Deconstructs how and why an obscure New Age cult attacked a Tokyo subway system with Sarin Gas in 1995. This cautionary tale unpacks how cults create filter bubbles of reality while drawing parallels to our modern political discourse. We break down AUM: THE CULT AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Ben Braun & Chiaki Yanagimoto in this episode.
Sundance 2023 Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
Distribution: Not available.
From Sundance’s website: In 1984, Shoko Asahara started a seemingly innocuous yoga school based in Tokyo. By 1995, the group had evolved into a doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo, meaning “Supreme Truth,” whose weapon of choice was sarin, an extraordinarily toxic nerve gas first invented by the Nazis during World War II. An unrelenting, in-depth look at the group, AUM: The Cult at the End of the World weaves a chilling narrative from Asahara’s claims of being a reincarnation of Buddha to the 1995 attack on the Tokyo subway system that left 14 dead and injured an estimated 6,000 additional civilians. From the convenient disappearance of presumed adversaries to the acquisition of Russian weaponry, the warning signs are examined alongside the historical and socioeconomic context that ultimately led to the group being designated as a terrorist organization. Drawing from the book on Aum by acclaimed investigative journalist David E. Kaplan and Pulitzer Prize–winner Andrew Marshall (who both appear in the film), documentarians Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto make a powerful entrance with their directorial debut.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.518] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. And I'm Wonder Bright. And welcome to Story All the Way Down, where we're continuing on our series of looking at Sundance Documentaries 2023. In today's episode, we're going to be focusing on a documentary called Aum! The Cult at the End of the World by Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto. So this is a film that is a number of different genres, I guess. It's looking at, we've seen a lot of cult movies on these streaming movie services. We've also seen true crime elements where this is blending a number of those genres. I'll just read this part from the synopsis of, in 1984, Shoko Asahara started a seemingly innocuous yoga school based in Tokyo. By 1995, the group had evolved into a doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo. meaning supreme truth, whose weapon of choice was sarin, an extraordinarily toxic nerve gas first invented by the Nazis during World War II. So here we have a seemingly innocuous yoga studio that turns into this cult that is using these biological weapons against their own citizens in Tokyo. So it's kind of a story about how that came to be. What happened? What was going on in Japan? What was all these influences? What is it about this cult and how do they get ahold of the Sarin to attack in this domestic terrorism situation? So really kind of a wild journey that I was vaguely aware of, but never really thought about what was behind it and to this new age cult that was bringing about this domestic terrorism within Tokyo. So, yeah, I'd love to hear some of your initial thoughts of this piece.
[00:01:50.963] Wonder Bright: You know, I'm not necessarily drawn to true crime filmmaking as a general rule. I think I almost didn't even watch this one, but I think this was by the third day that you were watching that the films were available. And I'd begun to surrender to the process of just watching the films as they showed up. And so I sat down with this one thinking, well, if I don't like it, I'll duck out. And then I got sucked in and I ended up watching it. And You know, it's funny because as I think about my resistance to it now, it's not the same as necessarily the resistance to true crime drama, generally speaking. Generally speaking, I'm not interested in watching people kill one another. It's odd. I read thrillers and mystery novels that have grisly murder at the core of them and I like action-adventure but the true crime drama where it's something that actually happened to someone and there isn't a protagonist who's trying to discover it. There's just a protagonist who ends up dead by the end of it and it's inevitable and there's nothing you can do about it because it literally happened in the past. Just is not something that I generally want to see, and I usually have regret about having watched. So it's usually not my cup of tea. And from having watched the interview with the filmmakers, it's clear that this story caught a hold of them because of, in the instance of Chiaki Yanagimoto, she talks about how, you know, she grew up being told to avoid the people in those white robes in the town that she lived in in Japan. And, you know, come 1995 and spoiler alert, they released this horrible sarin gas on the Tokyo subway system and that left 14 dead and injured an estimated six thousand people. you know, her mom's warning was proven correct. And I can imagine that would have a hold on you if you lived through something like that, even by association. There's a need to, like, understand what happened, try and unpack it a little bit. So the true crime nature of the story was not so stimulating for me. But what ended up really arresting my attention was the way in which the true crime drama was enacted. Because, you know, as the filmmakers themselves describe, there are some correlations with our current contemporary life where people are having a really hard time discerning truth from fiction, fact from fiction, what is true, what is false. And this is a story about a very charismatic leader who was able to essentially brainwash his followers into murder and mayhem and disappearing people who were a threat to the institution that he had founded. And the film is not necessarily able to answer how did he do that? How can we prevent it? But it is an earnest description of what happened and how it occurred and the fallout therein. And that was chilling and uncomfortable. And yeah, it's 100% a cautionary tale, like who gets to decide what God is saying? And is it really a good idea to like, allow one person to decide that God is saying kill people? I mean, this is an age old question. We're not going to answer it in the next half an hour. But it's certainly a question that we all need to be asking ourselves. And this film posits it in a way that is compelling. And even though it's talking about past events, it still feels contemporary.
