Aum Shinrikyo and Religious Terrorism in Japanese Collective Memory

ISBN-13: 9780197267370 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 228 str.

Rin (Queens University Belfast) Ushiyama

Recenzje

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.

O autorze

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.