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Aum Shinrikyo was a religious group which mixed Buddhist and Hindu beliefs and was based in Japan. It gained international notoriety in 1995, when a group of followers carried out a poison gas attack on the Tokyo subways on the orders of its founder, Sho-ko- Asahara. Since 2000, it has been called Aleph.
The movement received an official status of a religion from the Japanese government in 1987. It had been founded by Shoko Asahara in his one-bedroom apartment in Tokyo's Shibuya district in 1984. In the following years the group grew quickly and thus became Japan's fastest-growing religious group. Despite the highly negative public image that followed the group since the time it decided to participate in municipal elections, the group attracted a considerable number of young intellectuals and was dubbed a "religion for the elite" by the press due to the abundance of graduates from Japan's top universities. Asahara engaged in lecture tours, during which he explained his views on religion and answered questions. Shoko Asahara traveled abroad on a number of occasions and met various well-known yogic and Buddhist religious teachers, such as the 14th Dalai Lama and Kalu Rimpoche, a patriarch of the Tibetan Kagyupa school.
Aum Shrinrikyo encourages its followers to immerse themselves in extremely hot water, to the point of causing scalds, as a method of purification. Before the reformation, followers also wore caps with electrodes attached, supposed to keep their brainwaves in sync with Asahara. They also paid to drink Asahara's used bathwater.
In 1995, following a Tokyo subway sarin gas attack in which 12 commuters died and thousands were injured, Shoko Asahara and a number of senior Aum Shinrikyo officials were arrested and accused of planning the attack. The trial, called "the trial of the century" by the Japanese press, ruled Asahara guilty of masterminding the attack and sentenced him to death. The indictment is currently in the process of appeal at the High Court. Some senior members accused of participation, such as Masami Tsuchiya, also received death sentences. After the 1995 sarin gas incidents and following police searches and arrests, a number of Aum followers were accused in other crimes.
The reasons why a group of senior Aum members decided to commit atrocities and involvement of Asahara remain unclear to this very day. Prosecutors charged that Asahara had obtained inside information on police activities, specifically plans to conduct coordinated searches of all the Aum facilities in Japan. The subway attack, by this theory, was an attempt to distract the police investigation (previously police suggested attempt of Shoko Asahara to become a king of Japan). The defense maintains that Asahara was not aware of events, pointing to his deteriorating health condition. He left the post of organization's leader and maintains silence, refusing to speak even to lawyers and family members. Many believe the trials failed to establish truth behind the events.
The group still continues to operate in Japan. It has announced a change in its doctrine: misreading of religious texts related to Vajrayana Buddhist doctrines that authorities claimed were "justifying murder" were removed. The group apologized to the victims of the sarin gas attack and established a special compensations fund.
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Holy Terror: Armageddon in Tokyo
By by D. W. Brackett
In March 1995, a Japanese terrorist sect, Aum Shinri Kyo (Aum Supreme Truth), which had governmentally sanctioned religious status, carried out a poison gas attack in Tokyo's subway system using odorless sarin, a lethal nerve gas that the sect's chemists produced; the attack left 11 dead and more than 5000 severely injured. This chilling report makes stunningly clear that small terrorist groups are capable of unleashing chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction against defenseless populations. Brackett, formerly a UPI correspondent in Tokyo, a Knight-Ridder Tokyo bureau chief and a U.S. Air Force counterterrorism expert, tells how an Aum death squad murdered a lawyer and his family in 1989 because he was prosecuting the cult. Aum commune members who wanted to quit were given lethal punishments, including execution by microwave radiation, by this account. The sect had extensive connections with former Soviet weapon scientists and leased a ranch in Australia where it mined uranium. Brackett also charges the group with mind control and widespread use of LSD and other drugs. Semi-blind Aum leader Shoko Asahara and other members are standing trial in proceedings expected to last two years.
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Underground:
The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
By Haruki Murakami
The deadly Tokyo subway poison gas attack, perpetrated by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult on March 20, 1995, was the fulfillment of every urban straphanger's nightmare. Through interviews with several dozen survivors and former members of Aum, novelist Murakami presents an utterly compelling work of reportage that lays bare the soul of contemporary Japan in all its contradictions. The sarin attack exposed Tokyo authorities' total lack of preparation to cope with such fiendish urban terrorism. More interesting, however, is the variety of reactions among the survivors, a cross-section of Japanese citizens. Their individual voices remind us of the great diversity within what is too often viewed from afar as a homogeneous society. What binds most of them is their curious lack of anger at Aum. Chilling, too, is the realization that so many Aum members were intelligent, well-educated persons who tried to fill voids in their lives by following Shoko Asahara, a mad guru who promised salvation through total subordination to his will.
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Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan:
The Case of Aum Shinrikyo
By Ian Reader
This study looks at Aum's claims about itself and asks why a religious movement ostensibly focused on yoga, meditation, asceticism, and pursuit of enlightenment became involved in violent activities. Reader places the sect in the context of contemporary Japanese religious patterns, discussing developments in Asahara Shoko's personality and teachings, Aum's millennialism and its developing hostility toward society, and compares Aum with other religious and political movements that turned to violence, both in Japan and elsewhere. He concludes that Aum is not unique, nor is it solely a political or criminal terror group. It must rather be analyzed as an extreme example of a religious movement which, largely due to its own religious characteristics, came into friction with the surrounding society and developed into violence.
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The Cult at the End of the World:
The Terrifying Story of the Aum Doomsday Cult
By David E. Kaplan
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Destroying the World to Save It:
Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the the New Global Terrorism
By Robert Jay Lifton
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