In 1981, at age twenty-six, during his troubled Tokyo days, he joined Agonsh�・, one of the most successful of Japan’s “new religions.” (The term refers to religious sects that have arisen since the late nineteenth century, often beginning with the vision of an ordinary person who becomes the sect’s founder and borrowing eclectically from various religious traditions.) Although he was later to disparage Agonsh�・ and even claim that it had been spiritually harmful to him during his three years of membership, there is every evidence that he derived from it many of his subsequent religious principles. Indeed, he found there a powerful guru model, sixty-year-old Seiy�・ Kiriyama, a highly charismatic figure. Kiriyama claimed, as the British scholar Ian Reader tells us, “miraculous and extraordinary happenings, visitations, and other occurrences that create[d] a sense of dramatic vigor and expectation around the religion and its leader, endow[ed] them with a legitimacy and suggest[ed] that they possess[ed] a special, chosen nature.” In those three years Asahara was in effect apprenticing for joining the ranks of the “dynamic, charismatically powerful … religious figures” who, Reader says, “have frequently, by their very natures, upset or challenged [Japanese] social harmony and norms.”
