Aum-Shinrikyo

In the spring of 1995, the reportedly safest country in the world was shocked by the revelation that the perpetrators of a terrorist attack against Tokyo’s subway which killed 12 and injured approximately five thousand people were talented Japanese students mesmerized by a hodgepodge of Christian and Buddhist millennialism (the belief that a Golden age is about to dawn), Vajrayana tantric techniques, Taoist beliefs in cycles of cosmic recurrence, and Hindu notion of destruction and rebirth, with bits of Nostradamus thrown in. Many found it hard to believe that the highest ranks of Aum-Shinrikyo, the organization that carried out the attack, comprised several relatively young scientists and doctors who, far from simply going along with their guru’s instructions, actually pressed for the adoption of extreme measures towards the “final solution” of all Japanese plights, that is to say, the obliteration of government agencies. The weapon of choice was sarin gas, a cheap and simple chemical developed in Nazi Germany in 1938 and used by Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran.
The man behind all this, Shoko Ashara, was the embodiment of the “banality of evil,” in the sense that Hannah Arendt uses this expression in a letter to the philosopher and historian Gershom Scholem. She argues that “evil is never radical…it is only extreme,…it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension…It spreads like a fungus on the surface….Thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its banality. Only the Good has depth and can be radical” (Arendt, 1964).
The Japanese media made an inaccurate portrayal of this terrorist group and concealed the dullness of their worldview, while focusing on an equally trite juxtaposition of “good” and “evil,” “sanity” and “madness,” and “health” and “disease.”
Born as Chizuo Matsumoto in Kyushu in 1955, Asahara suffered from impaired vision due to congenital glaucoma, and was sent to a school for the blind. There, he bullied his blind schoolmates and sought to create a milieu that he could wholly control. He confided to his closest friends his plan to become the Japanese Prime Minister. Then he would set up his own “robot kingdom.”
When he was not prey to his megalomania, Asahara aspired to become a doctor. But he flunked the entrance exams at Tokyo University, and resigned himself to earn his living as an acupuncturist and a healer. He soon became aware that he could not cure his patients through either the Western or the Chinese medical tradition, and gradually turned into an obsessively religious person. When his business failed, he made a trip to India in 1986, as he was determined to attain enlightenment. Later, he claimed he had gained a considerable level of sanctity and command of his magical powers, changed his name to Asahara Shoko, and founded a new religion, christening his sect “Aum Shinri-kyō” – from Aum, “powers for destruction and creation in the universe” and Shinrikyō, “teaching of the supreme truth” –. Approximately 40,000 Japanese and Russians flocked round him to learn his synthesis of Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and biblical scriptures. Like Joseph Goebbels, who in his semi-autobiographical novel, Michael, published in 1929, submitted that “it is almost immaterial what we believe in, so long as we believe in something,” Asahara selectively assembled all that could appeal to young educated Japanese of the 1990s and to himself.
In the course of time his teaching changed tune, shifting towards a more radicalized sectarianism. Asahara warned his disciples of an imminent Armageddon and prophesied that Pluto’s entry into Sagittarius in January 1995 would have catastrophic consequences. The January 17, 1995 disastrous Kobe earthquake strengthened the resolve of his followers. He then inaugurated a segregate community on the slopes of Mt. Fuji, where his ascendancy over his followers increased inexorably. Aum-Shinrikyo initially sought to develop forms of therapeutic treatment aimed at the spiritual salvation of psychologically and physically sick individuals. Over time, however, as Asahara realized that, outside the sect, nobody took him seriously, Mahayana Buddhism, which aimed not only at personal salvation but at the salvation of the whole of humankind, together with messianic and millennial expectations, took the upper hand. The utopian plan to use medicine and science to redeem the world and create a harmonious and peaceful society was falling apart, and the sect’s leaders grew restless and slightly paranoid. If Japanese were indifferent to Asahara’s enlightened leadership, he would make them take notice. As is often the case with utopias, Aum’s goal of achieving total liberation and perfection called for the subjugation and purposeful deception of individuals, who were regarded as essentially incompetent and selfish. When ordinary citizens, by ignoring his call for action, showed that they were not sufficiently prone to self-deception, Asahara and his entourage lost their residual faith in humankind. Like a Nazi ideologue, Asahara claimed that while killing animals was wrong, because they are innocent by definition, human beings, who commit crimes intentionally, should not be spared when they stood in the way of the greater good (Lifton, 1999).
