rush hour. A male cult member boarded each of the trains carrying two or three small plastic bags covered with newspaper and, at an agreed-upon time, removed the newspaper and punctured the bags with a sharpened umbrella tip. On the trains, in the stations where they stopped, and at the station exits, people coughed, choked, experienced convulsions, and collapsed. Eleven were killed and up to five thousand injured. Had Aum succeeded in producing a purer form of the gas, the deaths could have been in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. For sarin, produced originally by the Nazis, is among the most lethal of chemical weapons. Those releasing it on the trains understood themselves to be acting on behalf of their guru and his vast plan for human salvation.
Aum and its leader, Shōkō Asahara, were possessed by visions of the end of the world that are probably as old as death itself. Asahara also held in common with many present-day Christian prophets of biblical world-ending events a belief that Armageddon would be connected to those most secular of “end-time” agents, nuclear warheads or chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
But his cult went a step further. It undertook serious efforts to acquire and produce these weapons as part of a self-assigned project of making Armageddon happen. For the first time in history, end-time religious fanaticism allied itself with weapons capable of destroying the world and a group embarked on the mad project of doing just that. Fortunately, much went wrong. After all, it is not so easy to destroy the world. But we have a lot to learn from the attempt.
The impulses that drove Asahara and Aum are by no means unique to him and his group. Rather, Aum was part of a loosely connected, still-developing global subculture of apocalyptic violence—of violence conceived in sweeping terms as a purification and renewal of humankind through the total or near-total destruction of the planet. One can observe these inclinations in varied groups on every continent. Their specific transformative projects may be conceived as religious or political, the violence to be employed either externally directed or suicidal or both at once. One can find certain psychological parallels to Aum Shinrikyō in, for instance, the Jewish fundamentalists who encouraged the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in Palestinian Hamas suicide bombers, and in Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists who act violently on behalf of claims to ancient sacred places on the Indian subcontinent. But my exploration of Aum led me particularly to the apocalyptic inclinations of American groups like the Charles Manson Family, Heaven’s Gate, and Peoples Temple, as well as the Oklahoma City bombers, Aryan supremacists, and paramilitary survivalists on the radical right. Just as we now take for granted the interconnectedness of the global economic system, so must we learn to do the same for the growing global system of apocalyptic violence. Outbreaks anywhere reverberate everywhere.
Increasingly widespread among ordinary people is the feeling of things going so wrong that only extreme measures can restore virtue and righteousness to society. When the world comes to be experienced as both hateful and dead or dying, a visionary guru can seize on such feelings while promising to replace them with equally absolute love and life-power. Nor are any of us completely free of those inner struggles. The sentiments that created Aum Shinrikyō are part of the spiritual and psychological ambience each of us inhabits day by day.
Apocalyptic violence has been building worldwide over the last half of the twentieth century. Having studied some of the most destructive events of this era, I found much of what Aum did familiar, echoing the totalistic belief systems and end-of-the-world aspirations I had encountered in other versions of the fundamentalist self. I came to see these, in turn, as uneasy reactions to the openness and potential confusions of the “protean” self that history has bequeathed us. I had been concerned with these matters since the mid-1950s, when I first studied “thought reform” (or “brainwashing”) in Communist China and then among American cultic religious groups. I came to recognize the power of a totalized environment for mobilizing individual passions in the creation of fierce, often deeply satisfying expressions of collective energy.
Aum’s obsession with nuclear weapons and with the atomic destruction of Hiroshima in particular connected with interview work I had done in that city in the early 1960s on the psychological effects of the atomic bomb and on the psychology of the survivor. In subsequent work I had explored the dangers of “nuclearism,” the embrace and even deification of nuclear weaponry so that potential agents of mass destruction become a source of security, life-power, and even at times salvation. My work in the early 1970s with Vietnam veterans who told of destroying a village—indeed, much of a country—in order to save it had reverberations in Aum, where the ambition was considerably greater: destroying a world in order to save it. There were striking parallels in Aum to behavior I encountered in the 1970s and 1980s while studying the Nazis’ utilization not only of professional killers but also of killing professionals—in this case, doctors. In Aum, too, doctors were central to the cult’s reversal of healing and killing. They participated in individual murders and had an important role, together with other scientists, in producing and releasing deadly chemical and biological weapons.
