The Tokyo Subway Sarin Attacks 1995 – Part 2

==== 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.

You are listening to the final installment of a two-part series on the 1995 Tokyo Subway Sarin Attacks.

If you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, I’d definitely recommend doing that before jumping into this one. Last time, we covered some very important concepts, people, and events – and without all that context, you might start to feel like I did the first time I stepped onto a Tokyo subway platform: Confused, overwhelmed, and very, very lost.

But before we arrive at the final stop on our journey, let’s take a few quick minutes to recap the major beats of the previous episode, so we have all those details fresh in our minds.

Last time, we spent the better part of two hours exploring the enigmatic origins of the cult at the center of this story: Aum Shinrikyo.

Our story began in 1986, at the height of Japan’s bubble economy. Thanks to a feverish period of economic growth and astronomical real estate speculation, the little-island-that-could became the second largest economy in the world. And for a brief, shining in moment in time, the Japanese were living large, dropping pallets of cash on every conceivable luxury. But underneath that gold leaf façade, many Japanese people, especially young people, were feeling disenchanted with the money-obsessed, career-oriented culture.

To understand / To put a human face to that aimless ennui, we met a man named Dr. Ikuo Hayashi. Employed as a cardiac surgeon at a prestigious Tokyo hospital, Hayashi had plenty of money and a beautiful family to spend it on. But still, he was deeply unhappy. The good doctor was in a bad way – depressed, self-loathing and starved for a sense of purpose…until, that is, he discovered the teachings of a man named Shoko Asahara.

Shoko Asahara was a self-styled “Guru”, a purple-robed religious leader who built a hardcore following out of a weekly yoga class / yoga studio and a hare-brained mix of New Age gibberish. As the author Haruki Murakami put it:

“He was not deterred by the knowledge, whether conscious or not, that his ideas and images were recycled junk. Asahara deliberately cobbled together bits and pieces from all around him (the way that Spielberg’s ET assembles a device for communicating with his home planet out of odds and ends in the family garage) and brought to them a singular flow, a current that darkly reflected the inner ghosts of his own mind.”

As writer David E. Kaplan describes, “Asahara blended mystical Buddhism with Hindu deities, added the physical rigor of yoga, and, from Christianity, drew on the concept of Armageddon.”

Despite his lack of originality, Asahara’s ideas clicked with dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people, including the [aforementioned] cardiac surgeon Dr. Ikuo Hayashi. By the late 1980s, the cult of the Supreme Truth, or Aum Shinrikyo, boasted a fanatical following, a huge business network and financial assets that sat comfortably in the 9-digit territory.

But the real turning point in this story – the place where it all went wrong – was when Shoko Asahara attempted to make the leap from religious leader to political leader. After a disastrous and embarrassing run for Japanese parliament in 1990, Shoko Asahara and his inner circle came to the conclusion that the world was never going to embrace their philosophy – therefore, it had to be destroyed. To make a better world, they were going to have burn down the old one. As one former member of the cult put it:

Asahara was scheming to bring about tremendous destruction. He thought that Armageddon would not happen spontaneously, so his idea was to make it happen. His idea is so dangerous that I still can’t sleep at night just imagining it.

To bring about Armageddon, Aum Shinrikyo used its substantial financial resources to procure a veritable toybox of death-dealing materials. From rocket launchers and submachine guns, to Russian helicopters and anthrax, Asahara gathered the means to make his apocalyptic visions a reality. But of all the weapons the Guru assembled, the one that held the most potential for mass casualties was the widely feared, but rarely used chemical nerve agent, sarin gas.

At their headquarters near the rural village of Kamikuishiki, in the shadow of Mt Fuji, the Asahara’s cultists began manufacturing sarin with the intent to kill large numbers of people and initiate Armageddon, from which they would emerge the only survivors.

But every big project needs a test run, and in June of 1994, Aum Shinrikyo released sarin in the city of Matsumoto, killing as many as 8 people and cementing its transition from a misguided cult of personality to full-on terrorist organization. As one researcher put it:

“Aum Shinrikyo was thus a new type of terrorist organization, combining elements of a doomsday cult and a large-scale criminal enterprise.”

But in many ways, the attack on Matsumoto was the beginning of the end for Aum. The cult did not take credit for the gassing, obviously, but Japanese authorities and members of the press were able to connect the dots fairly easily. Aum Shinrikyo was nothing if not sloppy, and they left behind a trail of clues and incriminating evidence which lead back to the cult’s Fuji compound. Newspapers from Hokkaido to Hiroshima speculated that Aum Shinrikyo and its insane Guru were responsible for the Matsumoto attacks.

By March of 1995, the national police were ready to make their move. They started making preparations for a surprise raid on the Aum compound near Mt. Fuji. But for all their careful planning, there was one thing the cops didn’t count on. As it turned out, Aum Shinrikyo had members everywhere – and I do mean everywhere.Including, unfortunately, the Japanese military. As the writer DW Brackett explains:

“At this point, the biggest gaffe the police made was the steps they took within the department to acquire protective gear to shield their policemen against the chemical threat they knew they faced at the Kamikuishiki compound.

In mid-March, the week before their planned raid on Aum facilities, the police asked the Japanese army to supply them with three hundred gas masks and protective suits. This unusual request was picked up by two alert army sergeants who were members of Aum. They proceeded to ask a few questions and then informed the sect leadership via an open computer network that the police raid was scheduled for early the following week, March 22.”

Armed with this vital information, Shoko Asahara convened what one historian called a “war council” in the back of a limousine on the night of March 18^th, 1995. There, behind tinted glass, the Guru and his disciples made the fateful decision to launch a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway as a sort of diversionary tactic. The police, the delusional thinking went, would be so distracted by the nerve gas attack that it would allow Aum Shinrikyo to forestall the impending police raid.

The date chosen for the attack was Monday, March 20^th, 1995; proof that even history hates Mondays. There was, however, one small problem with this plan. Aum Shinrikyo had recently destroyed all of its sarin stockpiles as a cautionary measure in the event of a surprise raid. But bitter irony aside, the Guru had made his decision and Armageddon was nigh. So, it fell to the cult’s scientists and chemical engineers to somehow produce enough sarin over the course of a long weekend to attack the most populous city on earth.

And that, folks, is where we left off last time.

And now that we’ve eaten our vegetables, we can get to the main course.

If Part 1 was about the cause, Part 2 is about the effect. In this episode, we will attempt to reconstruct that fateful day, minute- by-minute. We’ll hear from witnesses and bystanders, and survivors and train drivers, doctors and first responders. We’ll try and piece together a chaotic day into a…hopefully coherent narrative. And after we’ve done that / We’ll also examine the fallout of Aum’s terrorist attack – not only for the cult, but for the thousands of people who were affected by it.  

But enough of my jabbering. With that preamble out of the way, let’s get started.

Welcome to the Tokyo Subway Sarin Attacks – Part 2.

==== BEGIN  ===== 

SAKURA SEASON

It’s Saturday, March 18^th , 1995

Less than 48 hours before / Two days before the subway attack.

We’re in Tokyo, Japan, and all across the city, in its parks and groves and gardens, the buds of spring are just beginning to bloom. As the air warms and the winter frost retreats, flowers of every shade paint the city in splashes of crimson, violet, and baby blue. From hanging wisteria to delicate daffodils, plums and poppies and peonies.

Yes, spring is a very special time in Japan.

But the most anticipated seasonal flower has yet to grace the stage. The big one. The one that brings out all the tourists with their scrapbooks and smiles and disposable cameras. In about a week, the first wave of cherry blossoms – the famous sakura – is expected to bloom.

In the modern day, Japanese cherry blossoms are so well-known that they’ve essentially become a cliché; fodder for travel influencers and AI-generated screensavers. Year after year, millions of foreign tourists flock to Japan to take their next profile pic beneath a sea of pink petals. And if that’s you – no shade, of course. I myself have done this. And trust me, / And I can tell ya, it was absolutely worth it.

But 30 years ago, in 1995, cherry blossom season was a much more homegrown affair. The gaijin and their travel agents hadn’t gotten wind of the phenomenon just yet, and so Sakura blooms were mostly reserved for the Japanese.

For centuries, the cherry blossom has been revered in Japan as a powerful symbol for the frailty of human life. Those little pink petals, fragile as tissue paper, only live for a week or two. They bud, they bloom, they flower into spectacular beauty, and then…just as quickly, they flutter to the ground, dry up, and rot. A poignant metaphor for human life, if ever there was one.

Well, by the early 1990s, the persistent tendrils of commercialism had crept into this cultural tradition. As Sakura season approaches, Japanese stores line their shelves with a panoply of seasonal products. For a limited time only, get your Cherry blossom tea, cherry blossom cakes, cherry blossom lip gloss, hair clips, bath soap, and plates. And for the kiddos, Hello Kitty plush dolls in Sakura print kimonos. Because after all, who says “poignant’ can’t be profitable?

But this year, 1995, Sakura season is a little more muted and subdued. In the wake of the Great Hanshin Earthquake - the natural disaster that killed 6.000 people as they slept in their beds in the early hours of January 17^th - the fragility of life is all too clear.

No, this year, Sakura season will pass not with giddy purchases but sober reflection. A time to count your blessings, cherish your loved ones, and hope that the blind predations of fate and tragedy stay their hand.

But unfortunately, tragedy is coming.

And 70 miles west of Tokyo, one of its architects is hard at work.

BROWN SARIN

At the Aum Shinrikyo compound, in the shadow of Mt Fuji, there is a large two-story building. White, nearly windowless, with all the charm of a morgue/crematorium – and a slightly worse smell. Most members of the cult are not allowed to go into this building. It is off-limits to all but the most senior monks and renunciates. And that’s because it is a laboratory for creating chemical weapons.

Inside the lab, amidst a tangle of pipes, hoses, beakers and boilers, a man named Seiichi Endo is having what some people might call a panic attack.

Endo (that’s E-N-D-O) is not just any / an ordinary member of the cult. Within the rigid leadership hierarchy, he is very near the top of the pyramid. In title, he is the “Minister of Health and Welfare”. But in practice, Endo is the head of Aum’s biological and chemical weapons program.

There aren’t many pictures of Seiichi Endo in existence, but one of the few that does exist, shows a handsome young man with shiny, shoulder-length hair, a square jaw and prescription glasses. This was the PR-friendly photograph that Endo took as a political candidate for Aum’s short-lived campaign in the 1990 parliamentary elections. Five years later, on March 18^th, 1995, Endo does not look like that at all.

The long black hair is gone, razored-down to a more efficient buzz cut. The square jaw is clenched in concentration, and the glasses are fogged up with sweat. In short, Endo is extremely stressed out – because his boss, the Guru, has given him an impossible task with an impossible deadline.  

Somehow, someway, Endo has to produce enough sarin gas to attack the Tokyo subway system. And he has to do it in 36 hours – basically from scratch.

A few months ago, this would have been no problem at all. A few months ago, they had liters and liters of sarin, with a purity as high as 70%, just begging to fill the lungs of Aum’s enemies. But then, in the aftermath of the Matsumoto attack, journalists had started snooping around, writing articles and bringing unwelcome attention to the big white building. So, out of an abundance of caution, the Guru ordered the sarin and all the evidence of its production destroyed. Only to demand its miraculous reappearance 2 months later.

But luckily for Seiichi Endo, not all of it has been destroyed.

Buried in the black volcanic soil near the compound, tucked carefully into a cache box, are a few remaining chemical precursors. The building blocks of sarin nerve gas. With the scrape of a shovel and a shower of dirt, the cache box is unearthed and the dormant lab equipment rumbles to life.

It’s only been a few hours since Endo received the order from Shoko Asahara to produce a fresh batch of sarin nerve gas, but the clock is ticking; the minutes draining away like sand in an hourglass. In less than two days, he has to perform a miracle. Like Jesus turning water into wine, Endo has to turn a few liters of sludge into high-quality nerve gas. But making chemical weapons takes time, patience and a steady hand. Three things that Endo does not have right now. This is a rush job, and it will produce rush results.

