Aum Shinrikyo: Japan's Strange Terrorist Cult

today's video is sponsored by Shaker and Spoon more about them in just a bit Hello everybody welcome back to another brand new episode of The Casual criminalist as always hello there I'm your host Simon what happens here one of my writers in this case Chris thank you Chris has written me a script ohm shinrik yo yes I looked it up I know I'm gonna get the pronunciation wrong many times in this video I'm absolutely excuse me certain of that thank you also to Jen who edits these pieces afterwards and makes them look beautiful and sound wonderful no I'm no hero Gotham's finest they're the heroes if you're watching this on YouTube it also goes out as a podcast that's why it sounds so nice at least I hope it does I'm not flattering myself I'm flattering gem a video editor which I suppose because she helps me make it is flat look let's just move on let's just get on with the episode because that's what you're all here for I've never read this before did I mention that if you're new here that's the format it's a cold read not like what some person who pretends to tell you a future which is another like cold read can mean you're reading something like sight reading it but also it means like you know people who like pretend to be able to tell your future and stuff about you which I hate let's go [Music] there was once a man called Harry Mason a geologist from Western Australia Mason was an interesting man whose main claim to fame was that he believed a Japanese cult called om shinyakyo had been conducting nuclear tests a banjawan station a massive property about a thousand kilometers Northeast of Perth his theory was that ohm was working in collusion with the U.S Australian and or Japanese governments for reasons never fully made clear I can tell you those reasons were probably never made fully clear because they were utterly insane like this this isn't a real conspiracy there are conspiracies which are real you know and then it comes out later oh wow they were doing that like Edward Snowden when he's like oh my God they are spying on us all the time that's intense this isn't one of those this is a crazy conspiracy theory he suggested this cult had also been developing seismic weapons that Evergreen Trail of the conspiracy not universe and even traveled to the Tesla archive to find evidence of this for anyone who knows anything about nuclear weapons testing and development these claims are ludicrous for a lot of other people though it's entirely plausible and there are a great many of these folks who were painstakingly explain why before moving on to deliver highly detailed explanations of exactly just how a seven foot reptilian can look like Pope Francis as I found out to my detriment yeah this is the biggest like people believe in multiple conspiracy theories because if you're like into one conspiracy it's not like you looked at all the conspiracies and we're like okay that one makes sense it's like you're just predisposed in your mind to believe in that stuff which is why the same person who believes in this will also believe in reptilians and the Flat Earth and that it's all being orchestrated by a big Jewish conspiracy because once you're in you're in aren't you you may as well go full bore the thing is as wacky as Mason's theories are there's something about Alm which stops you from immediately dismissing them oh not me uh look look they're obviously a big like I I've I've made videos before and and we touched on this cult and it's like yeah yeah they were a big deal they were doing all sorts of crazy stuff I I think the subtitle of this episode is Terror on the Tokyo subway so they were like using biological weapons and stuff but making a biological weapon is something you can do in your basement making a nuclear bomb is not and testing it outside of a thousand accommodators outside of Perth is is also something that let's just know just know Mason's claims made it all the way to the U.S Senate's permanent standing committee for investigations and the BBC was so convinced they created a documentary feature on them anyone who likes lazy journalism and Terrible Special Effects will very much enjoy it come on BBC you can do better than that what our bloody TV license is paying for I'm just joking I don't pay for a TV license because I don't relax relax I don't live in the UK and even if I did allegedly would I pay for one no it wouldn't would he I don't know in my opinion I probably wouldn't because I don't watch television I'm not not that I'm some book reading snob I just watch Netflix like any normal human being in 2022. but thanks to Harry Mason as well as the high profile of the case there's quite a lot of garbage in The Ether which is a shame as the true story is incredible to get to the truth I've relied heavily on transcripts of the U.S Senate committee hearings the NHK news archive and the Sterling research of Rand CFR and CNAs as well as double checking the chemical warfare information with an old colleague of mine who's a chemical engineer for Australian Special Forces Rand is an organization it's like a they they've sponsored one of my videos I can't remember if they did describe themselves as a think tank or something or like a we were doing a video about truth Decay with them and since then I've been like biter meinhoffing the hell out of them like that's where you know you see something and then it keeps cropping up in your life for some reason Rand is all over my life lately and I don't know why this is in addition to eyewitness testimony and primary accounts from interviews with the jailed om senior leadership group but even though there's going to be a shortage of insane conspiracy theories the actual criminal conspiracy was literally insane so we can confidently promise a pretty wild ride nevertheless I'm looking forward to it let's crack on Armageddon will be indefinitely postponed it's a hell of a title Chris the 20th of March 1995 is a picture-perfect Tokyo spring day sakahara at Sushi a bright young advertising executive is heading to the subway to catch his train to work he gets into a lead carriage and sees an old man sitting next to an empty seat the old man looks a bit peaky he also sees a clear liquid leaking onto the floor of the train from a newspaper wrapped plastic bag which seems to have a brain ruptured sakarasan moves to take the seat next to the old man but as he steps toward the fluid he notices other passengers glaring at him disapprovingly who gets onto it who gets onto a Subway uh there's a there's a man I'm just peaky mean like he looks a bit peaky does that mean like suspicious like you know he looks like he's on drugs or something like that who's like oh yeah I'm gonna sit next to the the man who looks a bit crazy and has a newspaper bag newspaper wrapped plastic bag just a leaking fluid onto the ground I'll be like I'm gonna just get out of the next stop and uh go to the subway car behind me all you need is a strategy the train gets underway and he decides to move to the next garage instead yes oh man man yes yes you and me are the same he isn't feeling very good for some reason his eyes are sore and irritated and there's a strange smell in the air when he has the next Carriage he looks back and sees the old man having a seizure when the train stops in the next station kind people take the old man onto the platform and Saka Horizon disturbed by what he's seeing decides to get off and catch a cab he's still not feeling great and he tries to perk himself up by heading to the gym it doesn't work as he hits the showers there seems to be some sort of power outage as the room keeps getting darker once he's outside though it becomes clear that unless the sun's also suffering a power outage the problem is with his eyes this is confirmed when his work colleagues react in shock to the livid redness of those very same eyes and they urge him to go to the hospital it's like mate are you okay and you're like no no I can't really see to the hospital with you the nearest hospital isn't Luke's and sakarazan is stunned by what he sees it was like a war hospital he told BBC witness history violently ill people sprawl everywhere some bleeding from the eyes and nose some having seizures and many unconscious he's admitted but at some time before the hospital knows what to treat him for it's not until their colleagues in Matsumoto a few hours away tell him about a mysterious attack which killed seven people in June the previous year that they realize all of these people are victims of a sarin attack and need to be decontaminated and injected with atropine the total death toll was 13 including the old man sakahara San had seen on the train that morning wait so was this man a part of the attack or did you just happen to sit next to the the punctured plastic bag more than 5000 people were injured with many suffering or permanent after effects before long Japanese police began connecting these dots as well and began belatedly rounding up members of religious organization turned Colt known as umshin riccio who had been building chemical plants and Publishing hymns about sarangas as a vehicle for Armageddon uh oh you know your religions turned into a cult when your hymns are about sarin don't you watch out for that guys if you're like going to what you think is a church and they're like and then we release the sarin [ __ ] hate this song just uh just go out leave quietly and go to the police okay okay saving lives as for Saka harassan he was unfit to return to work for many months afterwards and was racked with survivor's guilt rage and PTSD but he was one of the lucky ones eventually his survivor's guilt prompted him to quit his advertising job in pursuit of something more meaningful as he said himself the fact of his survival made him feel pressured to do something more worthwhile with his life he spent five years studying filmmaking in the US before returning to Japan to watch the sentencing of ashahara shoko the leader of the cult which had changed his life forever in pursuit of some crazy misinterpretation of the Book of Revelation as we have said though