, better known by their former name , is a Japanese new religious movement and doomsday cult founded by Shoko Asahara in 1987. It carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995 and was then found to have been responsible for the Matsumoto sarin attack the previous year.
The group says that those who carried out the attacks did so secretly, without their plans being known to other executives and ordinary believers. Asahara insisted on his innocence in a radio broadcast relayed from Russia and directed toward Japan. On 6 July 2018, after exhausting all appeals, Asahara and six followers on death row were executed as punishment for the 1995 attacks and other crimes. Six additional followers were executed on 26 July. At 12:10 AM, on New Year's Day 2019, at least nine people were injured (one seriously) when a car was deliberately driven into crowds celebrating the new year on Takeshita Street in Tokyo. Local police reported the arrest of Kazuhiro Kusakabe, the suspected driver, who allegedly admitted to intentionally ramming his vehicle into crowds to protest his opposition to the death penalty, specifically in retaliation for the execution of the aforementioned Aum cult members.
Aum Shinrikyo, which split into Aleph and Hikari no Wa in 2007, had already been formally designated a terrorist organization by several countries, including Russia, Canada, Japan, France, Kazakhstan, and the European Union. It was previously designated by the United States as a terrorist organization until 2022, when the State Department determined the group to be largely defunct.
The Public Security Intelligence Agency considered Aleph and Hikari no Wa to be branches of a "dangerous religion"National Police Agency (Japan) (2009), , GYOSEI Corporation, pg. 160. and it announced in January 2015 that they would remain under surveillance for three more years. The Tokyo District Court canceled the extension to surveillance of Hikari no Wa in 2017 following legal challenges from the group, but continued to keep Aleph under watch. The government appealed the cancellation, and in February 2019, the Tokyo High Court overturned the lower court's decision, reinstating the surveillance, citing no major changes between Aum Shinrikyo and Hikari no Wa.
History
The movement "evolved out of a yoga school founded by Asahara Shoko in the Shibuya district of Tokyo in February 1984". The movement was known as and steadily grew in the following years. Its original teachings were based on doctrines derived from Nichiren-based sects such as Nichiren Shōshū and Soka Gakkai. They gained official status as a religious organization in 1989 and attracted a considerable number of graduates from Japan's elite universities, thus being dubbed a "religion for the elite". Early activities
Since its inception, Aum was controversial, but it was not initially known for its serious crimes. It was during this early period that Asahara became obsessed with Biblical prophecies. Aum's public relations activities included publishing comics and animated cartoons that attempted to tie its religious ideas to popular anime and manga themes, including space missions, powerful weapons, world conspiracies, and the quest for ultimate truth. Aum published several magazines including Vajrayana Sacca and Enjoy Happiness, adopting a somewhat missionary attitude.
Isaac Asimov's science fiction Foundation Trilogy was referenced "depicting as it does an elite group of spiritually evolved scientists forced to go underground during an age of barbarism to prepare themselves for the moment...when they will emerge to rebuild civilization". Lifton posited that Aum's publications used Christian and Buddhist ideas to impress what he considered to be the more shrewd and educated Japanese who were not attracted to boring, purely traditional sermons.
Advertising and recruitment activities, dubbed the "Aum Salvation plan", included claims of curing physical illnesses with health improvement techniques, realizing life goals by improving intelligence and positive thinking, and concentrating on what was important at the expense of leisure. This was to be accomplished by practicing ancient teachings, accurately translated from original Pali suttas (these three were referred to as "threefold salvation"). These efforts resulted in Aum becoming one of the fastest-growing religious groups in Japan's history.
David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall claim that its practices remained secret. Initiation rituals often involved the use of hallucinogens, such as LSD. Religious practices often involved extremely ascetic practices claimed to be "yoga". These included everything from renunciants being hung upside down to being given shock therapy.
In the early days, Aum was able to recruit a variety of people ranging from bureaucrats to personnel from the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.
Incidents before 1995
The cult started attracting controversy in the late 1980s with accusations of deception of recruits, holding cult members against their will, forcing members to donate money, and murdering a cult member who tried to leave in February 1989.
In October 1989, the group's negotiations with Tsutsumi Sakamoto, an anti-cult lawyer threatening a lawsuit against them, which could potentially bankrupt the group, failed. In the same month, Sakamoto recorded an interview for a talk show on the Japanese TV station TBS. The network then had the interview secretly shown to the group without notifying Sakamoto, intentionally breaking protection of sources. The group then pressured TBS to cancel the broadcast. The following month, Sakamoto, his wife and his child went missing from their home in Yokohama. The police were unable to resolve the case at the time, although some of his colleagues publicly voiced their suspicions of the group. It was not until after the 1995 Tokyo attack that they were found to have been murdered and their bodies dumped in separate locations by cult members.
Kaplan and Marshall allege in their book that Aum was also connected with such activities as extortion. The group, authors report, "commonly took patients into its hospitals and then forced them to pay exorbitant medical bills".
