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Shoko Asahara | |
|---|---|
 Asahara | |
| Born | Chizuo Matsumoto (1955-03-02)March 2, 1955 Yatsushiro, Kumamoto, Japan |
| Died | July 6, 2018(2018-07-06) (aged 63) Tokyo Detention House, Tokyo, Japan |
| Cause of death | Execution by hanging |
| Occupations | Cult leader, founder ofAum Shinrikyo |
| Political party | Shinri Party |
| Criminal status | Executed |
| Spouse | Tomoko Matsumoto (took the name "Akari Matsumoto" after her release from prison)[1] |
| Children | 12 |
| Convictions | Mass murder Terrorism |
| Criminal penalty | Death |
Date apprehended | May 16, 1995 |
| Supreme Leader of the Aum Shinrikyo | |
| In office August 25, 1989 – May 16, 1995 | |
| Preceded by | Religion founded |
| Succeeded by | After his execution, no successor of the Supreme Leader of the Aum Shinrikyo was elected |
| President of the Shinri Country | |
| In office June 20, 1994 – May 16, 1995 | |
| Prime Minister | Kouichi Ishikawa |
| Supreme Leader | Himself as Leader of Aum Shinrikyo |
| Preceded by | Position established |
| Succeeded by | Position abolished |
| Chairman of the Shinri Party | |
| In office August 16, 1989 – July 6, 2018 Interim: 1990 — July 6, 2018 | |
| Preceded by | Party founded |
| Succeeded by | Party dissolved Party dissolved after the execution of Asa |
Shoko Asahara (麻原 彰晃,Asahara Shōkō; March 2, 1955 – July 6, 2018), bornChizuo Matsumoto (松本 智津夫,Matsumoto Chizuo), was a Japanesecult leader andterrorist who founded and led thedoomsday cult known asAum Shinrikyo. He was convicted of masterminding the 1995sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway which killed 14 people and injured thousands more, and was also involved in several other assassinations and terrorist attacks. Asahara wassentenced to death in 2004, and his final appeal failed in 2011. In June 2012, his execution was postponed due to further arrests of Aum members.[2] He was ultimately executed along with other senior members of Aum Shinrikyo on July 6, 2018.[3][4]
Chizuo Matsumoto was born on March 2, 1955, the fourth son of a large, poor family oftatami-mat-makers inKumamoto Prefecture.[5][6] He hadinfantile glaucoma from birth, which made him lose all sight in his left eye and go partially blind in his right eye at a young age. He was enrolled in aschool for the blind when he was 6 years old since he could not continue the family trade. He never lived with his family again.[6]
Matsumoto discovered a way to earn money by directing other kids to a candy store, and as he was the only student in the school still capable of having some vision, this led to him becoming somewhat well-liked. However, he was also known to be a bully, taking advantage of the other students by beating andextorting money from them. During his adolescence, Matsumoto developed a fantasy about ruling a kingdom of robots with total power and confided in his schoolmates about his aspiration to becomePrime Minister of Japan.[7]
He graduated in 1973 and applied toFaculty of Law ofUniversity of Tokyo, but was rejected. He then turned to the study ofacupuncture andtraditional Chinese medicine, which were common careers for the blind in Japan, and he established a Chinese medicine shop outsideTokyo.[8] Asahara married the following year and eventually fathered six children, the eldest of whom was born in 1978.[9] In 1981, Matsumoto was convicted of practicing pharmacy without a license and selling unregulated drugs, for which he was fined ¥200,000 (equivalent to about ¥270,000 in 2023).[10]
Matsumoto's interest in religion reportedly started at this time. Having been recently married, he worked to support his large and growing family.[11] He dedicated his free time to the study of various religious concepts, starting withChinese astrology andTaoism.[12] Later, Matsumoto practicedWestern esotericism,yoga,meditation,esoteric Buddhism, andesoteric Christianity.[13] Matsumoto let his hair and beard grow and adopted the name Shoko Asahara.
