The Tokyo Subway Sarin Attacks 1995 – Part 1

==== INTRO =====  

Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network; and as always, I’m your host, Zach Cornwell.

Over the years, we have visited all sorts of fascinating time periods on this show, some of them very deep in the distant past. From the racetracks of Byzantium to the jungles of Vietnam, there are amazing stories tucked in just about every corner of humanity’s long and troubled timeline.

But today’s episode concerns a much more recent event. In fact, for many of you listening, it falls well within living memory. This time on Conflicted, we’re traveling back to that strange and misunderstood / long-forgotten era:

The 1990s.

For an aging millennial like myself, the 90s seem like they were only yesterday. A simpler time when phones had buttons, Bruce Willis had hair, and “podcast” was just a made-up word. But time marches on, and it marches fast. As much as I hate to say it, the 90s were almost thirty years ago, which makes them – from a certain point of view – history.

The line separating history from current events is often a fuzzy one, but generally, 20 or 30 years is considered enough time to view the past with a reasonable degree of clarity. The dust has settled, the passions have cooled, and the government records have been unsealed/ declassified. So, if you’ll indulge me, let’s hop in our time machines and zap back to the height of a very turbulent decade.

All the way back to 1995.

For many people, 1995 was a very memorable year. It was the year Starbucks sold its first Frappuccino. The year that Michael Jordan returned to the NBA. And the year that Sheriff Woody the cowboy met Buzz Lightyear.

[AUDIO] “to infinity and beyond!

Yes, life was simpler then. At the time, my biggest concern was which Power Ranger I was going to be for Halloween. But elsewhere in the world, 1995 was memorable for all the wrong reasons. While people in the United States were watching Seinfeld and learning how to use AOL, the island nation of Japan was having a terrible, horrible, no-good very bad year. One of the worst years in its modern history, in fact.

And for Japan, that’s saying a lot.

The trouble started on January 17^th, when a 7.2 magnitude earthquake ripped through the bustling port city of Kobe.  

[AUDIO

“It is now day two and Japan is still trying to come to grips with the devastating that rocked Kobe and Osaka. There are approximately 2,000 dead who have been accounted for, more than 11,000 injured, and approximately 1,000 people are missing.

[…]The earthquake hit in the early morning hours of Tuesday, as most of Japan slept. The quake centered just off the coast of Kobe, affected town within a 60 miles radius, it destroyed thousands of buildings, from single family homes to multi-story office towers. Buildings which were supposed to be earthquake proof.”

The Great Hanshin Earthquake, as it came to be known, was “one of the gravest tragedies in Japan’s postwar history”, according to the celebrated novelist Haruki Murakami.

For most countries, one national disaster in a calendar year would be more than enough. But 1995 wasn’t done with Japan yet. Just two months later, tragedy struck again. And like the Kobe earthquake, this second calamity also came from underground.

But unlike the Kobe earthquake, this second calamity, was man-made.

On March 20^th, 1995, the Tokyo Subway System was flooded with sarin nerve gas in a deliberate terrorist attack. 13 people died, thousands were injured, and the city was thrown into complete chaos. It was, in the words of one academic, “an unprecedented event that paralyzed one of the world’s biggest cities while the nation was still recovering from the trauma of the Great Hanshin Earthquake just two months previously.”

And this event, what history remembers as the Tokyo Subway Sarin Attack, is the subject of our latest series. / topic we are going to talk about today.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, as the hospitals filled up and the death toll started to rise, people wanted answers. Who had done this? And why? Well, the answer to the first question came relatively quickly.

[AUDIO]

“ABC News at Sunrise…with Ann Curry. Good morning everyone, a massive nationwide crackdown after that nerve gas attack in Japan has yielded several arrests. Police are targeting a radical religious group, and now the death toll had risen even further to 10. […] It was the biggest force Japan had assembled since the earthquake at Kobe, over 3000 troops raided at least 25 buildings of a militant cult suspected of making the nerve gas sarin. That was the chemical used in the terrorist attack.”

The March 20^th attack had been perpetrated by a small, but well-armed religious cult called “Aum Shinrikyo”, often referred to simply as “Aum”. That’s Aum (A-U-M), Shinrikyo (S-H-I-N-R-I-K-Y-O). We’ll talk more about what exactly that name means later.

For most of the world, the revelation of the attacking group’s identity provoked a resounding “Who?”

At the time, the pantheon of terrorist groups was populated by big, established brand names like the Provisional IRA, the PLO, the ETA and various other murderous acronyms. Everyone knew what those guys wanted, but what did this “Aum Shinrikyo” want? What did they stand for? And most importantly, how did they manage to release military-grade chemical weapons in the world’s most populous city?

As the academic Ian Reader writes, the attack “represented the first case of the use of weapons of mass destruction by a private organization”

When we typically think of a terrorist attack, we imagine a bomb going off, or a plane crashing into a building – a sudden, shocking outburst of violence that’s over as quickly as it started. But the Tokyo attack was different. Compared to more traditional methods, chemical weapons work slowly and invisibly; they attack the body in unseen ways, turning our own biology against us. The result is a uniquely confusing and terrifying experience.

In fact, when we talk about these kinds of indiscriminate acts of violence, the word that’s often used is “senseless” /  “senseless” is a word that’s often used to describe them. Because for the victims, there is no satisfying logic or rationale. When a bomb goes off, or a truck plows into a crowd, or a commuter train floods with poisonous gas, no one stops to hand you a gift-wrapped manifesto, like a Walgreens receipt.

“Hello, this is why we are killing you today. Trust us, it’s for a good cause.”

No, for the victims - and there were thousands that day - the Tokyo attack was just a random act of cosmic violence. Wrong train, wrong time. Like a car crash or a falling rock or a bolt of lightning – it’s just something that happens to you. Not because you’re you – but because you were there. Fate, after all, is a blind predator, and in the years to come, many people who were on the subway that day could not help but ask themselves…what if I had done something just a little bit differently?

What if I had left for work five minutes later? Or hit snooze on my alarm, or got out of the shower a bit earlier? What if I stopped to give my kids one extra hug before heading out the door? Maybe none of this would have happened to me, and I’d be okay.

Those questions, unfortunately, have no easy answers. But luckily, we do have answers to the more tangible facts of the matter, like: who this cult was, why they did what they did, and how they did it.

And that, my friends, is what we will be talking about today.

This is admittedly, a weird little story. It’s not a war, or a revolution, or a grand sweeping political conflict. It didn’t shift international borders or fundamentally change the balance of power. But the reason I was drawn to it, is because I think it offers a lot insight into how people deal with the pressures, disappointments and sudden tragedies of life. The things that happen to us, outside of our control.

When bad things happen to us, how we do deal with it? Or not deal with it? Some people retreat from reality, they take shelter in cults, conspiracies, or confidence men. The world has hurt them, so they vow to hurt the world. And then, there are the other people – the ones who pick themselves up, get back on the train, and keep riding. By the end of this story, we will have met plenty of both.

This will be a two-part series, and in this first installment, we’re going to take some time to unravel the origin story of the mysterious and controversial religious movement known as Aum Shinrikyo. We’ll learn how they got started, what they believed, and why those beliefs culminated in the worst domestic terrorist attack in Japan’s history.

So, with that preamble said and down, let’s hop aboard and start the show.

Welcome to The Tokyo Subway Sarin Attacks 1995 – Part 1.

==== BEGIN=====  

It’s March 20^th, 1995.

We’re in Tokyo, the capital city of Japan.

Of course, when discussing Tokyo, “city” is an inadequate noun.

Ames, Iowa is a city. Boulder, Colorado is a city. Vatican City is technically a city.  

But Tokyo is something else.

In the spring of 1995, 33 million people live here. It is the largest city in the world. To stand atop the highest tower in Tokyo, is to look out and see an endless blanket of brick and steel and concrete stretching out toward the horizon, broken only by the lonely silhouette of misty Mount Fuji.

Of those 33 million Tokyo residents, about 96% have jobs. (Or ‘careers’, depending on the tax bracket) They work up in tall buildings or down at the docks; they slice fish, answer telephones, stack books or wait tables. They get up early and they go home late. Millions and millions of people, coming and going. And the way they do most of their coming and going, is through the Tokyo Metro – the subway system.

In many parts of the world, using public transit tends to have the unfortunate side effect of destroying one’s faith in mankind. Rocketing underground in a metal tube filled with strangers is unpleasant enough; but when you add in the fist fights, loud conversations, mysterious smells, and the occasional groping hand, it really does make you wish they’d hurry up and invent a teleporter already.

But the Tokyo Subway of 1995 is not your average rail line.

Renowned for its efficiency, reliability, and stopwatch punctuality, Tokyo’s rail system is the transportation method of choice for 8 million commuters a day. In a city where car ownership is relatively rare and extremely expensive, the subway is the best-way of getting from A to B in the Big Mandarin. And for that reason, it can get very, very crowded. As one frequent passenger named Naoyuki Ogata said in 1995: 

“It’s incredibly packed. Sometimes you can’t even get on. You’re just squashed in like the filling in a sandwich.”

But despite the crowds and the crush, the Tokyo subway is remarkably clean, famously safe, and best of all…quiet. One of the cardinal rules of public transportation is that you should mind your own business and keep to yourself. The Japanese have elevated this principle to an art form. There are libraries and funeral homes louder than a typical Tokyo subway car. It is, by its very nature, an unspoken rule. And in that comforting silence, broken only by the rattle of train tracks or the melodic chime of an arrival announcement, many passengers fall right asleep. As one woman named Aya Kazaguchi explained:

Once I’m on, I stand by the door just leaning into this solid mass of people, maybe sleeping. Yeah, that’s right, I can doze off standing up. Almost everyone does. I just close my eyes nice and quiet. Couldn’t move if I wanted to, so it’s easier that way. People’s faces are so up-close, like this, right?…so I close my eyes and drift off …

And today – on March 20^th 1995 – we are sitting in just such a quiet subway car, zipping through the tunnels beneath the streets of Tokyo. It’s a Monday morning – about 8am - and the business crowd is out in force. Secretaries and salary men, patiently waiting to arrive at their destinations. And somewhere in this game of human Tetris, standing rigid as a stick of incense, is a 48-year-old man named Ikuo Hayashi. (ee-koo-oh)

That’s Doctor Ikuo Hayashi, thank you very much.

I-K-U-O (Ikuo), H-A-Y-A-S-H-I (Hayashi)

With his rumpled business suit, thick Dad glasses, and hygienic face mask, Dr. Hayashi looks like any other Monday morning commuter. But unlike his fellow passengers, Hayashi is not on his way to work. Hayashi is here, on this subway, at the behest of a higher power. He is a holy warrior, burdened with divine and righteous purpose; and today, if all goes well, he is going to change the world.

Around him, many commuters are flipping through newspapers to pass the time, reading up on the latest political scandal or stock market fluctuation.

Dr. Hayashi has a newspaper too. But he’s not reading it. Tucked under his arm, wrapped in a thick wad of newspaper, is a fragile plastic bag – the kind used in hospitals to administer intravenous drips. But instead of saline solution or harmless electrolytes, the bag under Hayashi’s arm is filled with roughly 1,000 milliliters of unrefined Sarin.  

Sarin, S-A-R-I-N, is a chemical weapon – a toxic nerve agent.

As a medical doctor, Ikuo Hayashi is well aware of what sarin does to the human body. When liquid sarin evaporates, it floats into the air as a clear, colorless gas. When a person breathes in this gas, the sarin attacks the central nervous system by disrupting the actions of a certain enzyme, triggering a critical failure of nerve impulses and a dangerous buildup of toxic molecules in the body.

That is the bone-dry, academic, textbook-friendly description, of course. But it belies the sensory reality of what sarin gas actually does to your body. After all, you don’t feel your enzymes being disrupted, or your protein chains unraveling, or the signals in your nervous system fizzling like wet fireworks.

What you feel is pain. Indescribable, synapse-shredding pain. Your vision begins to inexplicably darken as your pupils shrink down to pinprick dots, robbed of their ability to naturally expand and let in light. Your nose begins to pour snot like a faucet and your muscles start to clench and convulse, as your nervous system struggles to regulate basic bodily functions. Basic functions like, for example, breathing. Ultimately, sarin gas strangles you to death – it paralyzes your lungs and destroys your ability to draw in the oxygen that’s all around you. It is like / It is the medical equivalent of having your head cocooned in plastic wrap. 

“Death by respiratory arrest,” writes researcher Jonathon B. Tucker, “takes place in about five minutes.”