In the bowels of his laboratory, Endo hunches over barrels and flasks like a suburban Dad making homebrew in his garage. The key difference being that most homebrew doesn’t require industrial protective gear. Inside the barrel, the liquid bubbles and burps and steams – reducing itself to primordial viscosity. Beneath his rubber gas mask, Endo’s face is wet with sweat. If he were a reality show chef, the atmosphere in this particular kitchen would be akin to the season finale of Chopped, with 30 seconds on the clock. And like any time-crunched cook, Endo makes mistakes…

After a few tense and torturous hours, the sarin is finally done. And when he looks at the finished product, Endo realizes something is very, very wrong. Ideally, liquid sarin should be clear and colorless. This is…brown. When he checks the purity level, his heart drops. Only 30%. Less than half the potency of the batches used in the Matsumoto Attack last year. But - Endo yanks off his gas mask – it’ll have to do.

It is a decision that will massive importance for what’s about to happen. The Aum scientist doesn’t know it yet, but his incompetence will save thousands of lives.

Emerging from the lab like Orpheus from the underworld, Endo marches across the compound to inform the Guru of his lackluster progress. These days, Shoko Asahara’s mood is like a magic 8 ball - you never really know what kind of response you’re going to get. So, Endo braces himself for a scathing tirade of anger from his spiritual master.

With his head hung low, Endo bows before Asahara and tells him that there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that we do have enough sarin to attack Tokyo. The bad news is that it’s very poor quality. He just…didn’t have enough time. As Endo reportedly said:

“It is completed, but it’s still not pure. It is a mixture of sarin and other impurities.”

But the Guru is in a gracious, magnanimous mood today; and his response surprises Endo:

“That’s okay.”

At the end of the day, the Guru is a practical man, and he knows that killers can’t be choosers. As the writer D.W. Brackett puts it:

“30% was by no means harmless, just less harmful than it could be […] And impure sarin was better than no sarin at all.”

With his work blessed by Asahara, Seiichi Endo goes back to his lab and begins packaging the sarin for tomorrow’s attack. According to Brackett, the scientist and his assistants:

“Cut sheets of plastic wrapping into 8x8 inch squares, and using a sealing machine they converted them into bags with each corner specifically cut to create an opening. A little over 20 ounces of sarin were carefully poured into each bag, which was then sealed.

Eleven bags were made.”

Aum’s holy weapon had been forged. Now all that was left to do, was place it in the hands of holy warriors.

HOLY WARRIORS

Several hours later, at about 3AM on Monday morning, two pairs of headlights cut through the darkness around the Aum Shinrikyo compound. The metal gates creak open, a hand waves them through, and two cars park near the chemical weapons lab. The car doors swing open and five men step out of the vehicles. Their names are:

Kenichi Hirose,

Toru Toyoda,

Masato Yokoyama,

Yasuo Hayashi,

and our old friend, the former cardiac surgeon, Dr. Ikuo Hayashi.

(No relation to the aforementioned Yasuo)

This is the attack team. The five men who – in just a few hours - will board the subway and unleash sarin gas on an unsuspecting city, triggering Armageddon and the rise of Aum Shinrikyo’s new utopia. Each one of these men is nervous and scared, but they are crystal-clear on what they have to do. The previous day, while Seiichi Endo was agonizing over chemical formulas and sarin impurities, the five-man team had huddled over a map and discussed their plan of attack.

> 

If you look at a map of the 1995 Tokyo rail system, it looks a lot like a circuit board, a tangled nest of nodes and wires – red ones and green ones and purple ones – crisscrossing the Tokyo area along 189 miles of track.

In a way, these terrorists were spoiled for choice. There were so many potential targets to attack, literally hundreds of stations and platforms. But the strike team was only five strong, and there were only 11 bags of sarin. So the question facing Dr. Hayashi and the rest of the team, was how could they maximize the damage of their payloads and expose as many people as possible at one time?

The answer was Christmas colors.

The Green Line, the Red Line, and the Silver Line – all converged at a central location in downtown Tokyo – a crowded hub/thoroughfare called Kasumigaseki Station. In the tangle of wires that was the city rail system, that was the biggest knot, the densest concentration of people for the largest window of time. As Brackett writes:

“The cult leadership ordered the sarin attacks to take place on the Hibiya (silver), Marunouchi (red), and Chiyoda (green) subway lines, all main arteries that feed into the Kasumigaseki Station, and then confirmed that the nerve gas would be unleashed at 8AM on Monday, March 20^th, during the height of rush hour.”

[…]“The attack was intended to spread the nerve gas among five subway cars on the three lines going into Kasumigaseki. When the trains stopped to let out and take on passengers, the odorless and colorless gas would spread from the cars and contaminate the station platforms along the way. If all this went as planned, five subway cars, each approaching from a different direction and filled with sarin, would crisscross through the busy Kasumigaseki intersection shortly after 8am, leaving behind a number of poisoned subway stops. Anyone headed toward Kasumigaseki on the three lines shortly before or after 8am [tens of thousands of people] stood an excellent chance of riding straight into the deadly gas.” 

The strike point for the attack was also chosen for its symbolic importance. As one researcher put it:

“The political message of the Tokyo attack was obvious. The three subway lines that the culprits targeted all passed through the bureaucratic nerve center of Kasumigaseki –  an area which houses various ministries, as well as the Tokyo District Court, High Court, and Supreme Court. The metro lines also served the central business district of Ōtemachi, and the popular retail districts of Shinjuku and Ginza, some of the busiest areas in the capital.”

“The poison-gas attack,” adds Jonathon B Tucker, “was clearly intended to kill large numbers of government bureaucrats on their way to work.”

And with that, the map was rolled up with a snap.  

The targets were chosen. The team was briefed. The sarin was packaged. Almost everything was ready to go. But there was one last weapon to add to the arsenal of Aum’s holy warriors. One last piece of equipment upon which the entire operation hinged:

The common umbrella.

There are many sophisticated ways to gas people with sarin. When the Iraqi Army did it to Kurdish villagers in 1988, they used bombs, rockets and ballistic munitions. When Aum Shinrikyo did it in the city of Matsumoto in 1994, they used a refrigeration truck outfitted with a system to heat and evaporate the liquid, which then floated through the air toward the target. But by March of 1995, Aum didn’t have any of that stuff. Out of fear, they had disposed of all their advanced equipment – along with anything else connecting them to the Matsumoto attack.

And so, for the Tokyo subway operation, they would have to rely on more…primitive dispersal methods. After all, how DO you discreetly release toxic nerve agents, in a public place, when the liquid is double laminated inside a thick plastic pouch? Well, you put in on the ground and you poke it with something really, really sharp.

While the five-man attack team was gathering for their final planning session, another Aum cultist made a midnight run to 7-Eleven, where he bought, according to Brackett:

“Seven umbrellas, the kind that had long metal points extending out from the top of the roof. It must have seemed an odd thing to the all-night convenience store clerk in Fujinomiya, a tourist city near the Aum compound, when [the Aum man] strode in at 2 o’clock in the morning and purchased seven vinyl umbrellas; it was not raining, and cheap convenience store umbrellas are usually bought by people caught in a sudden downpour.”

Back at Aum headquarters, the tips of the umbrellas were sharpened until they were, in Brackett’s words, “icepick sharp”, and then given to each member of the team.

Without any advanced dispersal equipment, the attackers would have to rely on good-old fashioned physics to release the sarin. Once they boarded the subway, they would have to quietly puncture the bags with the tips of their umbrellas, and then disembark the train before the liquid converted to gas. Naturally, this…low-tech dispersal method made several members of the strike team extremely nervous, and rightfully so.

If they poked the bags too gently, the plastic wouldn’t break, and the sarin would stay safely contained inside. But if they poked too hard – if it gushed onto their leg or sprayed onto their hands, the dose would be fatal. “One small drop on the skin was enough to kill or incapacitate,” writes Brackett, ‘a splash big enough to wet your socks was certain death – all of them knew that.”

Despite their fervor, no one wanted to be a martyr for the cause, so just to be sure, the team practiced with their umbrellas on a few dummy bags filled with water. And for a little extra peace of mind, they were given sarin antidote pills to take a couple hours before the attack. They were also equipped with a syringe of atropine sulfate, a “drug effective against treating sarin poison,” according to DW Brackett. Dr. Ikuo Hayashi had prepared the syringes himself.

By the time the sun broke over the horizon on March 20^th, and dawn placed a corona of pink light on Fuji’s summit, the five Aum terrorists were already on their way back to Tokyo, their bags of sarin cradled gently in their laps. Or far more likely, stashed safely in the trunk.

Meanwhile, all across the metroplex, the city was waking up. Steam curled off pots of black coffee. Alarm clocks chittered and buzzed. The neon signs powered down and the school buses started up. For millions of people, it was just another Monday.

For some of them, it would be the last Monday.

---- MUSIC BREAK ----

AYA’S COMMUTE

It’s March 20^th, 1995.

A Monday morning.

And Aya Kazaguchi is trying not to be late for work.

Aya, that’s A-Y-A, has never been late for work. Not once. Not even with a 40-minute commute both ways and two station changes along the way. As a 23-year-old woman just starting out in the corporate workforce, Aya knows that it’s very important not to be late for work. Employers don’t usually appreciate that kind of thing. And so, every morning, she wakes up, inhales breakfast, does her hair and makeup and rides the subway for almost an hour to arrive at her job at 9:05 on the dot. A full five minutes before the workday begins, in fact. As a wise man once said: if you’re not early, you’re late.

Who knows, Aya thinks, maybe someday soon, if she works really, really hard, she’ll get a promotion. And frankly, she could really use that promotion. If she got it, she might be able to move out of her parents’ house, and get a place of her very own.

But as Aya trots down the stairs to the subway platform, her black hair swinging, her business heels clicking, she has a little extra pep in her step. Because today, her routine is slightly different. For whatever reason, some big wig at the office decided that on this particular Monday, the weekly stand-up meeting would start at 8:30, instead of 9:30. So, this morning, Aya is on the train about an hour earlier than she normally would be.

Once she’s at the subway platform, Aya smooths her skirt, checks her watch, and waits for the telltale melody of the Chiyoda train – the Green Line. Japanese trains don’t just arrive, you see, they chime.

Back in the early days of the Tokyo metro, someone decided that harsh buzzes and tuneless beeps were not a very pleasant accompaniment to a long commute. So, the Transportation Ministry hired a composer to create unique departure melodies for each individual station and rail line. Instead of monotone beeps and a metallic shriek, you hear something like this:

[CHIYODA LINE TONE]

That way, if you’re train is leaving soon, you can recognize the melody and hustle up to catch it. It’s one of those little details that makes the Tokyo subway just a little more bearable for corporate commuters like Aya Kazaguchi. Of course, it’s not a totally pleasant experience. As she steps onto the train and the doors hiss shut behind her, Aya has to be mindful of some of the more universal perils of public transportation. Occasionally, a male commuter might “accidentally” bump into her, or pass a hand over her body. As she recalls:

“You get “feelie” guys too, sometimes. No fun.”

But this morning, Aya enjoys a relatively relaxing and grope-free commute. So she leans back, closes her eyes, and tries to catch a little nap before the chime of her final stop jolts her back into consciousness. And because her eyes are closed, she does not see the 40something year-old man at the front of the train car. The one with thick glasses, a cheap umbrella and some sort of package wrapped in newspaper.

HAYASHI’S DROP

Just a few yards away from Aya Kazaguchi, Dr. Ikuo Hayashi, holy warrior of Aum Shinrikyo, gently places his bags of sarin on the floor of the train. For the past few minutes, Hayashi has been wrestling with what he is about to do, agonizing over the gravity of it. As he remembered:

“When I looked around, the sight of many commuters leapt to my eyes. I am a doctor and in theory I’ve been working to save people’s lives. Tormented by pangs of conscience, I hesitated and thought a number of times that I should stop. But I couldn’t go against orders.”