sakahara atsushi was one of the lucky ones he is a successful filmmaker and has even made a documentary about the current leader of the remnants of om shinrichio now called aleph there are dozens of others who didn't survive their brush with the cult and its pursuit of Armageddon how is there even a remainder of this car it'd be like today if there was like what was that Jim Jones cult like that was it no who was the Branch Davidians that wasn't Jim Jones that was David koresh in the brunt it'd be weird if there was like no no it's cool like it all happened but there's still Branch Davidians around today maybe there are I'd kind of be very surprised though arms theology was a weird grab bag of Hinduism Buddhism Christianity and even World War II era Nazism oh yeah throw in some Nazism as well why not as one cult member putted they believed in whatever their leader ashahara shoko happened to be thinking at the time he would pick up bits of Science Fiction ancient Theology and New Age woo-woo pretty much at random and then synthesize it into an overarching belief system which was part apocalyptic gnosticism part alexandrian self-dearfecation and all confused with paranoid lunacy what he most consistently believed however was that the Armageddon would take the form of an apocalyptic war between Japan and the USA and the alms people would oversee the Reconstruction and isn't well this is getting very confused with Saran attacks on the Tokyo subway where you're like well there wasn't going to be a war so we were just like let's just use biological weapons on civilians you pieces of and like many prophets of the Apocalypse the world's irritating failure to end meant that I'd have to help Armageddon along a bit which was one of the motives for the subway attack but who I hear you asking are these people and how on Earth did they become not only able but willing to launch a wmd attack on one of the world's most densely populated cities well that's not a simple answer and it's a question which isn't typically dealt with very well in other reporting on all many people just seem satisfied with an explanation along the lines of crazy cult camera crazy I mean it is I don't want to disagree with you Chris but is often a fairly good explanation it's like why did they do this because they're crazy because they're the leader was Cults someone is crazy and you combine that with a really good shaking of Charisma and a cult is born you know that's how it works crazy's gonna crazy but Cults are made up of people who were once reasonable and actions don't exist in isolation but the culmination of history as law professor masaki fakuda says the tendency has been to render Alm in two Dimensions as a uniformly scary and murderous death cult but this picture isn't entirely accurate in the beginning [Music] not much is definitively known about ashahara shaco's early life but information we do have speaks to grinding poverty and spiritual crisis born in 1955 as Matsumoto shizo he was the fourth of seven children of an impoverished family in rural Japan Afflicted with congenital Clau coma chiso was blind in one eye and severely impaired in the other his eldest brother had been born sightless and had been sent to a boarding school for the blind in 1961 chizol went there as well his father was a Tommy maker whose other children joined him in the trade they lived at a subsistence level grinding out a precarious existence and understandably not that able to care for their couple of disabled children there's also the fact that for many Japanese especially at the time physical disability in a child was seen as a karmic punishment oh that's that's really um what's the word you're stupid in license Japan well done and it's possible that was sarcasm and it's possible that shizo's parents weren't attached to him or his older brother yeah that's gonna brilliant so not only are you blind but they're also your parents hate you because you're blind great work culture great work there nice one I can already people because cyber don't judge other cultures well when they're ostrichating their disabled children because they think it's colonic punishment I don't really feel bad about judging that I'm sorry I just don't after leaving for boarding school chizo never lived with his family again there are conflicting reports about chiso's conduct in school some accounts describe him as popular and charismatic and others as a bully prone to violence and extortion this guy sounds like a charismatic cult lead it's popular it's like yeah you can be all of these things popular and charismatic while being a bully who's prone to violence and extortion if you're charismatic enough you can absolutely get away with those things and people will still like you because that's what Charisma is when you're a cult leader it's likely that both accounts are true it seems chiso used his Magnetic Personality as well as the advantages which came with being partially cited strange statement to build a following for himself among his fellow students and he also turned to abusing this influence quite early on exactly that's kind of what I'm saying he graduated around 1975 and became an acupuncturist in masseuse both traditional occupations for the blind in Japan the next year he was fined 150 equivalent for the offense of causing bodily harm or injury which is presumably an occupational hazard when you're manipulating joints and sticking pins in people yeah both of these things like I think people find massage relaxing on all that stuff but there's not really any there's not proven health benefits to that other it's like saunas people are it's good for you and it's like there's no evidence to support that it just feels nice doesn't it you just get super you sweat it out getting out those toxins that's not a real thing stop believing that people will hit me up in the comments be like actually Simon I'll point you to this study and it's like okay so there's one not very well done study but there's also tons of stuff saying that this isn't true this isn't true someone was telling me about God what was it someone was telling me I had to eat some there was some the superfoods were real or something like that and I was like I literally Googled it and all of the things from like any source that you should trust like I mean I don't want to say you should trust the government and stuff like that but like big sites University things being like no no no this isn't a real thing but people love it people I mean more on you go by your like go get your massage and get your acupuncture and stuff if it makes you feel better who am I to judge I wish I've believed in that stuff because obviously it'd be nice if I had acupuncture and I was like wow my headache went away it's like no I just have to have a headache or take some actual drugs it's so religion I wish I believed in religion I really do I wish I believed in an afterlife it'd be awesome I just don't he's a nihilist a 1977 he moved to Tokyo to attend a preparatory school for the Tokyo University entrance exam which he failed during this time he met is she is she is thanks for the pronunciation guide Chris tomiko a girl four years is Junior who he married against her parents wishes now that his dreams of attending University were over he opened the Matsumoto Acupuncture Clinic which was by all accounts a successful business enough people believing in it while peddling his Chinese remedies to the good people of Chiba prefecture chiso developed an interest in spiritualism and the Paranormal these things just go together they believed in acupuncture believes in ghosts it's just for people who are irrational the religious landscape in Japan is quite different to that of the West firstly there's only a limited Christian influence Portuguese missionaries in the 16th century were wildly successful and for a brief period Christianity looked like it was becoming one of Japan's major religions funnily enough I'm uh working on a long form episode about the history of Japan for another show that I'm working on and I was just talking about this literally this morning what a fun coincidence it's super interesting there's like the Portuguese and how they and how the the colonial star countries like and the us as well sail to Japan and we're like we want to trade with you and opens up the country and all of this stuff and then it went horribly wrong it's good I mean it's not good it's uh I think it's a good piece of content that I'm making I was really enjoying reading it this morning some accidents of History however led to Violent expression of Christians by toyotomi hideyoshi and the Tokugawa shogunate this was what I was talking about this morning leaving only a few small scattered groups who be in Catholic languished without the presence of priests in a tragic irony probably the largest community of Christians remaining in the 20th century were based around Nagasaki and these poor unfortunates were decimated by some American Christians in 1945 Savage apart from the Christian subtext of the post-war reconstruction Japan is similar to places like India where there is an unbroken community of ancient Pagan religion this leads to a religious landscape which is simultaneously more heavily populated but generally less fervent or fanatic this is because the old Pagan religious tend to be more focused on ritual practice than on the minutiae of what people should or shouldn't believe and they tend to be more pluralistic meaning that being part of a religious community in the Pagan world doesn't usually come with the condition of exclusivity I have to say like these mature religions that have been around for longer they're way more chill aren't they it's like when you you know it's like they're like the old person of religions you know it's like yeah they used to you know get into fights when they were young they go to the pub they get into some fisticuffs and then they get old and they're like nah Alice from my use it's nice I like that I like these old religions I don't believe in any of the stuff but it's nice this tends to lower the barriers for entry and unlike Christians