In keeping with this misanthropic tenet, the acolytes of the charismatic leader developed sophisticated techniques for mass-killing and stored weapons and high technology designed to support their plan to annihilate the Japanese government. On June 27, 1994 they carried out the first bio-terrorist attack in history, in Matsumoto, causing a death-toll of seven and injuring hundreds of people. On March 20, 1995, their most infamous action: the assault of Tokyo’s subway network. The terrorists riddled with the tip of their umbrellas several bags filled with sarin gas, but the number of victims was comparatively low thanks to the presence of mind of some travelers who opened the windows and dispersed the gas. On both occasions, a more careful planning and execution would have caused a catastrophe.

The psychology of terrorism

Following the terrorist attack, the celebrated Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami interviewed some of the followers of Aum-Shinrikyo and revealed traits of their personalities that warrant a closer examination (Murakami, 2001). When he was an adolescent, Hiroyuki Kano, an Aum member who was not involved in the attack, was driven by the urge to attain superior knowledge, but nobody seemed to be able to help him fulfill this wish. He spent hours pondering over the most vexed existential questions without reading through a single book, for he did not like reading: “When I read something I just see what’s wrong with the book.” Although he was primarily interested in finding a mathematical demonstration of the soundness of Buddhist philosophy, he conceded that he never got into depth with any study of Buddhism, as “the ones I read didn’t seem very direct in their approach. I couldn’t discover the remedy I was searching for.” When he met the Aum instructors, he was delighted to see that all his questions were answered: “We were told: ‘do this and this will happen.’ No matter what question we had, we got an answer straight away. I was completely immersed in it.”
Another member, Akio Namimura, pointed out that Fumihiro Jôyû, the sect’s spokesman, “could answer any question clearly,” and Mitsuharu Inaba recalls that he was really impressed by what Jôyû said: “It was so clearly stated – the way he used metaphors, for instance…after the sermon he took questions, and his answers were extremely precise, each one perfectly tailored to the person who asked it.” Their lives were greatly improved as they freed themselves from the burden of their responsibilities. For Harumi Iwakura, the way Aum did things made life easier: “they’d give the order and you just did what they said. No need to think for yourself, or worry about every little detail, just do what you’re told.”
These young people were manifestly unprepared to take responsibility for their own action and to grasp the gravity of what they were doing. They candidly pointed out the simplicity of the choices they made, and the eagerness to completely surrender their critical faculties, without spending too much time on considering the morality of their actions. The sort of morally and intellectually numbed people that Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor argued he was morally obliged to guide (Dostoevsky, 1912). Those who joined the sect did so in order to withdraw from reality, shut out their fears and misgivings, for they were already estranged from real life. They wanted someone else to cope with the problems of their own lives. For them, relinquishing critical thought, systematized ideas, and ethical concerns in exchange for protection and support was a matter of course.
As a result of their moral obliquity, these cultists thought little or nothing of their victims. A hermetically sealed milieu, dominated by reductionism, narcissism and self-centeredness, disabled their moral faculties. Their absolute moral certainty prevented them from becoming aware of the wickedness of their behavior. The scope of their endeavor was so absolute that they were drawn into a parallel, suspended reality, in which their previous nagging duties and concerns could be ignored, and all norms and conventions were turned upside down: hence their disinclination to accept that they should feel guilty about what they had done. Social order and conventional morality were perverted to such an extent that the boundary between right and wrong completely dissolved, while adepts’ self-denial came very close to self-imposed mind-control.
