The world — this insignificant little spinning rock we call home — is nearing its end. Armageddon lies ahead: violence, upheaval, horror. The normal human mind shrinks from the mere thought, but "higher consciousness" embraces it. Higher consciousness sees things in a wider perspective. Where you and I see only this world, higher consciousness sees the cosmos. What are death and destruction to it? Nothing; if anything, good — harbingers of a better, more just world to come.
The sentencing of former Aum Shinrikyo cultist Naoko Kikuchi last month for attempted murder brought all this back, for such, more or less, was the "philosophy" behind a series of Aum atrocities whose climax, permanently etched on the national consciousness, was the March 1995 sarin gassing of the Tokyo subway. Kikuchi's 17 years on the run make quite a story — not our story, however; our story takes up a provocative suggestion posed by freelance journalist Minori Kitahara in the weekly Shukan Asahi. Has Japan, she wonders, become "Aum-ified"?
Kikuchi, implicated in Aum's mail-bombing of Tokyo City Hall in June 1995, was arrested at last in June 2012. An odd feeling came over Kitahara as she followed Kikuchi's Tokyo District Court trial and interviewed other former cultists. "Aum is more comprehensible to me now," she writes, "than it was in 1995. Why? Because the Aum atmosphere as it emerged in court is remarkably similar to the atmosphere of Japanese society today."