After a fleeting moment of guilt and hesitation, Hayashi takes a deep breath and stabs his sharpened umbrella tip down through the newspaper and into the plastic bag of sarin. Once punctured, the sarin leaks out with a “springy gush”, according to Hayashi.

In that critical moment, Hayashi might’ve expected dozens of heads to suddenly whip in his direction, accusatory index fingers pointing at him, strangers holding him down and calling the cops. But…no one did anything. No one seemed to notice. I just killed them all…and they don’t even realize it.

But unless he wants to join them in death, Hayashi needs to get off this train RIGHT NOW.

Carefully avoiding the rapidly spreading puddle of liquid at his feet, Hayashi steps off the Green Line at the next stop. He walks through the station, past the attendants, up to the street and into the air-conditioned interior of the waiting getaway car.

As he sinks into the soft leather of the passenger seat, Dr. Hayashi tries to remember what the Guru said. He’s not killing people, he’s helping them – transforming their souls and elevating their karma. Next stop, nirvana. But for some reason, Shoko Asahara’s sermons ring a little hollow right now. At least, Hayashi thinks, his part in this necessary tragedy is over.

One down, four to go.

Crisis of conscience aside, Dr. Hayashi’s sarin drop went relatively smoothly. One of his compatriots, however, was less fortunate.  

INSTANT KARMA

Less than a mile away, on the eastbound Red Line, a younger and less experienced Aum terrorist is having…technical difficulties. 30-year-old Kenichi Hirose – that’s H-I-R-O-S-E – is discovering the practical challenges of trying to discreetly release a chemical weapon inside a human sardine can. As D.W. Brackett writes:

“It was rush hour, all the cars going to Tokyo were packed, and all Hirose was able to find was jam-packed standing room crushed against the door. Crowded in by wall-to-wall people and trying hard not to impale anyone with his bayonet-sharp umbrella, he struggled to ease his shoulder bag off so he could retrieve the sarin pouches. But in the process, the newspaper in which they were folded came undone, fluttering at the top of the shoulder bag while he dropped two plastic bags containing the sarin at his feet.”

Flustered and exposed, Hirose is hit with a sudden wave of remorse. As Haruki Murakami describes:

“Overwhelmed by the horror of what he had been commanded to do, [Hirose] he was filled with an intense desire to leave the station without going through with it. He [later] confessed to feeling “envious of the people who could just walk out of there.”

In retrospect, that was the crucial moment when things might have been very different. Had he simply left the station, hundreds of people would have been spared a major derailment in their lives … But Ken’ichi Hirose gritted his teeth and overcame his doubts. “This is nothing less than salvation,” he told himself. The act of doing it is what matters, and besides, it’s not just him, all the others are doing the same thing too. He couldn’t let the others down.”

In a swell of faith, Hirose jams the tip of his umbrella down into the naked pouches, ripping the bags open and spilling sarin onto the floor. Panicked and flushed with adrenaline, Hirose shoves his way through the crowds and squeezes out the subway doors before they close, sealing the other passengers inside. As the train pulls away, Hirose consoles himself with a simple thought:

“The [Guru’s] teachings tell us that human feelings are the result of seeing things in the wrong way. We must overcome our human feelings.”

Practically leaping up the steps, two-at-a-time, Hirose emerges from the subway station into the bright fresh Tokyo air. But to his mounting alarm, those deep gulps of oxygen don’t seem to satisfy his lungs. His chest feels tight, his thigh starts to twitch, and Hirose quickly realizes that in his rush to get out of the train car, he somehow came in contact with the sarin. Maybe a microdroplet splashed on his skin or he briefly inhaled a fraction of a fume, but that tiny amount is all it takes to kill him. Limping to the getaway car, Hirose fumbles in his backpack for the antidote syringe, the atropine sulphate that Dr. Hayashi had given each member of the team. Once in the backseat of the car, Hirose jams the needle into his leg, hoping that it’s not too late. As he recalled thinking:

“What if I just die like this?”

Karmic justice, however, was not at work that Monday morning, and Kenichi Hirose recovered from his sarin poisoning in a matter of hours. Thank God, he thought, for the resourceful Dr. Hayashi, his antidote syringes, and the Guru’s protection.  

But thousands of other subway commuters did not have a syringe of atropine sulphate in their purse or briefcase. And every second that passed, every platform reached, they were exposed to higher and higher quantities of sarin - much more than the excitable and bumbling saboteur Kenichi Hirose.

For the other three Aum terrorists, the remaining sarin drops –  one more on the Red Line and two on the Silver Line – went off without a hitch or a glitch. As D.W. Brackett writes:

“By 8 AM the five members of the Aum attack team had struck their targets and were in the process of making their getaway. But for thousands of passengers riding to work on the three major subway lines, the nerve gas attack was just beginning. On the floors of the five subway cars, liquid Sarin sloshed out of punctured plastic envelopes, seeping through several layers of newspaper, and then mixed with the heated air inside the trains. It turned into a deadly vapor that partially filled the cars and drifted into the open platforms of the stations where the contaminated trains stopped.”

SHORTNESS OF BREATH

Back on the sound bound Green Line, near the heart of downtown Tokyo, 23-year-old Aya Kazaguchi jerks awake. The young woman’s brief nap has been interrupted, not by a chime or a bump or a groping hand…but a feeling. As she described:

“I notice it’s hard to breathe. It’s like, there’s this tight pressure in my chest, and as much as I try to inhale, no breath comes in … “That’s odd,” I’m thinking, “must be because I got up early” (laughs). I thought I was just spaced out. I’m pretty bad at waking up anyway, but this was just a little too stuffy. It was okay while the door was open and let in some fresh air, but once the door closed at Otemachi the stuffiness got worse. How can I describe it? It was as if the air itself had shut down, even time had shut down … no, that’s a bit exaggerated. […] When you fall down and you wham your chest, sometimes you can’t breathe. You inhale all right, but can’t push the air out again—it was kind of like that”[…]

“Strange,” I’m thinking. That’s when the people hanging on to the hand straps started coughing.”

Another Green Line passenger, 26-year-old Kiyoka Izumi, remembered:

“I inhaled, then suddenly my breathing froze—just like that. I was traveling in the first car on the Chiyoda (Green) Line. […] When I took a deep breath, I got this sudden pain. [...] it was like I’d been shot or something, all of a sudden my breathing completely stopped. Like, if I inhaled any more, all my guts would come spilling right out of my mouth! Everything became a vacuum, […] mean, I’d never felt so bad. It was that intense.”

It wasn’t long before the commuters on the Green Line located the source of their discomfort. As Aya recalled:

“That’s when I look, and by the door opposite me there’s something wrapped in newspaper. I was standing right in front of it and hadn’t even noticed. It was about the size of a lunch box and the newspaper it was wrapped in was dripping wet. Water or some kind of liquid seeping out all around. I took a closer look, and the thing was sloshing around to the rhythm of the train. I’m a downtown girl, so I know when you go to the fish shop, they wrap it in newspaper. That’s what I thought it was: someone had bought fish or something and left it behind. But who’d buy fish and be traveling on the train first thing in the morning? One middle-aged man also seemed to think it was odd and had gone over, just staring at it. He was forty-something, a salaryman. He didn’t touch it, though, just peered at it like, “What’s that?”

THE NOSE KNOWS

A few miles away, on the Red Line and the Silver Line, other passengers were starting to notice the presence of the sarin as well. But in contrast to the Green Line, the first thing that Red and Silver passengers experienced was a strong but wholly unrecognizable smell. According to a Mr. Mitsuo Arima:

“That day, I sit down and straightaway I notice an acid smell. Okay, trains often smell funny, but this was no ordinary smell, let me tell you. I remember a lady sitting across from me covering her nose with a handkerchief, but otherwise there was nothing obviously wrong.”

Normally, sarin gas is odorless, colorless and generally undetectable. Until, of course, it kills you. But because of the impurities that had crept into the sarin during Seiichi Endo’s hurried production process, the brown solvent produced a distinct and unpleasant odor. As one passenger, an automotive employee named Kenji Ohashi, recalled:

“At first, I thought there must be some drunk making the place stink, like when a drunk throws up. It wasn’t a sharp smell, it was a little sweet, like something rotten. Not like paint thinner, either. We do paint jobs, too, so I know what thinner smells like. It didn’t make your nose sting like that.”

Funny thing about the human brain – no two passengers seemed to describe the smell in exactly the same way. Their recollections vary wildly. For some people, it smelled like rubbing alcohol or paraffin or cleaning spray.  Others described it as smelling like decomposing fruit. For one older man named Shintaro Komada, it actually smelled kinda good:

“It was somehow syrupy sweet. I almost thought it was perfume, not unpleasant at all. If it had smelled really bad everyone would have been in a panic. Syrupy sweet—that’s what it was.”

Well, whatever the exact profile of the smell, if the passengers were smelling the sarin, that meant they were breathing the sarin. And what came next, was not pleasant at all. As a Red Line passenger named Soichi Inagawa recalled:

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“That day I sat in the first seat of the third car. Then I saw a puddle in the area between the rows of seats. This big pool was spreading, as if a liquid had leaked out. It was the color of beer and smelled funny. In fact it stank, which is why I noticed it.”

Another thing bothered me: there was a man sitting alone right next to the puddle. I thought he was sleeping when I got on, but gradually his posture was slipping in a very odd way. “Strange, is he ill or what?” Then, just before Nakano-sakaue, I heard a thud. I was reading my book, but I looked up and saw the man had fallen right out of his seat and was lying on the floor faceup.”

CHEMICAL PROCESSES

At this point, before what’s about to happen happens, we should probably take a moment to really understand what sarin gas does to the human body. Now, I am not remotely qualified to speak about science or biology in any degree, by any Degree, but I will do my layman’s best.

So, when sarin enters your bloodstream – through either the skin or lungs - it immediately starts attacking your central nervous system. These kinds of abstract chemical processes are very hard to picture– at least for me - so to visualize what’s going on, I usually reach for some kind of metaphor or analogy. Maybe that’ll work for you too:

Think of your nervous system as a traffic grid – an infinite network of roads and highways and intersecting streets. Nerve impulses travel along these different pathways, telling the various parts of your body what to do, when to do it, and when to stop doing it. Kind of like green, yellow and red traffic lights. Just as those lights regulate the flow of traffic, a healthy nervous system will regulate the involuntary actions of your muscles and organs.

Green light flex, Red light relax. Green light contract, Red light expand.

What sarin does – more or less -  is turn all the lights green [SNAP] at once. You can imagine the effect that might have in a crowded city. Cars crashing and t-boning and plowing into each other. Sarin works the same way.

It causes your muscles to start firing and flexing, and never stop firing or flexing. Basically, your entire body starts clenching itself and loses the ability to unclench itself.

Which means the muscles become fatigued, which means they cramp up, which means they shut down and become paralyzed. We usually think of “muscles” as meaning the stuff we admire in the mirror- the biceps, the triceps; the glutes, delts, abs, lats and pecs. But your eyeballs have muscles, your diaphragm is a muscle, your heart is a muscle, and when those things stop working, you have a serious problem.

And the first sign of this problem, the first biological ‘check engine’ light of sarin poisoning, is darkening vision. Which the hundreds of passengers on the Tokyo subway started to experience en masse, just after 8 o’clock AM.

IN THE DARK

As one passenger on the Red Line, Shintaro Komada, recalled:

“It was around the time we reached Ginza that I noticed the car interior was pitch black when I opened my eyes, as if I was sitting in a cinema.”

“Everything before my eyes grew dark,” a man named Koichi Sakata reported, “like I had sunglasses on.”

Another passenger, Mitsuo Arima, remembered:

I got off at Shinjuku-gyoemmae, except it was incredibly dark, like somebody had switched off all the lights. It had been a bright day when I left home, but when I exited above ground everything was dim. I thought the weather had taken a turn for the worse, but I looked up and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.”