Their atrophied morality, which was in stark contrast to their fervid imagination, was further exacerbated by a deterministic view of the effects of karmic influence on one’s personal life. They were persuaded that the negative consequences of past misdeeds could only be counteracted by escaping from the bonds of karma through meditation (karuma kara no dasshutsu) or overturning deleterious social institutions and conventions that had caused what they saw as widespread spiritual degeneration. By living in a sick and corrupted society, people accumulated a large amount of bad karma that, like a genetic burden, would affect them for the rest of their lives, and possibly beyond. Therefore, Aum preached positive spiritual cleansing through ascetic practices at the same time that it called for the annihilation and the subsequent regeneration of Japanese society.
But too few Japanese were eager to follow this path of spiritual cleansing through meditation. According to Asahara’s understanding of tantric Buddhism, these millions of skeptics were unworthy of life. They deserved a “compassionate” death, which would ultimately accelerate their cosmic journey of reincarnation. Additionally, to take the life of people who represented an obstacle for those engaged in the reduction of bad karma in the world was actually a meritorious act. Thus, Aum-Shinrikyo was not amoral or ethically indifferent: it rather embraced an inverted ethical system that was both “primitive” and “modern.” Asahara’s philosophy tapped into the deepest, ungovernable recesses of the human mind, but it also affirmed its determination to demonstrate that humankind, not God, is in charge of the future, and that happiness and spiritual fulfillment can be achieved in this life and in this world.

A Japanese distinctiveness?

The most important question we need to address, then, is where this predisposition to self-deception came from. In other words, are there any distinctive features of modernity in general or Japanese culture and society in particular that make some persons less prepared to face such a challenge? It seems undeniable that magic has not been banished from contemporary society, for it clearly satisfies a social and psychological need. While on the one hand science destroys traditional mythologies, it also paves the way for all sorts of post-modern mythologies inspired by a blend of science and religion. Hence the persistent and widespread belief in astrology even amidst the educated public and the proliferation of sub- and counter-cultures that merge science and magic in order to ease people’s existential angst. What is remarkable about Aum-Shinrikyo is how successful the sect was in making science a sacred enterprise. Sacred and profane mingled while fascination for state-of-the-art technology and science was employed to awe potential followers (Reader, 2000).
Shoko Asahara gave instruction to his aids to screen the top Japanese universities and lure brilliant researchers into joining the sect. This task did not prove exceedingly difficult. In Japan, traditional religions are giving ground to occultism and mysticism. In 1993, 231,019 sects were registered in Japan, with two hundred million members. This means that thousands of Japanese join more than one religious organization, indifferent to possible theoretical and ethical inconsistencies. Some of these sects profess a millenarian faith in an incipient new world order, reflecting in so many ways the rather bleak and apocalyptic view of society conveyed by Japanese science fiction and anime. That the new religions’ millenarianism has much to do with the apocalyptic visions of Japanese manga is proven by the fact that Asahara Shoko was himself the author of a manga tellingly entitled Metsubô no hi, “The Doom’s Day.” Furthermore, the enormous popularity of Nostradamus’ prophecies in Japan led many to believe that the saikimatsu, the end of the century, would coincide with the jidaimatsu, the end of time. Some, like the Aum cultists, went a step further, and became obsessed with the possibility of actively bringing about the Armageddon (Manzenreiter, 1995).
Asahara’s foolish plan was also inspired by Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation series,” whose key character, Hari Seldon, is a mathematical prodigy and the discoverer of a new discipline, psychohistory, enabling its practitioners to predict the future. When the Empire’s leadership fails to heed his warning of an impending catastrophe, he summons the best thinkers of the Empire and founds a sect that will preserve wisdom and knowledge. Following the disaster, the sect’s acolytes find themselves ruling the universe as no one else has a sufficient command of science and technology to challenge their authority: they are looked upon as wizards.
Asahara believed he was a post-modern hero, like Kaneda, the protagonist of Akira, a milestone of the Japanese techno-apocalyptic genre, which first appeared in Young Magazine in December 1982. Kaneda struggles in a post-nuclear Neo-Tokyo that has been completely destroyed by a nuclear experiment and then rebuilt. He is the member of a gang of bikers, bôsôzoku, literally “violent running tribe” (from bo violent, so to run, and zoku tribe). Bôsôzoku defy police authority, use Chinese characters for their gangsta name, wear uniforms of kamikaze pilots, all symbols usually associated with extreme right-wing political movements and yakuza members. Although Kaneda is poorly schooled and ignorant, he is also kôha, gallant, tough guy, and displays makoto, purity of motives, which makes him a qualified candidate for the leadership of the new, uncorrupted society that will rise from the ashes of the old one (Standish, 1998). It is possible that Asahara identified with Kaneda and thought himself a messianic leader on a mission to rid Japan of its “impurities.”
