Readers in Council,
The Japan Times,
5-4, Shibaura 4-chome,
Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0023
The November 7, 2009 report “Supreme Court upholds gallows for Aum pair in nerve gas attack” quoted Supreme Court Justice Yukio Takeuchi accurately describing the infamous crimes of the former Aum Shinrikyo cult as “organized and premeditated acts of indiscriminate mass murder.” In other words, terrorism. Why not openly call Aum Shinrikyo people terrorists? I worry that the reason the narrative is framed as crime control rather than terrorism is to avoid or discredit it as evidence that the terrorism Japan faces is from within, from domestic organizations rather than from foreign sources. When politicians go on television and are quoted in the press framing foreign immigration as a crime control issue, or when they and the media describe the government’s increasingly strict and intrusive immigration protocols as beneficial and even necessary security measures against international terrorism in this day and age they are talking about a state of affairs that is not entirely truthful and more than a little inaccurate. The only terrorists in Japan are Japanese terrorists, and accurately identifying Aum Shinrikyo as a terrorist organization would be as step in the right direction.
But I could be wrong.