The chilling relevance of Tokyo's Cult of Aum terror attacks today

Yahoo

20-03-2025

For the thousands of passengers piling into Tokyo's subway network on Monday, March 20, 1995, it should have been a commute like any other. The air was cool, the skies outside were clear, and the looming Spring Equinox – a national holiday in Japan –promised respite from the country's high-pressure work culture the next day. But unbeknown to the rush-hour crowds, among them were extremist followers of a doomsday cult about to enact Japan's deadliest domestic terror attack.
At around 08:00 that morning, five disguised men punctured plastic bags with sharpened umbrellas as their separate trains hurtled towards Kasumigaseki station. The act would release a manufactured nerve agent originally developed by the Nazis in World War II, considered 26 times as deadly as cyanide. As the terrorists fled, the fumes left commuters choking, vomiting, and temporarily blinded. Thirteen were killed and over 6,000 were injured.
Thirty years on and a new feature documentary Aum: The Cult at the End of the World, explores the cultural context that led up to the attack and carries a chilling relevance for a Western world rife with radicalist thinking today. Directors Chiaki Yanagimoto and Ben Braun see it as a 'cautionary tale'.
'This was a terrorism by Japanese people against Japanese people, and as a young kid, it was hard to grasp what the motives were,' says Yanagimoto, who was an elementary school student in rural Yamanashi province, home to the largest headquarters of Aum Shinrikyo ('Supreme Truth'). Concerns had been raised against the suspicious doomsday cult later convicted of the attacks – she says she still remembers 'my friends' parents warning the kids to be careful of people roaming around in white robes'.
Aum Shinrikyo was founded as a yoga society in 1987 under the tutelage of Shoko Asahara (born Chizuo Matsumoto), a long-haired, partially sighted man who became a self-styled guru sometime after being reprimanded for selling tangerine peel to the elderly as a quack medical cure.
In Japan's booming Bubble economy years, young people disillusioned with materialism may have thought they'd found the path to greater fulfilment when they stumbled across adverts depicting the purple-robed yogi seemingly hovering above the ground, promising to teach believers the powers of telepathy and levitation.
The cult gained official status as a religious organisation in 1989; its following grew to 3,000 members. Asahara's teachings blended Hinduism and Buddhism (he'd brokered several photo opportunities with the Dalai Lama during his visits to Tibet), and later incorporated elements of apocalyptic Christian prophecies.
But behind the walls of its communes, more sinister practices were taking place. Cult members were encouraged to sever contact with families, reject the material world, and forfeit their earnings – as bizarre 'energy transfer' practices involving wearing electrode caps and drinking Asahara's bathwater took place. 'Recommended sleep was as little as three hours,' one former cultist recalls in the documentary.
'The first time I saw him [on TV] was during his election campaign in 1990,' says Yanagimoto, referring to a failed, multi-million yen bid by Asahara and 24 other members of the group to gain seats in the House of Representatives that year. Having already widely published their own books and even anime, Asahara became a regular fixture on television. Yanagimoto feels that the media exposure played a prominent role in his influence: 'No one really saw him as a dangerous cult leader.'
Braun adds: 'People were too willing to accept Aum as a spiritual pop culture sensation. There were numerous cases where the group could have been stopped.'
By the time Aum's membership peaked at an estimated 11,400 in Japan in 1995, and 40,000 in Russia following a successful expansion following the fall of the Soviet Union, the cult had secretly murdered the family of anti-Aum lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto. When they released deadly sarin gas in a residential area in Matsumoto in 1994 – in response to local opposition to the group's expansion into the area, which also served as a test run for the efficacy of sarin as a weapon– they killed seven and injured 500.
Asahara claimed to his followers that, in the coming Armageddon, non-believers would be doomed to eternal hell unless they were killed by cultists (a manipulation of the concept of 'phowa' in Tibetan Buddhism) and so the group set about manufacturing Kalashnikovs and chemical weapons. In a ploy to prevent an anticipated police raid on Aum headquarters in Yamanashi, Asahara ordered the attacks on the Tokyo subway.
Yanagimoto feels that the cursory annual revisiting of the events in Japanese media fails to adequately scrutinise why such a tragedy was able to take place. 'There's a cultural aspect of not talking about what we're ashamed of,' she says. 'They say in Japan: 'If it stinks, put a lid on it'.'
In 1997, celebrated author Haruki Murakami published an anthology, Underground, comprising the testimonies of 60 victims, responders, and eyewitnesses. The concept was a response to the author's feeling that the Japanese media of the day had been 'bombarding us with so many in-depth profiles of the Aum cult perpetrators [that] the 'victim' was almost an afterthought.' (He'd later respond to claims of one-sidedness by publishing The Place That Was Promised, a collection of interviews with former cult members, in 1997. Both parts feature in the Penguin Random House edition published in the UK).
Though the book sold 270,000 copies within two months in Japan, Yanagimoto feels that 'the younger generation don't even know' about the cult and the people behind the attacks today. Aum: The Cult at the End of the World attempts to address this, with its talking heads including prosecutors; the bereaved families of children who left to become their followers; and Yoshiyuki Kono, who was wrongly suspected by both the police and the media of committing the Matsumoto sarin attack in 1994.
The presence of Fumihiro Joyu – once one of Asahara's highest-ranking Aum affiliates; stationed in Russia at the time of the attacks – meanwhile highlights the lingering influence of the group in some corners of society: Joyu today leads successor group Hikari no Wa. His willingness to discuss his time with Aum, partnered with what feels like a side-stepping of responsibility for the group's actions, is the source of a thought-provoking denouement in the documentary: 'Rather than regret or remorse, I have to look forward,' he claims.
Indeed, although Asahara and 12 other Aum Shinrikyo members convicted of the 1995 Tokyo sarin attacks were executed in 2018, the organisation still exists in some forms despite being designated a terrorist organisation in the US. As recently as June 2024, authorities believe Aleph, the most popular of the three Aum Shinrikyo successor groups (which collectively amass 1,650 followers), 'may conduct mass murders', with an official of the PSIA quoted as saying 'Basically, nothing has changed.'
Yanagimoto and Braun hope that by revisiting the Tokyo sarin attacks and the cult of Aum behind it, important lessons can be learned. In today's landscape of populist politicians, social media echo chambers and conspiracy theories, the dangers of radicalisation and extreme action are widely pronounced – a 2025 report by the Edelman Trust Institute concluded that 53 per cent of people aged 18-34 (from a survey of over 33,000 people across 28 countries) currently 'approve of hostile activism' as 'viable' means to drive change.
'In America, it felt like we were entering this culture of multiple realities and narratives, and that kind of culminated in the Capitol riot of 2021,' says Braun. 'There were lines that Asahara said in the archival material that exactly matched what Trump was saying at the time. The radicalisation of these yoga students seemed to be like what was happening in American politics.'
Braun hopes that Aum: The Cult at the End of the World will encourage younger viewers to 'question the narrative.'
Aum: The Cult at the End of the World is in cinemas now
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.