[00:05:58.260] Kent Bye: Yeah. At the end, there is this tying back into our current political situation where you have the actual facts and truth are versus the fake news. And depending on what side of the political polarization you're on, those could be opposite things where one thing's accepted as truth and the other is accepted as fake news. And so how do you draw the line between those things? And so you have this parallel between the ways in which this particular cult was able to create this bubble where you start to systematically cut people off from the outside information, you create an insular bubble, you're able to use a lot of these Buddhist type of principles where it's all about the world as an illusion. So why not just give up all your physical positions and take this vow, surrendering all of your physical belongings, but all those physical belongings are a part of enriching this cult. And then at the time they're talking about the culture at that moment, in Japan and Tokyo where they had really been on this boom, but then there was a little bit of a bust that had happened. And then the aftermath, people were trying to search for meaning and was also the middle of the World Wide Web was just coming up online and Japan was having an occult boom with people turning to the occult practices, to believing in aliens and conspiracy theories and these doomsday's cult and the end of the world. And so you have this seizing upon that cultural zeitgeist. Astrologically, it was this outer planet transit of Uranus conjunct with Neptune, which was the dissolving of the boundaries of the world through the internet technologies and having images propagated out there as the beginning of the viral nature of the network effects of all the mass communication that was happening. At the side effect of that, without having those existing editors, you have all these news groups that were talking about all these conspiracy theories and aliens and whatnot. And so, it's in that cultural zeitgeist that this is coming about where people are both looking for a deep practice of spirituality with yoga and There's probably a lot of legitimate ways in which that those embodied practices were giving people an experience of this exalted sense of spirituality. But at the head of it is this guy who has bad intentions and is using those spiritual practices to create and manipulate and control people and to say that we're under threat, we're going to be killed, and then use that to protect themselves by going out and doing these different attacks. So the film actually ended up taking all these really strange turns that are surprising in terms of like, how did they get ahold of the sarin gas and collaborating with these big nation states and all these unique places that are surprising. And for people who were within the context of Japan, having this new age occult group that's this really small entity ends up being a lot bigger of a heavy hitter in terms of domestic terrorism than anyone was even expecting. And so it really came out of nowhere. So it's really quite fascinating to go back and recount that story. And on the backs of the work of a couple of intrepid journalists who had written a book about it, both David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall had done a lot of investigative work. And I know that at least one of the journalists, if not both of them, are featured in this film. helping to narrate the story as it's unfolding. Because it's quite an interesting evolution that, again, you don't know quite how things develop or why or where things are going, but it ends up taking them in all these interesting directions as they have these little clues and these little moments. So it's that true crime element, how they piece together this puzzle. And yeah, I think it speaks to this deeper aspect that we're facing right now, which is this polarization within our society where you have these two different groups that have two completely different reality bubbles. So we can just see what's happening in our existing political discourse here in the United States and kind of empathize with how maybe some of the early beginnings of that filter bubble that was being created within the context of these cults were starting to filter what information was coming out and how to interpret and make sense of the world around them. Even though it does seem like it's in the past, it is very contemporary in terms of we're still living with this side effect of what is truth, what is reality, and how do we overcome these different dimensions of polarization.
