Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyo

Ian Reader's Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan, published by Curzon Press in 2000, is a scholarly study of Aum Shinrikyo and the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack, examining how the movement's teaching and organization led to religiously motivated violence. Reader is an established scholar of Japanese religion. Its strength is that it is a peer-reviewed academic monograph combining close reading of Aum's own teachings with sociological analysis of the movement's structure. Its limit is that it was published in 2000, close to the events themselves, so a claim about Aum's later reconstitution as Aleph and Hikari no Wa needs a more recent source alongside this study.