A frightening development this morning.
A chemical weapon, nerve gas,
was released inside a crowded subway system
in Tokyo today.
March 20th, 1995.
Tokyo rush hour.
Five bags filled with sarin,
a deadly nerve agent first used as a chemical weapon by the Nazis,
had been planted by a cult.
In seconds, it happens—
burning, retching, vomiting.
By the end, 13 people are dead and almost 6,000 injured.
Commuters stumbled into the open air, gasping for breath.
Emergency medical teams swarmed into the area.
This is the deadliest terror attack carried out on Japanese soil
and remains the only sophisticated chemical warfare attack
by a terrorist group.
The culprits?
Aum Shinrikyo, who are about to catapult to international infamy.
Police have reportedly been investigating the cult
for several months
and are more convinced now than ever
that Aum was behind the subway attack.
They saw themselves as having this ultimate truth:
The only way to save the world was to effectively destroy it.
Welcome to
In this episode, how did an obscure doomsday cult
become one of the most dangerous domestic terrorist organizations
in Japan?
And what has been their lasting impact on the Japanese psyche?
[THE BUSINESS OF CRIME]
Aum Shinrikyo started in the 80s and translates as “supreme truth.”
The so-called religious movement blended Hindu and Buddhist teachings
with a hefty dose of apocalyptic Christianity
and was recognized as an official religion
by the state of Japan in 1989.
They believed that if people listened to the truth,
everybody would flock to them, and they would save the world.
Its founder, Shoko Asahara, real name Chizuo Matsumoto,
wasn’t shy about proclaiming his divinity,
calling himself both “the first enlightened one since Buddha”
and the literal second coming of Christ.
As long as we follow the scriptures,
Asahara is literally a saint.
People who went to Aum
were dissatisfied with that life trajectory
where they would simply go to school, university, job,
marriage, kids, house, et cetera.
The appeal of Aum was to go beyond
what the current system within Japanese society was offering.
The cult wasn’t a localized Japanese phenomenon,
nor a curious eccentricity.
At its peak, Aum was a truly global movement
with tens of thousands of followers.
Asahara, depicted as a Christlike figure,
promised to transfer spiritual power over to true believers
and absolve them of sin.
But that absolution came at a price,
and Asahara took huge sums of money for the privilege of following him.
They started talking about the war that was going to come.
Initially, it was a war that was going to be
a metaphorical conflict of good and evil
but gradually became more and more transposed
into an actual war that was going to happen.
So they had to develop weapons.
Kidnappings and killings were ordered.
Rivals were maimed and poisoned.
Chemical weapons became their go-to tool.
And of course, the money kept rolling in.
When the American occupation came in 1945,
the American occupiers came in
and introduced this freedom of religion.
A number of religious groups abused the new liberties.
They declared themselves to be religious corporations
so they could get tax breaks.
Essentially, Aum was able to get money through tax loopholes.
A lot of the people involved in it were young, well-educated,
technologically advanced.
They had a company called Maha Posya,
which sold some of the best and cheapest computers in Japan.
And they were able to channel all the money they generated
into building their communes
and building what they saw as
their means of developing a utopian civilization.
When you scratch the surface, it appears less a religion,
more a criminal enterprise.
The cult produced methamphetamines
that were sold wholesale to the Yamaguchi-gumi Goto-gumi,
a faction of Japan's largest yakuza or organized crime group.
We know that they tried to import weapons from Russia.
They imported an AK-47,
and they tried to clone it and manufacture it.
They just weren’t good enough
to transpose their ambition into the reality.
With money extorted from followers, Asahara achieved two things:
He sent Japan into a crippling fear of terror attacks
whilst accruing massive wealth.
Many believe Aum Shinrikyo was more of a fanaticism-themed Ponzi scheme
than a doomsday cult.
Many worry that Aum may plot a comeback.
Well, to start with, there aren’t many original members left.
I ordered the executions after extremely careful consideration.
After Tokyo, Japan rounded up Aum members and put them on trial.
Thirteen got the death penalty, including Shoko Asahara,
the would-be messiah himself.
They were executed by hanging in 2018.
The leader of the cult behind the sarin gas attack
on the Japanese subway in 1995
has been executed.
What they did was so grave that they deserve these consequences.
The victims are still suffering.
These people should be put to death.
But the shadow of Aum’s activities hang over Japan’s national psyche.
They persevered through bankruptcy
to form a different organization, Aleph.
In 2007, after trying and failing
to make Aleph more acceptable to the wider public,
they rebranded yet again
as a new group called The Circle of Rainbow Light.
Similarly, it failed to take off.
None have proven they have the capacity
to inflict the level of terror that Aum did.
And they don’t have nearly the money that Asahara generated at his peak.
I met one of the group a few years ago.
I think there were 20 of them.
The idea that they posed a public threat was nonsensical.
But the intrigue at least endures.
2016 press reports from Montenegro alleged that Aum members
had a conference in a seedy hotel in Danilovgrad.
Only some participants were Japanese.
It’s hard to say exactly what the future holds
for one of the most controversial groups in recent Japanese history.
There have been a few rumors over the past years of a partial revival,
but the numbers never quite stack up.
In May 2022,
the US State Department removed five organizations
from their foreign terrorism list,
among them Aum Shinrikyo.
According to the State Department, the group, it seems,
has no motivation or means to carry out further attacks.
It's a shock to the Japanese psyche
because there was this image of Japan as a safe society.
That image was shattered briefly in 1995 with the Aum attack.
If you look into the history of terrorism,
it really was the first terrorist attack
by a non-governmental agency using chemical weapons.
So it's always the first. It's always there.
But what isn’t diminishing
is the memory of the terror they inflicted.
And that psychological power is harder to shake.