Starting in 1984, Asahara made several pilgrimages toIndia, where he met the14th Dalai Lama. Asahara later claimed to his followers that he managed to achieveenlightenment, metShiva, and was given a "special mission" to preach "real Buddhism" in Japan. The Dalai Lama later distanced himself from Asahara and said that he had met "a strange Japanese man", but denied having any significant relationship with him. Asahara returned to Japan in 1987 and assumed the title "sonshi" (尊師, lit. "guru") before stating that he had masteredmeditation to such an extent that he could lift himself with his mind. He promoted this achievement with pamphlets produced by his own publishing company, but outside a few Japanese periodicals with an occult subject, little publicity was achieved.[14]
Aum Shinrikyo (Japanese:オウム真理教,Hepburn:Oumu Shinrikyō; literally 'Supreme Truth'), later named Aleph (アレフ,Arefu), was founded by Asahara in his one-bedroom apartment inTokyo'sShibuya ward in 1987, starting off as ayoga andmeditation class[15] known asOumu Shinsen no Kai (オウム神仙の会,"AumImmortal Mountain Wizard Association") and steadily grew in the following years. It gained official status as areligious organization in 1989 and attracted a considerable number of graduates from Japan's elite universities, thus being dubbed a "religion for the elite".[16]
Although Aum was considered controversial inJapan, it was not initially associated with serious crimes until Asahara became obsessed withBiblical prophecies. Aum's public relations activities included publishing comics and animated cartoons that attempted to tie its religious ideas to popularanime andmanga themes, including space missions, powerful weapons, world conspiracies, and the quest for ultimate truth.[17] Aum published several magazines includingVajrayana Sacca andEnjoy Happiness, adopting a somewhat missionary attitude.[16]Isaac Asimov's science fictionFoundation Trilogy was referenced "depicting as it does an elite group of spiritually evolved scientists forced to go underground during an age of barbarism so as to prepare themselves for the moment...when they will emerge to rebuild civilization".[18] It has been 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 traditionalsermons.[19]: 258
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 originalPalisutras. These efforts resulted in Aum being able to recruit a variety of people ranging from bureaucrats to personnel from theJapanese Self-Defense Forces and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.[20] AuthorsDavid Kaplan andAndrew Marshall, in their 1996 book,The Cult at the End of the World, claim that initiation rituals often involved the use ofhallucinogens, such asLSD. Religious practices often involved extremely ascetic practices claimed to be "yoga". These included everything from renunciants being hung upside down to being givenshock therapy.[21]
Thecult 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.[22][23] Kaplan and Marshall alleged in their book that Aum was also connected with such activities asextortion. The group, authors report, "commonly took patients into its hospitals and then forced them to pay exorbitant medical bills".[21]
In October 1989,Tokyo Broadcasting System Television (TBS) taped an interview with 33-year-old Tsutsumi Sakamoto, a lawyer working on aclass action lawsuit against Aum Shinrikyo, regarding his anti-Aum efforts. However, the network secretly showed a video of the interview to Aum members without Sakamoto's knowledge, intentionally breaking itsprotection of sources. Aum officials then pressured TBS to cancel the planned broadcast of the interview.[24][25] Several days later, on November 3, 1989, several Aum Shinrikyo members, includingHideo Murai, chief scientist, Satoro Hashimoto, amartial arts master, Tomomasa Nakagawa andKazuaki Okazaki drove toYokohama, where Sakamoto lived. They carried a pouch with fourteenhypodermic needles and a supply ofpotassium chloride. According to court testimony provided by the perpetrators later, they planned to use the chemical substance tokidnap Sakamoto from Yokohama'sShinkansen train station, but, contrary to expectations, he did not show up—it was a holiday (Bunka no hi, or "Culture Day"), so he slept in with his family at home.[26][27]
At 3 a.m. on November 5, the group entered Sakamoto's apartment through an unlocked door. Tsutsumi Sakamoto was struck on the head with a hammer, injected withpotassium chloride, and strangled.[28] His 29-year-old wife, Satoko Sakamoto (坂本都子Sakamoto Satoko) was beaten and injected with potassium chloride.[29] Their 14-month-old infant son Tatsuhiko Sakamoto (坂本竜彦Sakamoto Tatsuhiko) was injected with the potassium chloride and then his face was covered with a cloth. The family's remains were placed in metal drums and hidden in three separate rural areas in three different prefectures (Tsutsumi inNiigata, Satoko inToyama, and Tatsuhiko inNagano) so that in case the bodies were uncovered, police might not link the three incidents. Their bed sheets were burned and the tools were dropped in the ocean. The victims' teeth were smashedto prevent identification.[30] Their bodies were not found until the perpetrators revealed the locations after they were captured in connection with the1995 Tokyo subway attack. By the time police searched the areas in which the victims were placed, their bodies were reduced to bones.[31] TBS kept the showing of the video secret until March 25, 1996. This led to strong criticism that it contributed to the murder.[32]
