A Japanese Cult Made Sarin in a Compound Camouflaged as a Yoga School

Shoko Asahara — born Chizuo Matsumoto in 1955, partly blind from childhood — founded Aum Shinsen no Kai in February 1984 as a small yoga and meditation school in Tokyo's Shibuya. Within a few years he had reorganized the group as Aum Shinrikyo, a religious order whose theology combined elements of esoteric Buddhism, Hinduism, Christian apocalypticism, and Asahara's own claims of divine status — at various times he announced he was Maitreya, Christ, and the Lamb of God. Membership reached the tens of thousands across Japan and Russia by the early 1990s. The cult's funded operations included weapons-related laboratories at a compound in the foothills of Mount Fuji.

What the police would eventually find at those compounds reads like a thriller plot. Aum had stockpiled chemical precursors sufficient, by Japanese government estimates, to produce enough sarin nerve agent to kill four million people. The cult had also tested an early sarin formulation on twenty-nine sheep at a 500,000-acre property they had purchased in Western Australia. They tried to manufacture 1,000 AK-74-style assault rifles in a basement; only one was completed. They had murdered an anti-cult lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto and his wife and infant son in 1989, dumping the bodies in three separate prefectures, where they remained undiscovered for six years.

The direct attack came on March 20, 1995, the morning rush hour. Five Aum members on five separate Tokyo Metro lines pierced plastic bags of sarin solution with the tips of umbrellas and walked off. The vapor sickened roughly 6,000 commuters and killed 13. The police raid that followed eventually rolled up Asahara and most of his senior leadership. Asahara and twelve other Aum members were executed by hanging on July 6 and 26, 2018 — the largest mass execution in Japan in decades. The remnant organization continues, under different names, in monitored form.