None of these people had a clue what was happening to them, but the sarin was causing the tiny muscles in their eyes to continually contract, narrowing their pupils, and limiting the amount of light that could be let in. As a passenger named Kozo Ishino recalled:

“I went to the bathroom and washed my eyes, then looked in the mirror. And what do I see but my pupils are like tiny dots.”

But even with the onset of these alarming symptoms – most passengers remained relatively calm, believing that this was some mild irritant or even a personal medical issue, rather than an attack on the subway at large. As one Red Line passenger, Ikuko Nakayama recalled:

“No one said a thing, everyone was so quiet. No response, no communication. I lived in America for a year, and believe me, if the same thing had happened in America there would have been a real scene. With everyone shouting, “What’s going on here?” and coming together to find the cause.”

D.W. Brackett elaborates on this phenomenon:

The popular image of a nerve gas attack is a sudden mass onset of horrific physical symptoms, followed by panic and hysteria as the victims struggle to escape the scene. Under tightly controlled circumstances, such as the gassing of people in a sealed room, this scenario is possible. But the Tokyo subway attack was anything but tightly controlled.

Once the gas (only 30% pure to begin with) was released in the cars, its effectiveness was limited by a number of factors, not the least of which was the rather haphazard way in which it was dispersed.

In the very early stages of the attack, those first minutes when the gas began to form in the stricken cars and people were affected by it, there was a little if any panic. First one person, then another became sickened. Some noticed a strange odor, probably caused by the impurities in the Saran. Others had stinging eyes and coughing fits. Some foamed at the mouth, and a few became nauseated and began retching.

The degree of injury depended on where people were located in relation to the spreading gas and how much of it they inhaled. Some persons were able to leave the cars and station platforms with only mild symptoms or none at all, while others had odd sensations but felt well enough to proceed on to work, only to be sick and after they were at their desks.

But as the gas continued flooding the subway system, and found its way into the lungs of more and more people, it quickly became clear to the passengers, the subway employees, and the city authorities, that they were in the midst of a deliberate terrorist attack.

And things were only going to get worse from there.

--- MUSIC BREAK ---

TV TOKYO NEWS

It’s 9 o’clock in the morning on March 20^th, 1995.

One hour after Dr. Ikuo Hayashi and his fellow terrorists released sarin gas onto the Tokyo Subway system.

We’re on a one-way street in downtown Tokyo, surrounded by glittering high-rises, half-finished skyscrapers and multi-story apartment blocks. This area, right at the heart of the city’s business and administrative district, is the kind of well-maintained thoroughfare where the paint is always fresh, the crossing signs always work, and last night’s trash is gone before you can say “$200 fine”

But this orderly, pristine scene is suddenly interrupted, by the screech of tire rubber and the grinding of asphalt, as a big white van zips down the street, taking corners like it’s auditioning for the next installment of Fast & Furious.

This particular van, an irredeemably ugly and virtually indestructible Toyota HiAce, has no business driving at these kinds of speeds, on these kinds of streets. But this morning, time is of the essence. There’s a breaking story at stake.

On the side of this ugly white van, painted in big blue letters, are the words “TOKYO TV”. The vehicle belongs to Channel 12 News, a popular television station in the metro area, one of several journalistic outfits on the search for today’s big scoop.

At the wheel of this speed demon, working the stick shift like a surgeon, is a 54-year-old man named Minoru Miyata. That’s M-I-Y-A-T-A. Miyata is one of Channel 12’s best drivers, and on a normal day, it is his job to ferry the station’s news crews - its camera men, video editors and reporters – to wherever news is breaking. Preferably without breaking any traffic laws.

Today was supposed to be a normal day. A simple and uneventful excursion to shoot stock footage near the financial district. Trees and bees, birds and B-roll – that sort of thing. The inoffensive wallpaper of a nightly news segment.

But then, the call came in from the news station: There’s something happening down at Kasumigaseki crossing, squawked the voice on the line, at the big subway junction near the government ministries. And whatever it is…it’s big. So take your van, your camera guy, and get your ass down there right now. And Miyata, don’t take the scenic route.

Not one to sleep on a hot lead, Mr. Miyata stomps the gas pedal like he’s squashing the world’s biggest spider, and peels off towards Kasumigaseki. As he zips and whips through the streets, past noodle shops and video stores and pedestrians shaking their fists, Miyata knows that the clock is ticking. News stories, after all, are like trophy fish. To catch the big ones, you have to wake up early and hook ‘em fast. Before they swim away, or worse, into someone else’s net. As he explained:

“It’s big trouble if the other stations beat you to the scene. A car will only go so fast, so it’s a matter of choosing the clearest route to get there a little faster, and that takes thought. Real skill.  In my spare time I’m always studying maps, memorizing routes. Ask me to go almost anywhere in the entire Tokyo region and I’ll know the way.

For a seasoned wheelman like Miyata, who’s been doing this for about six years, it’s all part of the thrill of the chase. But when he turns onto Kasumigaseki crossing, he is not prepared at all for what he sees. That initial excitement dies in his chest. As Miyata remembered:

“We were the first media on the scene.

When we got there, I could see three or four subway workers in green uniforms collapsed on the ground by the exit. Two or three were sprawled out, and some were crouching. This young station attendant’s shouting at the top of his voice: “Quick! Somebody call an ambulance!” They were carrying people out on stretchers. Next to them was a policeman barking into his radio: “Get some ambulances here now!” But by that time St. Luke’s and other hospitals were already in a panic and no ambulances were coming that way. They were even using unmarked police cars to carry the victims, it was so bad. Everybody screaming their heads off. Ikeda [the cameraman] was shooting the whole scene.

Below ground, on the subway platforms, the situation was even worse. As D.W. Brackett describes:

“Witnesses who saw it described a scene straight from Hell. On the platforms lay 40 to 50 people in various stages of sarin poisoning: some thrashed their arms and legs about violently has the painful muscular spasms brought on by the gas wrecked their bodies. Many others lay on their backs, unable to get up and coughing repeatedly as blood poured from their mouths and noses. A number crawled around in small circles, unable to see, vomiting and foaming at the mouth; some sank to their knees immobilized or sat abjectly against station walls and benches, extremely ill, nearly blind, and afraid that they were dying. Some people tried to cry out, their face is contorted in pain, but we’re unable to make a sound because the guys had choked off their vocal cords.

Those that could walk or run fled the platform, dodging the prostrate bodies near their feet and charging headlong for the subway exit stairs in the fresh air in the streets above. But for those who finally emerged into the cold winter morning air, relief was only a brief illusion. The sarin they had inhaled below was still working its way through their bodies and would eventually produce the effects they had seen below. […]

The horrific suffering at this station was repeated at more than a dozen stations up and down the three subway lines, and it all happened in less than an hour after the gas was released.”

Up above ground, at Kasumigaseki Crossing, Minoru Miyata and his Channel 12 news crew are doing their best to document the scene, capturing footage and snapping pictures of the chaos. And while posterity, historians, and yours truly surely appreciate that documentarian instinct, in the heat of the moment, Miyata and his crew just looked like voyeuristic vultures. As Miyata remembered sheepishly:

“That’s when somebody—maybe one of the injured—spoke up: “How about instead of filming us, you help take one or two people to the hospital?” But we’re loaded with equipment and stuff. We can’t just run off. So me and the crew talk it over. “What the hell are we going to do?” “It’ll look bad if we don’t take them.” In the end, I said, “Okay, I’ll go.” I ran to the shouting station attendant and asked where it is I’m supposed to be going. “Take them to Hibiya Hospital,” he says.

Press-ganged into service as an ad-hoc ambulance, Mr. Miyata and his news crew throw open the doors of the van, haul out their heavy video equipment, and fold down the seats to make room in the back. They only have space for two people, so the perennial rule of crisis situations is applied/applies: the worst go first.

And at this moment, the worst happens to be a subway employee, an Assistant [Deputy] Stationmaster named Kazumasa Takahashi. That’s T-A-K-A-H-A-S-H-I.

As Miyata helps load the twitching, groaning man into the back of his news van, he wonders what could’ve possibly done this to the stationmaster? Miyata was no paramedic, but you didn’t have to be Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman to see that Takahashi looked “bad”. Dots for pupils, barely conscious, foaming at the mouth and jerking with involuntary spasms. Whatever was wrong with Takahashi, every second mattered. As Miyata recalled:

“We unloaded all the equipment, but the van hasn’t got a flashing red light, so the young station attendant sits in the front seat next to me, his hand out the window waving a red handkerchief, and we’re off and heading for Hibiya Hospital. The red handkerchief was a loan from this young nurse at the scene. She told us to wave it to show we were an emergency vehicle.

In the car we had Assistant [Deputy] Stationmaster Takahashi, who died, and another guy—don’t know his name—also a station attendant, 30-something, wasn’t as bad as Takahashi. He even managed to get in the van by himself. We laid them both flat out across the backseat. The young station attendant kept asking, “Takahashi, you all right?” That’s how I knew his name. But Takahashi was hardly conscious, he could barely groan in response.”

TAKAHASHI

A mere 45 minutes earlier – at around 8:15 AM, Deputy Station Master Takahashi was perfectly alright, and fully upright.  And when he groaned, it was in response to a complaint about some kind of spilled liquid on the floor of the incoming Green Line.

As an employee of the Tokyo subway system, Takahashi handled all kinds of problems in a typical workday. “Station work involves all sorts of jobs,” explained another subway worker, “Not just ticket booth and platform duty, but lost property and sorting out arguments between passengers.”

But just after 8AM, a Green Line train rolled into Kasumigaseki, and when the doors opened, dozens of people stumbled out of the train car, coughing, rubbing their eyes, gasping for breath. Something had spilled in the car, some kind of mysterious liquid. Mysterious liquids of course, are a common feature of public transportation. It could be beer, it could be vomit, it could be urine – but whatever it was, it needed to be cleaned up.

So, Deputy Station Master Takahashi evacuated the passengers from the train, grabbed a bucket, a mop and, some trash bags. Once he located the mysterious puddle – which wasn’t hard, thanks to the smell - he started cleaning it up with his bare hands. 

If Takahashi had known that the liquid was sarin, he would not have picked up the sopping wet newspaper. He would not have crouched over it, breathing in the fumes. He certainly would not have stood nearby as a colleague mopped up the liquid, spreading the sarin all over the platform and splashing microdroplets into the air. But that is exactly what happened.

Minutes after he’d started cleaning up the sarin, Takahashi collapsed. As a colleague remembered:

“Takahashi walked over to a trash can at the end of the platform, probably to fetch some more newspaper to wipe up where it was still wet. Suddenly he sinks down in front of the bin and keels over. Everyone ran toward Takahashi, shouting, “What’s wrong?” I thought maybe he was ill, but nothing too serious. “Can you walk?” they asked, but it’s obvious he can’t, so I called the office over the platform intercom: “Send up the stretcher!” Takahashi’s face looked awful. He couldn’t talk. We laid him on his side, loosened his tie … he looked in really bad shape. We carried him down to the office on the stretcher, then phoned for an ambulance.”

But they didn’t get an ambulance, they got Tokyo’s fastest news van driver, Minoru Miyata. As the TV van sped toward the local hospital, squeezing through alleys and weaving through traffic, the true nature of the situation was starting to percolate into the public consciousness. The city, initially stunned by the attack, mobilized quickly to contain the threat. According to one historian:

“Ambulances from Tokyo’s hospitals, along with fire trucks, rescue squads and police emergency vehicles descended on the stricken subway stations after subway officials and medical personnel reported their suspicions that the trains had been deliberately gassed.

The city’s complex and lengthy subway system – a system that daily transports millions of passengers – was now paralyzed. All three of the major lines were shut down and more than 26 subway stations were closed to the public. St Luke’s Hospital, located in central Tokyo, was quickly overwhelmed with hundreds of patients. Soon it was taking only severe emergency cases and placing patients in hallways lobbies and other common areas.”

When Miyata and his news van screeched to a halt at the entrance to Hibiya Hospital in downtown Tokyo, the driver looked at the digital clock with a twinge of pride; as he remembered:

 “It only took us about three minutes to get there.”

