03-06-2025
How a year of tremor and terror transformed Japan
WHO COULD have known that on an ordinary Monday morning in 1995 a commute in Tokyo would turn into a scene from hell? On March 20th five members of Aum Shinrikyo, a doomsday cult, boarded separate trains on the capital's subway carrying bags filled with sarin, a deadly nerve gas. The poison spread through the packed carriages; 14 people died and thousands were injured. 'I still wonder: am I dreaming? Did the attack really happen?" says Sakahara Atsushi, a film-maker caught in the attack who still has symptoms today.
For a country as safe and orderly as Japan, the terrorist attack was an unimaginable shock. It came just two months after the Great Hanshin earthquake, a 6.9-magnitude disaster that killed more than 6,000 and left 45,000 homeless. The scale of the Kobe quake caught both residents and authorities off guard. It was the largest tremor to hit a big Japanese city since 1923. Today, Kobe has been completely rebuilt, and the Aum leaders were executed in 2018. But the trauma of these two disasters remains etched in the Japanese psyche.
The disasters struck a Japan already reeling economically. After decades as a powerhouse, it suffered a terrific crash of stock and property prices in 1991-92 as its asset bubble burst. Many believed that the downturn would be short-lived—but 1995 shattered even that remaining confidence.
The Kobe earthquake exposed a government that was suffocating in red tape. Swiss rescue dogs sent to find survivors were stuck in quarantine, and the Self-Defence Forces (SDF) arrived too late. The once-vaunted 'iron triangle" of bureaucrats, politicians and business that powered Japan's growth 'began to look rusty", says Jeff Kingston of Temple University in Japan.
'There was a marked change in the Japanese consciousness 'before' and 'after' these events," wrote Murakami Haruki, a renowned novelist, in 1997. These two 'nightmarish eruptions", he observed, triggered a 'critical inquiry into the very roots of the Japanese state". Just a couple of years earlier, foreign observers still feared Japanese dominance; 'Rising Sun", a 1993 Hollywood thriller, revolved around sinister Japanese businessmen. But Japan's mood turned gloomy after 1995. The media fixated on how Aum's recruits included elite-university graduates.
Thirty years on, Japan still lives in the shadow of 1995. Roam around Tokyo, and you may notice something amiss: public bins are scarce, removed following the sarin attack. Even those born after the attack recoil at the name 'Aum". Recently, Banyan nervously attended a study session run by Hikari no Wa—a group that splintered from Aum Shinrikyo. The session seemed innocuous (to your correspondent's relief), focusing on breathing techniques, meditation and Buddhist teachings. But outside the building hung angry banners that read: 'We will never forget the sarin incident!!" 'Your group must be dissolved!" A policeman stood watch, too.
Suspicion of marginal religious sects resurfaced in 2022 after Yamagami Tetsuya assassinated a former prime minister, Abe Shinzo, citing grievances against the Unification Church (also known as 'the Moonies"), a group with ties to the ruling party. The government has since moved to dissolve the group, and a court ordered it to do so this week—a rare step, taken in only a handful of cases, most notably against Aum Shinrikyo. Though the two groups are not remotely comparable, the backlash against the Moonies, including their dodgy recruitment tactics, carried echoes of the 1995 trauma.
Political leaders now struggle to lift Japan out of its malaise that began with the bubble's collapse—what started as a 'lost decade" has stretched to over three decades of stagnation. When Ishiba Shigeru, the current prime minister, recently said he wanted to build a 'fun Japan", critics slammed him as tone-deaf, arguing he should focus on solving economic hardships instead.
But 1995 also left a positive legacy. The earthquake inspired what came to be known as 'Year one of volunteering"—with over a million helpers flocking to the disaster zone. Civil society flourished. When the Tohoku earthquake struck in 2011, the SDF mobilised immediately. Since 1995, 'Japan has come to realise it needs to prepare for risk," says Fukuda Mitsuru at Nihon University in Tokyo. What emerged from that terrible year was a Japan that no longer believes it is invincible, but can face its vulnerabilities.
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