Japan’s Focus Shifts to Supreme Truth’s Future : Reaction: Questions arise about the 10,000 adherents cult claims. Its legal status is in doubt.

Lawyer Taro Takimoto recently devised an experimental “counter-brainwashing” tape to help in his work with former members of Aum Supreme Truth.

“I’m going to live with strength, depending on my own thinking! I’m going to live! I’m going to live! I’m going to live!” repeats a gentle but powerful voice, over and over again, mimicking the repetitive pattern of meditation tapes produced by cult leader Shoko Asahara.

With the arrest Tuesday of Asahara for allegedly masterminding the deadly March 20 poison gas attack in Tokyo’s subway system, attention is turning to questions of the future of the cult and the 10,000 believers it claims--especially the hundreds who still live at sect facilities.

Takimoto, who expects the number of believers abandoning the sect to grow sharply, said he made the tape in the Supreme Truth style to give those interested in leaving the group a way to engage in a familiar form of self-study that might help them re-integrate into society.

The sect’s days as a legally registered religious organization, at least in its present form, appear numbered. Education Minister Kaoru Yosano said Tuesday that his ministry is preparing to seek a court order disbanding the cult. Procedures to cancel its legal standing--which give it such benefits as tax-free status--will be initiated about when Asahara is formally indicted, he said. Japanese media predicted this will occur in three weeks.

Revocation of the sect’s formal status as a religious organization would not block believers from maintaining the cult as a religion should they wish to do so.

It will take months--possibly years--for the government to take control of sect properties.

Meantime, hundreds of believers might continue to live at the cult’s headquarters in the village of Kamikuishiki, about 65 miles southwest of Tokyo near the foot of Mt. Fuji.

Norie Okamoto, a Kamikuishiki resident who has helped families trying to get relatives to leave the cult, expressed hope Tuesday that sect members “will get out of this place without a single person left.” But he predicted that this will not happen quickly and suggested that, meantime, representatives of mainstream religions should try to bring their message to the cultists.

“Because Aum has rejected everything that parents and teachers say, for us in turn to just deny Aum’s teachings won’t work,” Okamoto said. “I think it would be best if Buddhist monks or Christian ministers would go into the Sixth Satian [the building where believers live] and persuade them by giving lots of seminars.”

Hiromi Shimada, a professor at Japan Women’s College who specializes in contemporary religions, said he doubts that Asahara’s arrest will cause a collapse of faith among ordinary Supreme Truth believers.

“There may be some who quit, thinking, ‘This doesn’t fit with what I believed’ or ‘This is terrible,’ ” he said. “But I think there are many, many more people who still believe in Asahara.”

For believers, Shimada said, much will depend on how Asahara copes with police interrogation.

“If he completely refuses to talk, or he just denies that he did it, or he says he doesn’t know anything--if he sticks to that kind of line, believers will think, ‘Oh, Asahara is telling the truth,’ ” Shimada said. “And they will continue to believe.”

But if Asahara takes responsibility for the gas attack and says he knew about sarin production, “that will destroy something they believed in and send them into confusion.”

If the cult is disbanded, some of its assets will probably be used by the government to compensate sarin attack victims, said a religious affairs official of the Tokyo metropolitan government. Assets also might be returned to members who were forced to make donations.

Masako Hasegawa, an employee of a Roman Catholic association that offers counseling services, said many members joined the cult after growing up in an environment where nothing mattered except material possessions and school test scores.

“When they got sick of that, they began searching for something to depend on, and by chance they found Aum,” she said. “They joined and started rising in its hierarchy. Then suddenly Aum is gone too, and they’re back to zero. They need to be treated warmly when they return to society.”

Shimada, however, said that even the collapse of the sect and tolerant efforts by society might not be enough to bring Asahara’s followers back into the mainstream.

“The problem is that most Aum believers aren’t unhappy,” he said. “They had money [before joining]. They had nice homes. They had spouses, girlfriends or boyfriends. They had degrees from good colleges. There was nothing they lacked. Asahara approached them by saying, ‘You’re happy--but not really happy.’ He touched their weakest point. . . .

“In becoming full members of Aum, they abandoned the world,” he noted. “They have responsibility for doing this. Unless they acknowledge their own responsibility, they can’t really recover.”

Megumi Shimizu of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.