But instead of a well-oiled, well-prepared medical environment, they encountered a hospital in disarray/chaos. Just as the sarin had paralyzed Takahashi’s lungs, the enormity and confusion of the emergency seemed to have paralyzed the medical staff as well. Miyata remembered:

“The hospital wouldn’t let us in. This nurse comes running out, and even when we told her, “They’ve been gassed in Kasumigaseki Station,” she just said something about there being no doctor available. Abandoned us there on the pavement. How she could do that, I’ll never know. The young station attendant went inside, practically in tears, to plead with the receptionist—“He’s going to die, you have to do something.” I went in with him. At that point Takahashi was still alive. His eyes were blinking. We lowered him out of the van and he lay on the pavement, the other guy crouching by the roadside. We were all just blown away, so angry the blood just rushed to our heads.”

There we were for ages—can’t really say how long—kicking our heels. Then a little later a doctor comes out and they carry the two of them in on stretchers. The point is, they didn’t have the least grasp of the situation. There’d been no word to the hospital about any injured people heading their way, so they were in the dark. Couldn’t cope. It was 9:30 by then, over an hour since the gas attack. And yet the hospital didn’t know what had happened. We must have been the first there with victims from the attack. They didn’t have a clue.”

SAVING LIVES

Miyata and his crew could’ve taken the dying Takahashi to another hospital, St. Luke’s or Omori medical center, but it would’ve made little difference.

As the patients poured in, and the cases piled up, the Tokyo medical community struggled to diagnose and respond to this very lethal and very esoteric/ specific mass medical emergency. Sarin poisoning, after all, is not high on the list of things a doctor might expect to encounter on a typical workday. As a Dr. Toru Saito from Omori Hospital recalled:

“Knowledge about sarin was inadequate. For instance, at one hospital the doctors and nurses examining and treating the patients began to feel dizzy. Their clothes were impregnated with the gas. They became secondary casualties. Even we weren’t aware that we should have asked the patients to undress first thing. We just didn’t even think about it.”

But as more and more patients came in, the injuries and symptoms the doctors and nurses started encountering tested not only their medical knowledge, but the strength of their stomachs. As journalist David E. Kaplan:

“One woman was admitted to a hospital in agony after the nerve agent had fused her contact lenses to her eyeballs. In the end, she had both eyes surgically removed.”

“The place seemed like a combat hospital,” one witness remembered, “IV drips lining the corridors.”

With so little information and so many people in excruciating pain, medical staff were on the verge of morale collapse. As an emergency room physician at St. Luke’s named Tetsu Okumura recalled:

"I felt scared, like I was being dragged into a bottomless pit. I felt everything in front of me turn pitch black."

But despite the carnage and the chaos, there was one factor working in the Tokyo medical community’s favor. Sarin poisoning was an unexpected curveball, but it wasn’t completely unexpected. Nerve gas, of course, had been in the news recently. Everyone in Japan not living under a rock had heard about the sarin attack on the city of Matsumoto less than a year earlier in July of ’94. As a result, not only were some doctors familiar with the symptoms, a few of them had hands-on, real-world experience treating this kind of poisoning. As Dr. Toru Saito recalled:

“The first reports came in about 8:15: “Poison gas at Kasumigaseki Station. Heavy casualties.” “What’s this?” I thought. The very first thing that came to mind was poison gas—cyanide or sarin.”

All across Japan, telephones and fax machines lit up like Christmas, as medical professionals shared knowledge, treatment methods, and resources. Dr. Nobuo Yanagisawa, one of the doctors who’d treated sarin victims in Matsumoto, remembered:

“I immediately called in two doctors from Neuropathology and Emergency, and told them to contact St. Luke’s and any other hospitals that were thought to have taken in these patients. We faxed information to every single hospital they mentioned on TV: “Treat with sulfuric atropine and 2-Pam as antitoxin, etc., etc.”

For the besieged/beleaguered doctors in Tokyo, that guidance was a god-send. As Dr. Saito recalled:

A call came in from Shinshu University Medical Department. It was the doctor who’d treated the patients of the Matsumoto incident. He’d been calling around all the emergency care centers and hospitals in Tokyo saying, “If you want, I’ll fax you our data on sarin treatment.” “Fire away,” I said, and the faxes piled up.

Dr. Yanagisawa and his staff obliged, and kept obliging all day long. As he remembered:

“The phones were ringing everywhere. Requests were coming in from clinics all over the place saying, “Send us information too!” I mean, they had sarin victims in over a hundred facilities. That whole day was one big uproar. We were faxing nonstop.”

Armed with the information they needed to treat their patients; the Tokyo medical community sprang into action. IVs were filled with life-saving antidotes and triage units were organized.  But in any medical crisis, with so many patients coming in at once, all fighting and begging for help, hard decisions hadto be made. As one doctor (Yanagisawa) explained:

“The most important thing in a mass disaster is triage: the prioritizing of patients to receive treatment. In the Tokyo gas attack, serious cases had to get first treatment, while lighter cases were left on their own to naturally get well over time. If the doctors treated everyone who came in, in the order they came in, lives may have been lost. If you don’t have a good grasp of the situation and people come in screaming, “I can’t see!” the whole scene can easily descend into a state of panic.”

The doctor’s dilemma is having to decide who gets priority: the patient who can’t breathe, or the one who can’t see? Difficult judgments come with dangerous situations. It’s the hardest thing about being a doctor.” (Yanagisawa)

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After the IVs had been applied, the drugs administered, and the severity of the symptoms established, all the doctors could offer patients was a gentle touch and a kind word. One physician at St. Luke’s remembered a woman who asked him:

“Am I all right? Am I going to die?”

He could only reply: “You’ll be all right. Don’t worry.”

Ultimately, who lived and who died seemed to come down to a mix of fast treatment and blind luck. As Dr. Saito recalled:

“Most of the seriously injured regained consciousness within a day. The ones we couldn’t save were those whose heart or lungs had stopped before they got to the hospital. Either that, or they were in fibrillated on arrival to restart their heartbeat, but became “vegetables” as a result.”

But sometimes, fast wasn’t fast enough. One of the unlucky few, one of the people who didn’t make it that day, was the Deputy Stationmaster, Takahashi. It had only taken three minutes for Mr. Miyata, the channel 12 news driver, to get Takahashi to the hospital, but by the time the ailing subway employee was brought inside, it was too late. As Miyata, the driver, reflected:

“I was so worried, I stood around in front of the hospital for an hour or more, but I heard nothing, so I returned to the scene. I never went back to Hibiya Hospital and never saw that young station attendant again. That night I learned Takahashi had died, which made me so sad. To think that someone you’d transported didn’t make it.”

It was cold comfort, but in all probability, the deputy stationmaster had been doomed from the second he reached down and started cleaning up the sarin with his bare hands.

But fate is a fickle thing, and the very same puddle that killed Takahashi and several others that day, failed to kill another character in our story: The young woman on her way to an early office meeting, 23-year-old Aya Kazaguchi. After noticing the leaking package wrapped in newspaper around 8AM, Aya got off the Green Line at her normal stop. Within a few minutes, she began feeling symptoms. As she remembered:

“By the time I got to the office and we were in the meeting, I started to feel really sick, like I’m going to throw up. Then it came on the news that something had happened on the subway, and I think, “Aha, so that’s it!” When I heard I felt faint … I’m a real coward. I went straight to St. Luke’s Hospital. They put me on a drip for two hours and ran blood tests, then told me, “Okay, you can go home now.” The tests didn’t show up anything out of the ordinary. I showed no sign of contracted pupils, I just felt sick. I was still wearing the same clothes. I was really suffering then, but I’ve gotten better over time.”

So why did Aya come out relatively unscathed? When so many others got violently ill? After Dr. Ikuo Hayashi had punctured the sarin bag, Aya had been standing just a few feet away from the vaporizing nerve gas, well within reach of its lethal fumes. But she had been protected by a very small, very unexpected factor: The fact that she was napping had saved her life. According to Aya:

Luckily, I was dozing off (on the train). That’s what a detective told me. My eyes were shut, and my breathing was lighter and shallower (laughs). Just lucky, I guess.

In the end, 12 people died that day as a result of sarin poisoning.

And a 13^th died from complications the following day.

That, of course, does not include the 5,000 people injured in the attack, the roughly 700 people who were hospitalized as a result, and the unknowable quantity of people who did not die, but sustained lifelong, debilitating injuries. People who lost their eyesight, or suffered brain damage, or nerve damage, or just the sheer psychological trauma of living through a terrorist attack. Not to mention the families of the dead and injured, whose lives had been changed irrevocably.

Yes, for thousands of people in Tokyo, there was a before March 20^th, and an after March 20^th. Like BC and AD. An indelible bifurcation in their lives.

And yet, it could’ve been so much worse. According to DW Brackett:

“If the Saran had been 70 or 80% pure, instead of the 30% reckoned by analysts, it would have taken Japanese rescue squads several days to decontaminate the subways before they could begin the onerous task of hauling out the thousands of dead.

But there would be plenty of time to pick through the human wreckage later. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the most important and pressing issue, at least in the minds of the Japanese authorities, was bringing the people responsible to justice. And in this particular case, it wasn’t much of a whodunnit. As Brackett explains.

“Within hours of the Tokyo subway gas attack, “Aum Shinrikyo”, “sarin”, and “Matsumoto” suddenly became household words throughout Japan.

Japanese stared at their television screens in stunned disbelief as cameras panned past suffering victims sprawled on the sidewalks outside the subway entrances. Shoko Asahara’s scheme to deflect police attention from Aum Shinrikyo by gassing the subway lines serving the National Police Agency headquarters and other major government offices at Kasumigaseki had failed miserably. Even though the news media were initially careful not to directly tie Aum to the gassing, by mid-afternoon practically everybody in Japan had a good idea who did it.”

With a commitment to procedural due diligence that seems almost quaint in the post-9/11 era, the Japanese authorities took the briefest moment to aim before they fired.

“The top echelons of the Japanese National Police along with leading legal authorities gathered in a series of urgent meetings at their headquarters in Kasumigaseki to plan their next move,” continues Brackett, “There was little doubt in their minds who the culprits were and who had precipitated the attack. Aum’s chemical fingerprints were everywhere in the subways and it took no particular genius to tie them to the attack in Matsumoto and the chemical samples gathered outside the sect’s Kamikuishiki compound.”

For years, the police had treated Aum with kid gloves, shrinking from perceived overreach and bending over backward to safeguard the cult’s civil liberties. In hindsight, that had been a mistake. Now, they were going to make up for lost time – and lost lives. With evidence/search warrants in their hands and anger in their hearts, the police made their move.

“At dawn on Wednesday, March 22, less than 48 hours after the subway assault,” writes Brackett, “one of the largest national police raids in recent Japanese history got under way. More than two thousand five hundred police descended on twenty-five offices, compounds, and complexes belonging to Aum Shinrikyo. Armed with search warrants justifying the operation as part of the investigation of the February 28^th abduction of Kariya, the largest contingent of policemen in the nationwide raiding force, more than 1000 men transported in a convoy of one hundred gray police vehicles moved out to the Aum Kamikuishiki complex. The compound was well lit but large red lights and mobile spotlights, a combination that cast a surreal glow over the sect’s austere buildings. Adding to the effect was the whapping sound of a small armada of helicopters circling above. Manned by television camera crews and news reporters, they beamed live coverage of the raid into millions of homes.”

As they prepared to force their way inside the compound, the police had no illusions about what they might be facing. The images of subway passengers foaming at the mouth and vomiting blood were still fresh in the mind’s eye. Who knows what dangers and traps lurked behind the gates of Aum Shinrikyo? So, understandably, the cops took every precaution. According to Brackett:

“Some members of the strike force were outfitted in heavy protective gear complete with state-of-the-art gas masks obtained from the Japanese military, while went into the compound carrying yellow canaries in blue cages; the birds were to serve as the sacrificial early-warning alarms in case the investigators encountered toxic gas or chemicals.”

