THE WORLD : JAPAN : The Lesson of Aum Supreme Truth: Constitution Creates Vulnerability

Imagine a media-saturated democracy. Allow for all the constitutional and legal restraints on agents of governmental authority that democracy requires. Then confound this with a religious leader of a powerful cult who not only predicts Armageddon, but plans to carry it out. One result is a growing skepticism about the efficacy of the MacArthur constitution.

Since March 20, when terrorists tied to Aum Supreme Truth unleashed deadly gas on two lines in Tokyo’s vast subway system, Japan has been held hostage. Minor incidents followed in Yokohama. More seriously, the head of Japan’s National Police Agency, the body spearheading the investigation of the attacks, was shot. Then, two packages--one containing a detonator, the other cyanide gas--were discovered in Tokyo’s huge Shinjuku station, one of the busiest in the world. Fortunately, the planned attack was foiled.

Like the Kobe earthquake, the Aum affair has caught the Japanese state unprepared. Having failed to anticipate trouble from this bizarre cult, the authorities were hobbled by a lack of solid legal evidence of Aum wrongdoing.

With the authorities stymied, the mass media stepped in and mobilized to prevent public hysteria. Early on, newspaper and television editors boldly decided that Aum Supreme Truth had to be the culprit. Stories about the cult swept the normal fare of sumo results and sports-star gossip off the front pages of the country’s many tabloid sports newspapers.

Similarly, the morning-chat shows, which cater to housewives, were dominated by endless interviews of Aum spokesmen and experts in organic chemistry. This went on for the two months it took to find enough evidence to arrest Shoko Asahara, the Aum leader.

The nagging doubt throughout this tense period was that Aum might be innocent. Such scruples were overwhelmed by two fears. First, the terrorists were targeting Tokyo. Nearly 50 million people live within 60 miles of Shinjuku station. Millions of them pour through the city’s rail system daily. Many Tokyoites have their stories of how they or their family and friends just missed death or injury last March because of the slightest adjustment in their travel plans. Saturation news coverage spoke to these people with rare force.

Second, the defenders of the Japanese state were hamstrung by a set of legal and constitutional constraints that conspired against subduing Aum. One consequence is that Japan has avoided a bloody confrontation such as occurred in Waco, Texas, between the Branch Davidians and agents of the U.S. government. But the legal legacy of the era of Douglas MacArthur, the American general who, in effect, ruled Japan between 1945 and 1951, has meant that Japanese society has felt itself to be at the mercy of a gang of violent fanatics.

Even more than the slow response of the Japanese state to the Kobe earthquake, the Aum affair has fueled doubts not only about the red tape that prevents Japan’s powerful bureaucracy from behaving arbitrarily, but also about the soundness of the postwar institutions, including the MacArthur constitution, imposed on Japan after 1945.

When the National Police Agency first ordered hundreds of its officers to investigate Aum’s chemical labs, the police had no experience with poison gas and thus possessed none of the necessary protective clothing. So the police had to turn to the Self-Defense Force.

The Japanese armed forces exist, however, in a kind of legal limbo, because Japan renounced the use of military force in its postwar constitution. Pressed by necessity, soldiers were brought in just once to help with the Aum investigation, but this required bending the rules. An uncomfortable precedent was created.

Desperate to prevent another gas attack, the police struggled to find evidence of Aum involvement only to discover that information about their movements was being leaked by Aum infiltrators inside the ranks of the army and the police. The “moles” were in place to organize a coup. This plot might have been uncovered by a covert “FBI-style” operation, but postwar reforms make it illegal in Japan.

The MacArthur constitution guarantees freedom of thought and conscience, and freedom from state interference in religious practice. Both preclude any repetition of prewar persecution of religious cults and the elevation of state Shinto as the national religion. But is the constitutional latitude guaranteed religion since the war too great?

Japan has 180,000 recognized religious bodies. Responsibility for regulating them is divided between central and local government, but the management of cult data at the national level is said to be the job of just four civil servants.

To protect their tax-exempt status, some of the wealthiest cults have helped finance key politicians, who, in turn, have blocked tighter cult regulation. Well-meaning if naive U.S. reforms and unchecked Japanese greed have made it very difficult to crack down on cults such as Aum.

Now, in the wake of the Aum menace, some moderate Japanese are beginning to question the wisdom of MacArthur’s constitution. This is not because it is a product of wartime defeat and foreign imposition (the old nationalist complaint), but because it leaves Japan helpless in national emergencies.

Whatever its faults, Japan’s powerful prewar Home Ministry would never have allowed a religious cult to threaten the state. But MacArthur abolished this interior ministry. Few advocate reviving it, but there is a growing feeling that state powers must be enhanced.

On Constitution Day this year, Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, once again provoked defenders of the MacArthur constitution by calling for a major strengthening of prime ministerial powers to cope with emergencies such as urban terrorism. It is another sign of the gradual decay of MacArthur’s Japan.

The United States fought the Pacific War to ensure that the Japanese state would never again oppress its citizens nor threaten the international peace. Most Japanese have embraced democracy and see no return to the prewar order.

Indeed, despite Aum’s provocation, the authorities have generally acted with impressive restraint. Nevertheless, Japan is beginning, with great reluctance, to contemplate easing the anti-authoritarian tripwires created under MacArthur.