Psychological Aspect of Religious Terrorism in Japan

Terrorism has become recently a subject to research in many fields of knowledge, and psychology is no exception. Happening in different parts of the world, terrorist acts are very difficult to predict, and also difficult to analyze because every terrorist organization differs in its social, cultural and psychological background. It means, that terrorism should be considered not as a common phenomenon with the same number of features, but as a complex problem depending much on the individual and cultural distinctive features. Current paper analyzes one of the most famous terrorist acts of previous century – “sarin attack” in Tokyo in 1995, and “Aum Shinrikyo”, a religious organization responsible for the attack. This event has some specific features which could happen only in Japan, and the analysis of the Japanese mentality and of the time the accident took place (Cultural-historic approach by L.S. Vigotskiy) can be a key to the understanding of this case. Click here and insert your abstract text.