who will rarely even mix across sectarian lines a fully practicing shintoist can happily attend Buddhist and Hindu rights without any real sense of contradiction this is borne out by the statistic that in 1995 the number of people registered to religious organizations in Japan exceeded the whole Japanese population by 70 million a result of many individuals holding multiple memberships the other side of this coin where the Elder religions don't tend to be too fussed about what their congregations actually believe is shown through the highly secular nature of Japanese Society for the most part Japanese religion is cheerfully worldly and compartmentalized away from daily life this is a twin impact of the nature of non-abahamic religions in general and the deliberate shift away from the fascist Warrior cult which had developed in Japan before World War II haven't got there in my Empire of Japan video yet I'm looking forward to it that's in the next episode the point of all this is that she's always interest in hardcore religion was unusual but it existed in an environment where religious devotion was not only permitted but encouraged even though the vast majority of the population would never really consider taking the plunge themselves the particular branch of religion chiso chose was a relatively new cult called agonshu the folks were hardcore Buddhist fundamentalists who advertised in glossies and on television and encouraged their members to commit to a monastic lifestyle and cut off ties with their friends and Families is it'd be like run they're advertising on the thing that they want so you know I can't imagine glossy magazines and television are very present in these monasteries so they're kind of advertising on the things they want to cut people off from which I suppose kind of makes sense but it also does feel a bit contradictory additionally they stressed repeated cash donations of course they did as it means a spiritually cleansing and progressing towards enlightenment of course they did televangelists will be everywhere for anyone who knows how om shinriku worked this is going to sound very familiar and it's probably this model which inspired om's peculiar fee and membership structures as well as progressing through the aganchu levels chiso was reading an Eclectic mix of Vedic Buddhist and New Age texts with a focus on ways to use yoga and meditation to cure illness and acquire powers like levitation and telepathy so uh he was reading what I would describe as fiction it might sound silly or crazy to us but in the Hinterlands of many Eastern and Asian cultures there exists a sort of willingness to believe these things might actually be possible oh you don't need to go to the Hinterlands of Japan to find people who think this is possible there are plenty of people I have a family member who really believes that through like meditation or all of this stuff that they'll you know they'll be able to like commune with the dead and they believe in all the stuff and I'm like okay that's that's that's mildly insane I guess in a similar way to our willingness to think that some of the stuff we see in action movies could be feasible yeah those are called fantasies Chris you know it's like yeah yeah I'd love you know like you see James Bond he's like Bob and he's got like it's awesome you're like yeah yeah if I took classes in fighting I could do that it's like no there's no way that sucks why not in any case cheeser was chugging along happily seeking Nirvana by throwing cash at a cult and having multiple children when he was prosecuted in 1982 for violating the drugs cosmetics and medical instruments act he was fined two thousand dollars and briefly imprisoned various reporters gave a variety of reasons for this but it seems that he was basically not properly licensed to sell Pharmaceuticals and some of the Chinese herbal remedies he was selling were permitted in Japan either so uh he was a drug dealer in any event Shizu was devastated by the incident falling foul of the law is a huge stigma in Japan a country with a 99 conviction rate that's acknowledged the world over as one of the most law-abiding places on the planet that's got to be scary if you're a wrestler they decide to prosecute you're like oh my God it's over 99 charts but then I guess that's all it it's not as simple as okay you get arrested you're going to prison it's like well they've got to decide to prosecute and all of this stuff but when they do go to prosecute God damn defense law has got to be a hard job in Japan he sees operating his business and retreated into intensive yoga practice as well as pursuing interests in mystical divination the human potential movement and the writings of Nostradamus basically he was pursuing seriously as a fully grown man the kind of reading list you'll find in the Journal of a 15 year old goth so true in 1984 he decided he wanted a piece of that cult money for himself course he did some unverified Reports say that it fantasized about running a cult since his days at boarding school he left a gonshu and started his own yoga school called omnokai or om Incorporated depending on how you translate the Japanese for Club the demographics of his early adherents were Youth and women who worked in White Collar jobs these latter were attracted because in 1980s Japan women were largely confined to clerical roles regardless of qualification or abilities and this population group was a fertile ground for anyone claiming to sell a sense of meaning and significance by 1985 he was claiming to be a warrior of Destiny and making pilgrimages to spiritual sites in India and Japan he claims an Old Mystic had told him an apocalypse was coming and that benevolent Mountain Hermits shinzen in Japanese would Safeguard the legacy of humanity he claimed to have met the dile armor and been given a special Mission and to have been lauded by traditional Buddhists in Tibet and Nepal it seems that arm was presented with a special stupor at some point purportedly containing the remains of a Reincarnation of the shukiyamuni Buddha as a reward for promoting Buddhism but if this did occur it was well after 1985. there's also an apocryphal report that the Dalai Lama questioned by reporters after the 1995 sarin attack dimly recalled meeting a strange Japanese man but as Buddhism is one of Japan's major religions one assumes he would have met any number of strange Japanese men over the course of his career what do they call this it's like um is it a creation myth or something like that where the leader of the cult is like I know about this I know about that they create this like Mythos around themselves and their ideas so you're basically giving people Something to Believe In Beyond themselves which is apparently incredibly powerful for making a cult intense who he met with and where isn't as important as what he was claiming though as the evolution of has more to do with chiso's image making than anything else one of the big problems with mystical stuff is that it's highly vulnerable to people just making [ __ ] up as it seems there's an inverse proportion between how Ludacris Acclaim is and How likely the claimant's followers are to believe it in the earlier iteration of om for instance chisu was basically setting himself up as Christ the Redeemer mixed with the essene Jews Shiva the Creator and destroyer and the emperor of Japan and his core of about 35 followers just went with it partially because they were constantly being told they were kind of a gnostic Elite who would inherit the earth after Armageddon partly because of chizo's charismatic leadership and probably also because of the sheer amount of time they'd invested into learning highly advanced yoga techniques and listening to woo-woo nonsense yeah this is this is one of those things it's like well for two one if you make up something crazy and people have like you they've already been LED down the path are crazy it's really easy to just get them to believe more and more crazy stuff because they're already committed and they're like well I already believe all of this crazy I mean obviously they don't look at it quite like that but you can see how it works and also never underestimate the power of someone of his crazy charismatic because they all just make you believe you know you've you've people you've met charismatic people in your life are like oh my God like there's just something about these people you're like holy [ __ ] like I like you and I don't know why I was working with a psychological warfare unit okey-dokey Chris I love that I just don't really know anything about Chris or like my writers will just surprise me because you know they just send me scripts every now and again you know and I'll just eat I'll be like well okie doke we learned one of the most powerful types of narrative is the kind that explains the world the fancy term for this is etiological mythopayism all right one thing I noticed when going through alms tracks and sermons is that almost all of them had this quality and would therefore have been powerfully pervasive to Seekers and acolytes alike and then there's the sun cast when I was 17 my family moved to a different suburb and I had to find a new kung fu school I initially thought I'd found a very good one there were a dozen students all highly dedicated and the Shifu was able to teach the secret forms which was rare in Australia at the time before long I was the siong or senior student and happily training five to seven days a week shortly after this however Shifu completely and utterly lost his mind he started to believe he could use qi energy to revive dead animals or win fights without touching the opponent he insisted everyone read and follow the teachings of Carlos castanada a notorious new age fraudster and lessons went from practical martial arts instruction to chi gong magical Gung Fu ass nonsense which isn't good for anything other than memes but so powerful was the sunk cost fallacy that it was six months before I cut ties with the school and I imagine that most people who encounter Cults have a similar experience yes they do and while I am surprised