It is also plausible to assume that the declining role of Shintoism and Buddhism may have concurred to produce a moral void for thousands of young Japanese and that while the new religions enjoy the clear advantage of not having to prove any consistency of behavior or doctrine, they may not always be able to provide the desired spiritual anchor in troubled times. Under extreme circumstances, this loss of firm religious and ethical landmarks is apt to provoke a fluctuation between the idolatry of humankind and nihilism of the “humans pollute the Earth” kind.
Aum-Shinrikyo could be fairly described as a progressive, millennialist response to the prolonged stagnation of the Japanese economy and the suffocating traditionalism of Japanese society. Initially drawn to Asahara’s philosophy as a result of a feeling of emptiness, boredom, isolation, and possibly hopelessness, thousands of cultists increasingly saw themselves as the instruments of a superhuman agent whose decision could change the course of history and usher in a millennial kingdom.
Like Hong Houxiu, the leader of the disastrous Taiping Rebellion, which took place in mid-nineteenth-century China, who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, Asahara proclaimed himself “Today’s Christ” and “the Savior of This Century,” and promised collective salvation after the ultimate battle between good and evil. This doctrinal shift caused a momentous transition from a progressive and tolerant gradualist attitude to social reform and spiritual cleansing to an apocalyptic and violent revolutionary fervor. AUM adepts had been chosen to fulfill a providential purpose and felt enormously empowered. The eschatological dimension of the movement, which was bound to create an alternative society and an alternative modernity, the beginning of a new era of peace and prosperity, conferred a sacred status on those who were entirely committed to the cause and a transcendental significance to their murderous actions. Their calling, as “metaphysical agents of reform,” would in turn fill the spiritual void which haunted them.
The fact that this movement could flourish so vigorously in a peaceful and generally affluent society like Japan, raises a number of thought-provoking issues. Because of economic stagnation, these disgruntled and alienated young Japanese men and women were the first generation since the end of WWII who could expect to have a worse standard of living than their elder brothers and sisters. Tired of vicarious emotional experiences, they were probably going through a severe identity crisis and viewed middle class over-bureaucratized corporate life and materialistic, rampantly consumerist society as dehumanizing and intolerable. They despised a public structure that enforced a conservative, authoritarian, unchangeable, and corrupt system. At the same time, docile and virtuous, hopelessly mediocre, desperately bored, perfectly trained in the art of self-denial, these level-headed young citizens never experienced material deprivation. Too lethargic to feel compelled to become politically active, they were nonetheless eager to re-sanctify the world.
Like a demigod, Asahara offered them collective empowerment and a false sense of individuality. Then he molded them into an army of drone-like radical revolutionaries fighting against the same society that had shaped them. Estrangement, disenchantment, discontent, powerlessness, the urge to find a way to liberate their emotions, and a paradoxically nihilistic search for meaning, caused them to become enemies of their own peers. They ended up thinking that “life-affirming” violence was a solution to their resentment and emasculation. Creation would follow destruction, and the terrorist assault on Kasumigaseki and Nagatacho, home to the Japanese government, was part of a plan meant to wipe out the ruling elite to make room for the drop-out elite, hungry for status and motivation.
Ultimately, Aum-Shinrikyo should serve as a cautionary tale: there is a limit to the amount of pressure and constraints that a democratic society can place on its citizens. When that limit is reached, society will pay the consequences.

REFERENCES

Arendt, Hannah, Letter to Gershom Scholem, in Encounter (January 1964), pp. 51-56. Cited in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982, p. 369.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor M., The Brothers Karamazov, London: Heinemann, 1912.