[00:10:13.403] Wonder Bright: And we may also be living with the history of allyship in World War II. That's another history that this film brings into view. There's a couple of films on the slate at Sundance this year that bring forth bits of history that I was not aware of. And there's this strange thing where when you watch all of the films simultaneously, you actually end up having a much fuller picture where you're like piecing all these puzzle pieces together. So I have this sense of history of Japan and Russia being allies, but it really comes to bear in a way that is really quite surprising in this film. I think we're both resistant to like naming exactly what happens, but the fact that Russia ends up being a player in this film and instrumental towards the action that occurs is fascinating. It's not the only film where this happens. We'll describe it in other episodes as well, but it adds to the sense of, wait, what time period are we talking about? Is this still now? Like this confusion of propaganda and who gets to tell the story and like what's happening. And I appreciate about the film that one of the filmmakers is Japanese born herself and that she's coming at it from those deep need to understand and to know like her own history as well. Right. To just explore this experience that impacted the nation in that generation. And she's still feeling the impact and it's still relevant.
[00:11:56.182] Kent Bye: Yeah. And it's one of those, the true crime, when you start to piece the puzzle together, it becomes a bit of a rollercoaster ride. And yeah, there's a number of different twists and turns that I'm hesitant to dig too much into, but I think it's part of the centering back on investigative journalists who were doing a lot of the legwork to put together those puzzle pieces. And again, getting back to what is the extent to people are able to surrender their agency to follow authority. And we have the Milgram Stanford obedience experiments that shows the degree to which that people are willing to follow authority. And I think this is yet another iteration of that as people are willing to give up their own sovereignty to follow this larger cause, even if that means going out and acting in an unethical way. I guess it's the part of the true crime that is that moral transgression, and you want to see justice be served. And I think there's this sort of unsettledness about this piece where there's people who went away, they did their time, and they're kind of out there back at it, you know, kind of in a different iteration. And yeah, I feel like in this, it's reflecting reality of whatever the situation is. And sometimes it's only partially satisfying. So yeah, I guess some of the things that I'm taken away from
[00:13:15.485] Wonder Bright: Hmm. Yeah, it's interesting. Actually, I, you know, before we started talking, I looked to see if we had the birth data for Shoko Asahara, who was the cult leader who caused his followers to release these terrorist attacks and to kill people that threatened his cult. And there's a birth date that's given on the internet. We don't have a birth time. But what the internet gives is Shoko Asara was born on March 2, 1955. And that shows Mars in opposition to Neptune. Neptune was at 27 degrees Libra, and Mars was at three degrees Taurus on that date. So they're six degrees separating. So it's not an exact aspect by any means, but it is within orb. It's out of sign, but it's within orb opposition, which if you've heard our conversation about Little Richard, you will recognize a hard aspect between Mars and Neptune is something that Little Richard also had. So Neptune is a planet that astrologers associate with divinity, but also with delusion. And Mars is a planet that is associated with fighting, but also with desire. You know, Demetri George says it indicates your capacity to act on desire, to go after what you want, essentially. And so when we see that in connection with Neptune, there could be this space where like your own desire gets confused with what God's desire might be, for instance. And in modern astrological language, typically no planets are thought of as being, quote, bad or malefic. And there are certainly potential problems in thinking about planets in that way. And yet by depriving planets like Neptune of the teeth that comes when we have a healthy respect for them because they might be malefic. We tend to think of it only in terms of like what is great and glorious. Well, if Neptune is about divinity, then it's also about transcendence and these qualities that we associate with the better parts of religion and spirituality. And I think something that this film really shows up is the inherent danger in those spaces. The reason I'm bringing all that up isn't to say that this was foretold by the stars. It's not about the stars are evil, and that's why this happened. It's just that if we're going to regard this film as a cautionary tale, then as an astrologer, I want to look at some of those aspects as like, what's the cautionary tale that I can take away from that? And, you know, I personally have Neptune as a fairly strong planet in my chart. And there is this experience that I have sometimes to that experience or expression of divinity, where there's this space where I step aside and I don't know what thing is going to come out of my mouth. And I have been caught up in the past by realizing that that's actually quite dangerous. I don't necessarily trust that in myself, and I could look to my chart to explain all the reasons why. And I also just think that perhaps it's possible to have that measure of hearing the voice of God must always be accompanied by a certain measure of mortal skepticism of mortal humility, of not thinking that if I'm hearing the voice of God, that I am there for God itself, God herself, God themself, that humility has to be undertaken in that experience and in that realm. And that goes for a guru, but it also goes for anyone who might follow them. At a certain point, we have to be like Martin Luther and we have to ask ourselves, what's our relationship to the God and to not think about it as if God is making me do this or I am God. But to be in right relationship with the gods requires a level of self-reflection and humility that Shoko Asara and perhaps his followers were not willing to take on or could not take on and were therefore abused.
