The movement "evolved out of a yoga school founded by Asahara Shoko in the Shibuya district of Tokyo in February 1984". The movement was known as and steadily grew in the following years. Its original teachings were based on doctrines derived from
Nichiren-based sects such as
Nichiren Shōshū and
Soka Gakkai. They gained official status as a
religious organization in 1989 and attracted a considerable number of graduates from Japan's elite universities, thus being dubbed a "religion for the elite".
Early activities Although Aum was, from the beginning, considered controversial in Japan, it was not initially associated with serious crimes. It was during this period that 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. Lifton 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. In the early days, Aum was able to recruit a variety of people ranging from bureaucrats to personnel from the
Japanese Self-Defense Forces and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.
Incidents before 1995 The
cult 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. In October 1989, the group's negotiations with
Tsutsumi Sakamoto, an
anti-cult lawyer threatening a
lawsuit against them, which could potentially bankrupt the group, failed. In the same month, Sakamoto recorded an interview for a talk show on the Japanese TV station
TBS. The network then had the interview secretly shown to the group without notifying Sakamoto, intentionally breaking
protection of sources. The group then pressured TBS to cancel the broadcast. The following month, Sakamoto, his wife and his child went missing from their home in
Yokohama. The police were unable to resolve the case at the time, although some of his colleagues publicly voiced their suspicions of the group. It was not until after the
1995 Tokyo attack that they were found to have been
murdered and their bodies dumped in separate locations by cult members. Kaplan and Marshall allege 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". In 1991, Aum began to use wiretapping to get
NTT uniforms/equipment and created a manual for wiretapping. At the end of 1993, the cult started secretly manufacturing the nerve agent
sarin and, later,
VX. Aum tested its sarin on sheep at
Banjawarn Station, a remote pastoral property in
Western Australia, killing 29 sheep. On the night of 27 June 1994, the cult carried out a
chemical weapons attack against civilians when they released sarin in the central Japanese city of
Matsumoto,
Nagano. With the help of a converted
refrigerator truck, members of the cult released a cloud of sarin, which floated near the homes of judges who were overseeing a lawsuit concerning a real-estate dispute, which was predicted to go against the cult. This
Matsumoto incident killed eight and harmed 500 more. Police investigations focused only on an innocent local resident,
Yoshiyuki Kouno, and failed to implicate the cult at the time. It was only after the
Tokyo subway attack that Aum Shinrikyo was discovered to be behind the Matsumoto sarin attack. At the end of 1994, the cult broke into the Hiroshima factory of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, in an attempt to steal technical documents on military weapons such as tanks and artillery. Tadahito Hamaguchi, whom Asahara suspected was a spy, was attacked at 7:00 a.m. on 12 December 1994 on the street in
Osaka by
Tomomitsu Niimi and another Aum member, who sprinkled the nerve agent on his neck. He chased them for about before collapsing, dying 10 days later without coming out of a deep coma. Doctors in the hospital suspected at the time he had been poisoned with an
organophosphate pesticide, the cause of death pinned down only after cult members arrested for the
subway attack in Tokyo in March 1995 confessed to the killing. Ethyl methylphosphonate, methylphosphonic acid, and diisopropyl-2-(methylthio) ethylamine were later found in the body of the victim; unlike the cases for
sarin (
Matsumoto incident and Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway), VX was not used for mass murder. On 4 January 1995, the cult tried to kill Hiroyuki Nagaoka, an important member of the Aum Victims' Society, a civil organization that protested against the sect's activities, in the same way. 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". Prosecutors alleged Asahara was tipped off about this and that he ordered the Tokyo subway attack to divert police. According to the testimony of Kenichi Hirose at the Tokyo District Court in 2000, Asahara wanted the group to be self-sufficient in manufacturing copies of the Soviet Union's main infantry weapon, the
AK-74; one rifle was smuggled into Japan to be studied so that Aum could
reverse engineer and mass-produce the AK-74. Police seized AK-74 components and blueprints from a vehicle used by an Aum member on April 6, 1995.
Tokyo subway sarin attack and related incidents , September 8, 1996 On the morning of 20 March 1995, Aum members released a
binary chemical weapon, most closely chemically similar to sarin, in a coordinated attack on five trains in the
Tokyo 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. 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. Over the next week, the full scale of Aum's activities was revealed for the first time. At the cult's headquarters in
Kamikuishiki, on the foot of
Mount Fuji, police found explosives, chemical weapons, and a Russian
Mi-17-1V military helicopter (4K-15214). While the finding of
biological warfare agents such as
anthrax and
Ebola cultures was reported, those claims now appear to have been widely exaggerated. There were stockpiles of chemicals that could be used for producing enough sarin to kill four million people. Police also found laboratories to manufacture drugs such as
LSD,
methamphetamine, and a crude form of
truth serum, a safe containing millions of U.S. dollars in cash and gold, and cells, many still containing prisoners. During the raids, Aum issued statements claiming that the chemicals were for fertilizers. Over the next six weeks, over 150 cult members were arrested for a variety of offenses. The media were stationed outside Aum's Tokyo headquarters on Komazawa Dori in
Aoyama for months after the attack and arrests, waiting for action and to get images of the cult's other members. On 30 March 1995, Takaji Kunimatsu, chief of the
National Police Agency, was shot four times near his house in Tokyo and was seriously wounded. While many suspected Aum involvement in the shooting, the
Sankei Shimbun reported that
Hiroshi Nakamura is suspected of the crime, but nobody has been charged; Nakamura would later confess to the crime. On 23 April 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 of
Yamaguchi-gumi, was arrested and eventually convicted of the murder. His motive remains unknown. On the evening of 5 May, a burning paper bag was discovered in a toilet in Tokyo's busy
Shinjuku station. Upon examination, it was revealed that it was a
hydrogen 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. 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 hijacking
All 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. Asahara was finally found hiding within a wall of a cult building known as "The 6th Satian" in the Kamikuishiki complex on 16 May and was arrested. On 3 June 2012, police captured Naoko Kikuchi, the second fugitive, acting on a tip from local residents. Acting on information from the capture of Kikuchi, including recent photographs showing a modified appearance, the last remaining fugitive, Katsuya Takahashi, was captured on 15 June 2012. He is said to have been the driver in the Tokyo gas attack and was caught in Tokyo, having been on the run for 17 years. On 6 July 2018, Asahara and six other Aum Shinrikyo members were executed by
hanging. There were 13 members on death row at the time: Aum Shinrikyo members executed on 6 July 2018: •
Yasuo Hayashi, a perpetrator of the Tokyo subway attack •
Kenichi Hirose, a perpetrator of the Tokyo subway attack •
Toru Toyoda, a perpetrator of the Tokyo subway attack •
Masato Yokoyama, a perpetrator of the Tokyo subway attack •
Kazuaki Okazaki, a perpetrator of the Sakamoto family murder •
Satoru Hashimoto, a perpetrator of the Sakamoto family murder Initially, it was expected that Shoko Asahara's ashes would be collected by his youngest daughter according to his will. She urged her relatives and cult members to "put an end to the Aum and stop hating society". The ashes were kept at the detention center for fear of reprisals from other elements of the cult. In 2020 the Tokyo Family Court ruled that the second daughter, who had the "closest" relationship with her father, and who had repeatedly visited her father while he was incarcerated, should receive his hair and remains. On July 2, 2021, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by the fourth daughter and upheld the ruling of the family court. In 2024 the
Tokyo District Court ordered the government to hand over the remains to the second daughter. ==Doctrine==