As Dr. Ikuo Hayashi cradles his little bag of liquid agony, surrounded by hundreds of unsuspecting passengers/people, he reminds himself to think about the ‘big picture’. He knows that sometimes, to make the world a better place, we have to do bad things. It was like his master, the Guru, always said: Human civilization is hopelessly corrupted, an irredeemable flop house of sin and negative karma. Only by cleansing the world of its filth, by scraping away the barnacles of decadence and disgrace, could a new era of purity and enlightenment begin.

Hayashi looks down at his digital wristwatch.

Hayashi’s thoughts are interrupted by the train’s loudspeaker, announcing the next stop.

It’s almost time for him to do what he came here to do. It’s almost time for him to release his chemical poison into the air and kill hundreds, probably thousands, of people. He tries not look any of them directly in the eye. But as the doubts start to rise, seeping up like mud through the floorboards, Hayashi can at least take comfort in the fact that he is not alone in this endeavor. There are four other men, on four other trains, each with their own payload of sarin nerve gas.

The plan for the attack was simple.

Back at headquarters, Dr. Hayashi and the others had gone over every detail, dozens of times. At 7:45 AM, five different men would board five different trains across Tokyo. They would dress like businessmen, to blend in with the morning crowd and avoid drawing attention. Each of them would be carrying a bag of liquid sarin, concealed in newspaper. And shortly after 8’oclock, when the time was right, they would place the sarin on the floor of the train, and using a sharpened umbrella tip, discreetly puncture the bag. Then, they would casually get off at the next stop and escape the area via the getaway cars waiting outside their respective stations.

Back on the trains, as the bags leaked, the sarin liquid would evaporate and convert to gas, flooding the subway compartments with lethal poison. By the time all five trains converged in downtown Tokyo, near the governmental and bureaucratic heart of the city, it would be too late for anyone to stop it. As the writer and academic Ian Reader explains:

“The plan [goal] was to bring chaos to the city and to inflict as much damage as possible at the heart of the Japanese government and police force.”

It was a well-timed, well-choreographed plan, but still… Dr. Hayashi has his doubts. And two of those doubts are sitting across from him right now. A young mother and small child, on their way to school, or a playdate, maybe even a doctor’s appointment. For Hayashi, it sparks an old and distant memory– a painful one, in fact. And in that moment, seeing the woman and her child, he is struck by a red-hot spike of remorse. As he remembered thinking years later:

“If I unleash the sarin here and now, the woman opposite me is dead for sure. Unless she gets off somewhere.”

But there is no time to wait for one or two people. There is no room for selective mercy. Armageddon is imminent, and it is Dr. Hayashi’s responsibility to help bring it to fruition. As he remembered telling himself in that moment:

“This is a battle. Too bad if they’re women or children. If they are poa’d/sacrificed, their souls will be able to remain in the human world and placed on a higher level.”

Armored in fresh resilience, Dr. Hayashi removes the newspaper-wrapped sarin bag from under his arm, and places it on the floor, next to his right foot. And as the sharpened tip of his umbrella hovers over the swollen bag, he might be wondering how in the hell he got here. How it all came to this.

Well, Hayashi’s road to this moment began 7 years earlier, in 1988.

ONE BIG PARTY

It was the late 1980s, and in Japan, times were good.

[AUDIO] [0:00-:0:45) The world’s fastest rising currency, has turned Tokyo into a capital of glamor and glitz…and a $35 box of strawberries. The rock-hard Japanese yen, a new driving force in the world economy, and the dawn of a new era….

In 1988, Japan had the second-largest economy in the world, second only to its former foe, the United States. In less than 40 years, the island nation had transformed itself from the battered, broken, bombed-out loser of the Pacific War to a money-making powerhouse.

[AUDIO] Super Mario powerup:

What Japan failed to achieve with planes, tanks and bombs, it did with Nintendo cartridges, Sony Walkman’s and Toyota Corollas. “Made in Japan” became synonymous with quality and innovation, and all that foreign cash flowed back into the industrious archipelago, fueling a standard of living that would’ve made Carnegie and Rockefeller blush.

[AUDIO] [16:00} …Back out on the Ginza now, marveling at all this affluence. In the years right after the war, that big blue department store was American army barracks. If you don’t think prices have changed, check out the Wako department stores windows. Fine ladies hand bags. Purses imported from Italy. Well, the Japanese have a lot of the money in the bank these days, and the rest of the world would like them to spend it!

[AUDIO] [17:00-18:20, 19:00] The Japanese are transforming themselves from savers to spenders [Materal girl song]. An American theme song for an American lifestyle. Madonna sold out in Tokyo. They’re imitating us again, the Japanese. First they outsold us, now they’re outbuying us. ….They went to war, they went to work, now they’ve gone shopping. Gold, gold bars, of course. But how about gold bonsai tree or sushi wrapped in gold…

The Yen was strong, the stock market was soaring, and interest rates were low enough to touch the ocean floor. Japanese real estate eventually became so inflated, that a single square foot was valued at $140,000 US dollars. By that economic logic, the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo were worth more than all the land in the state of California.

It’s been said that to successfully hail a cab in Tokyo during this era, you had to wave a 10,000 Yen note in the air just to entice the drivers to stop. In those days, that was the equivalent of about $80 – which is almost $200 dollars today.

And once you secured your wildly overpriced taxi, you could celebrate at one of Tokyo’s many nightclubs, discos or karaoke parlors, draining champagne, sake, and highballs until the rising sun turned last night’s carriage into the pumpkins of regret. To put it plainly, Japan in the late 1980s was one big money-fueled party.

But not everyone in Tokyo was having a good time, basking in the euphoric glow of 80s consumerism. No party, of course, is without its share of wallflowers. 

THE GOOD DOCTOR

Seven years before he stepped onto the subway platform with a bag of sarin under his arm, Ikuo Hayashi was suffering from a sickness he could not name. In those days, he was not a terrorist or a murderer. He was “Dr. Ikuo Hayashi, Head of Circulatory Medicine at the National Sanatorium Hospital, just north of Tokyo.”

Trained as a cardiac surgeon, groomed and educated in the upper echelons of Japanese society, Dr. Hayashi had everything that a man could want. At least on paper. He had a high-paying job, a lovely wife, obedient children, the respect of his peers and the adoration of his patients. And for the nights when he grew bored of all that – he even had a mistress on the side, a 20-year-old nurse from the hospital who did anything and everything he wanted.  

And yet, despite his privilege, position and prosperity, Hayashi could not help but feel that something was wrong. Something was misaligned. The good doctor could perform a bypass, repair a ventricle, stitch up an aorta…but he could not diagnose the hole inside his own heart. He had everything, and yet he felt…nothing. It was like there was a sort of film over him, a membrane, separating him from other human beings. He was afraid, he realized. So afraid, all the time, without even knowing why. It was a phantom ache. A sickness of the soul.

Desperate to find a true north for his spinning compass, Hayashi turned away from the scientific, and toward the spiritual. He explored Buddhism and Tantrism and New-Age Religions. He practiced yoga and mantras and meditations – but none of it worked. Nothing could shake this horrible feeling that the material world had nothing worthwhile to offer him.

And then, as life tends to do, it kicked Dr. Hayashi when he was already down.

One night, after performing a long and taxing surgery, Hayashi was driving home from the hospital. Overcome by fatigue and numbed by depression, he nodded off and fell asleep at the wheel. When he opened his eyes, his car was dented/crashed, his engine was smoking, and two pedestrians, a young mother and her daughter, had been badly injured.

The mother and daughter recovered, thank God – and no serious charges were filed… but the guilt of the crash gnawed at Hayashi’s bones. He visited them in the hospital, brought them flowers and gifts and endless apologies, but the experience only sent the doctor deeper into his spiral. And just as Hayashi felt himself sinking into existential quicksand…. someone threw him a rope.

Sometime in 1988, while researching new-age religions and spiritual remedies, Hayashi came across a paperback book. The cover featured a stylized illustration of a man dressed in bright purple robes with long black hair and a thick, flowing beard. In the illustration, the man’s eyes were closed in an expression of serenity, and in his hands, he held a ball of glowing light. Intrigued by the cover, Hayashi read the title:

The Secret Method for Developing Supernatural/Psychic Powers, by Shoko Asahara.

They say a good book can change your life.

Well, a bad one can too.

As Dr. Hayashi flipped through the pages, something started to flower inside him. Word by word, syllable by syllable, he could feel the fear draining away. He felt life and confidence and certainty surging back into him again. After so many years of searching, so many years of this nameless affliction, he had finally found the cure.

Hayashi read the book cover-to-cover. And the writing inside resonated with him so deeply, he realized that he needed to find this man in the purple robe who seemed to have all the answers to his problems.

He needed to find “Shoko Asahara”.

== MUSIC BREAK ==

It’s the fall of 1989.

Six years before the Tokyo subway attacks.

We’re in a small Japanese village called Kamikuishiki, about 2 hours outside of Tokyo.

This far from the city, away from the smog and subway and skyscrapers, the air starts to feel cleaner and crisper somehow. As the population density declines and the noise fades away, the mind begins to clear, like a blank page of virgin paper.

Instead of apartment blocks and concrete overpasses, the skyline is dominated by the symmetrical slopes of Mt. Fuji, with its gentle dusting of powdered-sugar snow. Occasionally, a flock of birds will break the stillness and give you a sense of the mountain’s immensity. This close to the 12,000-foot cinder cone, it’s easy to see why the ancient Japanese worshipped Fuji as a living God.

And nestled at the foot of the mountain, resembling a collection of little Monopoly houses, you will find a small, nondescript village – a compound of sorts. There’s no sign on the fence or logo on the buildings, but everyone in the local area knows what this place is and who lives here.

This is the headquarters of a small, but well-funded religious organization called Aum Shinrikyo.

The first word, “Aum”, (A-U-M) refers to the traditional Buddhist chant, the single-syllable prayer that represents, in the words of religious expert Ian Reader, “the interlocking powers of the universe.” You’ve probably heard it before. It sounds like this:

The second word, “Shinrikyo”, means “supreme truth” in Japanese. So basically, in layman’s terms, Aum Shinrikyo means “The Supreme Truth of the Universe”. Humility, of course, has never been a hallmark of organized religion.

And here, in this pastoral paradise / landscape at the foot of Mt Fuji, the members of Aum Shinrikyo are seeking the supreme truth, one prayer and incantation at a time. Inside the compound, assembled in a simple lecture hall, dozens of practitioners sit together in the lotus pose - what American gym teachers call “Indian style”. These practitioners close their eyes, clasp their hands together, and chant in unison, focusing their energies and reaching toward the shores of enlightenment.

Leading this prayer group, sitting on a raised platform at the head of the hall, is a 34-year-old blind man in a bright purple robe. He has a thick black beard, long flowing hair, and an expression of practiced serenity. He is the leader of Aum Shinrikyo – their savior, their messiah, their Guru.

His name is Shoko Asahara.

That’s Shoko (S-H-O-K-O), Asahara (A-S-A-H-A-R-A).

As the prayer concludes, hundreds of eyes flick open and gaze up lovingly at their Guru. With an ethereal grace, Asahara picks up an electronic microphone and flips the “on” switch. After a brief squeal of feedback, he clears his throat, and begins his daily sermon.

The people in this congregation come from all sorts of backgrounds and walks of life. They are doctors and bus drivers, students and businessmen. Mothers and fathers and daughters and sons. But they all have one thing in common: A deep sense of disillusionment and dissatisfaction with the modern, material world. As one member of Aum, a young man named Hajime Matsuhani explained:

I never felt any major frustration or difficulties in my life, really. It was more like something was missing. I was really into art, but the idea of spending my life painting pictures, making some money from them, had no appeal. […] No matter how much I studied architectural design and found a good job, that’s all there’d be.”

Mitsuharu Inaba, another member, echoed this feeling of aimlessness:

“I didn’t have any personal problems or anything. It was just that, no matter where I found myself, I felt like there was a hole inside me, with the wind rushing through. I never felt satisfied.”

For many people, Japanese society of the late 1980s, with its relentless focus on the accumulation of wealth and material possessions, failed to offer a deeper sense of meaning. There was no higher purpose or grand destiny for anyone, just a preordained checklist of shallow consumption and reflexive achievement. You study hard to work hard to earn money to spend money to die to become a jar of ash on someone’s mantlepiece. As one Aum member named Akio Namamura recalled:

“The idea of getting a job made me sick. When I graduated from high school I felt like I would either renounce the world, or die—one of the two.”

How could this be all that there was?, many people were asking. Even ‘successful’ members of society, like the esteemed Dr. Ikuo Hayashi - were feeling desperate and adrift.

“They were,” writes Ian Reader, “unhappy with the pressurized education system and the demands of work and the rat race, and were disaffected with scientific rationalism and the modern emphasis on economic progress and technology.”

