One aspect of Asahara’s childhood is not frequently mentioned. He was attracted to drama of all kinds. From an early age, he loved to watch melodramas on television; later he acted in various school plays and as a high school senior wrote a play of his own about Prince Genji, a great romantic figure, taking the exalted leading role for himself. His stated ambition was to become prime minister of Japan. (One teacher remembered him avidly absorbing a biography of Kakuei Tanaka, the new prime minister in 1972.) He even reportedly said in those years that he wished to be “the head of a robot kingdom” (although in the context of the popular science-fiction culture of his adolescence, this fantasy might not have been as strange as it may now sound). His teachers generally came to think of him as someone who wished to “extend his own image into someone strong or heroic.” A former classmate made the interesting observation that as the school for the blind was a closed society, so in Aum Asahara would try “to create the same kind of closed society in which he could be the head.”
None of this can account for what he did later. Moreover, retrospective reconstructions always run the risk of evoking the past selectively in the light of subsequent behavior, particularly when that behavior is extreme. But every guru begins somewhere. Asahara’s childhood undoubtedly contributed to his sense of alienation, of otherness, to his generalized hatred of the world, to his tendency toward paranoia, to what was to become a habit of violence, to his cultivation of the art of performance, and to his aspirations toward the heroic and transcendent. Overall, he developed in childhood an inclination toward controlling and manipulating other people, and perhaps the beginnings of an identity as a “blind seer.”