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Thankfully, the strike force didn’t encounter any trip wires, bombs or booby traps. They didn’t even encounter any resistance; the only enemy action they faced was the occasional jeer or insult from the Aum cultists inside.

But they did find what they were looking for.

Over the next several days, the police took the Aum compound apart like an IKEA table, breaking it down to its most minute elements. They kicked down doors, tore up carpets and put sledgehammers through walls. It wasn’t hard, it just took time. Out of stupidity or arrogance, the cult had done very little to cover their tracks or dispose of incriminating evidence.

Inside the compound, the police found chemical solvents, sodium cyanide, isopropyl, ethyl alcohol – a terrorism spice cabinet. They found intent in the form of documents, pamphlets and planning materials. They found means in the form of lab equipment and air purifiers. It was, as they say, the smoking gun.

They even uncovered, according to Brackett, “Shoko Asahara’s personal safe, where they found more than 7 million dollars in cash and 22 pounds of unassayed gold bars”

But there was one thing they didn’t find. One missing piece of the puzzle. In all their searching, they could not find the ringleader of this religious circus. The addled brain behind the entire operation. The Guru himself.

In the days and weeks following the attack, Shoko Asahara seemed to have vanished in a puff of incense. He wasn’t at the commune, he wasn’t in the lab, he wasn’t at any of the far-flung Aum facilities throughout Japan. The only proof that he still existed at all came in the form of cryptic pre-recorded messages and broadcasts in which he denied Aum’s culpability in the sarin attack.

Through spokesmen and lawyers, Asahara claimed that Aum Shinrikyo was just a victim of religious persecution at the hands of an overzealous and fascistic police force. As one Aum spokesman said:

“Aum Shinrikyo has absolutely nothing to do with the sarin incident in the subways. The mass media describe us as a secretive, closed and suspicious group that is involved in weird activities. They have created such images of us, and I want to clearly deny the truth. Aum has suffered from being under suspicion. The only logical conclusion is that the Japanese government are the perpetrators of this incident.”

The chemical precursors the police had found, Asahara suggested innocently, were just for fertilizing gardens and making pottery. The police, however, were not fooled.

Besides, they said, innocent men don’t run.

No, in the proud tradition of many terrorist leaders, when the jig was up, the Guru went underground. To where exactly, no one knew. Maybe, the Japanese authorities worried, Asahara had fled the country. Maybe he’d found safe haven in Russia, or Australia or the US or any number of hiding spots he could’ve prepared with the cult’s enormous financial resources.

But that didn’t stop the police from rounding up everyone else in the guru’s inner circle. According to one researcher:

“Between March 22 and May 16, the police arrested more than 200 Aum Shinrikyo members. They had questioned several Aum Shinrikyo members taken into custody shortly after the Tokyo sarin attacks who had identified a number of individuals involved in the Tokyo attack and key leaders.”

Still…more than six weeks after the subway attack, a nationwide manhunt had failed to locate Shoko Asahara. And then, when they’d all but given up hope of finding the Guru himself, the police caught a lucky break during a routine search of the Aum compound. As Brackett writes:

“One of the policemen tapping along a wall heard a hollow sound. A power saw quickly cut through the wall to reveal a dark coffin-like enclosure, some ten feet long and three feet high. Inside, dressed in his favorite deep-purple silk robes and sitting in the lotus position, was Shoko Asahara. With him in the secret compartment were a small container of pills, a cassette tape recorder, and more than one hundred thousand dollars in cash.”

Despite Asahara’s protestations that “no one is allowed to touch the Guru’s body”, the police grabbed him, cuffed him, and stuffed him in a police van outside. When a police official informed Asahara that he was under arrest for the murder of 13 people in the Tokyo subway attack, he feigned innocence:

“Could a blind man like me possibly do such a thing?”

---- MUSIC BREAK ----

It’s December 3^rd, 1996.

Almost two years after the subway attacks.

We’re at the welcome desk of a small hospital in the suburbs of Tokyo, in the Recuperation Therapy ward.

Compared to the screaming and shouting and chaos that gripped Tokyo’s hospitals two years earlier, the hallways of this small facility are hushed and quiet and calm. Its silence broken only by the rhythmic beeps of a heart monitor, the inhalation of a breathing tube, or the rubber squeak of a nurse’s orthopedic shoe.

On this floor of the hospital, most patients are confined to their beds, beset by a variety of grave illnesses. Some have cancer, some have cirrhosis of the liver or complications from a stroke. But they all have one thing in common: They are not getting better any time soon – if ever. / at all.

At the welcome desk, a nurse looks up from her reading and smiles politely at the visitor standing in front of her. After a brief exchange, she reaches into a drawer and hands a visitor’s badge to a short, but fit man with close-cropped black hair. With a few quick flicks of a pen, the man writes his name in the blank space on the visitor’s pass:

HARUKI MURAKAMI.

That’s M-U-R-A-K-A-M-I, Murakami.

Some of you might recognize that name. Not only because we’ve quoted Murakami several times in this series already, but because he is a very famous writer – a bestselling author.

Known for his simple prose, philosophical themes and whimsical plots, Murakami is more accustomed to signing autographs than hospital passes. By 1996, he has become one of the most celebrated fiction writers in Japan. It all started with the publication of his hit novel, Norwegian Wood, which sold 2 million copies and propelled him to literary stardom almost overnight. For a quiet, introverted man like Murakami, it was too much, too fast. As he recalled:

"It became a phenomenon. It wasn't a book any more. I didn't want to be famous. […] I was not happy at all."

So, he left.

For almost 10 years, Murakami put Japan in the rearview and lived abroad in places where he was less likely to be mobbed on the streets by fans, press, and assorted literati. Five years in Europe, then four in the United States, places where Murakami could find the solitude he craved.

For the better part of a decade, Murakami stayed away from his home country, Japan, living in a sort of self-imposed exile. And then, 1995 happened. In Murakami’s words:

“The Hanshin Earthquake took place while I was living in the United States, and two months after that came the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.”

These “twin catastrophes” as Murakami called them signaled to him that it was time to go home, to reconnect with the country that was going through period of terrible suffering and societal upheaval.

“That summer,” Murakami explained in later interviews, “I returned to Japan.” But, “when I got back, everything had changed. I found myself looking for something to do for my country, for my readers.”

In the aftermath of the subway attacks, Murakami was particularly struck by the media’s handling (or mishandling) of the event. Cable news anchors and tabloid reporters were so fixated on the sensationalism of the true crime story – religious cults and chemical weapons. Insane gurus and gory details – that the actual victims of the attack were being completely overlooked, papered over and forgotten. As Murakami wrote:

The Japanese media had bombarded us with so many in-depth profiles of the Aum cult perpetrators—the “attackers”—forming such a slick, seductive narrative that the average citizen—the “victim”—was almost an afterthought. “Bystander A” was glimpsed only in passing. Very rarely was any “lesser” narrative presented in a way that commanded attention. Those few stories that got through were contextualized into formulaic glosses. Our media probably wanted to create a collective image of the “innocent Japanese sufferer,” which is much easier to do when you don’t have to deal with real faces. Besides, the classic dichotomy of “ugly (visible) villains” versus the “healthy (faceless) populace” makes for a better story. Which is why I wanted, if at all possible, to get away from any formula; to recognize that each person on the subway that morning had a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions and dilemmas—and that all these factors had a place in the drama.”

In short, Murakami wanted to help.

And the only way he knew how to help was to write a book.

As a counterpoint to the sensationalist narrative of the Japanese media, Haruki Murakami set out to write a book about the victims of the Tokyo Sarin Attack.

The only problem was, Murakami was known primarily as a writer of fiction. His stories were exercises in magical realism and surrealist imagery. In a Murakami novel, you’re more likely to find talking cats and alternate realities than a journalistic examination of a terrorist attack. But sink or swim, Murakami was determined to use his first foray into non-fiction as a way to explore not only the survivors of the attack, but the social undercurrents that produced it in the first place. As he explained:

“What I wanted to write about – what I myself, really wanted to know more about – was the violence in our society that lies hidden right beneath us. About the violence that’s there as a latent possibility, and the possibility that actually reveals itself in the form of violence, all o which we tend to forget exists. That’s why I didn’t choose the victimizers in the attack to interview, but the victims.”

Initially, finding people to talked to seemed like a fairly straightforward task. Thousands upon thousands of people had been affected that day, surely finding them would be as simple as standing in downtown Tokyo and throwing a rock in any direction. Sadly, that was not the case. As Murakami wrote:

“Quite frankly, this proved more difficult than I expected. So many passengers were on the Tokyo subway that day, I told myself, getting statements would be easy; […] They [the courts and the police] had a duty to protect people’s privacy, and the same went for the hospitals. All we had to go on were newspaper listings of the hospitalized from the day of the gas attack itself. Names only; no addresses or telephone numbers.

Somehow, we came up with a list of 700 names, of whom only 20 percent were identifiable. How does one go about tracing an “Ichiro Nakamura”—the Japanese equivalent of “John Smith”? Even when we did manage to contact the 140 or so positive identifications, they usually refused to be interviewed, saying “I’d rather forget the whole incident” or “I don’t want to have anything to do with Aum” or “I don’t trust the media.” I can’t tell you how often people slammed down the phone at the mere mention of publication.

[…] Thus, out of thousands of victims, we found only sixty willing respondents, and that took a huge amount of dedication.”

Once he had his 60 names, Murakami went to work. He interviewed passengers from the Green Line, the Red Line, and the Silver Line. He interviewed doctors, and drivers and first responders. He interviewed, as best he could, a representative cross-section of the people affected that day.

Over the course of this episode, we’ve heard from many OF those people. The 60 respondents who sat across from Haruki Murakami and his tape recorder. People like Minoru Miyata, the TV news driver. And Aya Kazaguchi, the sleepy commuter. And the triage doctor, Nobuo Yanagisawa.

No detail was too small. No anecdote too trivial. If you were there that day on the subway, Murakami wanted to hear about it, and capture it for posterity. As he wrote:

“The degree of suffering inflicted by the Tokyo gas attack varied considerably from person to person. Some escaped with little actual harm; those less fortunate died or are still undergoing therapy for serious health problems. Many experienced no major symptoms at the time, but have since developed posttraumatic stress disorders. I interviewed people even if they were virtually unaffected by the sarin gas. Naturally those who escaped with relatively slight injury had been able to return to everyday life more quickly, but they, too, had their own stories to tell. Their fears, their lessons. In this sense, I did not practice any sort of editorial “triage.”* One cannot overlook someone simply because they exhibit only “minor symptoms.” For everyone involved in the gas attack, March 20 was a heavy, grueling day.”

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Throughout 1996, from the beginning of January to the first week in December, Murakami conducted interviews with 59 people. And on December 3^rd, 1996, as he jots his name down on the visitor’s badge in the Recuperation Therapy Ward of the Tokyo hospital, he prepares to conduct his sixtieth interview– the very last one.

The other 59 interviews were difficult in their own way, but this is the one he has been dreading; because, he writes:

“Unlike all the others, she can’t speak her own mind.”

SACHIKO

Once he’s checked in, Murakami is led by a nurse into a small lounge area. Sitting in a wheelchair, waiting for him, is a 31-year-old woman named Sachiko Asakawa. That’s S-A-C-H-I-K-O, Sachiko.

In his book, Murakami used a pseudonym for Sachiko, because at the time, so soon after the sarin attacks, her family wanted her to remain anonymous. But in the decades since, Sachiko’s family eventually became comfortable with her real name – and theirs - being used in the public record.

Prior to meeting Sachiko, Murakami was shown a picture of the young woman. The photograph, dated February 1991, shows a twentysomething Sachiko at Disneyland in Tokyo, posing with her older brother, her little nephew, and a costumed Mickey Mouse. In the photograph, Sachiko has a big smile and pink cheeks, framed by a mop of short black hair.