Lifton, Robert J., Destroying the world to save it: Aum Shinrikyo, apocalyptic violence, and the new global terrorism, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1999
Manzenreiter, Wolfram, “Armageddon now! Dramaturgie und Inszenierung der Apokalypse. Manga, Mythen, Medien und Aum Shinrikyō,“ Minikomi – Informationen des Akademischen Arbeitskreis Japans 2 (1995), pp. 1-5.
Murakami, Haruki, Underground. The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. London: Harvill Panther, 2001
Reader, Ian, Religious violence in contemporary Japan: the case of Aum Shinrikyô. Richmond: Curzon, 2000.
Standish, Isolde, “Akira, Postmodernism and Resistance” in D.P. Martinez (ed.), The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures, Great Britain, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 56-74.

shintoism, zen buddhism and violence

The rise of militarism, nationalism and the process of “westernization” under Emperor Meiji (1868–1945) were accompanied by the official separation of Shinto, the indigenous, animistic religion of Japan and Buddhism (shinbutsu bunri) and by a nationwide campaign to eject foreign religions from the country.
However, in practice, given the overriding goal of infusing a heterogeneous population – national unification was only achieved during the Meiji Restoration – with a sense of social cohesion in the face of Western influence, the future of the imposed totalizing State religion, called Kokka Shintô, mainly hung on its ability to develop a blend of Shintoism, Zen Buddhism, and Confucianism. Advocates of this newly established political religion sought to bring the Japanese emperor back to the center of the political arena and to turn it into the core marker of Japanese group identity and national essence (kokusui).
At the same time, Shinto-Zen priesthood would function as an extension of the central government, with an enormous liability, ensuring that Japan would be correctly understood as a vehicle for world salvation and that other Asian countries would come to accept the plan of a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, that is, a racialized “imagined community” dominated by Japan.
The revival of traditional Shintoism was neither a reawakening nor a return to the past, but rather an evolution of pristine cultural forms and the reconstruction of new identities by resorting to historical themes. It served to lend legitimacy to the ruling elite, portrayed as a properly constituted authority which would guarantee the welfare of the whole of society.
The dismissal of the racial equality clause to the preamble of the Covenant for the League of Nations, which had been proposed by the Japanese delegation at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to undermine Australian and American immigration restriction acts and unequal international treaties, was taken as a denigration of Japan and the Japanese people. The public called for more aggressive and self-assertive domestic and foreign policy, and Kokka Shintô underwent a process of radical transformation. The Depression further intensified a trend hostile to democratic liberalism. In 1930s and 1940s Japan, as in Europe, governments were given full powers to manage the economy and society because ordinary citizens desperately needed to climb out of the Depression. This made their arbitration and dictates on public matters virtually indisputable. In Japan, a country which was heavily dependent on foreign trade, unemployment soared, labor disputes became more frequent and violent and so did anti-Japanese insurgent movements in Korea and Taiwan. Rural debt forced poor tenant farmers to sell their daughters as prostitutes and thousands of small businesses were gradually absorbed by zaibatsu, that is, huge financial combines which pushed for more authoritarian and imperialistic policies.
Accordingly, through its commitment to uphold the good and the righteous society, the Japanese State acquired a strong ethical foundation and was entitled to give moral guidance in public life and see that citizens didn’t swerve from the right path. Prime minister Yamagata Aritomo (1838-1922) stated that the “immutable and incomparable” national system (kokutai) was grounded, historically and spiritually, in the divine essence of the imperial dynasty – the Imperial Way (kôdô) – and of the Japanese islands, as well as in the principle of unity of worship and rule, religion and politics, known as saisei itchi. Adherence to this principle, encapsulated in the word matsurigoto (political affairs), which contains the term matsuri, for religious festivals, involved the merging of state authority (kokkashugi) and ethnic identity (kokuminshugi) (Gatti, 1983).
Because there was no transcendent source of moral authority outside the emperor, there followed that Japanese could not rely on an independent standard of justice, fairness and moral conduct, and nobody would dare to challenge the emperor’s decisions. Soldiers were enjoined to unfailingly obey their superior officers as they would obey the orders of the emperor himself. But because the emperor was infallible, then dutiful soldiers and officers would always be right, no matter how vicious their war tactics and behaviour towards civilians and POWs. That would exclude them from moral responsibility and would assuage feelings of guilt and fear of retribution.
