The attack on the Tokyo subway with Sarin, a powerful liquid nerve agent, is one of the most infamous attacks in Japanese history. The massacre was carried out on March 20, 1995 by members of the Aum Shinrikyō, an extremist Japanese religious sect, and caused 14 victims and over 5,800 injuries.
But what were the reasons behind this extreme gesture, considered the largest attack in the Japanese country since the end of the Second World War? And how was it all organised?
To understand this we must first take a step back and briefly see how this sect was born and who Shoko Asahara, its founder, was.
The birth of Aum Shinrikyō, the sect that attacked the Tokyo subway
Aum Shinrikyō (translated into “supreme truth”) was born in the 1980s as a spiritual group that mixed Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, with the integration of some Christian elements. At the head of this movement was Shoko Asahara – pseudonym of Chizuo Matsumoto – who proclaimed himself not only Christ but also the new “enlightened one” after Buddha.
In 1989, Aum Shinrikyō obtained the official status of a religious organization in Japan and managed to have such great success as to recruit thousands of followers all over the world, also thanks to the numerous conferences and books written by Asahara himself. However, beneath this veneer of apparent legality, there was a time bomb waiting to explode.
The extremist drift of the cult sect
Asahara began to develop a cult increasingly centered on his own figure. As also reported by the BBC, over time former members of the cult have confirmed that the practice of paying thousands of dollars just to participate in rituals involving the leader’s hair or bath water was common.
But it didn’t end there: Asahara became increasingly paranoid, prophesying the end of the world and even claiming that only the members of the sect would be saved from the apocalypse. He even tried to enter politics with the idea of founding a new religious dictatorship… but the defeat in the elections made him change his mind, however increasing a strong resentment within him.
His idea was therefore simple and vindictive: if the end of the world was coming anyway, why not speed up the process?
Thus was born the Aum Shinrikyō that everyone has come to know, that of violence, extremism and terrorist attacks – the most famous of which was that of the Tokyo subway in 1995.
The day of the Sarin attack: what happened on March 20, 1994
That March 20th seemed like a day like any other in Tokyo: people were going to work and, as always, the subway was very crowded. But in the midst of that crowd there were also five members of Aum Shinrikyō who, without being seen, abandoned plastic bags wrapped in newspaper filled with Sarin, a liquid nerve agent. These were left in five different subway trains on three different lines. The chemical compound was synthesized by two other members of the organization with a purity of approximately 35%. This is a crucial element because if pure Sarin had been used, the victims would have been in the thousands.
Once on site, the members used special pointed umbrellas to deliberately pierce the bags and allow the toxic compound to escape. This, being highly volatile, quickly became vapor, being inhaled by anyone nearby. Soon people began to become unable to breathe, vomit, lose their sight, and many were even paralyzed.
At Kasumigaseki station, employees Tsuneo Hishinuma and Kazumasa Takahashi performed a heroic gesture: they managed to recover some of the bags from which gas was leaking and move them away from the crowd. This gesture cost him his life but allowed many others to be saved. Unfortunately, however, the overall toll was still extremely serious: 14 victims and a number of injured in excess of 5,800 – with estimates even exceeding 6,000 units.
After the attack
Immediately after the attack, each of the five attackers ran away with their accomplice-driver, losing their tracks. In the months following the attack the group tried to carry out other attacks with hydrocyanic acid, but without success. Eventually, after months of investigation, several Aum members – including its leader – were arrested and sentenced to death by hanging.
The Tokyo massacre is a story that is still remembered with pain by the Japanese today and whose legacy can still be seen on the streets of the city. The limited presence of rubbish bins, in fact, is a direct consequence of the attack: the authorities were afraid of possible chemical weapons abandoned inside them and therefore, to prevent it, they chose to remove them from the main areas of the city.
