SHAINBERG: Do you think there’s a relationship between the way that Asahara’s own fantasies seem to have bled over into the world outside, and the condition of a world in which media is making fantasies concrete for us all the time?
LIFTON: Asahara’s relationship with the media was a two-way street: if there were fantasies going out, there were also fantasies coming in. Aum, like certain other New Religions, was media-savvy; it took full advantage of Japan’s media saturation. Asahara was a frequent television guest. In one of the blurbs for his book, it says he was, in effect, your all-purpose genius—”He wrote music, he made films, he was a great religious figure and a prominent television personality.” So there is a way that the media could be seen as a conduit between Asahara’s imagination and outer reality. His ideas certainly found a fertile environment. Ever since World War II, the Japanese media have thrived on apocalyptic fantasy. They feature all kinds of stories about the earth being threatened, or the earth being blown up, or the earth being involved in an enormous confrontation with an evil planet; and usually there are Japanese saviors who struggle to sustain the earth or who come into a postapocalyptic world and offer services to the human remnant. And World War II is very much a factor in these stories. It may be no accident that a violent cult that wants to bring about Armageddon appears first in Japan, the only country that’s experienced the atomic bomb.