Also, the deeply pessimistic and essentially anti-humanistic anthropology of Kokka Shintô encouraged distrust in people’s independent moral judgment and capacity for free and responsible action. The monopoly of ethical authority that religious leaders accorded to the State caused the legal suppression of pluralist accounts of the good life and the imprisonment and purging of hundreds of opponents. Consequently, historical, political, economic necessities, infused with a religious zeal, overruled any legal constraints and alternative moral views. The Japanese empire was held to be the mundane embodiment of all that was pure, true, good and beautiful. The belief in the ultimate infallibility of the leadership provided a considerable measure of ontological security (Ohnuki-Tierney, 2002).
Kokka Shintô reinscribed emotional attachment, spiritual yearning, and an idealistic sense of citizenship in a society in which citizens were expected to put their own interests and rights after the interests of their community. “Empowered” and highly motivated individuals would counter the iron cages and the amoral social atomization of liberal-capitalist Western modernity. Shinto Zen doctrine of political and ethical absolutism offered the millenarian promise of an alternative, re-moralized modernity and of a collective, mundane salvation, involving the redemption of the national community from an alleged fallen state. Behind these ostensibly noble pursuits, however, lay an invidious condescension for real people and their shortcomings, as well as the willingness to employ all possible means to shape and discipline the new Japanese man and the new Japanese society: including the abolition of pluralism, social conflict and fundamental rights, and the obliteration of all the forces and obstacles that could presumably undermine the moral fiber of society (Maruyama, 1969).
The dramatic predicament of the samurai caste is also worthy of careful consideration. Thousands of trained killers found themselves unemployed and devalued when Meiji reformers initiated sweeping changes in the dominant value system and social conventions – according to the motto fukoku kyōhei, that is, “enrich the country, strengthen the military” – and removed the ban against intermarriage between members of the upper and lower classes. Former samurais realized that the only way to retain their privileged position was to anchor their social status to a biological, and therefore unalterable, standard of distinction: one could only be born with the skills of a samurai. The shift towards an ideology premised on the natural causation of social inequalities and an emphasis on the biological and hereditary determinants of human behavioral traits exerted a major influence on the development of Kokka Shintô. At the same time, loyalty, obedience, fearlessness, self-discipline, self-sacrifice, and honor, that is to say, the keystones of Bushido, “the way of the sword”, the samurai warrior class’ code of conduct, were incorporated into the national ethos.
As a result of these developments, Kokka Shintô was shaped in such a way that it would not serve the interests of a democratic society, but of an autocratic warrior oligarchy captivated by the aesthetic appreciation of violence, death, and martyrdom. The same caste that had cynically exploited Japanese peasants for centuries resorted to indoctrination and propaganda to achieve the same results during the industrial era. Incidentally, it is worth asking whether Japanese nationalism was really so widespread under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1867), given the massive effort on the part of the Meiji government to instill nationalism in the larger population. After all, when Commodore Perry’s crew went ashore, on July 14, 1853, ordinary people welcomed them; instead, it was the samurais who felt threatened and intimidated and took an aggressive stance (Duus, 1988).
Kokka Shintô was also the outcome of the inability and unwillingness of the Japanese ruling classes, raised in a society where ethical universalism never really took hold, to critically incorporate Western values and concepts and suppress a rigid and atavistic system of frozen hierarchies which hampered upward mobility. In this sense, Meiji reformism was less a spiritual revolution than a deft strategy deployed by a pre-modern élite haunted by a siege mentality vis-à-vis the alleged Western threat, to transcend modernity by protecting the old system, while at the same time fashioning a modern, industrialized nation that could compete with Western powers for hegemony in the Far East. These reformers saw Western modernity as at once necessary and polluting and Western-style education as imparting knowledge that would shape “shallow, cosmopolitan-minded persons.”
