Why did Aum Shinrikyo attack Tokyo subways?
I wrote a long article on this which got posted on my friend Eric Barnes blog Gaijinass. Sadly Eric passed away very suddenly in May. RIP. Here’s a link to the full story: Aum Shinrikyô and the Tōkyō Sarin gas attacks. That article in turn was part of a larger book called Bubble to Quake, mostly written 1998–2002, and that book in turn morphed into my current book - Fukushima and the coming Tokyo Earthquake Book. Aum’s guru/leader Shoko Asahara has still not been hanged, though he remains on death row. What is amazing is how inept the Japanese police were over a period of years in dealing with Aum.
This is a short edited version of the sarin attack section of the story.
When the sister of public notary Kiyoshi Kariya escaped the cult, Kariya was kidnapped, brought to Kamikuishiki (Aum’s headqurters near Mt Fuji), and injected with sodium thiopental in an attempt to force him to reveal her whereabouts. The drug caused the elderly man to fall into a coma and die. Though the body was microwaved and the ashes thrown into a lake near Mount Fuji, his disappearance and subsequent public and media outcry, with many openly naming Aum as chief suspects, forced Japan’s laggard police force to finally take action. Kariya had left a note for his family which read – “If I disappear, I was abducted by Aum Supreme Truth”.
An article on the front page of the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper announced that traces of an organic phosphate compound that could have resulted from Sarin had been detected in soil at Kamikuishiki. Panic ensued as Asahara realised that massive police raids were impending. An estimated $30 million had been spent on sarin production. Cult members were forced to pour most of the chemical stockpile into streams and riverbeds. Other chemicals were hastily buried, burned or moved from the site. Equipment was moved to other Aum properties, records were destroyed. Components for the AK-74 rifles were dumped into dams. Then, amid police preparation for the impending raid, and Aum panic, nature intervened.
On the very morning that massive police raids were due to take place, the 1995 Kobe Earthquake occurred. 6,434 people lost their lives. Damage to the city was estimated at approximately ten trillion yen ($100 billion). Police and SDF forces were forced to divert manpower to deal with the disaster. Many in Aum believed the earthquake to be a sign that the end of the world really was at hand, and that their guru had foreseen the event happening. Asahara at once took credit.
To forestall the impending post-quake police raid, he decided to launch sarin attacks, via the subway system, upon two police headquarters in central Tōkyō. The fact that thousands of innocent commuters would be killed was irrelevant to a group that had twice tried to assassinate the entire Japanese government. The Tokyo subway system is the world’s busiest. In one day it transports 5 million people in coaches which are packed to 200% capacity during the morning rush hour. The nerve agent was to be released in subway cars that had been meticulously timed to converge, from different directions, at Kasumigaseki Station. The selected train coaches would arrive nearest the exits used by police from the National Police Agency and the Tōkyō Metropolitan Police Department.
Just after 8.00 am on the morning of March 20, 1995, Aum members used sharpened umbrellas to pierce eleven bags of liquid sarin placed on the floors of five subway cars. They then quickly exited at the following stations. Dozens of innocent feet trampled the bags, causing the sarin to leak and spread. The agent was only 30% pure, yet, in the crowded subway coaches, passengers went into convulsions. Panic ensued. Passengers forced all windows open as the gas caused their pupils to shrink to pinhole size. At the following stations, with tunnel vision and failing nervous systems, commuters staggered for station exits, vomiting and bleeding from noses and mouths, their motor control failing.
The resulting scenes were soon broadcast to a horrified world: thousands of office workers collapsed on roads outside subway stations, ambulance crews and doctors overwhelmed and unable to cope with the bizarre symptoms, and later, images of members of the military, clad in full chemical warfare suits, descending into eerily silent stations. The shock was all the greater because this was Tōkyō, generally considered to be the safest large city in the industrialised world. In total, 12 people died, 5,500 people were injured. Some were left in vegetative states; others still suffer from amnesia and post-traumatic stress disorders. Numbers of deaths would have been far higher had the sarin been pure or “if Aum had used an effective dispersal system, such as a vaporizer”.
Terror
Panic descended on the capital. For many weeks after the attack the perpetrators remained at large. The police investigation seemed to be going nowhere. Sports stadiums and department stores hired extra staff to search customers’ bags. Security was increased at airports. Cars were randomly searched, cyclists stopped, litter bins and coin lockers sealed. Gas masks and canaries sold out. Any suspicious package noticed in stations meant trains had to be halted while nervous rail staff investigated. Those who could travel to work by taxi did so, rather than risk going underground. What was truly frightening was that most employees have no choice but to use the subway system.
Two days after the attack, the police launched a 3,300-man raid on Aum facilities across Japan. At Kamikuishiki, police released over fifty emaciated prisoners from steel containers. In the basement of one of the buildings, they found dozens of blackened barrels, the containers for microwave disposal of murdered dissidents.
In the next few months, Japanese television viewers were inundated with the same constantly repeated images of commuters lying stricken outside subway stations, and scenes of chemical warfare-clad police carrying canaries in cages into Aum facilities. The tens of thousands of containers and bags of some two hundred chemicals found at the site revealed the intensity of the cult’s efforts to create weapons in sufficient numbers to paralyze one of the world’s largest cities.
For the full story go to the link above. It was a pretty terrifying time to be in Tokyo.
