When I started research for this episode, I thought we would focus on the beginnings of the cult leader Asahara. But instead, everything I was looking at brought me to think more about the context that would allow and nurture a cult like Aum. We have to go back in time, looking at the restrictions Meji era Japan (1868 - 1912) put on religion in an effort to prop up the emperor as a deity to understand what freedom of religion meant for an oppressed nation when the constitution came into effect in 1947.

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