As another Aum member, Hiroyuki Kano, explained his own jaded worldview:

There was one other reality I came to ponder when I was in the sixth grade. I was staring at a pair of scissors in my hands and the thought suddenly struck me that some adult had worked very hard to create them, but that someday they would fall apart.

Everything that has form will eventually fall apart. Same with people. In the end they die. Everything’s heading straight for destruction and there’s no turning back. To put it another way, destruction itself is the principle by which the universe operates. Once I reached that conclusion I started to look at everything in a very negative way. For instance, if my own life is headed toward destruction it doesn’t matter if I become prime minister or end up just one of the homeless, right? What’s the point of struggling? The horrible conclusion I came to was that if suffering outweighs joy in life, it would be much wiser to commit suicide as quickly as possible. There’s only one way out, namely the afterlife.”

The world seems filled with unnecessary suffering. And the causes of suffering are increasing—uncontrollable desires are causing people to suffer. The appetite for food, for instance, or sex.”

I tried talking with my friends about these things, but got nowhere. Even my friends who were good students would only say something like, “Wow. Pretty amazing stuff you come up with,” and that’d be the end of it. The conversation would hit a dead end. I couldn’t find a single person who wanted to talk about the things that I cared about.”

There is - and always will be - a certain proportion/segment of the population that is prone to the occasional existential crisis. People plagued by the difficult questions / who dare to ask the truly difficult questions, like “Why are we here?”, “Where do we go after we die?” and (more importantly) “Will I like it when I get there?”. Traditionally, organized religion has filled this void, and for many people in Japan, the mainstream religions of Shintoism and Buddhism offered satisfactory answers.

But people like Akio, Hiroyuki, Mitsuharu, Hajime and Dr. Hayashi were looking for something deeper. Something beyond the occasional ringing of a bell, lighting of incense and muttering prayers to some crumbling shrine. The world seemed so broken and corrupt, so inherently…wrong; Surely there was more to life than this?

In short, they were desperate for answers. And in their search for peace, only one man seemed to have those answers:

Shoko Asahara – the blind Guru of Aum Shinrikyo.  

THE SERMON

As he continues his sermon, speaking softly into the microphone at the Aum compound near Mt. Fuji, the Guru expounds upon his theological philosophy for the benefit of his followers. It is a message they have heard many, many times before, but as anyone who’s ever stepped into a church on Sunday can tell you…religion is repetition.

To a casual observer, the teachings of the Guru looked very similar to older, more established religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. Shoko Asahara dressed in the flowing robes of Hindu holy man; he led his followers in Buddhist meditations and Tibetan incantations. He spoke about concepts like nirvana and karma and enlightenment. But as one traveled through the looking glass deeper into the world of Aum Shinrikyo, the unique nature of Asahara’s philosophy began to reveal itself.

Asahara told his followers that the source of their profound sadness and dissatisfaction with the world… was the world itself. The material plane – the realm of flesh and blood and bone – what we experience with our five basic senses – was hopelessly, irredeemably polluted. A “den of evil”, he called it. Every second we exist in this world, the Guru explained, is like crawling through a sewage pipe. Every moment of your life, just by being alive and in contact with the world, you are more and more infected by it.  Like layers of mud and grime, this corruption builds up on your soul. And that is why you feel so sad, he explained. So unsatisfied, scared and lost.

Asahara referred to this negative energy build-up as “karma”.

Karma, of course, is a fundamental/core concept in many Eastern religions. Most people are familiar with the idea. To put it simply and somewhat inelegantly / clumsily, karma is a kind of moral currency. The more good things you do in life, the more good karma you accumulate. On the other hand, if you do bad things, you build up bad karma. Sort of like a spiritual stock price, it can rise and fall and fluctuate. And then, when you die, all your karma is tallied up. And depending on your cosmic balance sheet, you are reborn into a better or worse life. This kind of moral logic is meant to incentivize being a good person, because if you’re not, you’re going to pay for it in the next life.

But Shoko Asahara’s interpretation of karma was considerably darker.

In his view, bad karma was unavoidable. It was a corrosive agent, a moral slime that coated your soul every waking moment. Any normal person in the world, unaided by his teachings, was doomed to accumulate more and more bad karma, and be reborn into worse and worse lives, falling deeper and deeper into hellish planes of existence.

But be not afraid! The Guru said.

There was a way to avert this spiritual catastrophe. A secret method, you might say. And for the low, low price of 300,000 yen, Shoko Asahara was willing to give it to you. In Aum Shinrikyo, the collection plate was not just a polite suggestion. At the end of the day, this was a pay-to-pray system. As one member explained:

“Aum costs money. They had a course you could take—ten tape cassettes for 300,000 yen (which is about $2000). They were sermons by Master Asahara, so they were very effective. That’s a cheap price to pay to get power, everyone thought, and shelled out 300,000 yen.”

One Japanese reporter later commented [that in Aum]:

“Everything was money, money, money.”

And what “powers”, pray tell, could you expect to receive in exchange for your hard-earned cash? Well, according to Shoko Asahara, nothing less than mastery over the fabric of the universe. Once you and your bank account / routing number had embraced the Guru’s teachings, you would learn all sorts of spiritual techniques for ascending into higher realms of consciousness and shedding your bad karma like water weight. This included basic stuff like yoga poses and breathing exercises, as well as more advanced techniques like meditation.

And if you did all of these things correctly, with enough fervor, and enough patience, you would eventually be able attain what Aum Shinrikyo advertised as “psychic powers”.

In his many years of study and travel, Shoko Asahara claimed to have unlocked a veritable/ an astonishing skill tree of supernatural abilities. According to his closest followers, the Guru could read minds, attune with Gods, and look far into the future. He was so connected to the ethereal realm, they said, that he could defy physical/Newtonian laws like gravity, and levitate himself off the ground.

Skeptics of this last claim were referred to a well-circulated photograph of the Guru, in which he appeared to literally be floating several feet in the air. In an age before Photoshop and AI imaging, this photograph was quite convincing – at least to people who wanted or needed to believe it.

But Shoko Asahara did not claim a monopoly on these amazing abilities; with enough practice (and prompt payment), you too would be able float and see the future. And so, in the late 1980s, thousands of disaffected souls flocked to the enigmatic Guru and his teachings.

AUDIO: Peter Pan ““All it takes is faith and trust, and a little bit of pixie dust. Here we goooooo”

And one of these poor lost boys, was our very own terrorist-in-the-making, the depressed cardiac surgeon, Dr. Ikuo Hayashi.  In 1988, when Hayashi first stumbled upon Asahara’s book, “The Secret Method for Developing SupernaturalPsychic Powers”, it hit him like a bucket of cool, clean water. This is what he had been looking for.

Dr. Hayashi devoured the book, then immediately went out and bought two more of Asahara’s books. He started attending Aum Shinrikyo meetings at the organization’s Tokyo branch, where he personally met the Guru and fell in love with Asahara’s unique belief system. But as Hayashi grew more infatuated with Aum, he started exhibiting some troubling psychological symptoms at work. As the psychiatrist and researcher Robert Jay Lifton writes:

Hayashi joined Aum and soon began to demonstrate what his hospital colleagues viewed as bizarre behavior. He prescribed various Aum treatments for his cardiac patients, including purgations that involved swallowing large amounts of hot water or even physical objects like strings or bandages. […] He sent notes to former patients describing his “intention to achieve [enlightenment] as soon as possible in order to serve society with an unbiased spirit.” […] He explained his attraction to [Aum Shinrikyo]: “While “the job of the doctor is to save people,[…] it cannot compare in level or scale to the great master’s efforts to save all souls.”

By November of 1989, Hayashi had resigned from his position at the hospital, severed all contact with his friends and extended family, and declared his complete devotion to the teachings of Aum Shinrikyo and its charismatic Guru, Shoko Asahara.

There was, however, one final step on the road to enlightenment. In the war for spiritual truth, there can be no half measures. To truly break away from the materialist world and all its corrupting elements, the most fervent disciples of Aum Shinrikyo were called upon to become what the Guru called shukke (shoo-keh) or “renunciates”. As Robert Jay Lifton explains:

Shukke means “leaving home” and is a traditional term for monks or nuns who give up the world. Aum’s message was that if one really wished to follow the guru and join in his full spiritual project, one had to become a shukke, removing oneself completely from one’s family and one’s prior work or study and turning all one’s resources—money, property, and self—over to Aum and its guru. Even one’s name was to be abandoned, replaced by a Sanskrit one.

Such a renunciation of the world in favor of life in a small, closed society is the antithesis of the this-worldly emphasis of most Japanese religious practice and a repudiation of the still powerful hold the Japanese family has over its members. As a family-like alternative to an actual family’s conflicts and confusions, however, it proved a definite attraction to many young people.

Living together in Aum facilities, shukke underwent severe forms of ascetic practice, including celibacy and a prohibition against ejaculation, fasting, long hours of meditation, intense breathing exercises, and vigorous sequences of prostration combined with demanding work assignments and irregular sleep (often only a few hours a night). Their existence was a spartan one—two meals a day of extremely simple “Aum food” (rice and vegetables), tiny sleeping spaces, and no personal possessions.

By 1989, the Guru had gathered about 300 of these renunciates to him, most of them living at the organization’s headquarters in the shadow of Mt. Fuji. As time went on, those numbers continued to grow and swell – at its height, Aum Shinrikyo boasted more than 1,000 hardcore ascetic monks, which did not include the thousands of other, more casual followers in Japan, as well as countries as far away as Russia, Sri Lanka, West Germany the United States.

For many of these people, Aum offered exactly what they had been searching for. As one man named Hiroyuki Kano described:

“Life in Aum was much tougher than secular life, but the tougher it was, the more satisfying it felt; my inner struggles were over, for which I was grateful. I made a lot of friends, too—adults, kids, old ladies, men, women. Everyone in Aum was aiming for the same thing—raising their spiritual level—so we had lots in common. I didn’t have to change myself to get along with others. No doubts remained, because all our questions were answered. Everything was solved. We were told: “Do this, and this will happen.” No matter what question we had, we got an answer straightaway. I was completely immersed in it [laughs].”

Some members were comforted by the simple fact that they didn’t have to make any hard decisions anymore. As one woman explained:

“Not having to think for myself or make any decisions was a big factor. Just leave it up to them, and since the order comes from Mr. Asahara, who’s enlightened, you know everything’s been well thought out. […] The way they did things made life easier—they’d give the order and you just did what they said. No need to think for yourself, or worry about every little detail, just do what you’re told.”

In those early, innocuous days, Aum Shinrikyo might’ve seemed, to many people, like a harmless community of loners, losers and wackjobs. A new age cult with silly rituals and delusions of grandeur.

But as Japanese society, and the wider world was about to discover, the monks of Aum Shinrikyo were harboring some very dark impulses.

And their venerated Guru, Shoko Asahara, had his blind eyes fixed on a terrifying future.

---- MUSIC BREAK -----

It’s the night of November 3rd, 1989.

We’re in the city of Yokohama, about an hour south of Tokyo.

Normally a bustling port city, clogged with ship traffic, commuters and trade, Yokohama is a little less industrious on this fall evening, because it just happens to be a national holiday. Every 3^rd of November, the Japanese celebrate Bunka no Hi – or, “Culture Day”.

A rare pause in the relentless tempo of Japanese productivity, Culture Day is a time to loosen the necktie, put the briefcase in the closet, and spend some quality time with the wife & kids. You might visit a museum, drop some cash at a shopping mall, or admire the colors of autumn in a public park. And after a day of Kodak moments with the fam, you’d come home, set the table and enjoy a special meal together.

And that is exactly what the Sakamoto family is doing right now, in their small apartment in a quiet corner of the city. That’s S-A-K-A-M-O-T-O (Sakamoto). Around the table, there are three chairs. One chair for Tsutsumi Sakamoto, another for his wife Satoko, and a third chair – well, a highchair – for their 14-month-old son, little Tatsuhiko.

This is a rare and cherished moment of quality time, because lately, Tsutsumi - Mr. Sakamoto – has been working very long hours on a very stressful project. Mr. Sakamoto is lawyer. A relatively young, but successful one, in fact. At the tender age of 33, Sakamoto has already won some challenging civil rights cases, raising his prestige and profile in the Yokohama legal community.

But his latest case has proven especially taxing.

For the better part of a year, Sakamoto has been conducting an investigation into the new-age religious organization – some would say ‘cult’ - Aum Shinrikyo. His client is the “Aum Shinrikyo Victims’ Society”, a class-action coterie of disgruntled activists, angry parents and former members of the religion who are accusing Shoko Asahara and his inner circle of engaging in a shameless pattern of fraud, theft and even physical abuse.