A nationalistic and authoritarian government was the answer to a demand for a distinctive Japanese transition to capitalist modernity, that is, an alternative modernity that would preserve uncontaminated the essence of traditional Japanese culture and spirit (yamatodamashii). Japan was to become modern without simultaneously becoming Western, that is, without losing its cultural spirit and authenticity (bunka seishin), and its exceptionalism and uniqueness.
This would also substantiate the claim that, because of its capacity to amalgamate Western and Eastern cultures, Japan was the only nation that could seriously aspire to the role of Asian leader of a coalition of nations prepared to wage a total war (saishū sensō) against Western colonialist powers. Hence the advocacy on the part of the exponents of the Kyoto school, fascist sympathizers heavily influenced by the German philosophical tradition and by indigenous religious beliefs, of a New Asian Order under Japan’s leadership. The planned New Order would overcome the Western order (kindai no chōkoku) and the attendant individualism, materialism, the commodification of culture, social abstraction, alienation, universalism, international law, state’s neutrality on moral issues, and human rights theory (Harootunian, 2000).
Having said that, judging from the relative lack of media coverage of the philosophical debate on Japan’s role in the process of decolonization of the Far East and on the commonality of Asian peoples, it is safe to assume that nationalism and militarism were a necessary, yet not a sufficient condition, in the rise of Japanese vicious imperialism. Without the Kokka Shintô fundamentalist grounding and its corollary of absolute moral certainty, this doctrine would have almost certainly floundered, for it did not seem to have aroused the interest of the Japanese public or to have helped further Japanese economic interests.

Like today’s Islamic fundamentalism, Kokka Shintô rejected modern secularism, which extolled the value of personal freedom and the inherent worth of the individual over religious faith and collective duties, labeling it a source of incoherent liberal values leading to social fragmentation and atomization, a watered-down religiousness, and political decline. Its militant advocates believed that an uncontaminated cultural and moral authenticity could be preserved in the context of modernity, provided that the manipulative, cosmopolitan Western values were prevented from seizing control of the distinct historical and aesthetic path of Japanese civilization. Culturalism (bunkashugi), as part and parcel of a broader process of redefining what it means to be Japanese through an emphasis on self-affirmation and authenticity, would enable the Japanese to acquire the “modern” without acquiring “the West” as well, and especially the inquisitive “democratic frame of mind” characteristic of an autonomous citizenry. In this way, the Japanese “closed society” would be eternalized and the Japanese would be subsumed by the organic state and submerged by a collective, hyper-ritualized religious practice. The voluntary dissolution of the self to serve the public (messhi hōkō) would secure the attainment of a perfect sense of spiritual integration.
Kokka Shintô did not acknowledge the existence of individual inalienable rights and exalted the well-being of the community above that of individuals, instead of seeing them as complementary. Priority was assigned to moral obligations (giri), over legal obligations (gimu) and rights (kenri). Individual citizens existed for the sake of the nation and of the state-religion, not the other way around, and this reinforced the conception of individuals as mere corpuscles immersed in the eternal stream of history, whereby the past – the ancestral virtues and millenarian traditions of the Yamato race – was projected into the future – the modern manifestation of the same primordial community –, and vice versa (Dale, 1986).
As a response to the “artificial”, heterogeneous, and competitive social milieu of modern urban society, in which ties between individuals are loose and people are held together by personal interest, instrumental rationality, and by the social contract, this self-denying political religion valorized restriction and hierarchy over freedom, and a neo-ruralist, “natural,” organic model of society marked by cultural homogeneousness, cohesion, common objectives, and emotional bonds. The personal and the supra-personal were therefore inseparable and individuals dissolved into the group: loyalty to the group and to one’s own kind came first. Needless to say, the sense of universal indebtedness and responsibility to all other human beings was compromised (Petzin & Ruprecht, 1994). In this “ideal” society, age and kinship would determine a person’s position within an ascribed hierarchy and the strength of the obligation one must have towards his or her group. Stringent moral prohibitions, obliterating the separation of the public and private realms - on the ground that religion is inseparable from law and politics - would make rules to protect individuals from abuse unnecessary: true freedom was reconfigured as voluntary submission to the will of the emperor (Ito, 1998).