and shocked at this I totally know this I don't think I'm trying to think if I've ever been in a situation where something has gone on like I've done something or been a part of something longer than I rationally would I don't think so but I could totally see this happening to me I'd be like no no it's not that weird and then someone will be like bro take a look at yourself man and you'll be like oh my dude I gotta get out of this and I would hope I had the mental Clarity to be like okay I gotta get out of this because this is weird but I don't know maybe I've been in there forever and then the next thing you know you're puncturing a bag full of sarin on the Tokyo subway Jesus Anyway by 1987 chiso's message of restoring original Buddhism or making Buddhism great again as a way to survive Armageddon had grown from a little Cult of 35 to about 1 300. like his first teachers at a gonsu he used modern marketing methods establishing a publishing house and renaming it om shinriko which means something like new teachers of the ultimate truth how modest and definitely crazy sounding if I saw an organization called the new teachers of ultimate truth I'd be like you're a weird cult or at the very least you believe in some woo-woo nonsense about what's that what's that the secret whereas that yeah you just you just think positive thoughts and positive things will come to you now that I could cut that when people talk about the secret and they say that I'm like yeah well of course if you're positive more people are going to be positive towards you obviously because you're giving out that like Good Vibes and not like spiritual Vibes but if you go up somewhere to be like whoa what's up man how's it going yeah yeah right they're gonna be like dude what's up whereas if you go to someone that's like hey man Jesus what's new with you they're gonna be the oh man I don't know not much of course but when they're like yeah yeah but visually but like if you imagine what do you want yeah one I want a Ferrari well dude just think about Ferraris and I'll come to you no [ __ ] go to work what are you talking about it's a ridiculous nonsense the ultimate teachers of new truth and who cares he also rebranded himself by changing his name Matsumoto cheese was a common sounding name so he legally changed it to more aristocratic and mystical sounding ashikara Shoku it's brilliant it'd be like someone I don't know in the UK like adding it adding a surname like double-barreled surnames or I feel like Americans don't you don't you add like what's what's your name oh it's not John Smith it's uh Mr John Smith the third a squire okay wait Esquire means lawyer in the US doesn't it if you're a squire at the end does that mean you're a lawyer because in the UK it just means like it's an I think anyone back in the day was a dude you could add it on the end it means like gentlemen or some sh I don't even know I'm pretty sure that it doesn't actually have any meaning in the UK but also no one uses it but what am I talking about oh yeah making yourself sound more aristocratic I'm Simon Whistler the bird I'm not I'm not I'm the my dad wasn't called Simon and my granddad wasn't either but you could just throw it on there at the end just be like yeah makes me sound cool aristocratic ashahara had been featured in Japan's version of The Twilight Zone as well he claimed to be able to levitate and there was a photo of him floating above a mattress in the Lotus position which for most people was about as convincing as those Halloween photos were someone dressed as a witch jumped in the air holding a broomstick this b-list Fame and alms marketing effort saw the cult grow his numbers astronomically over the next few years this was partly because of all menashahara's tireless efforts but a few factors in Japanese society and culture at the time were also major contributors for many Japanese life is an unremitting succession of commercial filial and social duties with very little time for any private leisure it feels like my life right now with a busy job and two young children private Leisure ah what exactly is that the pressure to succeed is also very real and but are my Japanese and minus and minor setbacks and reversals which we in the west would shrug off can be devastating for Japanese folks who are at all times aspirational that feels like a sweeping statement you are at all I'm sure there are lazy Japanese people are there actually though singing look surely surely maybe maybe not given this there's quite a strong market for alternative lifestyles in Japan from fashion subcultures like Kauai to religious cults like om and om had become quite an impressive operation by 1987 it had a number of communes called Lotus villagers where people could renounce materialism usually represented as U.S influence and live as a monk or an unsheltered from a world which was high pressure cruel and demanding there were structured courses where just like in Scientology you could pay your way to Enlightenment and there was a wealth of strangely feel-good apocalyptic writings and preachings all assuring each practitioner they were specifically chosen to fulfill the highest purpose that of saving and restoring Humanity after the collapse of the World by 1988 Alm had a large community Fuji nomir at them output of Mount Fuji and was selling vials of ashara's blood and bath water like some apocalyptic Bell Delphine this is the OG guy selling his bath water I accepted it's old and he's ugly that's so weird I mean yeah no that's just so weird Belle Delphine selling her bath water is weird enough but this is like a big Japanese dude it's weird I mean I don't want to say there are different levels of bath water selling being weird but apparently there are over the next few years arm would accumulate up to 40 000 followers in six countries preaching non-violence and Gnostic monasticism and everything looked like it was coming up roses for our rags to Rich's cult leader now I really hope you're enjoying today's episode so far and something that you might want to enjoy along with a future episode of The Casual criminalist is a fantastic cocktail from our friends over at Shaker and Spoon the sponsor of today's video Shaker and Spoon is a monthly cocktail subscription box that delivers the craft cocktail 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at checkout again shakerandspoon.com forward slash criminalist thank you to Shaker and Spoon for sponsoring and now back to today's video Fear and Loathing in Tokyo while Omen been growing in size and profile many of those first 35 members had been promoted to senior leadership positions and were finding themselves seen by newer members as higher Elemental beings sitting under asahara himself that's another way to make your cult appealing to people be like yo yo yo other people will think you're a God or at least semi-god-like you'll be like sick what does that just appeal to insane narcissists like myself get out me too there were in fact I don't I don't really mean that I don't want to be seen I wouldn't I'd find that very weird this guy is lying why would I there were in fact at least two levels of Enlightenment below him according to the pay as you go Nirvana system om had in place ashahara's wife ishii tomiko initially showed no interest in the cult refusing when ordered to join and become a faithful adherent in response ashahorada whipped 50 times with a cane and locked in isolation to meditate for seven weeks when she re-emerged she was unsurprisingly a willing convert later say that ashahara had settle on the path of self-improvement that she hadn't been willing to initiate herself oh my god really I'd be like yeah yeah I mean this isn't her fault she is clearly a victim of insane abuse but also if I was I'd like to think if I was in that position yeah yeah no how long was I in there seven weeks okay yeah I'm super into the cult thing where do we go next and then the first moment I'll be like just get the [ __ ] out of there run play along and then leave if she Tamiko went on to achieve the second highest level of Enlightenment in Alm and along with ashahara's mistress ishi hisako apparently no relation they formed part of a group of females who were senior leaders in the cult sounds like uh he was also taken advantage of that doesn't it in some interpretations of Japanese Zen Buddhism it is permissible to remove Bad Karma via the use of force this includes things like confinement deprivation of food or water or an extreme cases flogging and to be like well we that I mean in Prima fastly that seems like an insane statement you can whip the uh the Badness out of someone but seeing as they see that they mention their confinement which is kind of what prison is it's like yeah we're going to confine you and that'll fix you no no no so as crazy as ashahara's actions sounds the torture and false imprisonment of his wife wasn't really that far beyond the pale in terms of running a religious cult when om made its first yeah but everything in a religious cult Chris is beyond the pale it's a crazy religious cult where the guy thinks he's a God where all made its first serious Vengeance criminality was when cult member Maya teriyuki accidentally drowned while performing ritual exercises um at the time was applying for official recognition as a religious organization they'd been rejected on their first application and were supporting their second by what was basically a campaign of harassment with members picketing government officials offices and homes and conducting a sort of pre-internet DDOS attack by spamming the authorities with phone calls oh my God this isn't gonna work is it please no ashahara told us in a circle that disclosure might sink their bid for recognition then bravely left the decision to them it was issued tomiko his wife who suggested that they cover the death up so they burnt the body at their sacrificial altar before ishii hisako led a small group who ground up the remaining bones and Scattered the ashes over a lake well that is a very thorough way of disposing of a body isn't it in Japan interfering with the body is an