Pana Wave and Japanese cults

[Anonymous]

Neat article on the Beeb today:

If anyone in Japan is still unaware of the Armageddon poised to take place on Thursday, it won't be the fault of the Pana Wave Laboratory.

This cult organisation - one of many in Japan - has caught the nation's attention with its prediction that a close encounter with a 10th planet will set off earthquakes and tidal waves destroying most of humankind.

Pana Wave - and its bleak prognosis - might once have gone unnoticed.

But since the poison gas attack by another cult - Aum Shinrikyo - on the Tokyo subway in 1995, Japan has grown suspicious of their destructive power.

Pana Wave's bizarre progress across the country in a caravan of white vehicles (their steering wheels bandaged in white) has provided a captivating spectacle.

To protect themselves from electro-magnetic waves allegedly directed at them by Communist aggressors, members of Pana Wave drape themselves - and surrounding trees, bushes or crash barriers - in white fabric.

Television crews, at first shunned, have been allowed to approach only when similarly garbed in white.

As so often with cults, this one has a powerful personality at its centre.

Yuko Chino is a former English teacher, aged 69 and in poor health, who has woven a personal philosophy out of Christianity, Buddhism and science fiction.

Another reason for heightened awareness of the plethora of cults is the trial of Shoko Asahara, leader of Aum Shinrikyo, reaching its culmination eight years after the group carried out the worst terrorist attack in Japan.

Twelve people were killed and 5,000 injured when members of the group released sarin gas on the subway system in Tokyo during a Monday rush hour.

Aum Shinrikyo - which had also preached that the world was coming to an end - was found to hold vast stores of the chemicals needed to make sarin.

Full article here.

 

[dot23]

Aum's lingering legacy

On a sunny morning in March 1995, a secretive group called Aum Shinrikyo quietly released bags of liquefied sarin gas on the Tokyo underground. Twelve people were killed, thousands were sickened, and Japan's image as a bastion of safety was shattered.

Nearly nine years later, Shoko Asahara, the leader of the group, is on Friday due to hear his verdict. Charged with masterminding a series of violent crimes, including two deadly nerve gas attacks, the partially blind guru faces the death penalty if found guilty.

What is less clear is the scale of the threat Aum, and some of the country's other quasi-religious groups, continue to pose to Japan.

Mr Asahara set up a small religious sect in Tokyo in 1984 and renamed it Aum Shinrikyo in 1987. It espoused a mixture of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs and the writings of Nostradamus.

Members of the cult, who had not demonstrated violent tendencies before they joined Aum, were fed a diet of violent apocalyptic teachings.

"Most of them had very few rebellious periods in their teens... They were from good stable households and were normal kids," Taro Takimoto, a lawyer whose fight against Aum nearly lost him his life at the hands of the cult, told BBC News Online.

Ironically it seems likely their backgrounds made them more vulnerable to the charismatic Mr Asahara's power.

"Many of them were naive about the corrupted nature of some people in society... they joined Aum with the true belief that they were going to make the world a better place," Mr Takimoto said.

Japanese government

Andrew Marshall, co-author of The Cult at the End of the World: The Incredible Story of Aum, says they were arguably not helped by a "straight-jacketed" education system which does not nurture critical faculties.

Aum also offered practical spirituality in a society absorbed throughout the 1980s with economic development.

Although many Japanese claim to adhere to the nation's traditional religions of Buddhism and Shinto, their worship often seems to fulfil a cultural rather than emotional need, according to Ian Reader, a lecturer in religious studies at Lancaster University in the UK.

"They [Asahara's followers] were looking for something more spiritually nourishing," Mr Reader said.

'Starting over'

Aum has since renamed itself Aleph and renounced violence.

Fumihiro Joyu, the group's new leader has said that while Mr Asahara is still considered a "genius of meditation" the group "cannot approve" of the activities conducted by Aum under his leadership and that he is no longer considered the group's guru.

"We will abandon the parts of [his] teachings that are considered dangerous," Mr Joyu has written on Aleph's website.

The Japanese government is not convinced.

"The threat that Aum poses today hasn't changed since the [sarin] attacks on Matsumoto and Tokyo," said a spokesman for Japan's Public Security Investigation Agency (PSIA).

"The Aum followers, they still maintain their absolute faith in Asahara and they maintain faith in his doctrine too," he said.

The PSIA said that it had not found any specific terror plans, or any signs that Aum was capable of producing sarin today, but that its beliefs, and the high standards of education and technical ability possessed by its members, meant it was still dangerous.

Its membership - which is thought to have numbered in the thousands at the time of the 1995 attack - has dropped to around 450, according to the PSIA, although the agency says it has shown signs of gradually increasing.

Mr Takimoto agrees that Aleph remains an unknown quantity, but that security has been improved.

"22 March 1995 was a major wake-up call. Japan has been through it. The police were lax until then but now things are much better," he said.

Full article here