Aleph (Japanese cult)
Aleph, formerly Aum Shinrikyo, is a Japanese doomsday cult founded by Shoko Asahara in 1984. It carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995 and was found to have been responsible for another smaller sarin attack the previous year.
The group has never confessed; they claim that those who carried out attacks did so secretly, without being known to other executives and ordinary believers. Asahara broadcast his singing, insisting on his innocence through a radio broadcast relayed from Russia and directed toward Japan.
On 6 July 2018, after exhausting all appeals, Asahara and six followers were executed as a punishment for the 1995 attacks and other crimes, and the remaining six on death row were executed on 26 July. At 12:10 am, on New Year's Day 2019, at least nine people were injured when a car was deliberately driven into crowds celebrating the new year on Takeshita Street in Tokyo. Local police reported the arrest of Kazuhiro Kusakabe, the suspected driver, who allegedly admitted to intentionally ramming his vehicle into crowds to protest his opposition to the death penalty, specifically in retaliation for the execution of the aforementioned Aum cult members.
Aum Shinrikyo, which split into Aleph and Hikari no Wa in 2007, had already been formally designated a terrorist organization by several countries, including Russia, Canada, Kazakhstan, the United States, as well as the European Union.
The Public Security Intelligence Agency considered Aleph and Hikari no Wa to be branches of a "dangerous religion" and it announced in January 2015 that they would remain under surveillance for three more years. The Tokyo District Court canceled the extension to surveillance of Hikari no Wa in 2017 following legal challenges from the group, but continued to keep Aleph under watch. The government appealed the cancellation, and in February 2019 the Tokyo High Court overturned the lower court's decision, reinstating the surveillance, citing no major changes between Aum Shinrikyo and Hikari no Wa.
Doctrine
Shinrikyo Aum is a syncretic belief system that draws upon Asahara's idiosyncratic interpretations of elements of early Indian Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism, as well as Hinduism, taking Shiva as the main image of worship and incorporating millennialist ideas from Christianity, Yoga, and the writings of Nostradamus. Its founder, Chizuo Matsumoto, claimed that he sought to restore "original Buddhism" but employed Christian millenarian rhetoric.In 1992, Matsumoto, who had changed his name to Shoko Asahara, published a foundational book, declaring himself to be "Christ", Japan's only fully enlightened master, as well as identifying himself as the "Lamb of God".
Asahara's purported mission was to take upon himself the sins of the world, and he claimed he could transfer spiritual power to his followers and ultimately take away their sins and bad deeds. While some reject Aum Shinrikyo's claims of Buddhist characteristics and affiliations with Buddhism, other scholars refer to it as an offshoot of Japanese Buddhism, and this was how the movement generally defined and saw itself.
Asahara outlined a doomsday prophecy, which included a third world war instigated by the United States.
According to Robert Jay Lifton, an American psychiatrist and author:
Humanity would end, except for the elite few who joined Aum. Aum's mission was not only to spread the word of salvation, but also to survive these End Times. Asahara predicted that Armageddon would occur in 1997. Kaplan notes that in his lectures, Shoko Asahara referred to the United States as "The Beast" from the Book of Revelation, predicting it would eventually attack Japan.
Arthur Goldwag, author of a book on conspiracies and secret societies, characterizes Asahara as one who "saw dark conspiracies everywhere promulgated by Jews, Freemasons, the Dutch, the British royal family, and rival Japanese religions".
In the opinion of Daniel A. Metraux, Aum Shinrikyo justified its violence through its own unique interpretation of Buddhist ideas and doctrines, such as the Buddhist concepts of Mappō and Shōbō. Aum claimed that by bringing about the end of the world, they would restore Shōbō. Furthermore, Lifton believes, Asahara "interpreted the Tibetan Buddhist concept of phowa in order to claim that by killing someone contrary to the group's aims, they were preventing them from accumulating bad karma and thus saving them".
The name "Aum Shinrikyo", usually rendered in English as "Aum Supreme Truth", derives from the Sanskrit syllable Aum, used to represent the universe, followed by the Japanese Shinrikyo written in kanji.