Thankfully, this is not Mr. Sakamoto’s first rodeo with religion / time investigating a fringe religious movement. In 1987, he successfully filed a class-action lawsuit against the Korean-based Unification Church, which was ordered to pay extensive damages for a slew of financial crimes.

But Aum Shinrikyo was different.  / a cult of a different color.

When his clients first approached him, Mr. Sakamoto didn’t know much about ‘Shoko Asahara’ or his mysterious movement. Where had this Guru come from, anyway? How had he amassed so many followers so quickly? And especially interesting to the lawyer, how was Aum able to purchase large tracts of land at the foot of Mr. Fuji in one of the world’s most inflated real estate markets? Mr. Sakamoto had a nose for this kind of stuff, and Aum Shinrikyo reeked to high heaven – or whatever celestial plane they aspired to.

The first place to start his investigation, Sakamoto knew, was with the nucleus of the organization, it’s animating force - Shoko Asahara himself. To understand Aum, he needed to understand its leader. As Robert Jay Lifton writes: “Every guru begins somewhere.”

Well apparently, “Shoko Asahara” was not even the man’s real name. Born into poverty in southern Japan in 1955, Shoko Asahara began his life as Chizuo Matsumoto, a name he would later discard as an adult.

---->

Rendered blind from birth by infantile glaucoma, Asahara had no sight in his left eye and almost none in his right. He was a bright, ambitious boy, but because of this disability, Asahara’s prospects were extremely limited as he got older. His efforts to enroll in medical school were thwarted by the fact that the university “made no provision for sight-impaired people”, according to one historian. When he tried to enroll in other universities in Tokyo, he failed the entrance exams.

His applications rejected, his dreams crushed, the luckless, embittered young man resorted to professions that were common for blind people in Japanese society - things like acupuncture and herbal medicine and massage therapy - but Asahara never seemed content with these tedious trades.

Like many of his future followers, the young Asahara felt lost, adrift and extremely dissatisfied with his circumstances. Why did this happen to me?, he might’ve wondered. What did I do to deserve this disadvantage? Asahara would never see a sunset, or a flower, or the snowcaps of Mt Fuji. He would never know the simple pleasure of watching a movie or seeing a pretty girl smile at him. Perhaps it was punishment for something he’d done in a past life.

But maybe, he thought, by elevating his consciousness, he could catch a glimpse of a different kind of beauty. Cut off from the visible world by his lifelong blindness, Asahara sought respite in the spiritual realm. As he recalled:

“One day I stopped fooling myself altogether and thought: ‘What am I living for? Is there anything absolute, does true happiness really exist in this world? If so, can I get it?’ I did not realize at this point that what my soul was looking for was enlightenment. But I couldn’t sit still. Urged by such restlessness, I started a blind search. It was an intense feeling; it was a faith.”

Animated by a fierce desire for purpose, Asahara started studying the wide world of religion in all its forms. He prayed and meditated and chanted and exercised; he researched every creed under the rising sun.

But in the shoe store of theology, nothing seemed to fit quite right. Japanese Buddhism was too morose and ritualistic. Catholicism was too rigid. Shintoism, too political.  So, in constructing his view of the universe, Asahara decided to just take the parts he liked from each and assemble a sort of theological burrito bowl. A spoonful of Hinduism, a dash of Christianity, dollop of Tibetan Buddhism and a scoop of new age mysticism. By 1984, this build-your-own belief system had cohered into a solid, but essentially derivative, creed.

It was, writes Ian Reader, “a ‘pick and mix’ approach to religious practices and structures, juxtaposing and combining numerous themes, ideas and practices from different sources and traditions”

But Asahara’s path to enlightenment was not a solo project. In 1984, he founded a small yoga studio in Tokyo, and somewhere along the way, the stretching of limbs became the stretching of minds. Asahara started preaching to this group and acting as their spiritual leader.

Shoko Asahara was good with people; the way an angler is good with fish. He was charismatic and likable, with an intoxicating way of speaking that made you feel seen and important and understood. If he were coming up in the world today, Asahara might be a social media influencer or a YouTube star. He’d have subscribers and soundbites and shareable quotes. He’d probably even have a podcast.

But in the late 1980s, building a following meant talking to people. It meant passing out flyers and grasping hands and interacting face-to-face. Well, whatever Asahara did in those early days, it worked. By 1985, the two-bit yoga studio in Tokyo had flowered into a small, but fanatical cult of personality. And it was at this point, that the Guru abandoned his birth name and stepped into his new role. As Robert Jay Lifton writes:

“By the mid-1980s, Chizuo Matsumoto, a name suggesting nothing but ordinariness, had become Shōkō Asahara, a much more striking and unusual name. (Shōkō means “bright light,” and the characters he chose for Asahara suggest a field of hemp, a plant associated with the Buddhist idea of connection.) The respected yoga practitioner and teacher (or sensei) became the charismatic guru with long, flowing hair and beard.”

“Guru”, continues Lifton, “is not a title that is used in much Japanese religious practice. It is a Sanskrit word meaning “heavy,” suggesting a person of special weight. The guru’s authority is such that he is sometimes described as “Father-Mother.”

The veneration that Asahara received from his followers, naturally fueled a growing sense of self-importance. The blind nobody from southern Japan was finally a somebody, at least to a few dozen yoga enthusiasts. And for a personality starved of meaning for so long, that validation was rocket fuel.

Draped in bright purple robes, Asahara explained to his wide-eyed disciples that he had achieved true spiritual enlightenment. And by doing so, he had unlocked the ability to see into the past. To see all of his previous lives and reincarnations. And wouldn’t you know it – they were all pretty important people.

The humble Guru claimed that he was the latest manifestation of a long line of messianic figures. In a past life, Asahara said, he had been Prince Imhotep, a great builder of Egyptian pyramids. He had also been the Buddha, the avatar of Shiva, and Jesus H. Christ himself. “He also claimed to have had previous existences in America,” writes Robert Jay Lifton, “including one as Benjamin Franklin.”

But the Guru’s miraculous insight was not just confined to the distant past. Asahara believed he could see the future as well, and as it happened, the forecast was looking very cloudy indeed.

Thanks to / Because of the ocean of bad karma and negative psychic energy humanity had accumulated in the modern age, the end of the world - Armageddon – was very close at hand. According to a report by an American security think tank:

“By the spring of 1985, [Asahara] had started to assert that he was a sacred warrior and hero, charged with saving the world.

 After a trip of self-discovery to a mountain in northern Japan, he added [said] that he met an old man who warned him about a coming apocalypse and prophesized that the survivors would be benevolent shinsen (mountain hermits). On a trip to India in the first two months of 1986, he claimed to have met sages who predicted that the world was heading for catastrophe but were unable to provide him with appropriate spiritual guidance to assist him in his quest.

[Asahara] decided to use his own ascetic techniques to save the world.”

It all sounds like your typical crazy doomsday stuff, but Asahara was not alone in this belief. As Ian Reader writes:

“In Japan in the 1980s and early 90s, many religious movements were impelled by the notion that the world was on the brink of a crisis largely caused by human failings and scientific and technological excesses, in which nuclear warfare and environmental destruction threatened to bring an end to life on earth. […] For many this was not just an expectation but a hope, a wish that the materialistic society would be swept away and destroyed, replaced by a simpler more spiritual realm.”

But what set Asahara’s prophetic predictions apart, was its marrow-chilling specificity. In his sermons and books, the Guru told his followers, exactly – to the year – how the Apocalypse would unfold:

From now until the year 2000, a series of violent phenomena filled with fear that are too difficult to describe will occur. Japan will turn into waste land as a result of a nuclear . . . attack. This will occur from 1996 through January 1998. An alliance centering on the United States will attack Japan. In large cities in Japan, only one-tenth of the population will be able to survive. Nine out of ten people will die. “Radioactivity and other bad circumstances—poison gas, epidemics, food shortages—will occur. The only people who will survive were those “with great karma” and those who have the defensive protection of Aum Shinrikyo organization. “They will survive, and create a new and transcendent world.”

And so, with this great prophecy filling his mind’s eye, Asahara began an extremely aggressive recruitment campaign, to save as many people as he could by bringing them into the arms of Aum Shinrikyo. As Ian Reader writes:

“Asahara believed that Aum could prevent such a cataclysm through its mission to transform the world spiritually, thereby bringing about a new spiritual age. The expansion of this movement was critical to the salvation mission: Aum had to grow enough to create the positive spiritual energy to overcome the world’s bad karma.”

And grow it did. As Lifton writes:

“There were many ways in which Aum spread its net beyond its physical facilities. It was not hard to find out about the group, as Asahara quickly became a very public personality. His subordinates systematically approached television stations to arrange appearances, and magazines to suggest interviews and articles. Asahara became for many a compelling television performer and a dramatic figure in occult publications.”

Asahara also created an entire publishing and business arm of the Aum Shinrikyo organization, financed by the steep costs of membership and assets donated by his followers. As Lifton continues:

Through the Aum Publishing Company and its printing presses, located at the headquarters, the cult churned out and sold vast numbers of books, magazines, pamphlets, videotapes, manga (comic strips or graphic novels, an extremely popular form in Japan), and religious pictures and objects.

Religious experience did not come cheap. A shaktipat [initiation] by the guru cost $500 for everyone but a renunciant (who would already have given Aum all his money and holdings); a liter of the guru’s bathwater, which one could drink for its special effects, was $1,000; a month’s rental of a Perfect Salvation Initiation headset – [a way of absorbing the Guru’s brainwaves] was $10,000; for a “blood initiation” (drinking the guru’s blood), one also paid $10,000.”

[AUDIO]:  “I’ve been involved in a number of cults, both as a leader and a follower. You have more fun as a follower, but you make more money as a leader”

> 

Money begets money, of course; and Asahara made a whole lot of it. As Lifton explains:

“Aum soon extended its corporate interests in highly secular directions. One of its most lucrative enterprises was the assembling and marketing of computers; the cult’s negligible labor costs enabled it to undersell competitors throughout Japan. Its far-flung business activities included noodle shops and other restaurants in many Japanese cities, a fitness club, baby-sitting and dating services, travel agencies, real estate interests, as well as a variety of “dummy companies” not identified as part of Aum that dealt in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and technical equipment of various kinds.”

“All of these,” adds Ian Reader, “were staffed by Aum members who worked tirelessly to generate income that could be channeled back into the movement, to support its communities, its renunciates and its proselytization campaigns”

Thanks to these well-funded marketing campaigns, Aum Shinrikyo’s numbers – both recruitment and financial - expanded at an explosive rate. Dozens of followers became hundreds became thousands. But while quantity may have a quality all its own, the Guru’s message seemed to attract an unusually well-educated audience. As journalist David E. Kaplan writes;

“Aum's membership list also included more than 100 experts in engineering, communications, computing, and other fields from companies like Toshiba, Hitachi, and IBM Japan - all high-tech firms whose state-of the-art technologies Aum coveted. Some eventually left their firms to join the cult full time; others merely donated large sums of money.”

“They were nearly all young, wide-eyed kids in their early and mid-20s. Some dropped out of Japan's finest schools to join the cult, leaving behind families, friends, and bright futures. Others left the nation's top companies in steel, computers, insurance, and other fields.”

For some strange reason, Aum seemed to attract some the best and brightest members of Japanese society. As Robert Jay Lifton writes:

A professional designer I talked to, in addition to his other activities in Aum, designed many of its books and pamphlets. An animator worked on Aum’s films. There were talented musicians who played at Aum concerts or helped compose the “astral music” attributed to the guru, just as there were scholars and students of religion who helped write and translate the guru’s books and pamphlets. Professionals, intellectuals, and university students could be drawn to Aum’s unusual array of concepts and doctrines. What now seems—even to most of them—simplistic and extreme was experienced by many, during the cult’s most active days, as admirably systematic, inclusive, visionary, and yet reasonable. They found in Aum not only a spiritual home but an opportunity to use their talents or knowledge within an oppositional subculture.

But still, for all his successful recruitment, the Guru was unsatisfied. It was not enough. He needed to save as many people as possible from the coming apocalypse. And to do that – to truly get his message out there – he had to hold his nose and engage with the lowest, most polluted form of human life:  

Politicians.

To the shock of his followers and amusement of the general public, Shoko Asahara decided to run for public office. As one researcher explains:

“In July of 1989, Asahara announced that Aum would contest the [local] elections. He established the Shinrito (“Supreme Truth”) Party and put up 25 candidates, including Asahara and most of the senior members of the hierarchy, for Tokyo region parliamentary seats. There was a great deal of resistance among the rank and file, who had joined Aum precisely to get away from society. Asahara justified his decision at a general meeting of his priesthood in September 1989 by saying that time was short and Armageddon imminent. A grassroots strategy would no longer be sufficient; he needed to develop a political base and authority in order to avert Armageddon.”