[00:17:35.609] Kent Bye: Yeah, so the cautionary tale of the different ways that we all want to be connected to this transcendent entity that's beyond whatever we can see within our physicality. But yet there is a part for whenever you're going into that transcendent space, you have this potential for disillusionment. So you have this aspect of the transcendent nature of that, but also the disillusionment of like, Even as we look at the New Age movements, there's an open question as to what is pseudoscience, to what degree is it snake oil, what is the power of consciousness. There's this direct embodied experiences that people have through the synchronicities, but yet there's this other element of Is it all sort of a delusion aspect? And so it's at this point unclear as to how to draw some of those lines still to this point. And so you have this capacity for people that as they are entering into these different cults like Aum, they were experiencing things that then could potentially in hindsight be seen as a lot of disillusioned aspects. But at the same time, I want to call out that they probably were experiencing some legitimate aspects of transcendence through the yoga practices, which, you know, you have this ability to associate the transcendent qualities of some of those practices and do something that is a little bit more sinister in terms of he's gone on and abused those powers in a hierarchical way. So, yeah, I just wanted to kind of echo that. I don't know if you have any thoughts or reactions to that.
[00:19:04.419] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I just wanted to add that, like, if you are inclined that way, as I am towards the sort of Neptunian transcendence, mystical realm of thinking and being a way of checking oneself is that cults classically, like one of the things that they're known for is separating people from their families of origin, separating them from other people that know and love them. i.e. if you've been listening to our conversations thus far, separating people from the things that tether them to the earth. And I think it's an unfortunate byproduct of spirituality and religion as a whole in Western culture that we think of it as being above us, sky gods. something that is beyond our mortal comprehension. And so this idea of transcendence is that you transcend the mortal coil, transcend earthly concerns. And in fact, that's not a holistic way of thinking about things. And there are other kinds of spiritualities that allow us to stay connected and in right relationship with the earth and with one another. So if you have that experience of this kind of leaning into like wanting something so much better that you no longer even have to stay tethered to the earth. Well, first of all, you're probably right for the plucking because that is kind of an indication that the people who might tether you to the earth are causing you harm. and that you don't have a problem leaving your family of origin. And of course, these are the people that are the most vulnerable that cult leaders are going to look for because they're the ones who want something to be tethered to that is not their family of origin for whatever reason. And this doesn't mean that people can't have strong, loving families and get captivated by a cult. Obviously, if you've watched any of the documentaries on NXIVM, you'll know that's the case. It's just that this is a way in which cult practices operate. And if you have that desire for belonging that comes towards divinity rather than towards a more earthly family of origin expression, This is something to pay attention to. You know, it just goes back to our conversations about the 12th house and being a cosmonaut and the willingness to travel and transcend and go far away. We always have to ask ourselves, how am I tethering myself to the earth? How can I stay connected?
