オウム真理教
Aum Shinrikyo
By Julian Rivera Brown
Period 2
Early History
Aum Shinrikyo is a Japanese doomsday cult
founded in 1984, starting as a yoga and
meditation class led by Chizuo Matsumoto.
After many of these members began believing
Asahara to be the next Buddha and feared
that the world was going to end in the early
2000s in a third world, they began to follow his
doctrines of life in the pursuit of both gaining
supernatural powers and to prepare
themselves to reclaim the world after the war.
They sent many missionaries to Russia and
across Japan to gain members, eventually
reaching 1,800 members in 1995.
Late History
The growth of the cult, however, slowed when seven
members including Asahara Shoko (the new name
Chizuo Matsumoto made for himself) used the chemical
agent, sarin, in 1995 to kill 13 people on a Tokyo subway.
While denying the attack, Matsumoto and his
accomplices were imprisoned and eventually hung in
2018 for their crimes. After his imprisonment, Aum
Shinrikyo split into two sects in 2007: Aleph and Hikari no
Wa. Aleph tried to return the cult to its pillars of strength
and reinforced the doctrines of Chizuo while lessening
the deification of him. Hikari no Wa, founded by the
spokesman of Shinrikyo, strayed from the violent and
doomsday aspects of the cult, tried to focus on
transcending the conventions of normal religions like
good and evil, and focus more on enlightenment.
Type
Aum Shinrikyo was both an Eastern
Mystical and Self-Improvement cult. Its
teachings were based on Buddhist and
Hindu doctrines involving the ages of the
world, Buddha, and the idea of karma
which would threaten humanity’s
existence. Also, it focused on how through
yoga, rituals, and following the cult’s
teachings people can gain supernatural
powers and will have reached a new state
of being which makes them able to survive
the apocalypse.
Leader
Chizuo Matsumoto was born in 1955 to an impoverished family and with mental disability and was sent
to a school for the blind for most of his childhood. After failing to enter medicine due to his disability,
he opened up his yoga class in 1984 and began inducting his students into the cult. Through his
charismatic presence, ability explanation of the problems of his followers and the world with
confidence, and his reported great compassion for his students, he managed to gain many followers
and demanded complete obedience. He began to assume the real estate of his followers, isolated them
from the outside world to produce more enlightened beings, used harsh violent punishments for
infractions, and had extreme ascetic rituals and practices which killed a few of its members.
Practices
● Members must live very scarcely
with food and luxuries
○ Failures result in violent
punishments
● Buddhist-based yoga rituals would
be held often to strengthen one’s
spirit
● Members will live in small
communities found in large
apartments in cities or complexes
in rural areas. They would live
almost exclusively in these
communes.
Universals
Like all cultures and groups, Aum
Shinrikyo…
● Had group medicines
● Had religious rituals dedicated to the
leader and/or religious idea
● Punishments regarding violations of
group norms and laws
● Rules regarding property rights
○ Estates and most property
belonged ultimately to Matsumoto
● Established a strict social structure
○ Enlightened students would be
above initiates and other members
Cultural Variation
Aum Shinrikyo breaks away from
mainstream Japanese culture in the
following ways:
● Focusing extremely on asceticism and
despising materialism and
consumerism
● Expecting and enforcing obedience to
one individual
● Living in one building complex
Bibliograph
y
Fletcher, H. (2008, May 28). Aum Shinrikyo. In Council on Foreign Relations. Retrieved from
https://web.archive.org/web/20100211141949/http://www.cfr.org/publication/9238
Japanese National Police Agency, . (2009). White Paper on Police 2009. White Paper on Police, 160-162.
Retrieved from http://www.npa.go.jp/english/kokusai9/White_Paper_2009_7.pdf
Reader, I. (2013, December 24). Aum Shinrikyō. In World Religions and Spirituality. Retrieved from
https://wrldrels.org/2016/10/08/aum-shinrikyo/
Adelstein, J. (2018, July 9). Aum Shinrikyo: The Japanese Killer Cult That Wanted to Rule the World. In
The Daily Beast. Retrieved from https://www.thedailybeast.com/aum-shinrikyo-the-japanese-killercult-that-wanted-to-rule-the-world?ref=scroll