But as Aum Shinrikyo donned its spiritual armor and ventured proudly into the political arena, they slammed face-first into one of the many uncomfortable realities of the campaign trail: Voter sentiment. The Guru’s followers were fervent and dedicated, but the vast majority of Japanese people were put off and creeped out by this bathwater-guzzling, brainwave-absorbing, blood-drinking New Age cult. As the novelist, Haruki Murakami, recalled:

“Asahara was running in Shibuya Ward, the Tokyo district where I was living at the time, and the campaign was a singularly odd piece of theater. Day after day strange music played from big trucks with sound systems, while white-robed young men and women in oversize Asahara masks and elephant heads lined the sidewalk outside my local train station, waving and dancing some incomprehensible jig.”

Most voters, including Murakami, decided they did not want Asahara’s stringy-black beard or his bizarre worldview anywhere near the levers of power. We like/prefer our politicians conventionally weird /off-putting/ corrupt, thank you very much. Aum’s electoral prospects were already on thin ice, but in October of 1989, the cracks started to spiderweb.

“The Sunday Mainichi, a weekly magazine published by the Mainichi newspaper group, began a series of seven articles that were highly critical of Aum,” writes Ian Reader, “Aum was accused, amongst other things, of exploiting its followers through the use of expensive and strange initiation rituals, and of breaking up families by refusing to allow those with relatives or offspring inside Aum to have any communication with them, while Asahara was portrayed as an exploitive and manipulative leader with an overbearing ego.”

[…] “The articles produced a widespread response from the public. The magazine received well over 200 communications from people with complaints against Aum, including former members who said they had paid for costly initiations that failed to give them any spiritual benefits. These various complainants were put in touch with one another by the magazine, and a protest group called the “Aum Shinrikyo Victims’ Society was established. A lawyer based in Yokohama, Sakamoto Tsutsumi, who was experienced in civil rights issues, was retained as its legal representative.”

And that brings us back to November 3^rd, 1989. To the city of Yokohama, and the humble home of Mr. Sakamoto, attorney at law.  

As his wife Satoko clears the table and stacks dishes in the kitchen sink, Mr. Sakamoto’s thoughts turn once again to the curious case of Aum Shinrikyo, and its blind guru turned aspiring politician, Shoko Asahara.

Like most lawyers, Sakamoto prides himself on his ability to separate facts from feelings, to be an instrument of the law, and nothing more. But this case makes it difficult to contain one’s emotions. In Sakamoto’s view, Shoko Asahara was taking advantage of his followers, exploiting their feelings of loneliness and confusion, to lure them into a ridiculous religion and charge them vast sums of money in exchange for empty promises of psychic powers.

Yes, there’s a sucker reborn every minute; but that doesn’t make it right.

Not only did Asahara empty their bank accounts and fill their minds with nonsense, he cut his followers off from their families and friends. Once they had ‘renounced the world’, the renunciates were not allowed any contact with their parents, their siblings, their husbands or wives or former coworkers. As one Aum member recalled:

“I became a renunciate. But I did agonize over it. I had one good friend who’d come over just about every day with some beer. “You’re not really going, are you?” he asked. He pleaded with me, tears in his eyes. But I was about to embark on something I’d been seeking since I was a child, so all I could tell him was, “I’m sorry. It’s something I have to do.”

Some relatives, desperate to reestablish ties with their wayward children, went to incredible lengths to reach them. As one historian described:

“A group of parents and families of Aum devotees had gathered outside the gate of Aum’s Namino commune […] and were calling, through a microphone, to their offspring who were staying there.

In trying to persuade their offspring to leave Aum and return to the family home, however, they frequently transmitted messages that demonstrated how little they understood the motivations of those they claimed to love.

One parent, for example, called out to his son that if he returned to his home town there were all sorts of jobs available, and that they had enlarged his room at home and got him a computer, video and television set. It is perhaps unsurprising that such appeals were in vain. Having rejected materialism and the career treadmill by joining Aum, commune members were hardly likely to be captivated by inducements of jobs and videos.”

Aum Shinrikyo seemed unassailable, its followers unreachable, its Guru infallible. So, it fell to the law - and Mr. Sakamoto - to reveal the cult for what it truly was. As the legal representative for the Aum’s Shinrikyo Victims AssociationSociety, Mr. Sakamoto went on the offensive, attacking Aum and its Guru from every possible vector.

He filed a class-action law suit against cult. He approached broadcast companies and taped television interviews in which he criticized Aum. He even contacted Kyoto University to debunk th fantastical, oft-repeated claim that the Guru’s DNA had been chemically tested at the university and found to be unique from other humans. As Ian Reader writes:

“Sakamoto raised serious problems for Asahara.”

Back at Aum headquarters, on the placid slopes of Mt Fuji, the Guru listened to the updates from his legal team, and seethed.

This lawyer, this Sakamoto, was interfering with Aum’s divine mission, and at the worst possible time. Election day, in which 25 Aum candidates were running for seats in the Japanese parliament, was only a few months away. If Mr. Sakamoto was allowed to continue spewing his lies in the newspapers and in the courts and on TV, it could completely derail Aum’s holy mission. And not only that - if Sakamoto’s class-action lawsuit succeeded, the legal damages could bankrupt Aum, destroying its ability to expand and gain new disciples. The loss of face might even spark a wave of defections from more casual followers.

In other words, Mr. Sakamoto was standing in the way of the salvation of the world. The Guru had learned so much, come so far, worked so hard – he was not about to let an avatar of karmic evil like Sakamoto thwart his mission to save mankind.

So, one day in November 1989, Shoko Asahara called a small group of his most loyal renunciates to his side. Six men who he knew would do absolutely anything for him. He whispered the orders in their ears, and shortly afterwards, the group departed for the city of Yokohama.

On the night of November 3^rd, 1989, the Sakamoto family had finished their dinner after a pleasant holiday. The table was cleared, the dishes were stacked, and the baby - 14-month-old Tatsuhiko - was fast asleep in his crib. Mr. Sakamoto and Mrs. Sakamoto kissed each other goodnight, turned the lights off, and went to bed.

At around 3 AM the next morning, the doorknob to their home turned with a gentle squeak, and several men entered the apartment. Moving carefully and quietly, they unrolled a bag of simple tools. A hammer, several hypodermic needles and a vial of potassium chloride. Potassium chloride is a chemical that, when injected intravenously, quickly induces cardiac arrest and death. A hammer is a tool that, when applied liberally, also induces death.

It would be years before anyone outside of Aum Shinrikyo knew exactly what happened that night, in what order, and to whom – but by the time the sun came up the next day, Tsutsumi Sakamoto, his wife Satoko, and their infant son Tatsuhiko, were all dead, murdered by a hit squad sent by Shoko Asahara.

The original plan, apparently, had been to only kill Sakamoto, silencing his inconvenient criticisms of the cult and ending the class-action lawsuit against Asahara. As Robert Jay Lifton explains: “Any critic was by definition evil and manifesting bad karma; attacking him furthered Aum’s mission of world salvation.”

But on the night of the hit, Sakamoto had woken up, his wife had started screaming, the baby had started crying… and well, one thing led to another. After the deed was done, the bodies of the Sakamoto family were taken to three different locations and buried separately, where they would not be discovered for another six years, after the Tokyo Subway Attacks.

At the time, it was as if the little family had just vanished. As one colleague of Sakamoto remembered;

“Sakamoto did not show up at the office or for a scheduled meeting, so I rushed to his apartment. I entered the apartment [for them], but they weren’t there. Dirty dishes were left unwashed in the sink. Sakamoto’s glasses and wallet were still in the apartment, as well as Tatsuhiko’s baby carrier.”

“The disappearance of the Sakamoto family caused concern among Sakamoto’s relatives and colleagues and led to a police investigation,” writes Ian Reader, “Because of Sakamoto’s ongoing disputes with Aum, the movement came under immediate suspicion, especially since an Aum badge along with traces of blood had been found at the family apartment. The badge had been dropped in the struggle to kill the family. However, Asahara denied that his movement had any connection with the incident, suggesting that someone had tried so set Aum up by abducting the family and leaving an Aum badge at the scene. There appears to have been relatively little investigation of the movement by the police, who hardly pursued any possible Aum links in the matter.”

No arrests were made, and no serious investigations were launched, but you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot to put two-and-two together. As Ian Reader continues:

“Despite the police inactivity, there was widespread suspicion of Aum’s guilt which was transmitted through items in the mass media. By killing Sakamoto, Aum gained new enemies, while its public reputation became increasingly unsavory.”

Aum was able to escape police scrutiny, but the swirl of controversy around the Sakamoto family’s disappearance had disastrous consequences for Aum’s already-slim electoral prospects. As one historian explained:

“The Sakamoto disappearance stoked press antagonism toward the cult. Aum-bashing developed into a common pastime. Despite this, Asahara confidently predicted victory in the parliamentary elections. The result was disastrous. Asahara received only 1,783 votes out of half a million cast, and he appeared to have been shocked when none of the Shinrito candidates was elected. The brief life of Shinrito was an unmitigated disaster for Aum. The campaign was extremely costly, about 7 million dollars, posing a serious short-term threat to the cult’s financial stability. Many monks, who had left the communes to campaign, defected after exposure to the real world and returned to their former lives.”

It is difficult to overstate just how much of an impact the election loss had on Aum Shinrikyo in general, and Shoko Asahara in particular.

For years, the Guru had believed that his mission was to save the world. But the humiliation and rejection of the 1990 elections proved to him that the world was not worth saving. The voters had a perfectly good Messiah, right there on the ballot, a get-out-of-hell-free card…and they’d spat it back in his eye. As Ian Reader writes:

“It was the fault of those who had not heeded his messages and had ignored his teachings of truth – not his failure to spread the word correctly – that world salvation was not going to be possible and that disaster and destruction would come instead. If they had listened and joined his movement, the global disasters and cataclysm that were about to engulf them would not occur. It was their fault that they could not be saved.”

“It was always someone else’s fault, either that mass media who were blamed for conspiring against Aum and hindering its efforts to spread the word, or politicians and civil authorities accused of conspiring against Aum to subvert its mission, or the general public, who simply disregarded the truth and remained in ignorance following the false gods of materialism”

And so, after the spring of 1990, the nature of Asahara’s prophecies fundamentally changed. It was so clear to him now! How had he not been able to see it before? In this ugly, ungrateful world, swimming in sin and negative karma, there was only one path to collective salvation.

He realized now that he wasn’t meant to avert Armageddon.

He was meant to bring it about.

As Robert Jay Lifton writes:

“For Asahara, the people of this world were so hopelessly defiled that their inevitable fate was the lowest of reincarnations, the closest to Buddhist hell and therefore dominated by death and suffering. That sense of defilement encompassed just about any personal or social experience outside of the guru’s teaching and the world of Aum—to the point where one could say that reality itself was a defilement.

With both matter and reality, indeed all of human life, so defiled, the process of purification could be achieved by nothing short of killing on a planetary scale.”

----- MUSIC BREAK -----

It’s February of 1993.

Two years before the Tokyo Subway Attacks.

We’re in Moscow, of all places. The capital of Russia. Just a few years earlier, this grim city on the Moskva River was the heart of the Soviet Union, where lines of tanks rumbled through Red Square, and lines of people queued up for their monthly ration of butter, soap, and cigarettes. This gloomy austerity was par for the course. As the old Soviet joke supposedly went:

A worker is standing in a long liquor line and finally loses his patience. He yells, "I've had enough! Save my place, I'm going to the Kremlin to shoot Gorbachev!" (the leader of Russia at the time)

Two hours later he returns, and his friends in line ask, "Did you get him?

""No," he replies. "The line over there was even longer than the line here."

But all bad things must come to an end, and by the early 1990s, things look a little different in Moscow. After 70 years of communism, the Soviet Union has collapsed under its own weight. The hammer & sickle are dead and gone, replaced by the horizontal stripes of the Russian Federation. Like a red tide receding, the nation’s borders have shrunk from 8 million square miles to a smaller, more tasteful, 6 million square miles.

Yes, Mother Russia has gotten a makeover.

Some things have stayed the same, though. All the old landmarks are there. The Kremlin and Red Square and Lenin’s Mausoleum. The onion domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral, bright as freshly painted Easter Eggs.

But there’s another iconic landmark gracing Moscow these days, one that has broken ground very recently: The world-famous Golden Arches.  

[AUDIO] “First McDonald’s Opens In Russia”

Since January of 1990, the fast-food chain McDonald’s has been serving up Big Macs, French fries, and Coca-Cola to the newly capitalistic comrades of Moscow. For half a day’s wages – or 3.5 rubles – you can get a little taste of Western prosperity. And if hamburgers aren’t your thing, you can pop down to Pizza Hut for a slice of pepperoni, or Kentucky Fried Chicken for a bucket of drumsticks.  

