Last July 2018, the international press reported the execution of Shōkō Asahara on the gallows; a method that, although surprising, is still used in Japan to carry out death sentences. The news went almost unnoticed. In fact, in Spain some media did not even dedicate a space to it in their paper edition. Although today a few 20-somethings will be familiar with this name, the truth is that there was a time when, just listening to it, it caused a chill. It may not be within our borders, but it is in the country of the rising sun, where, on March 20, 1995, five acolytes of the sect he led carried out a terrorist attack with sarin gas in tokyo subway which claimed the lives of 13 people and took, according to the most pessimistic counts, another 6,200 to the hospital.
By executing Asahara – who was escorted to the scaffold just two weeks later by the last half-dozen followers associated with the suburban attack – a sickening cycle of depravity, death, and insanity was closed.
With this character, in short, one of the last living vestiges of the ‘Aum Shinrikyō’ (‘Supreme Truth’) sect left, the same group that grew to more than 40,000 followers around the world during the 1990s and that , over two decades, managed to manufacture everything from sarin gas to nerve agent VX (considered a weapon of mass destruction by the United Nations); he flirted with the possibility of getting hold of nuclear explosives; He acquired an attack helicopter and had the ability to equip his disciples with military weaponry.
yoga school
The history of this group began long before Time magazine dedicated its cover to the cult leader after the attacks. Its origin dates back to a time when the country was experiencing a painful hangover caused by the capitulation in World War II. During those years, the Allied victory put an end to the idea that the Emperor was a kind of divinity incapable of bending the knee before his enemies and led, in the long run, to the emergence of hundreds of religious movements (up to 180,000 in 1995) with purposes as diverse as the people who joined them.
It was at that time, between 1987 and 1990, when Chizuo Matsumoto (Ashara’s real name) founded ‘Aum Shinrikyō’, a spiritual group based on Buddhist and Hindu foundations and centered on the practice of yoga.
That first phase did not last long. As time passed, Asahara modulated his speech and became a prophet of the apocalypse. Buoyed by the blind faith of his followers, the self-styled ‘Enlightened One’ began to preach against the supremacy of the United States and criticized Japan for having fallen prey to its tentacles. His paranoia grew and it was not long before he launched a hate speech against an alleged secret organization in charge of determining the destiny of the world from North America.
Asahara, during one of her talks
He also proclaimed the arrival of the Third World war before the turn of the millennium and urged his acolytes to hand over their possessions to him in order to flee worldly riches. “Souls attached to materialism or carnal pleasures will go to hell,” he used to repeat. Thanks to this maxim he amassed a heritage of about one billion euros in 1994.
His speech, strange as it may seem, caught on among the most educated classes in Japan. And all this, despite the fact that he claimed superpowers such as levitating or knowing how to read minds. To his followers, Asahara offered enlightenment and eternal life. In exchange, they had to abandon their work, move to the domain of Aum and dedicate themselves body and soul to the group.
The methods to convince his acolytes were typical of any sect; the deprivation of sex and food, the ingestion of drugs (among which LSD stood out) or exposure to electric shocks that -supposedly- increased mental capacity are just a few examples. “Their strategy is to wear you down and take control of your mind. It promises you heaven, but it makes you live through hell,” explained a repentant member after escaping from the congregation in 1995.
The hour that overtook Japan
After flirting with the production of toxic substances and using them in petty attacks on judges trying to end his reign of terror, Asahara orchestrated his most heinous deed in March 1995. That month he arranged for a five-man team to go into three of the main lines of the Tokyo subway (the central ones Hibiya, Marunouchi y Chiyoda) and release a lethal gas on trains as they converge at the Kasumigaseki stop, home to Japanese ministry offices and one of the largest metropolitan police stations.
He sold that coup to his followers as a religious vindication, but the reality is that the authorities increasingly closed the fence on the cult and the leader sought to mislead the intelligence services by making them believe that the attack was the work of the United States. .
As a weapon, Asahara selected small packets of sarin gas disguised as pre-cooked meal bags, ordering her acolytes to release their deadly contents into the wagons when the time came with the help of the sharp point of an umbrella. “This gas produces congestion of the lungs, intense sweating, vomiting and convulsions that cause death in fifteen minutes,” the Spanish press explained with concern in 1995.
The leader of the sect was captured and, last 2018, executed
It cannot be said that the command ignored the huge number of deaths that would occur, since the group was made up of three young people with superior knowledge in physics (Masato Yokoyama, Kenichi Hirose and Toru Toyoda), a graduate in artificial intelligence (Yasuo Hayashi) and a veteran cardiologist (Ikuo Hayashi). As a car day, the leader selected March 20, a Monday, because it was the day when more people used the subway.
The terrorist operation began shortly before eight in the morning. At that time, each of the five members of Aum got on a different train. When they were close to the objective they broke the packages and released the contents, although not without remorse. “When I looked around to see so many travelers I was shocked. I am a doctor and I have dedicated my life to saving lives. I knew that if I punctured those bags, a lot of people would die, but I couldn’t disobey orders,” Hayashi later told police.
Except in the case of Yokoyama (whose nerves prevented him from completing the task and he could barely make a small hole in one of the bundles) the rest fulfilled the mission and, between 8:09 and 8:17 in the morning, the sarin made its way into a total of 16 stations. From then on there were scenes of authentic panic. “I saw a man spasm on the ground, he looked like he was swimming like a fish out of water,” revealed Nobuo Serizawa, one of the photographers sent to the scene. The cult members escaped.
The press of the time defined the attack as a massacre. It was of such caliber that the intelligence services attributed it, in principle, to the United States. Asahara, for his part, denied his involvement in an interview on the Japanese network NHK and stated that his group had chemical products for other reasons: «We use sodium fluoride to make ceramics, and sodium trichloride phosphorus as fertilizer. I didn’t know they could be used to make sarin.”
He did not avail. The police counterattacked after receiving a tip-off and, a few days later, dispatched 2,500 agents to the 25 offices that the sect had throughout the country. The response of its members was general: «We have nothing to hide. What you do is unfair, but we will cooperate.” The rest is history. Once the investigations were completed, the leader was accused of masterminding 29 murders (16 of them before March 20) and, in the long run, 189 of its members were tried.