At the same time, the institutional indifference to individual circumstances and interests, and the fear of personal liberties, which is so typical of organic conceptions of society, fostered a self-righteous worldview stamped by intolerance and violence, and the crystallization of differences as timeless essences. This at once perversely narcissistic and nihilistic worldview justified killing, mass murder, and the ultimate clash of irreconcilable civilizations, for those who did not belong to the divine, racially and culturally superior Yamato ethno-religious community – i.e. the jama gedō, “unruly heathens” – were impure and corrupted sub-humans.
The process of dehumanization and depersonalisation of the victims was further exacerbated by the primacy of purification rituals in the Shinto religion, which sees dirt, pollution (kegare), and disorder in general as an offence against the cosmic, social, and cognitive order: a transgression of the most sacred boundaries, which cannot go unpunished (Reader, 1991), especially because those who are deemed impure may contaminate others.
In late nineteenth-century Japan, blood (chi, ketsu), became a metaphor for both the transmission of intellectual faculties and physical attributes, and for the perpetuation of the Japanese racial essence. This fascination with bloodlines was certainly encouraged by the Shintoist belief that blood is impure and that anything smeared in blood is tainted. If purity could not be invoked from the outside (divine intervention), it would be obtained by internal cleansing (Reader, ibid.).
Additionally, the tension between predestination and free will has never been resolved in Japanese culture. Akira Kurosawa once observed that the cheerful faces who celebrated the end of the war where the same that gazed at their swords with pleasure only a few hours early, before hearing the emperor’s radio message to surrender. The celebrated Japanese director remarked that he could not quite figure out whether he had witnessed a spectacular display of Japanese adaptability or of Japanese imbecility. Most importantly, he learnt that “without the establishment of the self as a positive value there could be no freedom and no democracy” (Kurosawa, 1982, p. 145).
While a collectivizing agency is a central element of the genocidal logic, another one is fatalism and the attending diffusion of responsibility. Karmic beliefs suppressed independent human agency and gave rise to a proclivity to see the course of human existence as pre-determined by an omnipotent and ubiquitous agency. This led to the neutralization of the moral relevance of individuals and their actions. A fundamentally nihilistic universe was altogether indifferent to the fate of millions of human beings. Accordingly, the Tenno was not expected to show concern for his subjects, nor were his soldiers: if the value of their lives was so minuscule, then the value of enemies’ lives was even more insignificant. Also, because individuals could not escape from their destiny, mass-killing those opponents who interfered with the progress of humankind under the “enlightened guidance” of the Japanese emperor, really amounted to nothing more than fulfilling a higher, absolute purpose, that of removing internal and external pollution. Their humanity was left out of the picture (Victoria, 1997).
As I mentioned before, this moral imperative was strengthened by the belief, conveyed for instance by the Lotus Sutra, that karma (innen) is a substance that can be transmitted through body fluids, like a virus or defective alleles. People are then punished not only for their own sins, but also for those committed by their relatives and ancestors, which are inherited. Hence, obligations of interdependency, especially those related to blood and familial ties, must be accepted unconditionally. A doctrine such as this, which faults the individuals for their actions in previous lives, instead of denouncing the social determinants of injustice and discrimination, is certainly not conducive to feelings of mercy and empathy, or to the promotion of social reformism. In Japan it consolidated the existing order, for iniquities were explained away as the outcome of karmic retribution, and therefore social inequality was defined as the only genuine form of equality (Victoria, 2003).
These tenets also disposed thousands of Japanese soldiers to self-sacrifice for the sake of Japan’s rebirth, for if their destiny was to follow the imperial dictates to the letter, then their duty was to eagerly embrace their own death – and, in desperate circumstances, national salvation through mass suicide – and the death of those who opposed the emperor’s plans. Japanese soldiers would look at themselves through the eyes of the imperial propaganda and of Japanese society and see their deeds and choices as inevitable and transcending good and evil. As a result, decisions concerning the life and death of civilians were morally indifferent, as witnessed by the atrocities committed by desensitized Japanese soldiers during the war, and especially at Nanking, in 1937, when as many as 350,000 Chinese civilians were remorselessly tortured and murdered (Chang, 1997).

References

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