Aum Shinrikyō and Religious Terrorism in Japanese Collective Memory.

Rin Ushiyama is Lecturer in Sociology at Queen's University Belfast, a post he has held since 2021. He holds a PhD in Sociology (2017) from Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. Previously, he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Sociology, Cambridge, and a Research Fellow at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. He is currently a Co-Editor of Cultural Sociology (British Sociological Association/SAGE). He is a cultural and political sociologist interested in contested memories of violence, including war, terrorism, and colonialism with a regional focus on East Asia. His latest research investigates historical denial in the context of contemporary Japan and East Asia.

• 1: Introduction2: Towards a Multi-layered Account of Collective Memory3: The Prelude to Destruction: the 1994 Matsumoto Sarin Attack4: Shock and Anger: Societal Responses to the Tokyo Subway Attack5: Commemorating Crisis: State, Media, and Civil Responses to the Aum Affair6: Public Intellectuals and the Struggle over Mind Control7: Performing Victimhood: Pursuing Justice after Tragedy8: The Trauma of Perpetrators9: Conclusions

Mistakenly, I believed I had read as much as I needed or wanted to read about Aum Shinrikyo by 2018, when Asahara Shōkō was executed as a result of the 1995 release of sarin gas in the Tokyo subway. Now, however, Dr Rin Ushiyama has taken the action forward by meticulously recording the varied and changing narratives of those affected, both directly and indirectly, by Aum's nefarious actions. Be they perpetrators, victims, officials, media, 'anti-cultists', scholars or intellectual commentators, each contributes to the collective memory and subsequent actions of a traumatised Japan. This is a story well worth telling - and, indubitably, well worth reading.