On the night of June 27, 1994, the cult carried out achemical weapons attack against civilians when they releasedsarin in the central Japanese city ofMatsumoto, Nagano. When carrying out the attack, Aum Shinrikyo had two goals; to attack three judges who were expected to rule against the cult in a lawsuit concerning a real estate dispute, and to test the efficacy of its sarin—which the cult was manufacturing at one of its facilities—as a weapon ofmass murder.[33][34] Residents of Matsumoto had also angered Asahara by vigorously opposing his plan to set up an office and factory in the city's southern area. Opponents of the plan gathered 140,000 signatures on an anti-Aum petition, equivalent to 70 percent of Matsumoto's population at the time.[35]
Aum's original plan to release theaerosol into the Matsumoto courthouse was altered when the cult members arrived in the city after the courthouse had closed. They decided to instead target a three-story apartment building where the city's judges resided. At 10:40 pm, members of Aum used a convertedrefrigerator truck to release a cloud of sarin which floated near the home of the judges. The truck's cargo space held "a heating contraption that had been specifically designed to turn "twelve litres of liquid sarin into an aerosol, and fans to diffuse the aerosol into the neighbourhood".[35]
At 11:30 pm, Matsumoto police received an urgent report from paramedics that casualties were being transported to hospital. The patients were suffering from darkened vision, eye pain, headaches, nausea, diarrhea,miosis (constricted pupils), and numbness in their hands. Some victims described having seen a fog with a pungent and irritating smell floating by. A total of 274 people were treated. Five dead residents were discovered in their apartments, and two died in hospital immediately after admission. An eighth victim, Sumiko Kono, remained in acoma for fourteen years and died in 2008.[36] The fatalities also included Yutaka Kobayashi, a 23-year-oldsalaryman, and Mii Yasumoto, a 29-year-old medical school student.[37]
The cult is known to have consideredassassinations of several individuals critical of the cult, such as the heads of Buddhist sectsSoka Gakkai andThe Institute for Research in Human Happiness. After cartoonistYoshinori Kobayashi began satirizing the cult, he was included on Aum's assassination list. An assassination attempt was made on Kobayashi in 1993.[38] In 1991, Aum began to usewiretapping to getNTT uniforms/equipment and created a manual for wiretapping.[20]
In July 1993, cult members sprayed large amounts of liquid containingBacillus anthracis spores from a cooling tower on the roof of Aum Shinrikyo's Tokyo headquarters. However, their plan to cause ananthrax epidemic failed. The attack resulted in a large number of complaints about bad odors but no infections.[39] At the end of 1993, the cult started secretly manufacturing the nerve agentssarin and laterVX. Aum tested its sarin on sheep atBanjawarn Station, a remote pastoral property in Western Australia, killing 29 sheep. Both sarin and VX were then used in several assassinations between 1994 and 1995.[40][41]
At the end of 1994, the cult broke into theHiroshima factory ofMitsubishi Heavy Industries, in an attempt to steal technical documents on military weapons such as tanks and artillery.[21] In December 1994 and January 1995,Masami Tsuchiya of Aum Shinrikyo synthesized 100 to 200 grams of VX which was used to attack three people. On December 2, Noboru Mizuno was attacked with syringes containingVX nerve agent, leaving him in a serious condition.[42] The VX victim, who Asahara had suspected was a spy, was attacked at 7:00 a.m. on December 12, 1994, on a street inOsaka byTomomitsu Niimi and another Aum member, who sprinkled the nerve agent on his neck. He chased them for about 100 yards (91 m) before collapsing, dying ten days later without coming out of a deep coma. Doctors in the hospital suspected at the time he had been poisoned with anorganophosphate pesticide. But the cause of death was pinned down only after cult members were arrested for thesubway attack in Tokyo in March 1995 confessed to the killing.[40][43][41]
On January 4, Hiroyuki Nagaoka, an important member of the Aum Victims' Society, a civil organization that protested against the sect's activities, was assassinated in the same way.[40][44][45][41]In February 1995, several cult members kidnapped Kiyoshi Kariya, a 69-year-old brother of a member who had escaped, from a Tokyo street and took him to a compound inKamikuishiki nearMount Fuji, where he was killed. His corpse was destroyed in amicrowave-powered incinerator and the remnants disposed of inLake Kawaguchi.[46] 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".[40]
Police made plans to simultaneously raid cult facilities across Japan in March 1995.[47] Prosecutors alleged Asahara was tipped off about this and that he ordered the Tokyo subway attack to divert police.[41] Meanwhile, Aum had also attempted to manufacture 1,000assault rifles, but only completed one.[48] According to the testimony of Kenichi Hirose at theTokyo District Court in 2000, Asahara wanted the group to be self-sufficient in manufacturing copies of theSoviet Union's main infantry weapon, theAK-74;[49] one rifle was smuggled into Japan to be studied so that Aum couldreverse-engineer and mass-produce it.[50] Police seized AK-74 components and blueprints from a vehicle used by an Aum member on April 6, 1995.[51]
On the morning of March 20, 1995, Aum members released abinary chemical weapon, chemically most closely similar tosarin, in a coordinated attack on five trains in theTokyo subway system, killing 13 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.[52] 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.[53]
