In the wake of the terrifying attack on the US Capitol last week, there’s been a lot of talk about cults. With little wonder. The growing QAnon cult that surrounds US President Donald Trump played a key role in the insurrection we all witnessed in horror on January 6th. One journalist in Japan recently made an insightful observation about how an infamous cult in her country operated – and how it’s frighteningly close to the behavior of Trump and his QAnon followers.
A Reporter Who Survived Aum
Aum Shinrikyo is mainly known in the West for its hideous sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1997. However, Aum’s murder spree started before then and claimed many more lives than just those lost on the Tokyo Metro. In the end, some 190 members of Aum were convicted of crimes that included murder, kidnapping, and assault.
Aum’s leader, Asahara Shoko, targeted anyone who disparaged him or worked to hold the organization to account. One such person was lawyer Sakamoto Tsutsumi, who filed suit to prove that members of Aum were being held by Asahara against their will. Aum members brutally murdered Sakamoto along with his wife and infant son.
Journalist Egawa Shoko (江川紹子) nearly met a similar fate. Her crime? Investigating the death of her friend, Sakamoto Tsutsumi, and proving that Aum was behind it. At the time, the Aum killers had disposed of the family’s bodies – they wouldn’t be found until after the Tokyo Metro attack – and seemed like they would evade responsibility for their crimes. Asahara ordered several of his followers to kill Egawa. The Aum assailants inserted a hose into her mailbox and shot phosgene gas at her. (Aum had previously used sarin several months before in a deadly attack in Nagano. Asahara ordered the use of phosgene to avoid drawing suspicion.)
Fortunately, Egawa heard the hissing sound from the hose and sped away in her car. She suffered two weeks of injuries to her esophagus but fully recovered after.
The One Indispensable Tool of Cults
So suffice it to say that Egawa Shouko knows a thing or two about demagogues and dangerous cults. She brought some of that experience to bear recently while comments on the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th.
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As I’ve written before, there are a not-insignificant number of Trump supporters among Japan’s “neto-uyo” (online right-wingers). This is far from a mainstream opinion, mind you. In an NHK survey conducted last year, over 57% of those surveyed thought Trump’s government would have a “significant negative influence” on Japan. Only 10% thought it would have a positive one.
However, while they may be small, the neto-uyo Trump supporters are also incredibly vocal – and, like their American counterparts, absolutely convinced that their man’s been robbed.
Related: Underground – The Stories of Japan’s Sarin Gas Attack Victims
Before looking a little more deeply at how Trumpism was imported to Japan, Egawa looks at the psychology of Trump supporters from the standpoint of cult behavior. She explains how a cult leader employs binary, “us-versus-them” thinking along with conspiracy theories to earn the loyalty of his followers:
陰謀論はカルトにはつきものだ。彼らにとっては、悪いことは常に「自分たち以外の誰かのせい」。敵対する人達や正体がはっきりしない組織などが裏で動いたとのストーリーを作り上げ、それは「仕組まれたもの」であるとして、自分たちは悪の組織の「被害者」であると訴える。
Conspiracy theories are indispensable to cults. For cultists, negative things are always “someone else’s fault, not mine”. They invent stories of enemies and organizations of unknown identity working behind the scenes and plead that they’re the victims of their machinations.
Egawa further elaborates how it’s “natural” that a “cultified” group would never accept the “unfair” results of an election that their leader refused to concede.
As noted above, Trumpism has found its way to Japan as a small but vocal movement. Many of its supporters are hiding behind anonymous accounts. (Twitter in Japan has a significantly higher percentage of anonymous users than anywhere else in the world.) But there are high-profile supporters as well, such as journalist Kadota Ryusho.
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"Noah [at Unseen Japan] put together an itinerary that didn’t lock us in and we could travel at our own pace. In Tokyo, he guided us personally on a walking tour. Overall, he made our Japan trip an experience not to forget." - Kate and Simon S., Australia


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The Time Aum Cried “Election Theft”

But the parallels don’t stop there. Egawa notes that Asahara Shoko also once contested an election he lost.
In February 1990, Asahara ran for Japan’s House of Representatives. His campaign was a fiasco, marked by performances where he made his female followers dance in the street and by illegal campaign tactics, such as ripping down the posters of his opponents.
Oddly, these tactics didn’t endear Asahara to voters. He lost his bid. But, like Trump, Asaraha wasn’t about to go quietly into that good night. He immediately made baseless claims of election fraud, claiming that “votes had been changed.” He blamed his loss on government coercion and, somewhat oddly, the Freemasons.
具体的な事実、説得力のある根拠を示さないまま、「不正」を言い募り、陰謀論を展開する行為は、あの時のオウムの荒唐無稽な言動とどう違うのだろうか。
How does this railing against “fraud” with no basis in concrete fact and no display of persuasive proof differ from what Aum did back then?
I know this is a rhetorical question. Still, there’s one major difference here between Aum Shinrikyo and Trumpism: the number of followers. Aum, at its peak, had only 15,000 members in Japan and another 30,000 in Russia. (A hardcore group of about 1,400 had taken vows and entered Aum’s “priesthood”.) Asahara’s gambit failed pitifully, his pleas falling on deaf ears outside of his tight circle of followers.
Donald Trump’s gambit reached a far larger audience. And it came damn close to succeeding. Hell, it still might. As some on Twitter have noted, 10 years after Adolf Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch, he became Chancellor of Germany. Given Trump’s unrepentant attitude to date, it’s not far-fetched that he, too, will take another speed-run against democracy.
Egawa Shoko warns that societies can’t “look lightly” on such movements and need to respond to them with a sense of urgency. Aum Shinrikyo managed to do a lot of damage with a small but dedicated cadre of followers. Trump, with his popularity ranging somewhere between 33 and 42% in the US, is positioned to do far more. In both cases, mainstream society dismissed the perpetrators as “crazy cult members” – until it became obvious just how sane and calculating they were. The free countries of the world need to get better at taking such movements seriously – and move to neutralize them before their rot spreads too deeply into society.
As an American, part of me wonders whether my home country is already too late.
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