JAPANESE SOCIETY flounders for explanations of the doomsday sect that killed a dozen people and sickened thousands in a nerve-gas attack on Tokyo subway riders. Members of the Aum Shinri Kyo are believed to have carried out other crimes, including murder, while reportedly trying to hasten the end of the world and preparing for more high-powered attacks on Japanese cities, aimed at displacing the government. The maximum leader of all this, Shoko Asahara, was finally arrested last week, almost two months after the subway atrocity.

Why such a wild combination of evil designs under a veneer of Buddhist and Hindu observance should draw highly educated adherents in modern Japan is a mystery to thoughtful observers. Asahara, an unhappy misfit in most accounts, was able to sign up scientists and doctors to donate their assets and skills to the shadowy cause and render complete obedience to the guru. Some social analysts blame failings in Japanese schooling: too much memorization and drudgery, not enough socializing and thinking for oneself.

But theories focusing on Japanese life do not cover the gamut of destructive, apocalyptic nonsense around the world. The Japanese sect claims thousands of members in Russia, and may have been trying to acquire nuclear weapons in that country. Visions of violence, obedience to crazed leaders and alienation from mainstream society were elements in the disasters of David Koresh's Branch Davidians in Waco in 1993, and of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple in Guyana in 1978. Last year, 53 people died in the immolation of the Order of the Solar Temple in Switzerland and Canada. The belief that the world is going down the drain seems to be shared, too, by non-religious practitioners of terror like the Oklahoma City bombers. Senseless mayhem is no monopoly of the Japanese sect.

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