But American fast-food chains are not the only foreign franchise expanding into Russia. And one of these newcomers to the Moscow market is hawking a very different sort of product. Located just outside the commercial district is a small liaison office, the regional headquarters of the controversial Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo.

Despite its humiliating performance in the 1990 Tokyo elections, and the suspicious disappearance of the Sakamoto family, Aum Shinrikyo continued to grow and expand. By 1993, it had almost 10,000 followers back home in Japan, with other small cells dotted across the globe, in places like Australia, West Germany, Sri Lanka, and the United States.

But the largest foreign following, oddly enough, was in Russia. At its peak, Aum membership in the former Soviet republics was said to be as high as 30,000 people, exceeding even Japan. The exact number and devotional depth of Aum followers in Russia is not known to a certainty – researchers and historians still seem to be arguing about it - but what is indisputably true, is that by the early 1990s, the cult had established a small but significant beachhead in the former USSR.

At first blush, this may seem like odd cultural soil for a new-age hybrid of Buddhism, Hinduism and mysticism to take root. But historically, wherever there is great turmoil, rapid political change, and economic hardship…. Religious figures have managed to pry open a crack/niche and find a receptive audience. When everything’s falling apart, it’s nice to think that it’s falling apart for a reason.

And not only did Russia provide a fresh crop of faithful disciples for the Guru, it also provided access to something that Aum Shinrikyo had been seeking since the turn of the decade.

Military-Grade Weapons.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

After Aum’s devastating election loss, Shoko Asahara decided that the world - and the people in it - were not worth saving.

Like Noah building his Ark, the Guru had created Aum Shinrikyo to shelter the pure of heart from a global catastrophe. He had hoped - perhaps naively – that by gaining a political platform in the Japanese government he could keep expanding and bring more followers into the fold.

But the voters had made themselves very clear. They would rather stay put, plant their feet, and drown in the rising tide of their own bad karma. To Asahara, the way forward was clear. It was time to finish the Ark, seal the hatch, and prepare for rain.

But why stop there?, the Guru fumed. If Aum Shinrikyo had truly reached the limits of its expansion, why sit around and wait for Armageddon to happen? Why continue sharing the world with these people for a second longer than we have to? In time, the Guru came to believe that it wasn’t Aum’s destiny to merely surviveArmageddon…they were meant to make it happen. As Ian Reader writes:

“Asahara both willed the death of all humanity and believed that everyone in it deserved to die.”

But achieving planetary destruction is easier said than done.

Aum was certainly well-funded and well-connected, but they weren’t a government, or an army, or nuclear power. The critical question loomed. How does a small cult that could barely fill a couple of cruise ships bring about the end of the world? They couldn’t levitate everyone to death. No, what they needed was a trigger – a catalyst – a little nudge to tip the first domino and get the party started. After all, prophecies do not fulfill themselves.

Well - In the bag of cats Shoko Asahara called a brain, the solution was quite simple.

A sudden, indiscriminate attack that killed large numbers of “innocent” people would be necessary to kickstart a global apocalypse. Once such an attack occurred, all Aum had to do was sit back and let 40 years of nuclear proliferation do the work. Fingers would start pointing, bombs would start flying, and World War III would begin. In the atomic holocaust that followed, the earth would be cleansed of its bad karma, and like Noah’s family stepping off the Ark, Aum Shinrikyo would inherit what was left.

At this point in the Guru’s sermon, several hands might’ve shot up in the lecture hall. Some less-informed followers might’ve asked, isn’t non-violence a central tenet of our creed? Aren’t we supposed to have reverence for all forms of life? We don’t really want to hurt or kill anyone, do we? I mean, technically, wouldn’t that result in negative karma for us? Wouldn’t that be…spiritually counterproductive?

Ah, but the Guru had an answer for everything. That’s why he was the Guru. And to these paradoxes of faith, he applied a well-crafted theological loophole. It was the same comforting explanation he’d given to the men that he sent to murder the lawyer Sakamoto.

The answer to this vexing question, Asahara explained, was the Buddhist concept of “poa”.

That’s P-O-A [Poa]. As Robert Jay Lifton explains:

“In esoteric Buddhism, poa is a spiritual exercise performed when one is dying, sometimes with the aid of a guru. A “transference of consciousness” from the bodily “earth plane” to the “after-death plane” that enables one to achieve a higher realm in the next rebirth or even passage to the Pure Land, the step prior to nirvana.”

To put it more plainly (and bit less woo-woo) Poa is a meditation ritual that a Guru performs for someone who is dying to wipe away or mitigate their bad karma. This allows the dying person to reincarnate into a higher plane. Basically, if you’re knocking at the pearly gates, your Guru can help pay the cover charge.

That’s the traditional interpretation of Poa. But Shoko Asahara twisted this idea to serve his own apocalyptic fantasies, proving yet again that there is no religious doctrine, however peaceful, that can’t be used as a rationalization for mass murder. As the Guru explained to his followers:

“Suppose there was someone who would accumulate bad karma and go to hell if allowed to live. And suppose an enlightened individual thought that it was better to terminate the person’s life and gave the person poa.… Objectively speaking, it is a destruction of life.… However, based on the notion of Vajrayāna [Tantric Buddhism], it is no other than respectable poa.”

“Poa is: to transform a person doing bad things.”

According to Asahara’s logic, by killing someone who has negative karma – by poa-ing them - you are actually doing them a favor. You’re saving them from themselves. Because if they continued living their sinful life, they would just accumulate more and more bad karma and condemn themselves to a worse and worse afterlife. As one researcher put it:

“It was acceptable for enlightened people to kill those in danger of accumulating bad karma in this life in order to save them in the next, thereby helping them to achieve salvation.”

From that perspective, they had not murdered the lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto, along with his wife and child, they had released them from a sinful existence and given them a wonderful gift, spiritually speaking. It was, explains Robert Jay Lifton, “altruistic murder.”  As Ian Reader explains:

“Murder, in other words, was legitimate if it were carried out by spiritually advanced practitioners such as Asahara or Aum’s ‘true victors’” (meaning disciples)

For the Aum followers in Asahara’s inner circle, this convenient logic seemed to track. So, when we commit murder, it’s not actually murder. Got it. By that rationale, there was no reason to feel guilty about violence or killing of any kind. It created a permission structure to kill anyone, at anytime, for any reason that benefitted Aum. As one man, Yoshihiro Inoue, allegedly said:

“If [the] Master ordered me to kill my parents, I would.”

And what do we do, the Guru asked his followers, if everyone in the world is corrupted and beyond redemption? We tried things the easy way. We tried to spread Aum’s message and bring non-believers into the light. But instead, they spat in our face. They ridiculed us on TV and at the polls, filed lawsuits against us, resisted the supreme truth in favor of their worthless materialistic reality.

We have to help them. We have to do the right thing. We have to Poa everyone.

Was it regrettable? Sure. It certainly wasn’t Plan A. But in the end, it would be for the greater good.

[AUDIO] “The greater good”

But there was also a question of practicality. Aum Shinrikyo couldn’t go house to house, strangling, injecting and hammering people into heaven one-by-one. To accomplish Armageddon, they needed bigger and better weapons. According to Ian Reader:

“Between Spring 1993 and the subway attack two years later, Aum embarked on an extraordinary campaign to arm itself and get its hands on advanced technologies for this purpose.”

To obtain these powerful weapons, Aum turned to their new contacts and fellow believers in the former Soviet Union. As researcher Christopher Harmon put it:

“There was a fruitful collaboration with Russia. Thousands joined in that country, but more importantly, high-level military and government and scientific circles in Russia sold or gave Aum many valued prizes.”

For example - In the spring of 1993, high-ranking members of Aum traveled to Russia and procured parts for a Soviet AK-74 assault rifle, which they smuggled back to Japan in hopes of reverse-engineering and mass-producing to arm hundreds of the Guru’s followers.

But automatic weapons were just the tip of holy spear. In the chaotic, capitalistic free-for-all of post-Soviet Russia, all sorts of deadly toys could be procured for the right amount of rubles. Money, of course, was something Aum Shinrikyo had plenty of. By 1993, the cult’s net worth was upwards of 500 million dollars. And in Russia, they went on a shopping spree. As another researcher, Rohan Gunaratna, writes:

“The group’s [Aum’s] members underwent military training in Russia. After completing flying training in Florida in 1993, they purchased a Soviet-made Mi-17 helicopter and transported it to Japan.”

“The cult also had materials or blueprints for rocket launchers and various other forms of military equipment,”writes Robert Jay Lifton, “In addition, Asahara seemed to have a special liking for personal handguns and was pleased when two Tokarev pistols were brought to him from Russia by an intermediary. It is believed that two hundred Aum renunciants were put through military training in groups of fifty each, led mostly by members of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces who were also members of Aum.”

In his own mind, Shoko Asahara was building an army for a coming/imminent holy war. But not all the renunciates were jazzed about this militant new direction. They didn’t give up all their possessions and estrange themselves from their families just to join a guerilla army. As one renunciate recalled:

“Our training started to include some bizarre elements: martial arts became a large part of our daily routine, and I could feel the atmosphere changing. I gave a lot of thought to whether I could continue being in Aum. Not that it mattered much what I thought, since the Guru / Asahara was convinced this was the shortest path to our goals. If that’s the case, there’s not much you can do. Either you stay or leave.”

Most renunciates stayed, and Aum’s arsenal continued to grow. But still, the Guru coveted deadlier, more impressive weaponry. That same year, Shoko Asahara called a meeting with some of his closest and highest-ranking disciples. According to a report by an American think tank:  

“They discussed amassing an Aum military force equipped with an ambitious array of weapons and the need to research guns, explosives, nuclear weapons and missile systems. Yet more fantastic propositions (UFOs, X-ray weapons and plasma weapons) were also raised. Asahara told them to expand their minds, let their imaginations soar, read books from science fiction and realize their visions as weapons. After the meeting, several groups were formed to study various weapon systems to be produced on a large scale.”

Shoko Asahara and the men around him were heavily inspired by science fiction stories – things like anime, manga, and cartoons that featured fantastical, futuristic weapons. From brave soldiers piloting cybernetic suits, to orbital bombardments and laser beam arrays.

[AUDIO] Mobile Suit Gundam trailer (very melodramatic for comedic effect)

The Guru seemed to sincerely believe that these things were possible and could be harnessed by Aum to unleash Armageddon. As one academic explained:

“It appears that most or all of these men had been science fiction enthusiasts in their youth and continued this interest as adults. […] They talked about futuristic technologies of destruction, such as plasma weapons that could atomize human bodies, mirrors several miles across that would float in space reflecting the sun’s rays so that they destroyed all life in the process, vast laser guns and other imagined means of destruction. It was presumed that many such weapons had been developed by the United States. Asahara shared his scientists’ fascination with pop science. Although blind, he would turn on television animation shows and have someone describe the scenes. Many of his prophecies and sermons were taken from these shows. A plan for an underwater city after World War III came from Future Boy Conan. Light Beam Satellite Cannon was taken from Mobile Suit Gundam, and Cosmo Cleaner from Starblazers.”

For the most part, these delusional, Neverland fixations remained limited to Asahara’s inner circle of Lost Boys, but even more casual Aum Shinrikyo members registered the shift. According to a man named Akio Nakamura:

“For a long time my relationship with Aum Shinrikyo was an on-off affair. One day in 1993, though, an Aum man named Kitamura came to my door. He’d called saying he wanted to talk to me, so I said okay. I’d been away from Aum for a while and wanted to catch up on the latest news. But the more he talked, the crazier he got. He talked about what would happen if World War III broke out, laser weapons, plasma weapons—like something out of science fiction. It was interesting, admittedly, but it made me think that Aum was getting into some pretty intense things.”

Akio’s instincts were correct. None of these science fiction fantasies bore fruit, of course, but Aum Shinrikyo did successfully develop one very real, very powerful tool that perfectly suited its goals of mass destruction.

Chemical weapons.

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE

Since the early 1990s, the scientists and engineers of Aum Shinrikyo had been trying to develop biological and chemical weapons. This may be seem like a very ambitious goal for a private organization, but with enough money and brain power, anything is possible. As one academic explains:

“The relevant technology is within the reach of groups that possess sufficient financial resources and technical expertise, such as members with postgraduate education in organic chemistry or microbiology. Leaders of the Aum Shinrikyo cult aggressively recruited university-trained scientists and engineers in Japan and Russia to work on the development of C/B weapons. Many Aum members were young intellectuals in their twenties and thirties who had become disenchanted with mainstream Japanese society. The cult's chief scientist, for example, was thirty years old and had a master's degree in organic chemistry from a Japanese university.”