In 2000, the organization changed its name to "Aleph", and it also replaced its logo.
History
The movement was founded by Shoko Asahara in his one-bedroom apartment in Tokyo's Shibuya ward in 1984, starting off as a yoga and meditation class known as Oumu Shinsen no Kai and 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, thus being dubbed a "religion for the elite".Early activities
Although Aum was, from the beginning, considered controversial in Japan, it had yet to be 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 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". 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 private, both Asahara and his top disciples reportedly continued their humble lifestyles, the only exception being the armored Mercedes-Benz gifted by a wealthy follower.
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 practising ancient teachings, accurately translated from original Pali sutras. These efforts resulted in Aum becoming one of the fastest-growing religious groups in Japan's history.
David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall, in their 1996 book, The Cult at the End of the World: The Terrifying Story of the Aum Doomsday Cult, from the Subways of Tokyo to the Nuclear Arsenals of Russia, claim that its practices remained secret. Initiation rituals, assert the authors of the book, 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.
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 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".
The cult is known to have considered assassinations of several individuals critical of the cult, such as the heads of Buddhist sects 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 July 1993, cult members sprayed large amounts of liquid containing Bacillus anthracis spores from a cooling tower on the roof of Aum Shinrikyo's Tokyo headquarters. However, their plan to cause an anthrax epidemic failed. The attack resulted in a large number of complaints about bad odors but no infections.
At the end of 1993, the cult started secretly manufacturing the nerve agent sarin and, later, VX gas. They also attempted to manufacture 1,000 automatic rifles but only managed to make one. According to the testimony of Kenichi Hirose at the Tokyo District Court in 2000, he mentioned that Asahara wanted the group to be self-sufficient in manufacturing AK-74s with one working model smuggled secretly to Japan in order to be studied and used as a basis for future Aum-made AK-74s. Police seized AK-74 components and blueprints from a vehicle used by an Aum member on April 6, 1995.https://fas.org/irp/congress/1995_rpt/aum/part04.htm
Aum tested its sarin on sheep at Banjawarn Station, a remote pastoral property in Western Australia, killing 29 sheep. Both sarin and VX were then used in several assassinations over 1994–95.
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.
In December 1994 and January 1995, Masami Tsuchiya of Aum Shinrikyo synthesized 100 to 200 grams of VX which was used to attack three persons. Two persons were injured and a 28-year-old man was killed. He is believed to be the first fully documented victim of VX.
The VX victim, whom Shoko Asahara had 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. But the cause of death was 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- ethylamine were later found in the body of the victim. Unlike the cases for sarin, VX was not used for mass murder.
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 in Kamikuishiki near Mount Fuji, where he was killed. His corpse was destroyed in a microwave-powered incinerator and the remnants disposed of in Lake Kawaguchi. 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".
Police made plans to simultaneously raid cult facilities across Japan in March 1995. Prosecutors alleged Asahara was tipped off about this and that he ordered the Tokyo subway attack to divert police.
Tokyo subway sarin attack and related incidents
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 Mil Mi-17 military helicopter. 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 was 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.
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. On 4 July, several undetonated cyanide devices were found at other locations in the Tokyo subway.
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 the same day, the cult mailed a parcel bomb to the office of Yukio Aoshima, the governor of Tokyo, blowing off the fingers of his secretary's hand. Asahara was initially charged with 23 counts of murder and 16 other offenses. The trial, dubbed "the trial of the century" by the press, ruled Asahara guilty of masterminding the attack and sentenced him to death. The indictment was appealed unsuccessfully. A number of senior members accused of participation, such as Masami Tsuchiya, also received death sentences.
The reasons why a small circle of mostly senior Aum members committed atrocities and the extent of personal involvement by Asahara remain unclear, although several theories have attempted to explain these events. In response to the prosecution's charge that Asahara ordered the subway attacks to distract authorities, the defense maintained that Asahara was not aware of events, pointing to his deteriorating health. Shortly after his arrest, Asahara abandoned his post as the organization's leader, and since then has maintained silence, refusing to communicate even with lawyers and family members.