Aum is now viewed throughout the world as the primary example of the extraordinary dangers posed by private terrorist groups arming themselves with versions of “the poor man’s atomic bomb.” For Aum was a small antigovernment group claiming ten thousand followers in Japan, about fourteen hundred of whom were renunciants, or monks, at thirty facilities across the country; thirty thousand in Russia (a figure that has been disputed); and a handful in West Germany, Sri Lanka, and the United States. Yet this relatively tiny organization managed to manufacture, stockpile, and release deadly sarin gas first in the city of Matsumoto, northwest of Tokyo, and then in Tokyo itself. It also prepared equally deadly anthrax bacillus and botulinus toxin, releasing them several times in Tokyo and nearby areas (including in the vicinity of two American military bases), largely unsuccessfully but with effects not yet fully known. Between 1990 and 1995 the cult staged at least fourteen chemical and biological attacks of varying dimensions. Aum also made inquiries, particularly in Russia, into acquiring or producing nuclear weapons. It was the grandiose plan of Shōkō Asahara to employ this weaponry to initiate World War III, a global holocaust of unprecedented proportions that would in turn trigger a hoped-for Armageddon. In his fantasies he saw the United States as a major military participant in this apocalyptic project.
But plans and fantasies, however earnest and elaborate, are not the same as action. A simple but terrible question therefore haunts this study: How did Aum Shinrikyō come to cross the crucial threshold from merely anticipating Armageddon to taking active steps to bring it about?
My way of going about answering this question was, as always, to talk to people—to interview those involved. I have been doing that for decades in applying a psychological perspective to historical problems. Here, during five trips to Japan between 1995 and 1997, I was able to conduct intensive interviews with ten former members of Aum, eight men and two women, averaging more than five hours with each person. Since the guru himself and most of his leading disciples were in prison and inaccessible, the people I interviewed tended to be at either the lower or the mid echelons of a very hierarchical organization. Only a privileged inner circle of Asahara’s highest-ranking followers were told of the more violent aspects of the guru’s visionary plans, and even then often incompletely. Most of those I interviewed had little or no knowledge of the various facets of Aum violence. But while part of Aum they had to do considerable psychological work to fend off that knowledge in the face of the evidence around them.
I was also able to have discussions, though less structured, with two additional former members and one present member as well as with many close observers of Aum. I spent several particularly valuable days with one of the people most intensely involved in helping former Aum members extricate themselves psychologically from the cult and find alternative forms of spiritual expression. Because my Japanese is limited, I required interpreters for all these exchanges. I was extremely fortunate to have the close collaboration of an eminent scholar of Japanese religion, Manabu Watanabe, in this project. He interpreted for me in many of these interviews and meetings and consulted on various issues having to do with present and past patterns in Japanese religion, history, and psychology. Almost all the interviews were tape-recorded and then transcribed and retranslated by young bilingual scholars, providing a further opportunity to explore nuanced meanings.
Several of the former Aum members I spoke to were introduced to me by scholars and journalists they had been in touch with. Having found some value in the interviews, these former members introduced me to friends who had also been part of Aum. Much of their motivation had to do with their need to understand more about what had happened to them in the cult, how they had become so profoundly involved with a group they and others came to see as criminal, and how they could extricate themselves from their tie to a guru who still had a considerable psychological hold on them. I felt a certain sympathy for their efforts, while remaining aware, as were most of them, of their moral complicity in Aum. To protect their anonymity, I have used pseudonyms consisting only of family names for those I interviewed. In addition, I have altered certain identifying details that do not affect the substance of our exchanges.