The cult is known to have considered assassinations of several individuals critical of the cult, such as the heads of Buddhist sects Soka Gakkai and The Institute for Research in Human Happiness. After manga artist Yoshinori Kobayashi began satirizing the cult, he was included on Aum's assassination list. An assassination attempt was made on Kobayashi in 1993.
In 1991, Aum began to use wiretapping to get NTT uniforms/equipment and created a manual for wiretapping.
In July 1993, cult members sprayed large amounts of liquid containing Bacillus anthracis spores from a cooling tower on the roof of Aum Shinrikyo's Tokyo headquarters. However, their plan to cause an anthrax epidemic failed, likely because they used a vaccine strain of Bacillus anthracis that is generally regarded as nonpathogenic. The attack resulted in a large number of complaints about bad odors but no infections.
At the end of 1993, the cult started secretly manufacturing the nerve agent sarin and, later, VX. Aum tested its sarin on sheep at Banjawarn Station, a remote pastoral property in Western Australia, killing 29 sheep.
On the night of 27 June 1994, the cult carried out a chemical weapons attack against civilians when they released sarin in the central Japanese city of Matsumoto, Nagano. With the help of a converted refrigerator truck, members of the cult released a cloud of sarin, which floated near the homes of judges who were overseeing a lawsuit concerning a real-estate dispute, which was predicted to go against the cult. This Matsumoto incident killed eight and harmed 500 more. Police investigations focused only on an innocent local resident, Yoshiyuki Kouno, and failed to implicate the cult at the time. It was only after the Tokyo subway attack that Aum Shinrikyo was discovered to be behind the Matsumoto sarin attack.
At the end of 1994, the cult broke into the Hiroshima factory of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, in an attempt to steal technical documents on military weapons such as tanks and artillery.
In December 1994 and January 1995, Aum Shinrikyo member Masami Tsuchiya synthesized 100 to 200 grams of VX which was used to attack three people. On 2 December, Noboru Mizuno, who was believed to have assisted former members of Aum, was attacked with syringes containing VX gas, leaving him in a serious condition. Tadahito Hamaguchi, whom Asahara suspected was a spy, was attacked at 7:00 a.m. on 12 December 1994 on the street in Osaka by Tomomitsu Niimi and another Aum member, who sprinkled the nerve agent on his neck. He chased them for about before collapsing, dying 10 days later without coming out of a deep coma. Doctors in the hospital suspected at the time he had been poisoned with an organophosphate pesticide, the cause of death pinned down only after cult members arrested for the subway attack in Tokyo in March 1995 confessed to the killing. Ethyl methylphosphonate, methylphosphonic acid, and diisopropyl-2-(methylthio) ethylamine were later found in the body of the victim; unlike the cases for sarin (Matsumoto incident and Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway), VX was not used for mass murder.
On 4 January 1995, the cult tried to kill Hiroyuki Nagaoka, an important member of the Aum Victims' Society, a civil organization that protested against the sect's activities, in the same way. In February 1995, several cult members kidnapped Kiyoshi Kariya, the 69-year-old brother of an escaped former member, from a Tokyo street and took him to a compound in Kamikuishiki near Mount Fuji, where he was killed. His corpse was destroyed in a microwave-powered incinerator and the remnants disposed of in Lake Kawaguchi. Before Kariya was abducted, he had been receiving threatening phone calls demanding to know the whereabouts of his sister, and he had left a note saying, "If I disappear, I was abducted by Aum Shinrikyo".
Police made plans to simultaneously raid cult facilities across Japan in March 1995. Prosecutors alleged Asahara was tipped off about this and that he ordered the Tokyo subway attack to divert police.
Aum had also attempted to manufacture 1,000 assault rifles, but only completed one. According to the testimony of Kenichi Hirose at the Tokyo District Court in 2000, Asahara wanted the group to be self-sufficient in manufacturing copies of the Soviet Union's main infantry weapon, the AK-74; one rifle was smuggled into Japan to be studied so that Aum could reverse engineer and mass-produce the AK-74. Police seized AK-74 components and blueprints from a vehicle used by an Aum member on April 6, 1995.
Tokyo subway sarin attack and related incidents
On the morning of 20 March 1995, Aum members released a binary chemical weapon, most closely chemically similar to sarin, in a coordinated attack on five trains in the Tokyo subway system, killing 14 commuters, seriously injuring 54, and affecting 980 more. Some estimates claim as many as 6,000 people were injured by the sarin. It is difficult to obtain exact numbers since many victims are reluctant to come forward.Haruki Murakami, Alfred Birnbaum, Philip Gabriel, Underground, Vintage International, 2001.
Prosecutors allege that Asahara was tipped off by an insider about planned police raids on cult facilities and ordered an attack in central Tokyo to divert police attention away from the group. The attack evidently backfired, and police conducted huge simultaneous raids on cult compounds across the country.Danzig, Richard, Marc Sageman, Terrance Leighton, Lloyd Hough, Hidemi Yuki, Rui Kotani and Zachary M. Hosford, "Aum Shinrikyo: Insights Into How Terrorists Develop Biological and Chemical Weapons ", Center for a New American Security, July 2011; accessed 12 July 2018.