Aum Shinrikyo and the Tokyo Subway Attack

Shoko Asahara was born Chizuo Matsumoto in 1955 in Kumamoto prefecture, on the southern island of Kyushu, into a poor family of tatami makers. Partly sighted from birth, he attended a school for the blind and later moved to Tokyo, where he ran a shop selling herbal remedies and in 1982 was fined for selling fake medicines. Like many young Japanese of the time, he was drawn to the boom in spiritual movements known as the “new new religions”, and for a while belonged to one of them, Agonshu, which promised spiritual power through esoteric Buddhist practice.

In 1984 he opened a small yoga and meditation school in Tokyo. He claimed to have reached enlightenment in the Himalayas in 1986, travelled in India, and in 1987 renamed his group Aum Shinrikyo, roughly “Aum, the Teaching of Supreme Truth”. Photographs of meetings with well-known religious figures abroad lent him prestige. In 1989, after some hesitation, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government registered Aum as a religious corporation, giving it legal protection and tax privileges.

Scholars often prefer the neutral term “new religious movement” for groups like Aum, because “cult” is a contested label that can be applied unfairly to any unfamiliar faith. In Aum’s case, though, the label was attached after crimes that the courts later established in detail.

Aum’s teaching was a mixture. Its main deity was the Hindu god Shiva, its meditations and terms came largely from Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, and its vision of the future borrowed from the Book of Revelation and from popular readings of Nostradamus. Asahara taught that a final war, Armageddon, was approaching, and that only those purified by his practices would survive. Over time his predictions grew darker and more precise, and the outside world, especially the Japanese state and the United States, came to be cast as enemies.

The heart of Aum was the relationship between guru and disciple. Ordinary members attended classes and seminars, while committed followers became renunciants, handing over their savings and cutting ties with their families to live in communes. The largest was at Kamikuishiki, at the foot of Mount Fuji. Life there involved yoga, chanting, fasting and severe austerities, and members paid large sums for initiations promising a share of the guru’s spiritual power. Asahara reinterpreted the Tibetan Buddhist idea of poa, the transfer of consciousness at death, into a teaching that killing could benefit the victim if ordered by an enlightened master. This distortion, rejected by Buddhist teachers, later served to justify murder.

Aum recruited energetically, and a striking number of its members were young graduates of good universities, including doctors, chemists and engineers. Some were drawn by disillusion with Japan’s competitive, materialist society; others by genuine spiritual hunger. In 1990 Asahara and 24 followers stood for parliament as the Supreme Truth Party and were all heavily defeated. Historians often see this humiliation as a turning point, after which the group withdrew further from society and began building weapons. It also expanded abroad, above all in Russia, where it claimed tens of thousands of followers in the early 1990s.

Violence began inside the movement and spread outward. A member who wanted to leave was killed in 1989. That November, members murdered Tsutsumi Sakamoto, a Yokohama lawyer who was helping families trying to reach relatives inside Aum, together with his wife and their baby son. The case remained officially unsolved for years, although suspicion fell on Aum from the start.

In June 1994 members released nerve gas in a residential district of Matsumoto, near a building used by judges who were hearing a case against the group; seven people died, and an eighth victim died in 2008. Then, on the morning of 20 March 1995, five teams of members released nerve gas on subway trains converging on Kasumigaseki, the district of government ministries in central Tokyo. Thirteen people had died by the end of 1996, and a fourteenth victim, who had lived with severe injuries ever since, died in 2020. More than 6,000 people were hurt, many of them suffering lasting effects.

Two days later police raided Aum sites across Japan. Asahara was found hiding at Kamikuishiki and arrested on 16 May 1995. Hundreds of members were questioned and many were tried. In 2004 the Tokyo District Court sentenced Asahara to death, holding him responsible for 13 crimes and 27 deaths; the sentence became final in 2006. Twelve other members also received death sentences. All thirteen were executed in two groups in July 2018, more than twenty years after the attack.

The trials that followed were among the longest in Japanese legal history. Asahara’s own trial opened in 1996 and ran for nearly eight years, during which he rarely spoke coherently in court; his lawyers argued that he was unfit to stand trial, a claim the courts rejected. Former members who testified described a closed world in which the guru’s orders could not be questioned and those who doubted were confined or punished. Some senior figures expressed remorse in court and wrote at length about how they had come to accept the guru’s logic. Their testimony became an important source for historians trying to understand how ordinary, often idealistic, people came to take part in grave crimes.

The attack forced Japan to ask how such a group could flourish unnoticed. Officials faced criticism for granting Aum legal status and for failing to connect it with earlier crimes. A court ordered the dissolution of Aum as a religious corporation in 1995, a decision that became final in 1996, and the Religious Corporations Law was revised to allow closer oversight. Successor groups exist and remain under official surveillance in Japan.

For many Japanese the attack ended the post-war sense of safety in everyday life. Victims and their families campaigned for years for recognition and support, and a law providing state relief for them was passed in 2008. Haruki Murakami’s book Underground, built from interviews with passengers and later with former members, gave the victims a voice and asked why bright young people had followed Asahara.

Scholars such as Ian Reader and Robert Jay Lifton have studied Aum as a case of how apocalyptic belief, an all-powerful leader and isolation from society can feed one another. Their work warns against easy explanations. Most new religious movements never turn violent, and what made Aum different, they argue, was a combination of a guru who demanded absolute obedience, a doctrine that justified killing, and members with the skills and resources to act on it.