But now, in December of 1996, Sachiko looks very different. As Murakami writes:

“Her left arm and left leg are almost completely paralyzed, especially the leg. […] She cannot eat or drink through her mouth. She cannot yet move her tongue or jaws. Ordinarily we never notice how our tongue and jaws perform complicated maneuvers whenever we eat or drink, wholly unconsciously. Only when we lose these functions do we become acutely aware of their importance. That is Sachiko’s situation right now. She can swallow soft foods like yogurt and ice cream. It has taken long months of patient practice to reach this stage. Shizuko likes strawberry yogurt, sour and sweet, but unfortunately most of her nutrition is still squeezed in by tube through her nose.”

On March 20^th, 1995, Sachiko Asakawa was on the Red Line, commuting to an annual training seminar for her job at a Tokyo supermarket, when the train was hit by sarin gas. Her older brother, a dutiful and supportive family man named Kazuo Asakawa, believes she was likely in the same train car as the sarin packet itself. After Sachiko collapsed on the platform, she was rushed to the hospital; and around 10:30 AM, her brother Kazuo got the call that his sister had been in an accident on the subway.

“The hospital reception was filled with victims,” Kazuo told Murakami, ”All of them were on drips or getting examined. That’s when I realized it was really serious, but I still didn’t know much.”

I waited for two hours—two grueling hours—and then just briefly I got to see her. She was dressed in a hospital gown and lying in bed getting dialysis. Her liver was quite weak and needed help to filter out all the toxins from her blood. She was on several intravenous drips too. Her eyes were closed. According to the nurse she was in a “sleeping state.” I reached out to touch her but the doctor held me back; I wasn’t wearing gloves. I whispered in her ear, “Sachiko, it’s your brother!” She twitched in response, or so I thought, but the doctor said her responding to my voice was practically unthinkable; she must have had a spasm in her sleep. She’d been having convulsions since they brought her in. Her face, to be crude, looked more dead than asleep. She had an oxygen mask over her mouth, and her face had no expression whatsoever. No sign of pain or suffering or anything. The device that measured her heartbeat hardly flickered, just an occasional blip. She was that bad. I could hardly bear to look at her.”

That evening [March 20] our parents, my wife and kids all came to the hospital. I didn’t know what to expect, so I had the kids come too, just to be safe. Of course they were too small to understand the situation, but seeing them eased my tension, or rather let me get some feelings out. “Something horrible’s happened to Auntie Sachiko …” I started crying. My kids were upset; they knew it was serious; they’d never seen me cry before. They tried to comfort me, “Daddy, Daddy, don’t cry!”—and then we were all crying.

Sachiko couldn’t breathe on her own, so she was hooked up to an artificial respirator. But that couldn’t go on indefinitely, so on March 29 they opened a breathing valve in her throat. That’s how she is now.”

In those first few critical days, Kazuo and the rest of the family were desperate for any signs of improvement in Sachiko’s condition, constantly oscillating between hope and despair. As he told Murakami:

In my date book, I noted that her eyes moved on March 24. They didn’t snap wide open, but rolled around slow, behind half-lifted lids. This was when I spoke to her. Again the doctor said that she wasn’t looking around recognizing things. It was just another coincidence. I was warned not to raise my expectations too high. And in fact on April 1 they said: “Judging from the pattern of brain damage […] there is virtually no chance of further recovery.” In other words, while she wasn’t a “vegetable,” she would probably remain bedridden for the rest of her life. Unable to sit up, unable to speak, barely aware of anything. It was hard to accept.

My mother burst out saying, “Sachiko should have died. She’d have posed no more trouble to herself or to any of you.” Those words really cut deep; I understood my mother completely, yet how could I answer her? In the end, all I could say was, “If Sachiko was of no further use, then God would have surely let her die. But that didn’t happen. Sachiko is alive here and now. And there’s the chance she’ll get well, isn’t there? If we don’t believe that, Sachiko’s beyond hope. We have to force ourselves to believe.” That was the hardest part for me. When my own father and mother could say such things—that Sachiko would have been better off dead—what was I supposed to say? That was about ten days after she collapsed.

AFTERSHOCKS

All the victims of Aum Shinrikyo’s subway attacks walked away with scars. Some less obvious than others. Sachiko’s injuries were plain as day, but other survivors carried more subtle pains – the kind of things that don’t show up on any X-Ray or MRI.

Even after recovering from the initial sarin poisoning, many survivors reported that the exposure to the chemical weapon had permanently degraded their eyesight. As one man, Michiru Kono, explained;

“My eyesight’s much worse. There’s little chance of recovery, so I’m no good at the detailed work anymore. I have to proof layouts, which is difficult if I can’t see precise alignments.”

Another man, Hideki Sono, said:

“My eyes had gone, my focus was blurry and my field of vision was tiny. My job involves a lot of driving, but after dark I couldn’t see a thing. My vision’s normally okay, but I couldn’t even make out street signs. And if I can’t read a computer screen, I can’t do business”

Other survivors experienced fatigue and depression. According to Yoko Izuka:

When I do go out, I feel run-down straightaway. It’s all I can handle just to go back and forth to the bank and do my job. I get back home and I’m a wreck. Even at work, 3:00 comes around and I’m thinking, “I am so tired.” Just worn out. It wasn’t like this before. It’s been this way the whole time since the gas attack. Maybe it’s partly psychological.

Problems with memory, focus and mental clarity was another common aftershock. According to a man named Noburu Terajima:

“My memory is worse. Not things slipping my mind so much as total memory loss. It’s just gone completely. So whenever anyone tells me something I make a point of jotting it down. Otherwise I’ll forget.”

But for many of the people Murakami interviewed, memory WAS the problem. The experience of the sarin attack had left them with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I often have dreams about it” one woman told Murakami, “Not so much right after the attack, but lately all the time. They’re so vivid. Then I wake up with a start in the middle of the night. Now that’s frightening. Even when I’m not dreaming, sometimes I’ll find myself in a confined space and I’ll just stop, especially underground—in the subway or an underground entrance to a department store. I’ll start to get on a train and my feet won’t move. That’s happened more and more since February. That’s nearly a year after the event. Times like that, I feel that no one understands. Everyone at work is really considerate and everything. My family’s been very kind too. But no one can really understand what it’s like, this fear. Not that I’d really want them to …”

Another passenger echoed the feeling:

“I was afraid to commute again. I’d board the train and see the door slide shut before my eyes, and in that very instant my head would seethe with pain. I’d get off and go through the ticket barrier, thinking, “I’m okay,” and the weight would still be there in my head, bearing down. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. If I talked for more than an hour my head would be killing me. It’s still that way now. […] One day in August it took me three hours to get to work. I had to stop off all along the route and rest until the pain subsided; but the moment I was back on board a train it would flare up again, so I’d have to rest—over and over again. It was 10:30 by the time I reached the office!”

Some people didn’t lose their eyesight, or their memory, or their peace of mind…they lost a person / their someone. It’s easy to forget, that for each of those 13 people who died, or the hundreds who were irrevocably damaged, there’s an entire web of family, friends, parents and coworkers. One woman, a young mother named Yoshiko Wada, lost her husband in the attacks. As she said to Murakami:

“A year on, I’ve managed to put things behind me a bit. It’s gradually sunk in that he’s not around anymore … My husband used to go to America on business trips for two or three months at a time, so on one level it seemed normal, him not being here. Even after he died I’d think, “Ah, he’s off again on one of his trips.” The whole year was like that, as if he’d suddenly step through the door and say, “I’m home!” I’d wake up in the morning and think, “He’s away,” but then I’d see his picture on the altar. Some part of me still couldn’t accept what had happened. I seemed to be living a mixture of reality and fantasy. Like I’d be thinking, “He’ll be coming home soon” even while visiting his grave. But now, a year later, I’m much clearer in my own mind: “Yes, he’s dead.” That was the hardest part. Going on walks, seeing a father carrying a baby on his shoulders was almost too much to bear; or overhearing a young couple’s conversation—I just didn’t want to be there.”

Yoshiko however managed to find some solace in their daughter Asuka.

I’m always telling Asuka, “Dada was like this.” If I didn’t tell her, she’d never know. When Asuka asks, “Where’s Dada?” I point to the photo on the altar and say, “Dada, Dada.” She says, “Nighty-night” to the photo before going to sleep. It makes me want to cry. I still have a few videos from ski trips, our honeymoon. You can hear his voice, so I’ll play them for her when she gets a bit older. I’m so glad we took those videos. Even I’m starting to forget his profile. At first, I could still feel every part of his face in my fingers, but gradually it’s all going away … Forgive me … It’s just that, without the body, it all starts to fade. I’m thinking of teaching Asuka to ski. My husband always said he would. I’ll wear my husband’s gear and teach her. My husband and I wore the same size. I think I’ll start next season. It’s what he would have wanted.

As Haruki Murakami listens to all these stories, capturing them for posterity on his cassette recorder, he occasionally asks them questions, but mostly he just lets them talk, unspooling their thoughts and feelings onto the tape.

But one of the most common themes in these interviews and survivor accounts – something that came up over and over again – is how close they were to NOT being there. If I hadn’t done this, or I had just done that, if I had left five minutes later, or five minutes earlier, or I hadn’t stopped for coffee, this never would’ve happened to me. As one man told Murakami:

“Looking back, it all started because the bus was two minutes early” […] On the day of the gas attack I left the house as usual just after 7:00. But as luck would have it, the bus was about two minutes early. It was always late, but for once it was ahead of schedule. I ran for the stop but didn’t make it in time, so I had to catch the next bus at 7:30 instead. By the time I reached Yotsuya I had already missed two trains on the subway. Looking back, it all started because the bus was two minutes early. My timing has never been so bad! Until then I’d traveled back and forth like clockwork.

When tragedy strikes, the mind will make enormous leaps of logic to imagine a reality in which it never happened. You dissect your day down the microsecond, try and pinpoint where it all went wrong, what decision placed you in the teeth of tragedy. This of course is the fast track to guilt. I did this to me. It’s my fault, because in a kaleidoscope of millions of varying choices, a veritable forest of decision trees, I chose this path. And this path got me gassed.

It was a line of thinking that plagued Kazuo Asakawa, the brother of the severely injured Sachiko Asakawa. Had it not been for one small aberration, one throwaway comment, she never would’ve been on that train on March 20^th, 1995.

364 days a year, Sachiko didn’t even take the subway to work; she took the bus. But that day, that particular day, Sachiko was planning to attend a seminar in west Tokyo. Her normal bus route didn’t get out that way, so as her brother, Kazuo remembered:

“I said, “Okay, I’ll drop you off at the station.” I had to take the kids to nursery school, then drive my wife to the station anyway. After that I’d park the car and take the train. All I had to do was give her a lift together with my wife. But she said, “It’s too much trouble for you. I’ll just take the local line to the Saikyo Line, then change to the Marunouchi Line.” And I said, “That’ll take forever. You’d be better off going straight to Kasumigaseki, then change to the Marunouchi Line.” Looking back on it now, if I hadn’t suggested that to Shizuko, she would probably never have suffered like this.”

But guilt is not the predominant emotion Kazuo feels when talking about his sister. Most of all, more than anything, he feels anger:

“If this had been caused by an accident or something, I could just about accept it. There’d have been a cause or some kind of reason. But with this totally senseless, idiotic criminal act … I’m at my wits’ end. I can’t take it!”

It’s hard not to feel that way, of course, when so much has been taken. As Murakami writes:

“Her memory has almost totally gone. Sadly, she remembers nothing before the attack. The doctor in charge says she’s mentally “about grade-school level,”

Nevertheless, in the two years since the gas attack, Sachiko’s condition has improved considerably– at least compared to the first few weeks. Although she is paralyzed, functionally blind, and unable to feed herself, Sachiko retains a spark of personality, even a sense of humor. As her brother, Kazuo said:

“This year (1996) she’s been able to laugh. Her face can smile. She laughs at simple jokes, at me making farting noises with my mouth or anything like that. I’ll say, “Who farted?” and she’ll answer, “Brother.” She’s recovered to that extent. She still can’t speak too well; it’s difficult to tell what she’s saying, but at least she’s talking. “What do you want to do?” I ask, and she answers “Go for walk.”