exceptionally serious offense and many researchers pinpoint this moment as the beginning of their slide into violent crime that's pretty intense like I mean of course like desecrating a body or whatever we call it is like a crime I think yeah it must be right but it's not like that it's not like murder it's just like it's more you're a bit of a weirdo rather than a violent Criminal unless you murdered someone and then need to dispose of the body which I would guess is probably a more common occurrence maima San the man who drowned had a best friend named taguchi shuyi who not only witnessed the vital accident but was aware of the cover-up understandably he'd become disillusioned with Allman signaled his intention to leave no no no no no no no no no no no we talked about this do not signal your intention to leave keep doing everything everything is fine then when you go to Tesco to get some baked beans or whatever the Japanese equivalent of that is you just wander off you just wander off and as soon as you're out of sight you start running run and run as fast as you can maybe go to a police station or just hide somewhere and just go start a new life okay that's how you escape from a cult don't signal intentions to leave even if you think it's okay anxious he might report the incidents of police ashahara tied to Gucci sand to a chair summoned his male senior leaders to consult he asked them to establish whether taguchi-san really meant to leave and Incredibly when they went to ask him he didn't lie you should have lied my friend as a result ashahara ordered them to kill him they strangled to Gucci sand with a rope and burned the body in much the same way as his friends who could have possibly seen this coming uh apparently not taguchi this division of labor with the women mostly segregated from the more violent actions would persist throughout the history of om in fact various security encountered terrorism experts see a strong correlation between the gradual freezing out of female senior leaders and the increasingly erratic and violent behavior of alms key members some experts say ashahara's wife and mistress LED what might be called a moderate faction acting as the sort of break on the self-proclaimed gurus more extreme Flights of Fancy whereas the men in the senior leadership group tended to enable and amplify them I stress that this informed speculation at best but several independent experts have come to the same conclusions so for what it's worth I included it here a key moment for om was when they were given official status as religion oh no it worked no understandably investigators found that Tokyo authorities despite having serious misgivings about the nature and activities of the cult simply got tired of being harassed and granted official status to get rid of them that is terrible this shouldn't be the case obviously not but it sets a terrible precedence there's probably loads of religions in Japan which shouldn't be religious because officials got tired of being harassed once recognized they were practically Untouchable why religions were still highly protected at the time mostly because of American post-war influence when the Japanese absorbed an exaggerated version of the First Amendment protections into their own constitutions yeah well into their own Constitution religion's crate like the amount of protection and religions don't have to pay tax in America right which is insane what are you doing as a result and the people are like flying around on private jets just say what are you doing America as a result Government powers to investigate religions were seriously curtailed and there was a deep reluctance among Japanese authorities to interfere with religious organizations shortly after gaining official status ashahara decided to run a series of candidates for the diet oh it's pronounced diet oh no I just mentioned that whole uh history video it's spelled diet as doing this history video about the Empire of Japan I pronounce it diet the whole time but it's deity oh no good news I don't particularly care Japan's Parliament he believed Japan's problems all boiled down to materialism and consumer culture for which he blamed America and that only through a restoration of traditional Buddhism could the country be saved he also believed America would launch a nuclear attack against Japan kicking off World War III and Armageddon and only the spiritually strong and pure armed practitioners would be saved to rebuild the world what are you talking about mate also you're like I hate to marry her except for all that sweet religious stuff that really benefits me everybody hates capitalism except when it Butters their bread it's worth noting here that the end of the world isn't a feature of most Eastern religions so ashahara's ideas are pretty unusual it's the end of the world like I know there's like Armageddon and stuff and the apocalypse and the six Horsemen Four Horsemen it's four horsemen isn't it of the apocalypse and all that stuff but is it is it like do people really believe that the world is going to end I mean obviously the world's gonna end at some really distant point in the future that's you know it's been around for a really long time but of course it's going to end at some point but do religions believe like Western religions believe this is going to happen like relatively soon I didn't even know that the election was a whitewash for arm they only got 1 783 votes out of 500 000 cars this was a doubly humiliating number as there were significantly more than 1783 old members and it seems even they didn't vote for armed candidates it seems the monastic focus of arm worked against them with many followers highly unwilling to re-engage with Society after joining expressly in order to retreat from it another reason for their poor performance was the impact of increased scrutiny arms party shinrito Supreme truth filled with 25 candidates including ashahara and they went on a marketing Blitz holding events and giving performances and interviews this led to many families coming forward to complain of the cult's bizarre practices extortionate behavior and breaking up of families yeah I mean you could Market the hell out of it but um what was it Michael Bloomberg running against um Joe Biden and stuff in the Democratic primaries in that last election he spent a lot of money but you can't buy it or get you somewhere but not far enough then or now these families organize themselves into the OM shinrigo victim society and hired Sakamoto tutsumi as their lawyer to kamato San launched an investigation and the findings were damning he had these on popular radio shows and the negative publicity proved fatal for alms election hopes Honestly though with 1 700 votes or whatever out of 500 000 needed did they ever really have a chance even if you'd have took a crazy amount more 500 times more basically sakamoto's goals were quite moderate he wasn't the implacable enemy om sought him to be in public he stated that he simply wanted om to be a little bit less bizarre and stop some of its more harmful practices think he might be able to persuade them to do this he agreed to meet with senior om leaders but the meeting was a complete train wreck why he went there to reason with a cult and they were unreasonable again shocking after this ashahara Mark Sakamoto sound down as a key threat and a handful of all members held a meeting to plan his assassination on no they toyed with the idea of using botulinum toxin more on that later but instead settled on a syringe of potassium chloride a drug which causes cardiac arrest and formulated a plan to Ambush him on his way home from work with typical efficiency The Chosen day turned out to be a public holiday and Sakamoto San stayed home with his wife and one-year-old son the old members decided to injure their way into the house but botched it so badly they had to beat the whole family to death oh my God they buried the bodies in different prefectures and reported back to ashahara who congratulated them and assured them the family's Souls would transmigrate to a better world oh my God this suddenly got super dark I mean it was dark already but they just murdered someone's whole family ah when police investigated The Disappearance of the Sakamoto family they discovered they hadn't been robbed and and armed Shin Ricky badge was left a supreme scene guys don't leave a badge behind bearing the name of your organization at a crimes he knew insane oh God on hearing this ashahara went to a recently established arm office in Bonn Germany oh my God it got International so it wasn't available to be interviewed by police the follow-up investigations were frankly pathetic and the inquiry simply languished the public however had no doubts about who was guilty and public attacks on arm sealed their fate in the elections this is insane a whole family was murdered police what are you up to you found a badge from the organization at the crime scene and you know he was investigating them how what are you doing police come on this pasting at The Ballot Box was the turning point of ashahara he immediately abandoned all attempts to integrate with traditional Japanese society and his sermons turned sharply from preaching Japan's salvation to being exclusively concerned with the salvation of alms members in multiple writings ashahara claimed the U.S was targeting Japan with a malign influence campaign drowning Japanese culture in Shallow consumerism arm was being targeted too by means of Airborne chemical attacks designed to render them compliant a version of the contrail conspiracy theory there was also a weird strain a virulent anti-Semitism in ashahara's teaching of course there was as we mentioned that you gotta do you got to throw in all of the conspiracies and of course it's the Jews obviously he claimed the world was run by a zionists shadow governments holding them responsible for such events as the kaima Rouge massacres and the serbo croat war obviously yeah it wasn't the kimur Rouge wasn't um uh Pol Pot it was a Jewish conspiracy I love it it's so crazy in the special edition of alms monthly circular the