Underground (42 page)

My grandmother’s death must have had an influence. Also the company I was working for was starting to lay off people. To top it all, the illness I talked about before was still with me. I hoped that joining Aum might help clear it up once and for all.

I’ll admit I was interested in Ms. Takahashi. Not in a romantic sense—but somehow I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I could see she was absorbed by Aum—but was it good for her to be so totally immersed in it? I was skeptical about Aum, and thought it best to raise these doubts with her. The fastest way to do so, I concluded,
was for me to join Aum as well, in order to be able to see her and have opportunities to talk to her. I know it sounds a bit altruistic.

Fortunately the entrance fee to join had gone down drastically to only 10,000 yen. Half a year’s dues came to 6,000 yen. And they gave us ten free tapes. After joining, in order to go through the initiation rite you have to watch ninety-seven Aum videos and read seventy-seven Aum books. A huge amount, but somehow I made it through them. The last thing you had to do was chant your mantra. We got a printed sheet and read it aloud over and over using a counter to click off the times. That’s why all Aum members have counters. We had to do that seven thousand times. I tried it for a while, but thought it was stupid and gave up. To my mind, it wasn’t any different from a Soka Gakkai service.

They tried very hard to get me to become a renunciate. At this point Aum was struggling to increase its numbers. I still hadn’t undergone the initiation rites, but they said it didn’t matter. Still I resisted. Ms. Takahashi became a renunciate at the end of that year. She called me at work on December 20 and said, “I’m going to do it.” That was the last time we ever spoke. She became a renunciate and went away.

When the gas attack occurred I was already distancing myself from Aum. There was a person Ms. Takahashi had proselytized and I was trying to convince that person not to join. Everyone knew I was critical of Aum’s methods. But a follower is a follower and in May 1995 the police took me in for questioning. By this time they knew who had been members. They probably had a list of names. Their methods were pretty archaic. “Can you trample on a photo of Shoko Asahara?” they demanded, like it was in the Edo period when they made the Japanese Christians renounce their faith by stepping on a drawing of Jesus. I had a direct experience of how frightening the police can be.

The police came to question me again in 1995, when an ANA [All Nippon Airways] plane was hijacked in Hokkaido. “You know something about it, right?” they insisted. They came all the time. It was like being stalked. No matter what I did, someone was always watching me. A spooky feeling. The police are supposed to protect citizens, but here they were frightening me to death. I hadn’t done
anything wrong, but still I was afraid all the time that I might be arrested. They were picking up Aum believers one after another for petty offenses. They’d trump up some charges like forgery or something, and I was sure they’d do the same to me.

They phoned me all the time, asking if anyone in Aum had been in touch. I should have just put up with it, but I was stupid enough to let my curiosity about what was happening inside Aum get the best of me and I went all the way to a satyam in Osaka to see another woman renunciate I knew. I wondered how she felt in the midst of this police crackdown.

I bought a few issues of the Aum magazine
Anuttara Sacca
to take back with me. You couldn’t get Aum books and magazines in bookstores anymore, and I wanted to see what was in them. Just as I left the satyam two policemen stopped me for questioning, asking me what I was up to inside. I was afraid, and also didn’t want to be bothered, so I somehow brushed them off and hightailed it out of there. No wonder the police kept an even closer eye on me.

MURAKAMI:
At the time did you believe that the gas attack on the subway was the work of Aum?

I did. I was positive they did it, but still I couldn’t suppress my curiosity about Aum. I was interested in the essence of this religious group that had been attacked by society, whose books no bookstore would stock, yet which still actively published its journals—this strange kind of life force that sprang back every time no matter how much you tried to crush it. What was going on in Aum? What did the followers really think? That’s what I wanted to know. A journalist’s viewpoint, I suppose. Nothing like what was ever shown on television.

MURAKAMI:
How do you feel about the gas attack itself?

It’s completely wrong and cannot be condoned. No doubt about that. But you have to distinguish Shoko Asahara from the ordinary rank-and-file believers. They aren’t all criminals, and some of them have truly pure hearts. I know many people like that and I feel sorry for them. They don’t fit into the system because they’re not comfortable with it, or because they’ve been excluded from it. That’s the kind of people who join Aum. And I like them. It’s easy for me to be friends with them. I feel much closer to them than to people who are
well adjusted. The real culprit is Asahara himself. He was tremendously powerful.

What’s funny is that being with the police so much I started to make friends with them. At first I was scared, but gradually we got to be friendly. They’d ask me if any mail had come from Aum and I’d show them everything. Once I cooperated, the police became much more open and kinder to me. “Well now,” I thought, “even the police can be pure and honest sometimes. They’re all working as hard as they can. So if they make a reasonable request of me, I’ll cooperate.”