Over the next weeks, the full scale of Aum's activities was revealed for the first time. At the cult's headquarters inKamikuishiki on the foot ofMount Fuji, police found explosives, chemical weapons, and a RussianMil Mi-17 military helicopter. While the finding ofbiological warfare agents such asanthrax andEbolacultures was reported, those claims now appear to have been widely exaggerated.[54] There were stockpiles of chemicals that could be used for producing enough sarin to kill four million people.[55] On March 30, 1995, Takaji Kunimatsu, chief of theNational Police Agency, was shot four times near his house in Tokyo and was seriously wounded. While many suspected Aum involvement in the shooting, theSankei Shimbun reported thatHiroshi Nakamura is suspected of the crime, but nobody has been charged.[56]
On April 23, 1995,Hideo Murai, the head of Aum's Ministry of Science, was stabbed to death outside the cult's Tokyo headquarters amidst a crowd of about 100 reporters, in front of cameras. The man responsible, a Korean member ofYamaguchi-gumi, was arrested and eventually convicted of the murder. His motive remains unknown. On the evening of May 5, a burning paper bag was discovered in a toilet in Tokyo's busyShinjuku station. Upon examination it was revealed that it was ahydrogen cyanide device which, had it not been extinguished in time, would have released enough gas into the ventilation system to potentially kill 10,000 commuters.[47] On July 4, several undetonated cyanide devices were found at other locations in the Tokyo subway.[57][58][59]
During this time, numerous cult members were arrested for various offenses, but arrests of the most senior members on the charge of the subway gassing had not yet taken place. In June, an individual unrelated to Aum had launched a copycat attack by hijackingAll Nippon Airways Flight 857, a Boeing 747 bound for Hakodate from Tokyo. The hijacker claimed to be an Aum member in possession of sarin and plastic explosives, but these claims were ultimately found to be false.[60] Asahara was finally found hiding within a wall of a cult building known as "The 6th Satian" in the Kamikuishiki complex on May 16 and was arrested.[47] On the same day, the cult mailed a parcel bomb to the office ofYukio Aoshima, the governor of Tokyo, blowing off the fingers of his secretary's hand.
On June 21, 1995, Asahara acknowledged that in January 1994 he had ordered the killing of a sect member, Kotaro Ochida, a pharmacist at an Aum hospital. Ochida, who tried to escape from a sect compound, was held down and strangled by another Aum member who was allegedly told that he too would be killed if he did not strangle Ochida.Fumihiro Joyu, one of the few senior leaders of the group under Asahara who did not face serious charges, became official head of the organization in 1999.Kōki Ishii, a legislator who formed an anti-Aum committee in theNational Diet in 1999, was murdered in 2002. At 11:50 p.m. on December 31, 2011, Makoto Hirata surrendered himself to the police and was arrested on suspicion of being involved in the 1995 abduction of Kiyoshi Kariya, a non-member who had died during an Aum kidnapping and interrogation.[61][62][63]
Asahara faced 27 counts of murder in 13 separateindictments.[64] The prosecution argued that Asahara gave orders to attack the Tokyo Subway to "overthrow the government and install himself in the position ofEmperor of Japan".[65] Later, during the trial which took more than seven years to conclude, the prosecution forwarded an additional theory that the attacks were ordered to divert police attention away from Aum. The prosecution also accused Asahara of masterminding theMatsumoto incident and theSakamoto family murder.[66] During the trials, some of the disciples testified against Asahara, and he was found guilty on 13 of 17 charges, including the Sakamoto family murder; four charges were dropped. On February 27, 2004,[67] he wassentenced to death.[68] The trial was called the "trial of the century" by the Japanese media.[69]
The defenceappealed against Asahara's sentence on the grounds that he was mentally unfit and psychiatric examinations were undertaken. During much of the trials, Asahara remained silent or only muttered to himself.[70] However, he communicated with the staff at his detention facility, which convinced the examiner that Asahara wasmaintaining his silence out of free will.[71] Owing to his lawyers' failure to submit the statement of reason for appeal, theTokyo High Court decided on March 27, 2006, not to grant them leave to appeal.[72] This decision was upheld by theSupreme Court of Japan on September 15, 2006.[73] Two re-trial appeals were declined by the appellate court.[74] In June 2012, Asahara's execution was postponed due to arrests of several fugitive Aum Shinrikyo members.[2]
Asahara was executed by hanging at theTokyo Detention House on July 6, 2018, along with six other cult members.[3][4][75] Relatives of victims said they approved the execution.[76] Asahara's final words, as reported by officials, assigned his remains to his fourth daughter, who was unsympathetic to the cult and stated she planned to dispose of the ashes at sea; this was contested by Asahara's wife, third daughter, and other family members, who were suspected of wanting to enshrine the ashes where believers can honor them. Until 2024, the ashes remained at the Tokyo Detention House.[77] In 2021, theSupreme Court of Japan ordered Asahara's remains to be released to his second daughter, which was affirmed by theTokyo District Court in 2024.[78]
(... enough Sarin in Aum's possession to kill over 4 million people).
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