[00:21:34.755] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it's in that spirit as we start to wrap up as what I'm bearing witness to is this parallel that they're drawing between what is happening in the context of this film is actually a bit of a microcosm of what is happening at a broad scale in our political landscape right now and how they explicitly say that these political parties are cults. because they are limiting the type of information. They are saying this is fake news, don't look at that. And so we've had this bifurcation of these reality bubbles that we've created. And I wanted to give a shout out to Agnes Callard who did this short little video that I think she's working on a book on Socrates, but she was looking at what was the insight of the Socratic method. And She has this brilliant way of articulating how epistemology and truth and knowledge is all about these dual algorithms, and these algorithms are actually two separate algorithms that it's impossible for one individual to do at the same time, and that's believing truths and avoiding falsehoods. and that in order to really believe truths and avoid falsehoods, you have to surrender yourself to a larger delimitative process that is the peer review process, that is just the same in the justice system. You have the prosecution that is trying to prosecute the guilty. You have the defendants who are trying to acquit the innocent. But you can't have one team of lawyers do both of those modes at the same time. It's a conflict of interest to try to prosecute and acquit at the same time. You actually have to have a dialectic between those two. And you have a third party, which is the judge and the jury, to start to understand what the objective facts that are produced. Now, of course, there's lots of different problems with our criminal justice system, and we don't always get to the sense of justice. But the idea in the ideal realm is that You prosecute the guilty and acquit the innocent is just the same as believing the truth and avoiding the falsehoods that requires this deliberative process. That's a thing that the antidote to this filter reality bubble is to have some sort of agreement as to what are the truths we should believe and what are the falsehoods that we should avoid. it's coming to those common understandings. It's complicated when you start to have it in a religious context because you have the phenomenology of religion and the spiritual experiences, which William James has talked about. He's talked about the fact of feeling where your feelings actually become a fact that becomes a part of this phenomenological dimension of the experience. So because of that, it's difficult to know what are the facts to believe or not believe when some of that could be manipulated, or you don't actually know the full truth of those embodied experiences or what the connections that are behind them and what is the causal chain behind all that. So it's kind of one of these things where the antidote of the epistemology and the philosophical perspective is that you need to have a common deliberative process through the dialectic or through being in conversation. But that's sort of an ideal that how do you get common understanding in a more political context. This is focusing on the spiritual context of this cult. It's got these deeper patterns of the belief part. It's the skepticism part that is still got to be worked out in terms of how this as an antidote gets applied out to a massive scale to how to get out of this polarization within our society.
[00:24:53.336] Wonder Bright: Yeah, it's really interesting, actually, as you're saying all that I'm thinking about this Mars, Neptune opposition that we're seeing in the chart of Shoko, a Sahara. Classically, in astrology, when we think about a malefic like Mars and opposition to another planet, which I would also describe as a malefic, if we're talking about Neptune, We're looking at an opposition, which is usually, generally speaking, going to be difficult. We talked about Mars opposing the Ascendant when we were talking about Michael J. Fox's chart and how this was an indication of his illness, but it was also an indication of his wife being willing to fight with him for him. and for their family unit. So when we think about Michael J. Fox's story, there's clearly this capacity to triumph in a fundamental way over the Mars opposition, where through that conflict and that struggle, he arrives at a new way of being. So it goes from being an either or circumstance to being a part of his evolutionary journey and a part of his process of becoming. And I think that's what you're speaking to. And that's what Agnes Callard is speaking to around this idea of the dialectic. I think in our culture, we have this inherent idea that opposition or argument or debate is necessarily bad. And certainly at this point, it's just not even possible. I can't tell you how many people I know who can't speak to their family of origin anymore because they're just at odds politically. So there's a despair that I feel in the sense that we can't seem to agree on a commonality in order to have these debates, because in the absence of that commonality, Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan had this agreement within themselves that the family unit was sacred and that their relationship was sacred. So even when Michael J. Fox was drinking and he was falling away from these things, he was able to be brought back to the table because ultimately in his heart of hearts that really did speak to him about what he wanted. This doesn't seem to be something that Shoko Asahara was able to reconcile inside himself and certainly his followers couldn't either. So how do we create space for those dialectics? I mean, I think really, ultimately, it's it's this is an open question. This is the open question of our times. How do we find agreement when we're living in the either orness and there's no and we're unwilling to even sit down at the table to have the conversation? And I count myself amongst that number, by the way, it's a question of, you know, we're talking at a very high level about certain concepts in this podcast that I can't have that conversation with certain family members, because it includes like books that I've read and biographies that I've studied and people that I've been influenced by and an education that I have. that other people don't have. And there's no way that for me to have that conversation with someone in the absence of having that shared understanding of the way that the world operates. And it feels to me like I'm in harm's way if I'm having that conversation. So it's unresolvable. This film does not illuminate resolution to the problem. It just illustrates that this is something that has been there, is ongoing, and needs our attention.