variana soccer oh my god I've even got a pronunciation guide and I know I'm getting it wrong ashahara declared war on Jewish people on behalf of Earth's 5.5 billion people variana Saka hereby formerly declares war on the world Shadow government that murders Untold numbers of people for obvious reasons arm couldn't find any Jewish people to persecute in Japan but ashahara and his senior leaders created long lists of people he called Japanese Jews the pro-western wealthy and Cosmopolitan Japanese what does this have to do with it being Jewish you're just taking random conspiracy theories like contrails and Shadow governments mashing them together you're truly losing your mind mate the upshot of all of this was that ashahara was able to convince his followers it was necessary to take defensive measures if the US was subjugating the armed chemical attack then Omni to develop their own cbrm weapons and if Japan's government had been captured by a world Shadow government almost have to restructure itself in Readiness to take over the country for its own good so I actually don't think this guy's lost his mind I think he's just you know he's creating a scapegoat he's creating an uh not scapio he's creating an enemy so he has something to like rally his people behind and make them even more loyal to him and he's like it's a good spirit it's craziness but it's totally works the shadow Shoguns by 1990 arm had attracted a core group of young males many of whom had Advanced technical qualifications one was a virologist another had been part of the Japanese space program and there were chemists and other scientific Specialists among them Ahmed began remodeling itself into Ministries there was an intelligence Ministry mostly made up of members with law enforcement or military backgrounds a construction Ministry headed by an engineer the health Ministry was fronted by the virologist and they even had a household Affairs Ministry this last one was based on an identical Department which had functioned under the Meiji Emperors and dealt with counter-intelligence and security the cult had a string of computer shops restaurants and other businesses all generating tax-free revenue and even owned and ran a hospital wait wait wait are they also did they take that from the Americans this is crazy by 1995 Alm was running two dozen companies and it's estimated that he had between 40 to 60 000 members and assets totaling a billion dollars oh my God this got huge this got huge huge this is not some Jim Jones David koresh nonsense this is a proper big weird cult I had no I I mean I I've talked about this before I totally forgot how big it is they're anti-semitic anti-American and anti-government rhetoric wasn't exactly being broadcast but it wasn't exactly secret either there were plenty of disaffected ex-members and concerned citizens repeatedly flagging alms ideas and activities to Japanese authorities but their status is an officially recognized religion made them hesitant to act during this period Arn conducted quite a few activities which would grab headlines in the wake of the Tokyo attack in the end these weren't the main game and they were far sickly inept but it's worth listing them to get a sense of just how nuts their ultimate goals were I'm surprised at their level of incompetence that's a lot of people and you've got like military people you've got virologists you've got all of these people who you know they're highly quite we said they highly qualified technical people so how are you still so [ __ ] at your job their intelligence Ministry perpetrated multiple break-ins at the offices of Mitsubishi and other defense contractors to steal doc documents relating to tanks and laser weapons there's no indication these efforts were successful senior arm members began quickly abandoning projects such as an astral teleporter a headset designed to broadcast ashahara's brain waves gigantic solar mirrors and plasma cannons this guy is like yeah go make me a uh astral teleporter I have one simple request and that is to have sharks with freaking laser beams attached to their heads and all of these technical Minds people will be like should we tell the boss that that's not a thing someone would be like no don't tell me let's just go working it quietly before he goes crazy more so how's that astral teller boy it's got a great boss almost there it'll be ready soon the ideas were inspired by Mobile Suit Gundam and other anime oh God they'll be like looking at Star tree and be like where's my warp drive it's the source she thinks possible when you're five I'm also trying to raise its own Elite Army their recruiting program in Russia was immensely successful and the bulk of international members of arm resided there possible the people are insane it's amazing I know I said earlier don't underestimate the Charisma like the power of like the charismatic cult leader but like oh my God they're recruiting people all around the world 60 000 people even this is getting it's a big stretch this is immense this was probably owing to the chaotic nature of post-soviet Russia enabling the purchase of millions of dollars worth of air time as well as their own radio station um also made donations to key Russian ministers and was able to buy a mig-17 attack helicopter and smuggle it back to Japan as well as Parts and Equipment required to manufacture AK-74 assault rifles the modern version of the ak-47. a dude we just brush over there that they bought an attack helicopter what the [ __ ] large cadres of our members were given firearms training as well as specialized training by expetsnad's troops but it seems that a bunch of Mystics who joined a monastic order to retreat from the world aren't the best material for molding a crack Special Forces Unit but honestly they've got so many people they've probably got Japanese Special Forces as well in there along with expert stats people which is like that's like Russia's elite soldiers right I'm also set up Branch officers in the US and Europe but these only attracted a handful of members possibly most bizarrely they bought a massive cattle station in Western Australia and tending to mine uranium either to make a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb they had thirty thousand dollars in excess baggage when they arrived at Perth Airport including lab equipment and glass carboys of hydrochloric acid labeled hand soap confused authorities find them two thousand four hundred dollars but carrying dangerous goods and confiscated the acid our members stayed at the station for about nine weeks before leaving and were denied a visa when they tried to return it so I'm trying to get back to my castle Raja cattle cattle eventually the state government forced them to sell the land Australian security agencies did flag this introductor U.S and Japanese counterparts but with no discernible effect it was this little Excursion that fueled Harry Mason's conspiracy theories many of which made it into otherwise factual accounts of om shinriku yeah so they won they bought a bunch of land in Australia thinking they could mine nuclear materials there and they didn't succeed it's quite a way to go Harry isn't it to say that they were testing nuclear bombs I mean yeah getting uranium out of the ground not impossible building a bomb from uranium it's really hard it's really really really hard really the main event with om was its chemical weapons program but it's also worth looking briefly at their attempt to make bio weapons chemical weapons are probably the easiest one to make right if you're an aspiring terrorist like I guess the order would be chemical weapons biological weapons nuclear weapons is there a third or fourth category because even if you make it a dirty bomb that's really you know you've got to really work out where to get like waste nuclear material from and stuff which is going to be really hard chemical weapon uh biological weapons I guess you've got to know how to like you've got to know something about that right chemical weapons not so much I think that's quite easy and then obviously Conventional Weapons the easiest of all like bombs made from um what fertilizer and Diesel wasn't that what the guy who blew up that building in the US was um the Oklahoma City bombing that was like fertilizer and [ __ ] and now it's like you buy fertilizer like lots of fertilizer you begin in a visit unless you're a farmer or something then it's okay during the meeting to plan Sakamoto sends murder ashara had asked what the most potent toxin was Mariah said it was Bocce linen the same pathogen used in Botox and which in slightly larger doses does shut down the nervous system yeah botulin and the stuff people injecting their faces to make themselves look younger is one of the mo is the most deadly toxin in the world since they didn't have any Sakamoto San was killed by other means but that sparked the notion of making some themselves in the spring of 1990 Endo went to a place in hokkiado prefecture to harvest sea botulinum from the soil omrana hospital and could have easily brought some cultures openly but paranoia prevented them from doing this Endo then began a long and fruitless project to manufacture first body lemon and then Anthrax they made huge amounts of what's called medium the fermented substance which carries the bacteria starting with square fermenters they made batches which weren't potent probably because Square objects are harder to contaminate they then moved on to barrel-shaped designs a logical Innovation but this also failed these efforts were significantly hampered by the constant lawsuits Elms sizable land Holdings and extortion of practices were exposing them to and only key members who could be trusted with anything this sensitive and there simply weren't enough of them to deal with lawsuits and engineer bioweapons at the same time okay so they've got a lot of members but the inner circle's fairly small okay there was also the fact there were strict Buddhists and therefore prohibited themselves from testing weapons on animals killing people was fine but animal testing was apparently a big bridge too far all right