, born as , was a Japanese cult leader and domestic terrorist who founded and led the doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo. He was convicted of masterminding the 1995 sarin 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 was sentenced 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. He was executed along with other senior members of Aum Shinrikyo on July 6, 2018.
Early life Chizuo Matsumoto was born on March 2, 1955, the fourth son of a large, poor family of tatami-mat-makers in Kumamoto Prefecture. He had infantile 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 a school for the blind when he was 6 years old, since he could not continue the family trade. He never lived with his family again.
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 and extorting 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 become Prime Minister of Japan.
He graduated in 1973 and applied to Faculty of Law of University of Tokyo, but was rejected. He then turned to the study of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, which were common careers for the blind in Japan, and he established a Chinese medicine shop outside Tokyo. Asahara married the following year and eventually fathered six children, the eldest of whom was born in 1978. 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.
Matsumoto's interest in religion started at this time. Having been recently married, he worked to support his large and growing family. He dedicated his free time to the study of religious concepts, starting with Chinese astrology and Taoism. Later, Matsumoto practiced Western esotericism, yoga, meditation, esoteric Buddhism, and esoteric Christianity. Matsumoto let his hair and beard grow and adopted the name Shoko Asahara.
Starting in 1984, Asahara made several pilgrimages to India, where he met the 14th Dalai Lama. Asahara later claimed to his followers that he managed to achieve enlightenment, met Shiva, 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 mastered meditation 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.
Aum Shinrikyo
Establishment , later named , was founded by Asahara in his one-bedroom apartment in Tokyo's Shibuya ward in 1987, starting off as a yoga and meditation class known as . It steadily grew in the following years. It gained official status as a religious organization in 1989 and attracted a considerable number of graduates from Japan's elite universities, being dubbed a "religion for the elite".
Early activities Although Aum was considered controversial in Japan, it was not initially associated with serious crimes until Asahara became obsessed with Biblical prophecies. Aum's public relations activities included publishing comics and animated cartoons that attempted to tie its religious ideas to popular anime and manga themes, including space missions, powerful weapons, world conspiracies, and the quest for ultimate truth. Aum published several magazines including Vajrayana Sacca and Enjoy Happiness, adopting a somewhat missionary attitude.
Isaac Asimov's science fiction Foundation 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". 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 traditional sermons.
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 original Pali sutras. These efforts resulted in Aum being able to recruit a variety of people ranging from bureaucrats to personnel from the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. Authors David Kaplan and Andrew Marshall, in their 1996 book, The Cult at the End of the World, claim that initiation rituals often involved the use of hallucinogens, such as LSD. Religious practices often involved extremely ascetic practices claimed to be "yoga". These included everything from renunciants being hung upside down to being given shock therapy.
In the late-1980s, the cult started attracting controversy 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. Kaplan and Marshall alleged in their book that Aum was also connected with such activities as extortion. The group, authors report, "commonly took patients into its hospitals and then forced them to pay exorbitant medical bills".
Sakamoto family murder
In October 1989, Tokyo Broadcasting System Television (TBS) taped an interview with 33-year-old Tsutsumi Sakamoto, a lawyer working on a class 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 its protection of sources. Aum officials then pressured TBS to cancel the planned broadcast of the interview."Ex-TBS affiliate staff showed video to Aum", Jiji Press Ticker Service (Tokyo), 27 March 1996. Several days later, on November 3, 1989, several Aum Shinrikyo members, including Hideo Murai, chief scientist, Satoro Hashimoto, a martial arts master, Tomomasa Nakagawa and Kazuaki Okazaki drove to Yokohama, where Sakamoto lived. They carried a pouch with fourteen hypodermic needles and a supply of potassium chloride. According to court testimony provided by the perpetrators later, they planned to use the chemical substance to kidnap Sakamoto from Yokohama's Shinkansen 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.
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 with potassium chloride, and strangled.Yomiuri Shimbun, "Asahara 'justified' murder of infant", The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo), September 14, 1995. His 29-year-old wife, Satoko Sakamoto (坂本都子 Sakamoto Satoko) was beaten and injected with potassium chloride.Yomiuri Shimbun, "Cultists killed baby first, police say", The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo), September 4, 1995. 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 in Niigata, Satoko in Toyama, and Tatsuhiko in Nagano) 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 smashed to prevent identification. Their bodies were not found until the perpetrators revealed the locations after they were captured in connection with the 1995 Tokyo subway attack. By the time police searched the areas in which the victims were placed, their bodies were reduced to bones."Japanese police: Bodies are Sakamotos", United International Press, September 6, 1995. TBS kept the showing of the video secret until March 25, 1996. This led to strong criticism that it contributed to the murder.
Matsumoto sarin attack
On the night of June 27, 1994, the cult carried out a chemical weapons attack against civilians when they released sarin in the central Japanese city of Matsumoto, 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 of mass murder.Kyle B. Olson, "Aum Shinrikyo: Once and Future Threat?", Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Research Planning, Inc., Arlington, Virginia 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.
Aum's original plan to release the aerosol 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 converted refrigerator 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".
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. 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 a coma for fourteen years and died in 2008.Seto, Yasuo. ""The Sarin Gas Attack in Japan and the Related Forensic Investigation". The Sarin Gas Attack in Japan and the Related Forensic Investigation. Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, June 1, 2001. April 18, 2021. The fatalities included Yutaka Kobayashi, a 23-year-old salaryman, and Mii Yasumoto, a 29-year-old medical school student.Kyodo News, "Matsumoto gassings remembered", The Japan Times, June 28, 2009, p. 2. (offline)
Additional incidents before 1995 The cult is known to have considered assassinations of several individuals critical of the cult, such as the heads of Soka Gakkai and The Institute for Research in Human Happiness. After cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi began satirizing the cult, he was included on Aum's assassination list. An assassination attempt was made on Kobayashi in 1993. In 1991, Aum began to use wiretapping to get NTT uniforms/equipment, and created a manual for wiretapping.