I supplemented my interviews with efforts to learn all I could about historical and cultural influences on Aum—from writings by and discussions with scholars concerned with Japanese religion and society, Japanese journalists who had covered or followed the story of the cult, and Europeans and Americans familiar with Japan’s religious climate. I utilized the Japanese and American Internets for early reports on Aum and details of the ongoing trials of its leaders, especially that of its guru. And I drew upon my past work on Japan, including studies of its youth and of prominent figures of the modern era.
I focused on the inner life of Aum members and above all on the extraordinary ramifications of the guru-disciple relationship. Most of Aum’s wildly destructive visions came from its guru, but he in turn was completely dependent upon his disciples to sustain those visions and act upon them—indeed, for his own psychological function. One can understand little about Aum without probing the extremity of what can be called its guruism, and that guruism helps us to grasp certain essential aspects of the leader-follower interaction in much of the extreme behavior taking place elsewhere. Included in Aum’s guruism was a bizarre embrace of science to “prove” Aum’s religious truths and to provide Asahara with the kinds of ultimate weapons that might bring such “truths” to fruition.
No truth was more central to Aum than the principle that world salvation could be achieved only by bringing about the deaths of just about everyone on this earth. Disciples described their embrace of this vision and their understanding of its evolution from Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian doctrine, but they always assumed that the world-ending violence would be initiated by others, not by the cult itself. Yet Asahara’s idiosyncratic version of these traditions came to focus on the Buddhist concept of poa, which, in his distorted use, meant killing for the sake of your victims: that is, to provide them with a favorable rebirth. One can speak, then, of a weapons-hungry cult with a doctrine of altruistic murder—murder ostensibly intended to enhance a victim’s immortality. The doctrine sanctified not only violence against the world at large but the killing of numerous individuals who ran afoul of the guru’s aspirations.
At the heart of Aum’s violence—and its violent world-ending fantasies—was the interaction of a megalomanic guru with ultimate weapons of annihilation. Such weapons were profoundly attractive precisely because they enabled him to feel that he alone had the power to destroy the world. The existence of the weapons, then, effaces age-old distinctions between world-destroying fantasy (whether of paranoid schizophrenics, religious visionaries, or even ordinary people in their dreams) and the capability of actualizing that fantasy. That blurring of categories was noted by a thoughtful psychoanalyst, Edward Glover, within months of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He spoke of the atomic bomb as “less a weapon of war than a weapon of extermination [and therefore] well adapted to the more bloodthirsty fantasies with which man is secretly preoccupied during phases of acute frustration.” He concluded, “The capacity so painfully acquired by normal men to distinguish between sleep, delusion, hallucination and the objective reality of waking life has for the first time in human history been seriously weakened.”
In sustaining his ties to ultimate weapons, Asahara brought to bear highly varied, seemingly contradictory personal characteristics: a genuine religious talent, a form of paranoia that enabled him to function at a rather high intellectual level, a con-man style that involved continuous falsification (both conscious lying and self-deception), a grandiosity of moral claim that justified unlimited mass murder, and a tendency, when control over his environment was threatened, to succumb to paranoid psychosis. His obsession with weapons of mass destruction aside, Asahara was hardly unique. All megalomanic gurus are likely to be some such psychological composite—hence the confusion of observers who focus on just one or two of these characteristics. Certainly, all of them operated in Aum as the guru and his closest disciples, struggling with internal and external crises, managed to generate a powerful momentum toward mass killing and eventually crossed a threshold that allowed for no turning back.
Aum is a Japanese phenomenon but a more general one as well. To begin to explain its emergence we must look at various psychological and historical currents in contemporary and modern Japan, which are replete with violence, national guruism, and apocalyptic temptation. But we are, of course, only dealing with a Japanese expression of our universal psychological repertoire, with feelings now being experienced everywhere, perhaps most strongly in the United States. We all have to face Aum’s significance for the human future and to ponder the question of how to deal with, and what alternatives there might be to, its vision of apocalyptic violence.