I'm like I don't like animal testing I'm not into animal testing I don't I think obviously if we didn't have to do animal testing on things I'd rather live in a world without it but do I think it is better than human testing yes yes I mean unless it's late stage where the humans can consent but we're talking about unconsenting humans here oh consenting animals unconsenting animals or consenting humans that's a more interesting moral quandary isn't it fortunately this isn't the channel as I mentioned before we solve more quandries is the channel where we move on from them this meant they never knew until an actual attack was conducted whether their bio weapons were potent despite buying multiple complex facilities and producing thousands of liters of medium no single viable bio weapon was ever produced alright so they've tried nuclear in Australia they've tried biological they're going to move on to chemical between March and July of 1990 om conducted around 30 separate botulinum attacks including on two usn bases the Japanese DEET the crown Prince's wedding and a major airport none of which or even noticed as they totally failed in October 3 all members were arrested on unrelated charges and the whole program was shut down and disassembled in a fit of paranoia it was started again a couple of years later this time to produce Anthrax it seems as if the strain of Anthrax they used for seed was stolen from a university lab that should not be possible you shouldn't be letting people get Anthrax it's extremely scary there are two types of Anthrax culture used for the making of Anthrax vaccines each of these contains one of two plasmids needed for a weaponizable product only the first kind of culture was obtained with Endo assuring everyone he could replicate the seconds this attempt failed as well possibly because well Endo was a virologist and not a bacteriologist you think yeah only Sardis doing the same thing they would know about this it's like no if you're a virologist you're extremely specialized in viruses you're probably like I don't pay attention to bacteria because I don't need my mind being filled with that nonsense when I'm on viruses right once again they only discovered their ant Anthrax didn't work when they used it in a series of attacks one random spraying of 20 tons in the immediate vicinity of one of their factories one targeted attack on a rival cult and 20 separate attempts to disperse it from modified trucks in and around Tokyo the factory released resulted in Residence reporting foul smells a sign that the medium had been contaminated and another fit of paranoia they shut it all down again the fact that Endo was quite senior in the hierarchy meant that even with his unbroken record of failure the bioweapons program was consistently prioritized if this hadn't been the case it's possible that the far more successful chemical weapons project run by Mirai might have gone a bit further than it did mirai's chemical program chemicals was initially focused on drugs one of Mariah's Chief assistants was a skilled chemist named Sami who worked for Endo and Mariah alternatively Tashia began initially producing drugs in a small Lab at home HQ some of these were sold through yaku's contracts who were also helping arm manage its property portfolio that's who we can have manage our property a property manager no no let's have the Yakuza do it that sounds smart Yakuza they lie low they've been here since the 70s and they have no problem partnering up with local gangs that serves their needs but the quality doesn't seem to have been very good with one police informant describing alms drugs as garbage he's like in the back room this cocaine is rubbish it's good I tried it though he's the guy who tests all the cocaine this is a great job I'm really happy Alm was mostly producing LSD and methamphetamine the amphetamines for sale and the LSD for brainwashing recruitment members as well as for recreational and ritual use after returning from a trip to Russia where I told tushia that om was under threat of chemical attack it's unclear why he told toshia to research chemical weapons and find the best one so he dutifully went after the University library and came back with the answer that sarin was probably the most cost effective Mariah then told him to make some for analysis so the cop could defend itself against an attack that made about 15 grams sourcing the precursors and equipment on the open market as he didn't think he was doing anything illegal once more I found the siren could be made He was ordered to make 70 tons to Shia bolted this he was a research scientist not a manufacturer and he didn't know how to scale for the mass production Mariah showed him a blank check and told him to get cracking on promptly built a facility called satyan 7 they called all their facilities satyans the turb deriving from a Sanskrit word for truth satyan 7 was a large sophisticated chemical manufacturing fully decked out and suspiciously similar in layouts to a russian-built chemical weapons facilities the estimated cost of satyan 7 was about 30 million dollars whoa whoa while it was being built Mariah ordered Chia to make one kilogram of sarin he was able to create a total of three kilograms with a purity of 90 Shea claims he doesn't know what it was used for but it's clear it was used in two failed attacks on the leader of a rival religious organization the first was and delivered in effectual on the second try they decided to use a truck to disperse the chemical sarin is not a gas regardless of how many times the media calls it that is clear liquid colorless and odorless when properly made which has a boiling point of about 140 Celsius and a very low evaporation point converting it into a gas can be done but it's much more effective as a vapor so atomizers tend to be used in their first truck-borne attack Mirai devised a sort of butane fire Brazier sitting in the trailer his subordinates warned him that the truck would catch fire but he ignored them on the day of the attack the truck did catch fire and the driver had to be injected with atropine to save his life the incident finally persuaded arm to focus on chemical weapons and scale production of sarin and other nerve agents became their top priority at that point if I was that chemist and it'd be like yeah yeah we're having this to defend against attacks I'd just be like so why are you making me make atropine this guy knows what's up he's gonna he's gonna go to prison surely chemical hearts with Satya and seven in full swing arm began producing VX and sarin in large quantities as well as small amounts of taben but without going into Too Much Chemistry detail these three nerve agents are in the same family sounds nice doesn't it same family of death produced with similar organophosphate chemistry which was first developed by the Nazis in World War II VX was the agent used to assassinate Kim jonnan's brother Kim jong-nam and has similar effects between 1992 and 1995 multiple attacks were conducted by on some of these were individualized being false Gene gas sarin and VX attacks on defecting members and the album activists and journalist as well as religious Rivals as far as anyone can make out there were about seven of these chemical attacks four of which were either holy or partially successful what's incredible about all of this is that they kept getting away with it yeah I mean if it would be more incredible I wasn't already super used to it because all throughout this episode it's been like no one's doing anything no one seems to care their target profile the fact that they'd openly purchased precursors and the fact that they had several large sophisticated chemical manufacturies ashahara is near constant preaching about chemical warfare and actual hymns about sarin all of this should have made abundantly clear to the police that Alm was Behind These crimes police were hampered though by the law and an Institutional unwillingness to interfere with religions yeah but this isn't it's a cult it's a crazy cult I suspect another Factor was the generally compliant nature of Japanese Society Japan has some of the lowest crime rates in the world and it seems the police just weren't equipped to deal with criminality on this scale in any event arm went on merrily settling scores and fulfilling boyish supervillain fantasies until June 27 1994. around this time Omid been evolved in commercial litigation and a Sahara assessing the judges in the case would find against them ordered their killings the judges all happened to live in a Swanky neighborhood in Matsumoto near Nagano so the core all members got to work Having learned their lesson from setting their truck on fire in the first attack Engineers got to work designing a sophisticated fan-driven vaporizer to be installed in the back of a newly modified truck in the early evening they parked 37 meters west of the judge's residences and fired her up initially the vapor was released into the drive truck itself after some frantic adjustments they were able to get it to disperse outside but a slight breeze pushed the Vape Cloud off Target and into the neighboring apartment complexes eight innocent people were killed and 200 were injured after about 10 minutes the armed Squad aborted and went home it's just endless incompetence and again I'll say it didn't have enough people in your cult with like even if you're not telling them even if they're not in the Inner Circle that you could at least ask like yeah yeah we're thinking about doing something like you know totally unrelated to horrible terrorism crimes can you tell me how this works you know police warned the neighborhood and began an intensive investigation directed in exactly the wrong direction they found traces of herbicides in the home of one of the victims who happened to be a chemical salesman and concluded that he'd conducted the attack either as revenge for a neighborhood dispute or some obscure insurance scam despite all the multiple indications over several years that all might be conducting chemical attacks police completely ignored the cult as well as eyewitness reports of