Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan

4. Depicting Religions on the Margins

125 b C H A P T E R 4 Depicting Religions on the Margins It is difficult to discuss religion in contemporary Japan without addressing the influence of Aum Shinrikyō, the infamous group responsible for the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in March of 1995. In the aftermath of the attack, religions—particularly religions of recent provenance— came to be popularly associated with violence, brainwashing, and fraud. While attitudes towards religions were not overwhelmingly positive in Japan prior to March 1995, Aum has undoubtedly contributed to the perpetuation of negative images of religions since. ThischapterexaminessomemangaandanimethatinfluencedAumdoctrine during the expansion of the group in the 1980s and early 1990s, some manga that Aum itself produced, and portrayals of religion in manga that have appeared since Aum’s violent tendencies came to light. Manga that apparently influenced Aum doctrine featured apocalyptic themes and a small group of protagonists wielding supernatural powers to create a new world order. Aum’s resident artists created manga and anime that reproduced these tropes, although they minimized the adventure aspects of stories in favor of focusing on conversion episodes, the acquisition of spiritual powers, Aum’s salvific role in the face of impending apocalypse, and praising guru Asahara Shōkō. In the years since the “Aum shock,” mangaka have conducted critical evaluations of groups like Aum, attempting to explain the actions of marginal and potentially violent religious movements in a rational and accessible fashion. Depicting Religions on the Margins 126 Aum Shinrikyō Asahara Shōkō (born Matsumoto Chizuo) developed the eclectic yoga group that eventually became Aum Shinrikyō in the mid-1980s. The group’s generally well-educated membership shared an interest in the acquisition of spiritual powers and a rejection of previously valued moral and epistemological systems, including those of established religions and of modern rationality or scientific thought. Many of these people initially encountered Aum through its promotional literature and ads in occult magazines like Twilight Zone and Mu. Aum’s millennial outlook, its ideal of the spiritually enlightened and superior being, and its antisecular orientation led to a gradual secession from Japanese society in the early 1990s. The small yoga group became a large organization of renunciants (around 1,200, as well as a wider community of affiliated householders) headed by Asahara and his group of close disciples. Aum maintained several communes throughout Japan where participants engaged in extreme ascetic practices, and eventually where they developed the weaponry that would be used in Aum’s “holy war” against its perceived opponents (secular forces in general, but particularly the United States, Freemasons , Jews, and the Japanese government). Aum’s conflicts with secular society began with lawsuits filed against the group by concerned families of members, were exacerbated when Aum came under suspicion for the mysterious disappearance of a lawyer who had been investigating the group, escalated when Aum members made flashy but ultimately ineffective campaigns for political office in 1990, and came to a head when the group purchased the land for a commune against the wishes of the local community at Namino in the same year. At first by accident and then intentionally, members carried out poa (a euphemism for murder based on a Tibetan word roughly meaning “liberation”) in a few smaller isolated cases before moving to indiscriminate terrorism. Aum’s sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway on 20 March 1995 led to the deaths of twelve, seriously injured hundreds, and otherwise negatively affected thousands of people. By late 1995, the media was in an uproar about the dangers of “cults,” and Japan was generally at a state of high alert regarding religions of any kind. Scholars and journalists attempted to account for young people’s attraction to Aum, and some analyses rather simplistically attributed the source of Aum’s putative social pathology to members’ shared interest in the fictive worlds of manga and anime. At the same time, scholars of religion noticed Depicting Religions on the Margins 127 a sharp increase in college students’ interest in religion as a social problem. Against this background, in the years since the Aum incident authors of various types of popular fiction and nonfiction, including manga, have dealt with the Aum issue—explicitly or by allusion—through combinations of sensationalism , critique, curiosity, satire, and psychoanalysis. Schemes and Plots Earlier chapters focused on sketching a method somewhere between auteur...