Living Aum

Abstract

This article examines the experiences of female Aum Shinrikyō members who left the group after the 1995 sarin gas attack in Tokyo, but who are unable to reject Aum and the lives they had lived inside it completely. Based on interviews and material published by Aum, the article discusses what it meant for these women to “live Aum” while they were members, and why many of them have been unable to move on. It focuses on the extreme ascetic practices that were central to their Aum lives and status in the group, and the entanglement of love and fear in the emotional connections they formed while inside the group and with its leader Asahara Shōkō. I argue that these interrelated elements form the basis of a “feeling community” of former members who have continued to feel different from, and out of sync with, the emotional regime and temporal rhythms of Japanese mainstream society, but who are also aware that the past they are somehow stuck in cannot exist in the present, nor can its recreation be imagined for the future.