In the early stages, Aum’s scientists were focused on biological weapons – things like anthrax, botulinum neurotoxin, even weaponized Ebola, according to some historians. And this was no shake & bake, trailer park / basement operation. The project involved, according to Robert Jay Lifton:

“Air filtration for “clean rooms,” various forms of molecular modeling software, sophisticated computer hardware, laser equipment, and serum bottles. A striking indicator of Aum’s biological ambitions was the extraordinary amount of peptone, a substance used to cultivate bacteria, found by the police at the main facility, suggesting that Aum intended to stockpile materials aimed at killing hundreds of thousands or millions of people.”

But biological weapons are notoriously difficult to produce, and Aum’s scientists just didn’t have the technical expertise to really pull it off. In their laboratories at the complex near Mt. Fuji, entire batches went bad, strains fizzled out, workers got sick – it just wasn’t working.

But then, around 1993, Aum’s scientists had a breakthrough. They successfully produced a small, but highly lethal quantity of Sarin nerve gas.

[AUDIO] “Could be Sarin gas!”

Like most horrific and deadly weapons, sarin gas was invented with the best of intentions.

Accidentally created by a pair of German chemists in 1938 while trying to produce a more powerful pesticide, sarin was originally just another exciting discovery in the world of applied science. But as Mr. Gatling, Mr. Guillotine, Mr. Maxim, Mr. Kalashnikov and Mr. Diesel all eventually found out, sometimes the things we create take on a life of their own.

It wasn’t long before less scrupulous minds realized that sarin wasn’t just great at killing bugs, but people as well. The first government to see its homicidal potential and develop plans to deploy it against their enemies was – who else – Nazi Germany. But Hitler and the gang never pulled the trigger, for reasons unknown, and lost the war before they could muster up the nerve to use it. Pardon the pun.  

During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union developed large stockpiles of Sarin, mostly for the sake of appearances / symmetry. You show me yours; I’ll show you mine. But at the end of the day, it was just a flex. Neither superpower had the cajones or the inclination to pop that historical cherry.

And then, on March 16^th, 1988, around the same time Aum Shinrikyo was starting to gain a following, the theoretical became the actual. The first recorded use of sarin as a large-scale weapon against human beings was perpetrated during the Iran-Iraq War by the Saddam Hussein’s military. As journalist Amarnath Amarasingam writes:

“In the Kurdish town of Halabja, about a dozen miles from the Iranian border, Iraqi aircraft appeared overhead and spread poisonous gas, killing over 5,000 people. […] Families in Halabja were utterly disoriented by the attack, as they watched birds fall from trees and animals and neighbors collapse to the ground, writhing in pain.”

On the other side of the world, in Japan, Shoko Asahara took notice of sarin’s remarkable efficacy against human targets, and few years later, when Aum’s apocalyptic mission had fully ossified, the Guru commanded his disciples to begin developing sarin as a holy weapon for its holy war.

The first step was assembling all the equipment and ingredients, which proved relatively simple for an over-educated, under-regulated/scrutinized organization like Aum Shinrikyo. As one terrorism expert writes:

“Developing countries seeking a Chemical Weapons capability generally lack the ability to manufacture chemical agents from the most basic starting materials, and hence must purchase immediate precursors from foreign sources. Because of this dependency, twenty-nine countries with large chemical industries, including the United States, have sought to slow the proliferation of chemical weapons by establishing a committee, known as the Australia Group that coordinates national export-control regulations in order to restrict the sale of Chemical/Biological-relevant materials and production equipment to suspected proliferators

The Australia Group restricts exports to target countries, but *not* to substate actors. Aum Shinrikyo was therefore able to purchase all of the chemical precursors and processing equipment it needed to manufacture sarin by importing them through front companies controlled by the cult, legitimate chemical manufacturers owned by cult members, and overseas shipping agents. Because such illicit transactions often yield extremely high profits, many suppliers and middlemen have been willing to take the risk of violating national export laws.”

With the equipment purchased and ingredients assembled, they just needed a formula. Which was relatively easy to procure. As Ian Reader explains:

“The necessary chemical formulas were especially available in Russia, whose empire had collapsed and whose often-desperate military and industrial scientists were under great economic duress. An Aum manual also refers to an […]  American source of sarin know-how. Much of Aum’s information was apparently available on the Internet.”

And so, in a well-guarded warehouse on the slopes of Mt Fuji, Aum Shinrikyo started secretly manufacturing sarin. There were great bubbling vats of liquid slurry, and shelves of unpronounceable chemicals, and evil fumes that leaked out of the building and killed all the plants. But at the end of the day, making chemical weapons is like baking a cake. All you need is a reliable recipe, quality ingredients and practice, practice, practice. Before long, Aum’s chemical engineers were churning out huge batches of high-purity sarin.

And that wasn’t all they were cooking. When you have a safe space to manufacture illicit chemical substances, you might as well put the privacy to good use. As Ian Reader writes:

“From spring 1994 Aum also became heavily involved in the manufacture of drugs, including amphetamines (which were used in some initiation rituals but also marketed using underworld connections to raise funds for the movement), mescaline and LSD.”

[AUDIO] “You wanna cook crystal meth?” That’s right.” (Breaking Bad)

Indeed, Aum Shinrikyo was beginning to look less like organized religion and more like organized crime.

And as the Guru led his followers into an escalating pattern of criminality, the organization’s collective paranoia grew in kind.. Since the murder of Tsutsumi Sakamoto, the crusading lawyer who had represented the Aum Shinrikyo Victim’s Association Society, the cult had been a steady ping on the radar of national law enforcement, and Asahara couldn’t shake the feeling that the heat was closing in.

---->

Rather than putting end to the cult’s legal woes, the disappearing act of Sakamoto and his family had only intensified the general public’s distaste for the Guru and his bizarre disciples.

Everywhere Aum Shinrikyo went, they faced resistance, hostility and suspicion. If Aum tried to open a recruiting center in a city, the local government denied them a permit. If the cult bought large tracts of land in a new area, the residents signed petitions and filed lawsuits. This ubiquitous pushback only intensified Aum’s growing sense of persecution and reinforced its belief that the external world was beyond saving.

But the Guru’s paranoia ran even deeper. Aum’s external enemies were all too obvious – the police, the government, the decadent mainstream culture – but what about the enemies within? Every boat has a leak, every sweater has a loose thread. Perhaps spies and informants had infiltrated their ranks, intent on sabotaging the holy mission to trigger Armageddon?

“In this climate of fear and suspicion,” writes Ian Reader, “violence began to be used against suspect followers at the commune, who were accused of spying or who, because they had wanted to leave or took steps to do so, became immediately suspect.”

As one renunciate recalled;

Anyone breaking commandments had their legs tied up in chains and they were hung upside down. It doesn’t sound like much if you just describe it, but it’s torture, plain and simple. The blood drains from your legs and it feels like they’re about to be torn off. By breaking commandments I mean anything from breaking the vow of chastity by having relations with a girl, or being suspected of being a spy, or having comic books in your possession … The room where I worked at the time was directly below the Fuji dojo and I could hear these loud screams from above, real shrieks, people yelling, “Kill me! Put me out of my misery!”—the kind of barely human voice wrung out of someone in excruciating pain. Pitiful screams, as if the space there itself was warped and twisted: “Master! Master! Help me!—I’ll never do it again!” When I heard them I just shuddered. I couldn’t work out what possible point it could have. But what’s weird is that many of the people who were hung upside down like that are still in Aum. They’d suffer, be taken to the edge of death, and then be kindly told “You did well.” And they’d think, “I was able to overcome the trials given to me. Thank you, O Guru!”

As the Guru set about cleansing his organization of perceived traitors and saboteurs, he turned to one of his oldest and highest-ranking renunciates for help. An old friend of ours. The disillusioned cardiac surgeon and future terrorist, Dr. Ikuo Hayashi.

By 1994, Dr. Hayashi had been a member of the Aum Shinrikyo cult for almost five years.

Living at the compound near Mt Fuji, the former physician discovered a sense of clarity that he had been searching for all his life.

His work in mainstream society, as a surgeon at the Tokyo hospital, had never been fulfilling, because he wasn’t really helping anyone. He could patch up their bodies, and fix their hearts and buy them a few more years…but to what end? What was the point if they were so hopelessly polluted with negative karma and sinful energy? If anything, he was dooming them to a more hellish reincarnation, by prolonging their lives and allowing them to build up more bad karma.

But in Aum Shinrikyo, he could make a difference.

He was literally saving the world!

In Aum, Dr. Hayashi could just.. let go of all his doubts and put his faith in someone who had the answers. In regular society, the doctor had been in deep psychological pain, and Asahara’s teachings had cured him of that pain. It was a drip feed of spiritual morphine, numbing his mind like warm jelly, driving away all those haunting questions about the meaning of life. Because the Guru was the source of supreme truth, Hayashi said…“It seemed unnecessary for any of us to think on our own.”

And the Guru had quite a few thoughts about what Hayashi’s role in Aum Shinrikyo should be. It wasn’t long before Asahara called on Dr. Hayashi to apply his medical expertise in some very disturbing ways. As Robert Jay Lifton writes:

“Hayashi’s knowledge was [not] wasted in Aum. Indeed, his skills were made use of in every form of its medicalized criminality.” […] “What was originally a finely tuned medical mind descended to an absurdist monologue of medical mystification as Hayashi offered himself completely to Aum’s cosmic melodrama.”

Alone together in their frequent meetings, Shoko Asahara told Dr. Hayashi that he suspected there were spies living among them. The organization had grown exponentially since they’d first met in 1988, which was a wonderful thing…but more members meant more exposure. Surely there were traitors in their midst. It was an infestation, Asahara said. Police informants and Freemasons and CIA operatives, all trying to sabotage Aum’s Holy War before it could begin in earnest.

We are so close to triggering Armageddon, Asahara told Hayashi, so close to cleansing the world of its filth, and these spies are threatening everything. Help me find these traitors, he said, root them out, interrogate them, and if need be, render them… harmless. How you accomplish that, is up to you. The good doctor bowed low and did as his Guru commanded.

Throughout 1994, the paranoid atmosphere at Aum headquarters continued to congeal/rise. As one renunciate remembered:

They used lie detectors to try to root out spies. They called this an initiation, too, and everyone in Aum had to take a lie-detector test. I thought it was strange, because wouldn’t the guru, who was supposed to know everything, be able to tell at a glance who the spies were? Aside from this I was once questioned about my best friend, who’d been placed in solitary confinement. I was given a polygraph test and asked all sorts of questions, including some unpleasant ones I couldn’t accept. Afterward I asked the higher-ups, “Why do you have to ask such things?

Polygraph tests are not famed for their reliability, and when those didn’t yield the desired results, Dr. Hayashi was called in to apply his own sort of treatment. This often took the form of sodium thiopental, which is a powerful anesthetic, commonly referred to as “truth serum”. And when a needle prick didn’t work, when the answers were not satisfactory, Hayashi turned to a more dangerous and permanent procedure: Electric shock therapy. As David E. Kaplan writes:

“One set of tests performed by Dr. Hayashi used electric shocks to wipe the memories of suspicious followers. According to Hayashi's detailed medical records, 7 shocks of 100 volts each, delivered to the scalp, were enough to blank the short-term memory of one of Asahara's drivers, who had been branded a spy. The man couldn't remember he had ever driven the guru's car. A worker at the compound who tried to escape received 11 shocks, while a male follower accused of sexual relations got 19. During one three-month period beginning in October 1994, Dr. Hayashi administered more than 600 electric shocks to 130 followers. Afterward, some of them forgot which cult they were in, what the guru was called, even their own names.”

As one woman told the novelist Haruki Murakami:

I underwent electroshock. I lost my memory after that. I still have the scars from the electricity right here. (Raises her hair to show her neck, where a line of white scars remains.) I remember things up to a time, but after that it’s a blank. I have no idea at what point, and for what reason my memory was erased. I asked people around me but no one would tell me. I’d press them to tell me more. “It’s been erased so we can’t talk about it,” they’d reply.

If Dr. Hayashi harbored any reservations or guilt about administering these treatments at the time, he kept them to himself. The Guru’s reality was his own, and in the Guru’s reality, it was all for the greater good.

[AUDIO] “The greater good” Shut it!

As another renunciate explained:

“Our ability to distinguish right from wrong was being eroded.”

And if Dr. Hayashi believed he had reached the limits of what his Guru would ask him to do, he was sorely mistaken. Because in the coming months, Ian Reader writes:

“Aum’s sacred war against evil became a real one.”

---- MUSIC BREAK -----

It’s June 27^th, 1994.

Nine months before the Tokyo Subway Attacks.