For Aum is about death in the nuclear age, about a distorted passion for survival, and about an ever more desperate quest for immortality. It is also about despising the world so much that one feels impelled to destroy it. In these ways, Aum encompassed the most destructive forces of the century just passing.
One can look at the guru of a fanatical new religion or cult* as either everything or nothing. The everything would acknowledge the guru’s creation of his group and its belief system, as well as his sustained control over it—in which case the bizarre behavior of Aum Shinrikyō could be understood as little more than a reflection of Shōkō Asahara’s own bizarre ideas and emotions. The nothing would suggest that the guru is simply a creation of the hungers of his disciples, that he has no existence apart from his disciples, that any culture can produce psychological types like him, that without disciples, there is no guru. Both views have elements of truth, but the deeper truth lies in combining them, in seizing upon the paradox.
Gurus and disciples are inevitably products of a particular historical moment. They represent a specific time and place, even as they draw upon ancient psychological and theological themes. As our contemporaries, they are, like the rest of us, psychologically unmoored, adrift from and often confused about older value systems and traditions. That unmoored state has great importance. Here I would stress only that a guru’s complete structural and psychological separateness from a traditional cultural institution—in Asahara’s case an established religion—permits him to improvise wildly in both his theology and his personal behavior, to become a “floating guru.” Disciples in turn are open to any strange direction he may lead them and contribute their own unmoored fantasies without the restraining force that a religious or institutional hierarchy might provide.
The guru narrative is always elusive. The guru appears to us full-blown, catches our attention because of what he, with disciples, has done—all the more so when that is associated with any kind of violence, no less mass murder. We then look back on the guru’s life history to try to understand his part in this culminating act. But while we should learn all we can about him, we are mistaken if we believe that his childhood—or his past in general—will provide a full explanation of that act.
No adult is a mere product of childhood. There is always a forward momentum to the self that does not follow simple cause and effect. Each self becomes a constellation or a collage that is ever in motion, a “self-system” or “self-process.” There are, of course, powerful early influences on that self, but outcomes depend upon evolving combinations of experience and motivation that are never entirely predictable. This is especially clear with exceptional people: one would be hard put to explain the extraordinary actions of either a Picasso or a Hitler on the basis of childhood experience alone. With anyone, we can at best connect that childhood to later inclinations, attitudes, or passions, finding certain continuities of talent, destructiveness, or both. But precisely the quality that claims our interest here—what we usually call charisma—tends to leap out of the life narrative and create a special realm of its own.
The British psychoanalyst Anthony Storr offers a useful description of a guru type: a spiritual teacher whose insight is based on personal revelation, often taking the form of a vision understood to come directly from a deity. The revelation, which has transformed his life, generally follows upon a period of distress or illness in his thirties or forties. There is suddenly a sense of certainty, of having found “the truth,” creating a general aura around him that “he knows.” The emerging guru can then promise, as Asahara did, “new ways of self-development, new paths to salvation, always generalizing from [his] own experience.”
But the guru, in turn, needs disciples not only to become and remain a guru but to hold himself together psychologically. For the guru self often teeters on the edge of fragmentation, paranoia, and overall psychological breakdown. We will observe a particularly bizarre and violent version of this in Asahara, and in the manner in which he disintegrated when his closest disciples turned against him. Disciples are crucial to all dimensions of a guru’s psychological struggles in ways that are seldom fully grasped.