And in December of 1996, as the novelist Haruki Murakami sits across from Sachiko’s wheelchair, with a rolling tape recorder, a note pad, and a kind face, she reveals to him that underneath the injury and the disability, she has still thoughts and feelings and dreams. One in particular shines through her labored speech patterns. As Murakami writes:

“What do you want to do when you get well?” I think to ask her. “Aeh-ehh,” she says. I don’t understand. “ ‘Travel,’ maybe?” suggests Kazuo after a moment’s thought. “Ehf [Yes],” concurs Sachiko with a nod. “And where do you want to go?” I ask. “Ii-yu-nii-an.” This no one understands, but with a bit of trial and error it becomes clear she means “Disneyland.”

The sarin poisoning had stripped Sachiko of most of her memories, identity and self-awareness, but she still held on to the idea of going back to Disneyland with her family.

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When Haruki Murakami left the hospital that night, after he’d said goodbye to Sachiko and her brother, after he’d handed back his visitor’s pass and returned to his car, the experience of that interview weighed heavier than most. As he wrote:

That evening when I visited the hospital, I’d wanted somehow to encourage her—but how? I’d thought it was up to me, but it wasn’t that way at all; no need even to think about giving her encouragement. In the end, it was she who gave me encouragement.

In the course of writing this book, I’ve given a lot of serious thought to the Big Question: what does it mean to be alive? If I were in Sachiko’s place, would I have the willpower to live as fully as she? Would I have the courage, or the persistence and determination? Could I hold someone’s hand with such warmth and strength? Would the love of others save me? I don’t know. To be honest, I’m not so sure. People the world over turn to religion for salvation. But when religion hurts and maims, where are they to go for salvation? As I talked to Sachiko I tried to look into her eyes now and then. Just what did she see? What lit up those eyes? If ever she gets well enough to speak unhindered, that’s something I’d want to ask: “That day I came to visit, what did you see?” But that day is still far off. Before that comes Disneyland.”

In the weeks and months that followed, Haruki Murakami transcribed the hundreds of hours of interviews he’d collected over the course of 1996. He organized it, edited it, wrote a manuscript and turned it into his editor for review and publication.

He called the book Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

Despite being a sharp divergence from his usual style, the book well and sold better – moving more than a quarter million copies in the first two months of its release on March 20, 1997. Over the next few years, Murakami’s book found its way onto many different bookshelves and many different languages in many different parts of the world.

And one of those copies found its way to the mail room of high-security prison on the outskirts of Tokyo. After being checked for any hazardous materials and cleared by security, it was delivered to a jail cell, into the waiting hands of Dr. Ikuo Hayashi.

HAYASHI

Last time we saw Dr. Hayashi, he had just punctured his sarin bag on the Green Line and stepped into a waiting getaway car. In the two years since that awful day, Hayashi’s fortunes have rapidly deteriorated.

Like most of Shoko Asahara’s inner circle, Hayashi was arrested by the police a few short weeks after the attack. Some of his fellow terrorists tried to run and hide, to evade the dragnet and live on the lamb, but they didn’t last long. Eventually, all five terrorists who had physically participated in the subway attacks were apprehended, charged with murder, and hauled in front of deeply unsympathetic judges.

Many people in Japan believed that the Aum terrorists deserved death for what they had done. As one survivor told Haruki Murakami:

“I want anyone who could do such a thing given the maximum punishment. I say this on behalf of the people who died. I can say this because I came back to life—but what did they possibly have to gain from killing them? It wasn’t this; it wasn’t that; I don’t know a thing about it; my disciples did it—all that is just crap. Killing people as if they were ants, all for purely selfish, egotistical reasons, or even just on a whim: It’s unforgivable.”

Like most high-profile criminal trials, the Aum Shinrikyo trial was a media circus, full of twist and turns and shocking revelations. In the course of those trials, the full extent of the cult’s criminality came to light. The world learned about the Sakamoto murders, the weapons program, the internal abuse – all of it. And ultimately, the outcome of the trial was not a shocker.

As the judge banged his gavel, and the sentences were passed down, it became clear that Shoko Asahara and his cultists were going to keep the prison’s executioner busy for many years to come. Shoko Asahara, a handful of his top advisors, and all of the terrorists who’d released sarin on the subway received the death penalty for their actions. All except for one:

Dr. Ikuo Hayashi.

Unmoored from the toxic culture of the cult, Hayashi’s rational mind seemed to return, like sunlight through the clouds. And it quickly illuminated the horror of what he had done, the selfish, stupid, ridiculous depths he had sank to to please an insane guru and curry favor in a criminal organization. All the people he had hurt. The way he had betrayed his oath as a doctor. Disgusted with himself and Aum, Hayashi turned on the cult.

As Robert Jay Lifton writes:

“Hayashi took on the task of exposing everything he could about Aum, though he carefully waited until his wife and two children were safely out of the cult’s hands before beginning his public confession. Cooperating completely with the prosecutors, he was the first defendant fully to reveal the details of the sarin release and the first to confront the guru in open court. He spoke of Asahara as his “former master” and the guru’s doctrine as “totally in error, so that it cannot be called a religion.” Revealing all was a necessity because he realized that “Asahara has the kind of mind that cannot in itself tell the truth.” He spoke of his “chagrin and regret,” of remorse for the victims and everyone else, “to the point of not knowing with what words to apologize.” Telling “all that I know” became “the only thing I can do,” and “my duty as a human being.” He was tearful during his testimony, which had a powerful impact in the court and, when reported in the media, elsewhere as well.”

Some, of course, thought Hayashi’s remorse was performative. A desperate tactic to save his own skin. And it very well might have been. But even in private, when the cameras were off and the courtrooms were empty, Hayashi seemed to be actively confronting his demons.

He could never apologize to the victims in person, he could never confront the human wreckage he had made, but he could read their words. He could, in some indirect way, feel what they felt.  Ikuo Hayashi requested a copy of Haruki Murakami’s book underground. He ended up reading it four times, cover to cover.

They say a good book can change your life.

Well, in Hayashi’s case, it helped him atone for a life gone wrong.

In his cell, Hayashi read every single word that you’ve heard from the survivors of the attack. From Aya, from Miyata, from Dr. Yanagisawa and countless others. Even from Kazuo Asakawa, brother of the paralyzed and brain-damaged Sachiko. Which means he read this passage from Kazuo’s section:

“The night before the gas attack, the family was saying over dinner, “My, how lucky we are. All together, having a good time” … a modest share of happiness. Destroyed the very next day by those idiots. Those criminals stole what little joy we had. Right after the attack, I was insane with anger. I was pacing the hospital corridors pounding on the columns and walls. At that point I still didn’t know it was Aum, but whoever it was I was ready to beat them up. I didn’t even notice, but several days later my fist was sore. I asked my wife, “Odd, why does my hand hurt so much?” and she said, “You’ve been punching things, dear.”

When asked by his lawyer, WHY he would read Murakami’s book, with such scathing and heart-wrenching accounts, Hayashi replied;

“Who else should read that book if I don’t?”

“In December 1995, while in prison,” writes Robert Jay Lifton, “Hayashi made a formal request to the Japanese Ministry of Public Welfare to rescind his medical license because “I caused irredeemable harm to society through acts that made me unfit to be a doctor.” The request was granted. Hayashi was the first participant in the sarin attack to be convicted. When it came time to pass sentence, the judge ruled that, while Hayashi deserved the death penalty because of his murderous deeds, he also deserved the leniency of a life sentence, given his confession, which helped link the cult to the sarin attack; his commitment to “telling the truth in court as his last mission … even if [the facts] were against him”; the “passivity” of his role in the gassing (as the crime had been ordered by Asahara); and the desire of the next of kin of two dead subway workers that he not be executed. After the sentencing Hayashi faced the judge and bowed deeply.”

To this day, Dr. Ikuo Hayashi is still in prison.

And what became of Shoko Asahara, the venerated Guru who set all of this misery in motion? By the time he sat in front of a judge in late 1996, Asahara seemed to have lost all connection to reality. In one exchange with the judge, the Guru said:

“My way of living is different from yours. I want to make that clear. You are causing me, a blind person, to have illusions. You are dispensing ultrasonic waves to make me crazy. You are using the death penalty as a threat. Why are you talking about burning with laser beams? If you want to shoot me to death, then do it,… kill me by torturing me, by freezing me and burning me and removing my energy,… taking away my life force.… You are trying to brainwash me by letting me hear the sounds of the guillotine … or of people falling from a building—and making me believe these are real.… So take me out of here to the jail and continue the lynching there.”

One Japanese reporter described Asahara’s behavior in court:

 “He mumbled continuously in Japanese and English, sometimes moving his head vertically in a violent manner. He was heard once saying ‘never kill’ in English.” Sometimes, switching back and forth between the two languages, he would explain that he was “translating” his English into Japanese. On another occasion, when Asahara mumbled a great deal and seemed to be confused, his lawyer explained that the guru was “talking to the prosecutors, his own lawyers, and his former followers, and playing all the roles himself,”

Ultimately, Asahara was convicted of 23 counts of murder, which included the people who died in the subway attacks, the Matsumoto attacks, the Sakamoto murders, and several other sanctioned killings. For these crimes, he was sentenced to death.

For years, Shoko Asahara had claimed that he had the ability to float and hang in the air /suspend himself in the air. Well, on July 6^th, 2018, Asahara proved it was true. His last act on earth was a feat of levitation, assisted by a hangman and a noose. In the end, at least for a few minutes, the Guru really did float in the air.

THE 14^th VICTIM

The news of Shoko Asahara’s execution came as a relief to many, including Kazuo Asakawa, brother of Sachiko Asakawa, the severely brain-damaged and paralyzed woman that Haruki Murakami had visited in the hospital all the way back in 1996.

In the years since that interview, Sachiko underwent countless hours of physical therapy, speech therapy, and medical treatment. But despite the prayers of her family and top-notch doctors, she never got better. At least not to the degree that Kazuo and the rest had hoped for.  She never stood up out of the wheelchair, and she never went back to Disneyland.

Shoko Asahara was dead, his followers were scattered, his Aum Shinrikyo was effectively destroyed – but no amount of vengeance or retribution could make Sachiko whole again. As her brother, Kazuo, reportedly wrote in his diary:  

“Even though he [Matsumoto] was sentenced to death, our lives will not change. This doesn’t mean that Sachiko will get better, either.”

For almost three decades the official number of fatalities in the Tokyo subway sarin attacks sat at 13. Thirteen people who died from exposure to Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin on March 20^th, 1995. Well, on March 10^th, 2020, thirteen became fourteen. After 25 years, Sachiko Asakawa passed away as a result of the injuries she sustained on the subway three decades earlier.

“The cause of death,” wrote a reporter for the Japan Times, “was hypoxic encephalopathy caused by sarin gas poisoning.”

It was a sad ending to a sad story. But even still, Sachiko’s brother Kazuo managed to find a silver lining. As he told a reporter:

“I want our family to be always smiling and cheerful. Sachiko was devoted to her family and she would have wanted that.”

And the silver thread of that sentiment, ran all the way back to 1996, to the darkest days of Sachiko’s treatment, when the grief was still raw and fresh. When every blink or syllable or movement Sachiko could muster was a victory. During that time, Kazuo kept a personal diary. The entries were full of anger and rage and despair, but also bright bursts of hope and humanism. What happened to Sachiko was a tragedy, but it didn’t have to be an anchor around their necks. It didn’t have to define their lives. Instead, it could be a reminder, to be thankful, to savor every unlabored breath we take, to live with conviction, if only because so many others can’t. As Kazuo wrote in his diary in 1996:

“Let’s live as hard as we can once more tomorrow!” “Hooray, hooray for Sachiko! Hang in there, Sachiko! Hooray!”

This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

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