Nobutaka Inoue

Inoue's published work has established the gold standard in the study of Japanese religions and society. He founded Japan's premier association for the study of contemporary religion, the Japanese Association for the Study of Religion and Society, as well as a research archive for the study of religion in Japan today, the Religious Information Research Center. He is highly regarded as a public intellectual for his balanced, cool-headed perspective, a contribution that tempered society's reaction to the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo incident of 1995, when a religious group released sarin gas onto the Tokyo subway system.