Trauma and Historical Referentiality in Post-Aum Manga

Abstract

Cultural treatments of the 1995 Tokyo subway gas attacks perpetrated by Aum Supreme Truth (Aum Shinrikyō) often reference another tumultuous episode that many argue belongs to the same radical impulse in Japanese society: the violent end to the ‘extremist period’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s, punctuated by the United Red Army’s Asama Sansō incident of 1972. Yet while scholarship and the media have sought to contextualize the gas attacks by directly identifying Aum in relation to United Red Army radicalism, the works examined here thematize the unassimilated nature of the extremist period in the Japanese historical imaginary and complicate the construction of referential ties in the narration of these events. Produced in the years following the attacks, two works of manga serialized in the late 1990s and 2000s – Biriibaazu [Believers, 1999] and Nijūseiki Shōnen [Twentieth Century Boys, 1999–2006] – represent Aum as a trace of an event that has not been fully assimilated in the cultural consciousness. These two works demonstrate how the largely unclaimed nature of the radical era highlights the problems of transcribing unprocessed events like the United Red Army incident into narrative imaginings of recent Japanese history