After 1995
On 21 June 1995, Asahara acknowledged that in January 1994 he 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. On 10 October 1995, Aum Shinrikyo was ordered stripped of its official status as a "religious legal entity" and was declared bankrupt in early 1996. However, the group continues to operate under the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion, funded by a successful computer business and donations, and under strict surveillance. Attempts to ban the group altogether under the 1952 Subversive Activities Prevention Law were rejected by the Public Security Examination Commission in January 1997.The group underwent a number of transformations in the aftermath of Asahara's arrest and trial. For a brief time, Asahara's two preteen sons officially replaced him as guru. It re-grouped under the new name "Aleph" in February 2000. It announced a change in doctrine: religious texts related to controversial Vajrayana Buddhist doctrines and the Bible were removed. The group apologized to the victims of the sarin gas attack and established a special compensation fund. Provocative publications and activities that alarmed society are no longer published.
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 the National Diet in 1999, was murdered in 2002.
For over 15 years, only three fugitives were being actively sought. At 11:50 p.m. on 31 December 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. 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. Japan's Justice Minister Yōko Kamikawa stated that the crimes "plunged people, not only in Japan but in other countries as well, into deadly fear and shook society to its core." Amnesty International criticized use of the death penalty in the case. While executions are rare in Japan, they have public support according to surveys. There were 13 members on death row at the time:
Aum Shinrikyo members executed on 6 July 2018:
- Shoko Asahara, leader of Aum Shinrikyo
- Yoshihiro Inoue, Aum's "head of intelligence" and chief coordinator of the Tokyo subway attack
- Tomomitsu Niimi, the getaway driver for Ikuo Hayashi, one of the perpetrators of the Tokyo subway attack
- Tomomasa Nakagawa, a perpetrator of the Sakamoto family murder
- Kiyohide Hayakawa, Aum's "construction minister", convicted of strangling a young cult member in 1989 suspected of dissidence
- Seiichi Endo, the "head scientist" of Aum Shinrikyo
- Masami Tsuchiya, Aum Shinrikyo's chief chemist and director of the sarin gas manufacturing
- 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
- Satoro Hashimoto, a perpetrator of the Sakamoto family murder
Current activities
According to a June 2005 report by the National Police Agency, Aleph had approximately 1,650 members, of whom 650 lived communally in compounds. The group operated 26 facilities in 17 prefectures, and about 120 residential facilities. An article in the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper on 11 September 2002 showed that the Japanese public still mistrusts Aleph, and compounds are usually surrounded by protest banners from local residents.Monitoring
In January 2000, the group was placed under surveillance for a period of three years under an anti-Aum law, in which the group is required to submit a list of members and details of assets to the authorities.In January 2003, Japan's Public Security Intelligence Agency received permission to extend the surveillance for another three years, as they found evidence which suggested that the group still revered Asahara. According to the Religious News Blog report issued in April 2004, the authorities still considered the group "a threat to society".
On 15 September 2006, Shoko Asahara lost his final appeal against the death penalty. The following day Japanese police raided the offices of Aleph in order to "prevent any illegal activities by cult members in response to the confirmation of Asahara's death sentence". Thirteen cult members were eventually sentenced to death.
Split
On 8 March 2007, Fumihiro Joyu, former Aum Shinrikyo spokesman and head of Aum's Moscow operation, formally announced a long-expected split. Joyu's group, called Hikari no Wa, claims to be committed to uniting science and religion and creating "the new science of the human mind", having previously aimed to move the group away from its criminal history and toward its spiritual roots.In April 2011, the Public Security Intelligence Agency stated that Aum had about 1,500 members. In July 2011 the cult reported its membership as 1,030. The group was reportedly active in trying to recruit new members via social media and proselytizing on college campuses.
Japan's Public Security Examination Commission announced in January 2015 that Aum Shinrikyo's two spinoffs would remain under surveillance for three more years starting 1 February 2015.