We’re in the city of Matsumoto in central Japan, a picturesque little castle town known for its tourist attractions, soba noodles and classical music festivals. A nice quiet city, full of nice quiet people. The kind of aggressively normal/tranquil place that old people want to settle down in and teenagers want to run away from. In other words, Matsumoto is boring in all the best ways.

But on this muggy summer night, Matsumoto is anything but boring. In fact, the city is about to become world-famous. Because tonight, it will be the site of Japan’s first ever chemical weapons attack.

Just after 10 o’clock PM, in a sleepy residential area, the gentle squeak of brake pads pierces the evening calm as a white delivery truck rolls to a stop. These kinds of vehicles are quite common in Matsumoto, hauling eggs or meat or TV dinners in their refrigerated storage compartments. But this particular truck is carrying something you cannot find in any supermarket. In the cargo hold of this truck, there are 12 liters of liquid sarin.

Up in the driver’s seat, an Aum Shinrikyo cultist grips the steering wheel like a talisman. He puts the truck in park, looks to his right, and shoots a nervous glance at his compatriot in the passenger seat. After a long 3-hour drive from the Fuji compound, the moment of truth has finally arrived. But for all their apprehension, they know exactly what they have to do. They are soldiers in an army, and tonight is Aum’s first act of war.

Matsumoto is a fitting target for Aum Shinrikyo’s chemical weapons program. Because in recent months, this serene little city has been a thorn in the Guru’s side.

When Aum attempted to purchase land here and begin construction of a training center, 140,000 of the city’s residents (about 70% percent of the population) signed a petition protesting it. Their message to Aum Shinrikyo and its Guru was abundantly clear. We don’t want you here. Build your crazy-ass center somewhere else.

It was a brazen insult. One that the proud Guru was anxious to avenge.

And then there was the matter of the lawsuit. A local Matsumoto landowner had sold a parcel of real estate to a shell company owned by Aum Shinrikyo. But once he learned that Aum was who he’d actually sold to, he claimed he’d been deceived, and filed a lawsuit against the cult alleging business fraud. He said he would never have sold it to them if he knew that that Aum was the true buyer. To date, the case has not been going well for Aum. Next month, in July 1994, the three judges presiding over the case are expected to hand down their decision, and by all indications it will not be a favorable one for Shoko Asahara.

Those three troublesome judges live right here in the city of Matsumoto. On this very block, in fact. The block that the refrigeration truck filled with sarin gas has just pulled up to.

For months now, Shoko Asahara has been looking for an opportunity to test his fresh batches of sarin out in the field, and what better place than a city that had defied the cult, outside the homes of judges who were about to rule against Aum in a civil suit. Three birds, one stone.  As Ian Reader writes:

“The attack was therefore ordered as a means of incapacitating the judges and preventing them from delivering their verdict.”

And so, just before 11pm, the cultists in the refrigeration truck flip a switch and listen to the machinery in the back whir to life. To disperse the sarin into the air, the engineers back at Aum headquarters fitted the truck with “a vaporizing device consisting of a heater and a fan”, according to one terrorism expert. From three little vents on the roof of the truck, minarets of colorless sarin gas twist up into the air and drift towards the judge’s residences.

But tonight, by chance, for no reason at all, there’s a stiff summer breeze in the air, and it carries the cloud of sarin gas past the judge’s residences and directly into a nearby apartment complex. Inside, the effects were felt within minutes.

In a house about 30 meters way from the truck spewing clouds of sarin into the air, a woman named Toshie Koibuchi was taking a bath. It was a nice summer night, and she decided to open her window to enjoy the breeze. But as she dried her hair and wrapped herself in a towel, Toshie started to feel…weird:

"Just after I got out of the bath, my nose started to run. It wasn't like a normal runny nose, it was running like water. And when I looked at a light bulb, all I could see was a pin prick of light. I felt very strange. Then I got diarrhea and headaches. It was indescribable. I had no idea what it was. I started to feel very, very sick."

Toshie was one of the lucky ones that night. She survived. But many others did not. The main concentration of the sarin cloud, carried by the wind, flooded into the apartment complex down the street, killing 7 people and causing symptoms in more than 200 others. A doctor who arrived at the scene recalled:

“There was a lot of confusion. There were a huge number of people outside, I can't say exactly, but more than 50 with similar symptoms."

“The victims,” writes journalist Paul Murphy, “ranged in age from 3 to 86 years old.”

Back at Aum Shinrikyo headquarters, 100 miles to the southeast, Shoko Asahara allowed himself a moment of private exultation. The sarin had worked! After so many false starts and dead-ends, they finally had an ultimate weapon.

But the attack on Matsumoto was just a dress rehearsal.

In his mind’s eye, which was the only eye that worked, Asahara pictured how this new weapon could be deployed. He imagined whole fleets of sarin-dispersing trucks, pumping their poison into the air, and the faithless dropping like flies. He imagined the helicopter they had purchased in Russia, soaring over downtown Tokyo, blanketing clouds of nerve gas on hundreds of thousands – no millions! – of people.

In some ways, it was the perfect weapon. Unlike conventional explosives or nuclear bombs, sarin only destroyed human tissue /bodies, leaving physical buildings and critical infrastructure intact.

If only the Americans had dropped sarin on us during the Pacific War, instead of incendiary bombs and atomic weapons. We’d still have most of our national treasures, and tourists would have so many more attractions to visit.

In any case, Shoko Asahara was delighted with the results of the Matsumoto attack, and he instructed his chemical engineers to continue manufacturing sarin and developing more efficient ways to disperse it.

And, even more good news – the Guru told his closest followers - Armageddon officially has a date! After many hours meditating in the astral plane and consulting with my fellow deities Shiva, Buddha and Jesus Christ, I have decided that we will trigger Armageddon in November of 1995, less than one year from now. When that day comes, my children, we will use our Russian helicopter to drop sarin gas on downtown Tokyo, triggering World War III and the birth of our utopian society. So do your yoga stretches, practice your martial arts, and save the date.

But while Aum Shinrikyo plowed forward with its chemical weapons program, its activities had not gone unnoticed. In the aftermath of the attack on Matsumoto, the cult had not covered its tracks well at all, and the national police were starting to put the pieces together. As Ian Reader writes:

> 

Aum was “a potential suspect in the Matsumoto case, a point further emphasized when on July 9^th, 1994, two weeks after the attack, villagers at Kamikuishiki [the site of Aum’s headquarters] saw a number of people in laboratory clothing and wearing gas masks fleeing from a building at the commune. At the same time, they detected a foul smell in the air, and shortly afterwards notices that the surrounding vegetation had been damaged and showed signs of having been affected by poisonous chemicals.

When confronted by villagers and members of the media, Aum’s spokespeople claimed that the damage had been caused by sarin dropped on to its commune by opponents – a defense that hardly sounded convincing to any save the members of the commune who believed Asahara’s prophecies and his conspiracy theories. The direct link between Aum and Matsumoto was verified in November 1994 when police analysis of the samples taken from around Aum’s compound showed the presence of sarin.”

The whole story could’ve ended right then and there. In another universe and another timeline, the Japanese authorities sent in armed counterterrorism units and drug-sniffing dogs, they raided the compound and put the Guru in handcuffs. They seized the sarin, destroyed the labs, and chained up the entrance to the Mt Fuji commune like a condemned house. Aum’s financial assets were liquidated and the cult was outlawed in Japan. And the Tokyo Subway attacks never occurred.

But that is not what happened. At least not yet. Despite all the evidence linking Aum Shinrikyo to the Matsumoto attacks, Ian Reader continues:

“The police remained extremely reluctant to move on the matter. No clear reason has emerged as to why the police continued to display such reluctance to investigate a movement that appeared to have done everything it possibly could to make itself a prime suspect in the affair.

The most likely possibility was that, since Aum was a registered religious organization with extremely militant tendencies that readily complained of persecution and resorted to lawsuits whenever challenged, the police were fearful of making mistakes or leaving themselves open to the charge of interfering with religious freedoms – a delicate subject given the ways in which religious liberties had been trampled on in the 1930s and early 1940s when the police served as instruments of the fascist state in investigating potentially deviant organizations such as religious movements.”

The police might’ve had cold feet, but independent journalists were hot on Aum’s trail. Like the ill-fated lawyer, Sakamoto, many writers and reporters kept pulling at the loose threads the cult had left dangling in the wind. According to Ian Reader:

“The story, however, soon entered the public domain. On January 1, 1995 the Yomiuri Shinbun, Japan’s biggest newspaper, carried a story stating that the substance that had damaged vegetation [near Aum headquarters] in July 1994 had been sarin, the substance used in the Matsumoto poisonings, and that the police were looking at possible links between the two incidents. For those who did not make the immediate connection with Aum, another national newspaper the Asahi Shinbun, followed up with an article linking the Matsumoto attack to the controversial religious movement Aum Shinrikyo.”

For years, Shoko Asahara had been shamelessly raising his public profile, manicuring his image and puffing up his fame, but this was not the sort of attention he had in mind. The police had kept their distance for a long time, but now, with Japan’s news media biting at their heels, the cops would be forced to act. It was only a matter of time before men with guns and badges started snooping around the compound, waving warrants and knocking on laboratory doors.

So, Asahara did what any guilty man would do. He got rid of the evidence. The Guru ordered the sarin destroyed, the lab dismantled, and the building converted into a harmless temple. But this small act of damage control could not forestall the blinding spotlight that was now trained on the cult. Like a boulder rolling down the hill, gathering more and more momentum, Aum Shinrikyo was on a collision course with the law.

A rational mind, of course, knows when it’s time to cut bait and lay low. To throw in the towel and go underground. But Shoko Asahara was not in possession of a rational mind.

Even with all this negative attention on the cult, all this suspicion and legal scrutiny, Aum Shinrikyo continued to break the law and make sloppy mistakes. At this point, its criminality was pathological, reflexive and self-destructive. And in February of 1995, the Guru discovered that when you push your luck, sometimes luck pushes back. According to Ian Reader:

On February 28, 1995, Aum conducted an even more brazen crime, seizing and abducting Kariya Kiroshi, an 68-year-old public notary from the street in Tokyo in broad daylight.

Why would they do this? Robert Jay Lifton explains:

“Kiroshii had refused to reveal to Aum the location of his sister, who had fled the cult; she had already donated hundreds of thousands of dollars but Aum wanted still more of her considerable wealth. The intent had apparently been only to have Dr. Hayashi inject Kiroshi with the barbiturate thiopental, a “truth serum” that Aum commonly used, in order to obtain information about his sister. But something went wrong—probably the dosage was miscalculated—and Kiroshi died. Asahara ordered the body cremated in the basement.

This particular atrocity,” continues Ian Reader, “ at a time when so much suspicion was already directed at Aum, shows that the movement had lost all semblance of control over its actions. The Kiroshi abduction was the catalyst that brought the forces of law down upon Aum.  

The police could hardly hold off any longer, and it is clear that, by the middle of March 1995, preparations for a massive raid were underway as the police acquired various items of equipment, including gas masks, for this task. The news leaked out that a raid would occur on or around March 20, 1995.

At the Aum compound near Mt. Fuji, the Guru consulted with his inner circle. The police were close, circling like wolves and snapping their jaws. Any day, they’d burst in here with gas-masks and machine guns, and everything would be ruined. The long-promised Armageddon would fizzle before it even began.

The only way to save Aum Shinrikyo and preserve its sacred mission, Asahara believed, was to distract the police in some way. To shift their attention to a larger, more complicated problem. Something that would consume all their time and resources and throw the entire country into a state of confusion.

And then, an idea hit Shoko Asahara like a lightning bolt from heaven. A pure vision, clear as a diamond, smacked him right between his blind eyes. Most of the sarin had been destroyed, but they still had the equipment and precursors and a place to mix them.

Armageddon wasn’t cancelled, it was just…accelerated. /moved up. And so, the Guru told his chemists to get to work. Before the police could conduct their raid, Aum Shinrikyo would launch a preemptive strike against the nation. There was no time to use the Russian helicopter, not enough vans to disperse the gas across a wide enough area. So, they would use the state’s own infrastructure against it. They would plunge a dagger into the country’s heart.

They would use the Tokyo Subway System.

---- OUTRO----

Well guys, that is all the time we have for today.

Next time, in the finale of this two-part series, we will arrive at the climax of our story, the Tokyo Subway Attacks of March 20^th, 1995.

To be honest, this first episode was much, much longer than I originally intended, but I felt it was important to really dig deep into the inner workings of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, so that when they do what they do, we understand exactly why they’re doing it.

So goodbye for now. As always, thanks for spending your  valuable time with me, and I hope you have an awesome day.

This has been Conflicted.

I’ll see you next time.

---- END ----