New Year rolled around and I got a card from Ms. Takahashi’s mother. She wrote, “We were completely wrong.” She’d been a devout Aum follower herself, at first. She’d gone through the initiation. I wanted to see Ms. Takahashi, no matter what. There was so much I wanted to talk to her about. I mentioned this to the police and showed them the card.

That’s probably what gave them the idea that they could use me as a spy. They called me in and sounded me out about the idea. Whether they actually used the word “spy” or not I can’t recall, but that was the gist of it. In other words, would I go into the Aum organization to gather information and report back to them? Naturally the idea of being a spy wasn’t appealing. I just wanted to find a way to be with Aum followers. I was already friends with the police, I thought, so what the hell. I’ll give it a try.

I’m the type who just goes with the flow. A loner, basically, with no friends. The type who’s stuck at the bottom of the company ladder and is always getting yelled at. Nobody would ever take me seriously. So when the police said to me in all sincerity, “Do your best and try to get some information for us,” I was very happy. Even if it’s the police, I just felt happy being able to communicate with someone. At my company, I never made any friends. My Aum friends were all gone, and Ms. Takahashi had become a renunciate and disappeared. So, “If it’s for a short time, okay,” I thought. And that’s what I told them. I shouldn’t have.

MURAKAMI:
Was being a police spy a valuable experience?

All I wanted was to get in touch with Ms. Takahashi, to bring her back. Not as a spy or anything, I just wanted to be in contact with Aum members. But if I tried that on my own, without cooperating
with the police, I would have been pegged as an Aum person, and I was afraid of that. They would have treated me as a criminal. Having the police back me up would make the whole thing go more smoothly. Also I thought I might be able to persuade a few members to quit Aum. But that was dishonest. Don’t you think?

MURAKAMI:
Dishonest or not, it’s a convoluted story
.

It is indeed. I felt sorry for Ms. Takahashi, and felt I had to do
something
. That’s all I was thinking about. If things continued as they were, she’d be treated like a criminal. I had to try to persuade her, but I had no idea where she was. If I cooperated with the police, I might get some information. But I never did find out her whereabouts. I asked all the time, but the police couldn’t track her down. All they knew was that she was still a renunciate. Maybe they did know but just didn’t tell me.

At any rate, since the Fukui and Kanazawa branches were shut down, the plan to have me infiltrate Aum fell through.

MURAKAMI:
So it ended up well for you, didn’t it? By the way, are you interested in Nostradamus’s prophecies?

Very much so. Nostradamus had a great influence on my generation. I’m planning my life’s schedule around his prophecies. I have a desire to kill myself. I want to die. I don’t mind dying very soon. But since the end is coming in two years, I think I might be patient for a bit longer. I want to see with my own eyes what will happen at the end. I’m interested in doomsday religions. In addition to Aum, I have contacts among Jehovah’s Witnesses. What they talk about is nonsense, though.

MURAKAMI:
When you say
“the end,”
is that when the present system will be wiped out?

I prefer to think of it as being reset. It’s the desire to push the reset button on life. I imagine it as a catharsis, very peaceful.

I didn’t want to be a teacher, but according to my mother, that was the only path open to me
[laughs]
. I spent two years after high school studying for the college entrance exams before I got in. One whole year I was ill. I had some sort of philosophical struggle going on in me, a period of great discontent. I went to the hospital and it turned out my blood pressure was 180. After this I stayed at home to get better. I took medicine to lower my blood pressure. I was the kind of person who broods over things, and is too sensitive to his surroundings. By “philosophical struggle” I mean that I realized I had to do certain things in a certain way, and knowing I couldn’t manage it made me hate myself. I was young and hardheaded.

I majored in elementary education in college, with a concentration in educational psychology. I chose the elementary level because I like children. Still, I was plagued by the question of what I should do with my life. I had the notion that there were things the children would teach
me
. I would both teach, and be taught at the same time.

I graduated from college and found a job in an elementary school in Kanagawa Prefecture. It wasn’t so hard for me to leave home. I was used to moving, and was sure I could make friends no matter where I went.

I was put in charge of my own class from the very first year. Forty kids to a class, and it wasn’t easy in the beginning, believe me. It totally occupied me for a while. Actually it was a lot of fun. I was a teacher for a total of ten years, and the five or six years I was in elementary school were the best. I got on well with the parents, too. We’d get together sometimes to sing, eat homemade cakes, and so on. I never had any bad experiences with the rest of the staff.

People tried to find someone for me to marry. My parents even tried to set me up. And I did go out with a few women for a while. But all the time I knew that eventually I was going to renounce the world.

MURAKAMI:
So you were already thinking about that?

Yes, I was. It was before I found out about Aum, but what I had in mind was more becoming a traditional renunciate. The image I had was of quietly retiring from the world at 60 and living a simple life.