[00:28:37.069] Kent Bye: Yeah. And from a Hegelian perspective, there's a thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This is just sort of the thesis of where you're starting in, sort of how do you have the antidote to that and how do you synthesize that into the culture, I think is a question. And I've done an interview with Grant Maxwell about difference and repetition and these 13 different philosophers who are going against the binary framing that Hegel often has in his work and from 13 perspectives of different philosophers. from Deleuze and Young and Schelling and Leibniz and Spinoza and process relational thinkers like Whitehead. So there's other philosophical frameworks that I think get to this capacity to have this pluralistic view, but we're talking about how do you apply that to the culture en masse? That's sort of a much broader question that I think is an open question to be discerned. I think what we're doing here at least watching these stories and trying to have one conversation that is maybe opening up portals for expanding the way that we even think about our own stories. Maybe that's one step that we can continue to move forward in by having these conversations and how we are able to connect our own lives into these larger trends and how we fit into these deeper archetypal patterns that are illuminated in a film like this. How are the ways that we get disillusioned in our own lives where we want to have a sense of faith or belief, but yet can also be harmful in the sense that it untethers us from the sense of grounded, pragmatic, empirical, objective, rational reality. So there is this rationality versus the transcendent embodied experiences of these mystical type of experiences, the new age, the occult, everything that's being covered here. There is a tension there that we each have, whether we want to call it the air element of the mind versus the earth element of the body or emotions and ways that we take action, all these different elemental aspects. So yeah, I don't know. I guess, like you said, it's provoking more questions than answers that's continuing the conversation. But I guess as we start to wrap things up, what are some other things that you're going to be taking away or are bearing witness to from this film?
[00:30:43.173] Wonder Bright: Well, I think I just want to bear witness to the cautionary tale that it is and take that on personally to sit in the inquiry of where my voices are coming from and and to find ways to both honor those voices and also make sure that I'm, you know, remain tethered to the earth, remain tethered and connected to other people and the well-being of all rather than just the well-being of the things that might serve my gods. And in terms of the open question that it's brought up for the both of us, like how do we create consensus reality with people whose viewpoints are so diametrically opposed to us? The film has not changed my mind about that. I still I think like once you get to a certain point, you actually there you can't have a willingness to engage in debate with somebody who rejects your humanity on a base level. It's just not safe. And it's not fair to ask that of people. And, you know, I prefer not to. Nikki Giovanni is right. You can't make me. I'm not doing it. Yeah.
[00:31:59.841] Kent Bye: It's the Karl Popper paradox of tolerance is that you can't be tolerant of intolerance because once you are tolerant of that intolerance, then if people aren't tolerant of your perspective, then you end up getting silenced. And so you have to look at the larger view of having the most viewpoints possible in this pluralistic way. And when you have those intolerant perspectives, it becomes difficult to be completely tolerant of that intolerance.
[00:32:25.687] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I mean, I think that's really just a fundamental truth. But what I can commit to do by bearing witness to this film is to continuing on a journey of questioning my own seeking nature and of exploring it with a humility that is held in tension by the trust in the voice that I have that's bringing me forward.
[00:32:50.730] Kent Bye: All right. Well, that sounds like a good place to wrap up our conversation here about Aum! The Cult at the End of the World by Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto. It was a part of the U.S. documentary competition at Sundance 2023. As of this point, there's no distribution that's been announced about this film, but it's being represented by Synetic Marketing, so there's a good chance that it might be picked up at some point. If you'd like to get more information about Story All the Way Down, you can go to storyallthewaydown.com and find out ways you can support this podcast and look at all the other information there that we have and find out more about Kenton Wander. Thanks for joining us.
