Shoko Asahara And The Japanese Doomsday-Cult Of Aum Shinrikyo
Wojtek Laski/Getty ImagesShoko Asahara during a visit to Moscow, Russia, on Feb. 17, 1994.
In 1987, Shoko Asahara (born Chizuo Matsumoto) founded the group Aum Shinrikyo. The group began as a yoga school that fused Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism and encouraged spiritual mindfulness — at first. According to The Independent, the group amassed thousands of acolytes in Japan and Russia.
Unfortunately, the group also eventually preached Doomsday prophecies and occultism. Asahara not only claimed that he was the reincarnation of Buddha, but that nuclear war between Japan and the U.S. was nigh — and only faithful followers of his would survive.
According to The South China Morning Post, Asahara was born on March 2, 1955. He was one of nine children born to a poor straw hat maker on the island of Kyushu. Partially blind, he went to a state boarding school for blind children when he was six and quickly grew to be a bully.
United States Public Health Service / Wikimedia CommonsEmergency personnel respond to the Tokyo subway attack on March 20, 1995.
“For him, violence was like a hobby,” a former classmate said. “Once he got angry, there was no way to stop it.
Nevertheless, his charisma and manipulative empathy would later allow him to attract thousands of devotees. He promised followers of Aum Shinrikyo that they could acquire “the power of God with the right kind of training.”
He began calling himself Asahara in the 1980s, after leaving school at 19 and studying acupuncture.
Failing to get into both medical school and law school, Asahara illegally sold medicine out of his acupuncture practice — which led to his first arrest. He became reclusive, studying religious texts and traveling to India after which he reemerged as a yoga teacher. He claimed he had reached enlightenment in the Himalayas and that he could even levitate for hours.
“Asahara was talented at brainwashing…[he] lured young people, who felt a sense of emptiness in Japanese society.” — Kimiaki Nishida, social psychology professor at Rissho University in Tokyo.
He soon amassed a group that operated out of a hub at the base of Mount Fuji where members synthesized chemical weapons.
His growing cult ran for a parliamentary election in 1990 but failed to get enough votes. Increasingly angry and impatient, Asahara led a sarin gas attack in Matsumoto city in June 1994, which injured over 500 people and killed eight.
The group evaded detection, which led to an even more fatal incident on March 20, 1995, when five members of Aum Shinrikyo descended into the Tokyo underground at different points during rush hour. They exposed passengers there to the deadly World War II-era sarin gas.
The suspects wore surgical masks and carried the liquid chemical in packets hidden inside newspapers in plastic bags. These amounted to nearly a liter each, while a drop of sarin no bigger than a pin is already fatal through direct contact.
After piercing the packets with their sharpened umbrellas, the five men and their accompanying getaway drivers fled the trains and escaped. Panic set in almost immediately: those who weren’t foaming at the mouth or coughing up blood were desperately trying to escape.
In the end, 688 people were rushed to hospitals while 5,510 more hurried there on their own. Emergency response was harshly criticized, as authorities failed to rapidly halt train service to contain the issue and officials failed to arrest those responsible for the similar attack a year earlier.
Asahara’s lengthy trial landed him on death row in 2006. He was hanged in July 2018. Twelve Aum members were sentenced to death while Aum Shinrikyo rebranded itself as Aleph. The group officially disowned its previous leader and even donated money to those injured during the attacks.