What has also been insufficiently recognized is the life-death dimension that pervades the guru-disciple tie, a dimension I have stressed throughout my work. Moving away from the classical Freudian model of instinct, mostly sexual, and defense, mostly repression, I emphasize our struggles with the continuity of life and our ways of symbolizing life and death. At an immediate level these include experiences of vitality as opposed to numbing and inner deadness. But I also include an ultimate level of universal need for human connectedness, for a sense of being part of a great chain of being that long preceded, and will continue endlessly after, one’s own limited life span. This sense of immortality encompasses feelings of living on in our children and their children, in our influences on other human beings, in our “works,” in a particular set of spiritual or religious beliefs, in what we perceive as eternal nature, or in the oneness of transcendent experiences.
In the cult, the guru becomes a crucible for life-power. That life-power is experienced as a surge of vitality, or what was constantly spoken of in Aum as “energy.” One’s previously deadened life now has vigor and purpose, even if the vigor and purpose are borrowed from the guru. That life-power becomes bound up with larger spiritual forces, that is, with a fierce sense of death-defying immortality. This aspect was the most compelling feature of Asahara’s hold on his disciples. The charisma that a guru like him is always said to possess is usually described with phrases like “magnetic attractiveness” or a “naked capacity of mustering assent.” But at the heart of charisma is the leader’s ability to instill and sustain feelings of vitality and immortality, feelings that reach into the core of each disciple’s often wounded, always questing self, while propelling that self beyond itself. Such feelings can be as fragile as they are psychologically explosive.
In this book Asahara, the guru, will be everywhere, most of all inhabiting, even in the wake of Aum’s violence, the minds of the disciples I interviewed. At the same time he will be nowhere, his guruism a phantom force, wavering between hyperreality and nothingness.
One-Eyed Child
Shōkō Asahara’s childhood brings to mind Erasmus’s aphorism “In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.” But this particular one-eyed child was apparently an odd and uneasy king. Born in 1955 into the impoverished family of a tatami craftsman in a provincial area of Kyūshū, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands, he was the sixth of seven children and the fourth of five boys. Chizuo Matsumoto (Asahara’s birth name), afflicted with congenital glaucoma, was without sight in one eye and had severely impaired vision in the other. Because he did have some vision he was eligible to attend an ordinary school, but his parents chose to send him to a special school for the blind. It had the advantage of providing free tuition and board, and a completely sightless older brother was already enrolled there.
Having some vision while his fellow students had none, and being bigger and stronger than most of them, he could be a dominating, manipulative, bullying, and sometimes violent figure in the school, where he would remain until he was twenty years old. He would, for instance, force his roommates to strike one another in a contest he called “pro wrestling,” and when he found their efforts unsatisfactory he would himself demonstrate how it should be done. He could be rebellious to the point of threatening teachers but, if challenged, would back down and deny any provocation. He always had a few completely blind followers toward whom he could at times exhibit great kindness, and his teachers observed that he was also capable of tenderness toward his older brother and a younger brother who later became a student at the school. But he was generally coercive, gave evidence of resentment over having been forced to attend this special school, and was prone to quick changes in attitude and demands.
In his early ventures into proto-guruism, this one-eyed “king” did not command wide allegiance. He unsuccessfully ran for class head on several occasions, and each failure left him dejected. Once, after being voted down by fellow students despite an attempt to bribe them with sweets, he accused a teacher of influencing the election by saying bad things about him, but the teacher pointed out to him that the other students were simply afraid of him.
While his actual background was humble enough, there were rumors of a further taint—that his family came from the outcast group known by the euphemism burakumin (literally “village people”) or that they were Korean, also a victimized group in Japan. These rumors, though false, suggest something of others’ attitudes toward him. Yet later he would sometimes himself imply that he was burakumin, in order to identify himself with a despised and victimized group and so to claim extraordinary triumph over adversity.
Most accounts of Asahara’s early years emphasize his preoccupation with money. He would charge other students for favors his partial sight allowed him to accomplish and insist upon being treated by them when he took them to food shops or restaurants. He is said to have accumulated a considerable sum of money this way by the time of his graduation. But whatever the complexities of his school life, he apparently obtained rather good grades as a student and achieved a black-belt ranking in judo.