a random truck spewing out particulates nearby police in Japan what are you up to the very next month while the police investigation was ongoing and the chemical salesman life was being ruined om had an accidental release of impure sarin from its Mount Fuji compound causing neighbors to complain of a foul odor this was the same impurity a coppery Brown byproduct of manufacture which caused the odors at the Tokyo subway attack later that year a more serious accidental release occurred at satyan 7 and ashahara ordered all weapons programs to shut down Tatian 7 itself was covered in plastic sheeting and decorated like a temple in a pathetic event to disguise its function despite the cleanup if is there really anything to worry about though the police seemed to just knock air it's all their religion they're immune to law despite the cleanup taking three months and police investigating the spills finding MPA a chemical associated with sarin breakdown and impa which is associated with sarin production in the soil around satyan 7. no action was taken because of course it wasn't and somehow they couldn't connect the evidence of sarin production with the multiple chemical attacks and strong indications of arm involvement and they couldn't and given they couldn't link the production to a specific assault or murder they couldn't prosecute us there was no law in Japan against producing poisonous chemicals that simply joking that's how you it's like if something is clearly wrong and it just happens to not be a crime because the crime isn't Miss it written find some other way find some like wide-reaching crime and use that instead the police weren't completely idle however it's kind of a surprise to me one of arm's more routine activities was the kidnapping and intimidation of critics it's a good indication of how nuts their activities were the multiple abductions fall into a side category anyway that finally managed to get some fingerprint evidence linking an old member to one of these kidnappings and were planning to raid arms facilities on the 22nd of March 1995 brilliant finally something's happening arm sympathizes in the police force warned them of the raid of course they did so ashahar and his Brain Trust started planning a sarin attack on the Tokyo subway focusing on trains converging on casu Miguel ski rail station right near the Metropolitan Police Headquarters the twin goals of this attack were to distract the police from The Raid and to trigger Armageddon that's also to facilitate on seizure of State Control guys you're getting too big for your breaches this isn't going to happen since the two accidental spills all our members have been banned from chemical and biological weapons production so Tashia was busy producing mescaline at the time of course he was he received orders to quickly make more sarin and was given some precursor that had been hidden for a rainy day sashia got to work but he found he lacked the appropriate organic precursor and substituted a brown liquid known as DEA which caused the originally colorless sarin to have a distinctive brown color as well as an odor some reports State Shia had invented a new supercharged sarin production method but this simply isn't true it was a substitution method which produced a product of lower Purity and efficacy about 35 pure five are members with 11 polythene bags of sarin wrapped in newspaper boarded trains hid the packages somewhere in the carriages and pierced them with umbrella tips eight of these bags were successfully punctured another three were found intact overall the Tokyo subway incident killed 13 people and injured 6000 252 many of them permanently wrap up the Tokyo subway attack left a scar on the Japanese psyche which persists to this day it was a hugely traumatic event which brought about multiple changes in the law and also in Japanese attitudes to religion good Alm was used as one of the reasons for re-militarizing Japan oh less good and authorities to this day will refuse basic state services to all members most of whom had no idea what was going on just before the attack ashahara had organized a fire bombing of an OM facility a sort of a reichstad fire to Garner public sympathy but it didn't work if anything it hastened his demise as it was one of the key incidents which led police to his door about a month after the subway attack arm tried again this time with zyklon B cyanide gas but the attempt was abandoned before the dispersers were properly set up the police finally sprang into action and bicepton it only it only took chemical attacks it only took the use of a weapon of mass destruction and by September of 1995 they had conducted 500 raids on 300 locations logging 6 36 000 items of evidence and arresting 398 our members ten days after the attack an ULM assassin shot the police commissioner several times seriously wounding him before escaping on a bicycle with typical arm incompetence he used a Colt 38 revolver at 60 yards outside the maximum effective range but with typically equal arm luck the attack was still partially successful one month after the year tag Mariah hideo was stabbed to death by Yo hirayuki a Yakuza member who later committed suicide in prison on May the 5th arm tried cyclon B again this time in Shinjuku station with a simple binary dispersal method which thankfully was interrupted by a member of the public on the day ashahara was arrested May the 16th all mailed a letter bomb to the governor of Tokyo which blew the fingers off as his secretary's left hand and others like Columbia attempt on the 4th of July also failed this time because the devices were shoddily made and just didn't work when ashahara was finally brought to trial he used every trick in the book he played incompetence mobilized his publicists and the media sacked his lawyer the day before the trial but all to no avail I know how this will ends and it's a good one he was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging as were several of his key Associates ashara Shoku was hanged on July the 6th 2018. seven other members including Endo the bioweapons guy the two sugar guy the chemist they were also executed that week yeah oh my God it took them a long time from 1995 to 2018. 23 years to get that execution done and I thought death threat America was long Jesus dismember of indices and yes that that was the good ending I was talking about dismember dependencies there are quite a few key players in this drama nimid the Strangler nakagawa hayakawa The Bodyguard and many others I've been named them for a few reasons firstly because ashahara was the prime mover secondly because they're not as important as the victims and thirdly to avoid confusion and the need for human Network charts and diagrams yeah I I have to say I found this very easy to follow and I've covered this story before and there were a lot of names that I kind of got tracks that lost track so that's kind of Eucharist thank you number two ahm shinrika broke into several different groups after the subway attack the biggest is called alef which seems to spend most of its time distancing itself from ashaharoshako's ideas and actions when I reached out to them I got a form letter saying they had nothing to do with any sarin and asking if I wanted some meditation videos nice one for reaching out to them Chris and uh let me know all those meditation videos work out number three ishi hasako ashahara's mistress was released from prison in 2000 or announced all connection with arm she had been jailed for damaging a corpse as well as providing cash and a vehicle to all members the day after the attack I feel sorry for her she was like locked in that room for like seven weeks and beaten like she was yeah I don't know I feel like she's a victim in this number four in the immediate wake of the attacks fumi hero joyu arms PR head became the de facto leader he argued strenuously for arms innocence and weirdly became something of a teen heartthrob for a while wait what he was jailed for three years for inciting perjury before breaking away to form his own arm Splinter Group Hikari Noir The Ring of Light number five just after the 1995 subway attack Japan's domestic intelligence agency turned a lady called kittagawa who had joined arm after the attack she apparently sold information to the agency for some years before defecting to North Korea okay she claimed that the intelligence agency was a Handler had forced her to have sex with him on more than 20 occasions which was a big part of the reason for her defecting as for choosing North Korea friends dread had always been fascinated by the regime and had a lifelong dream of living there you like people are fat I'm fascinated by North Korea it's super interesting do I want to live there absolutely not no good Lord no I've also said things about North Korea that would get me killed there number six in the early 2000s leaders of arm finally acknowledged ashahar and the cult's guilt they issued formal apologies and set up a compensation and counseling fund for victims and their families because of the use of sarin the attack attracted intense scrutiny from a whole range of security intelligence and law enforcement investigators from all over the world it's their unanimous opinion that the vast bulk of om Shin Ricky members had no idea what their chiefs were up to yeah I kind of share that opinion it does seem unlikely but that is where we end today's episode of The Casual criminalist I feel like the crime in this one was this tiny bit I mean all of there were loads of crimes but like that the actual attack was such a small part of this it was all about that build up like Chris said at the beginning thank you Chris for this thank you Jen for editing it thank you dear listener reviewer for watching if you were so kind to leave a review if you're listening as a podcast or a rating on Spotify a comment a like a subscribe on YouTube that'd be wonderful and I'll see you next time [Music] thank you

Channel: The Casual Criminalist

Views: 160,832

Keywords: true crime

Id: daQA6KBK2Xw

Length: 80min 11sec (4811 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2022