Wilson - Rogue messiahs : tales of self-proclaimed saviors

On March 20, 1995, soon after seven a.m., commuters on the Tokyo subway began to experience a tickling in the throat and a soreness in the eyes and nose; soon they smelled a stench like a mixture of mustard and burning rubber. Within minutes, dozens of people were choking or falling to the ground.

It was happening all over the Tokyo underground system. No one had any idea what was causing it. Fleets of ambulances ferried gasping or unconscious passengers to hospitalsthe figure finally reached 5,500. Many seemed to be paralyzed, and a dozen would finally die. Yet it was not until mid-morning that a military doctor made a cautious and incredible diagnosis: the victims were suffering from poisoning by a nerve gas called sarin, once used by the Nazis in their death camps.

The police had a strong suspicion about who was responsible: an immensely wealthy religious cult known as Aum Shinrikyo, or Aum Supreme Truth, led by a forty-year-old guru who called himself Shoko Asahara. During the past six months police had received dozens of phone calls accusing the cult of fraud, abduction, and brutality. Things had come to a head a month earlier, when a sixty-eight-year-old lawyer named Kiyoshi Kariya had been kidnapped in broad daylight, grabbed by four powerfully-built men, and bundled into the back of a van. Kariyas sister had been a cult member who had absconded, and Kariya had received a threatening phone call, demanding to know where she was. After Kariyas disappearance, his son found a note that read: If I disappear, I was abducted by Aum Shinrikyo. A police investigation began, but failed to find either Kariya or his body.

Now Aum Shinrikyo was the chief suspect in the gas attack. In spite of his protest (We carry out our religious activities on the basis of Buddhist doctrine, such as no killing), police raided Asaharas headquarters on the slopes of Mount Fuji. Most of the cultists had left, taking crates of documents; but the police found a huge stockpile of chemicals like sodium cyanide and peptone for cultivating bacteria. But the cult insisted, through its spokesmen, that this was all for legitimate peaceful purposes. On April 23, the cults chief scientist, Hideo Murai, was murdered in front of a crowd of reporters and TV cameramen, stabbed repeatedly in the stomach by a small-time crook named Hiroyuki Jo, who then demanded, Isnt anyone going to arrest me? Police quickly obliged.

But where was the guru? He had vanished without a trace. On May 5, two months after the sarin attack, a bag left in the toilet of the Shinjuku station burst into flame. Alert staff doused it with water, but not before it had begun to emit choking fumes. Police discovered later that it would have given off clouds of hydrogen cyanide gas, called by the Nazis Zyklon B, which would have been sucked through the ventilators onto the platform.

One of the chief suspects was a young cultist called Yoshihiro Inoue, the gurus intelligence chief. He was caught driving a car that contained chemicals for manufacturing high explosives. This left no one in any doubt that the cults protestations about love and peace were false. On May 16, there was another huge police raid on the Mount Fuji headquarters; this time they found a secret room, inside which a large, bearded figure sat cross-legged on the floor in the meditation posture. He admitted: I am the guru. Dont touch me. I dont even allow my disciples to touch me.

I followed the subsequent trial closely through press clippings sent by my Japanese literary agent. A few weeks before the sarin gas attack, my wife and I had taken a train to Shinjuku station and eaten at a pleasant little restaurant nearby, so we could visualize the scene on that March morning. But the trial, followed by Asaharas conviction for murder, failed to answer the question raised by the killings: why had a wealthy and steadily-expanding cult decided to commit mass murder? I had already written most of this book, so regarded myself as something of an authority on prophets of the millennium. Yet at the end of the trial, there was still no obvious answer to this question: why had a man who had everything decided to throw it all away?

Asahara, whose real name was Chizuo Matsumoto, had been born blind in one eye and partially blind in the other. He was raised in a poor home, but had been a brilliant pupil at school. He thought of becoming a radical politician, like Mao Tse Tung, then began to meditate and claimed that one day he felt the kundalini mounting his spine. The 1980s in Japan were rather like the 1960s in Britain and America, a period that Asaharas biographers have called the rush hour of the gods. Asahara founded a yoga school, which became so profitable that he opened several more. Then he went off to the Himalayas to meditate and had himself photographed with the Dalai Lama, who told him he had the mind of a Buddha. (After Asaharas arrest, the Dalai Lama was deeply embarrassed by this gaffe.) There in the Himalayas, Asahara claims he experienced enlightenment and achieved psychic powers.

Back in Tokyo he changed the name of his yoga school to Aum Supreme Truth (Om or Aum is a Sanskrit syllable pronounced during meditation) and was soon surrounded by hundreds of followers. Since he assured them that large cash donations would hasten their spiritual enlightenment, he was soon a wealthy man. Brilliant young students from the universities began to join the sect; one of them, Hideo Murai, invented a kind of electric cap which, when placed on the head, would raise the level of consciousness.

But desertion roused Asahara to a kind of frenzy. One disciple who announced he was leaving the sect was told he was in need of physical as well as psychological help, and ordered to drink large quantities of freezing water. He went into shock and died. Another disenchanted disciple, Shuji Taguchi, was strangled; his body burned. Another was attacked when he had returned home to his family; his skull was smashed with a hammer. The cult members also murdered his wife and child.

Asahara practiced sex with selected female disciples, and swore them to secrecy. But, as so often happens with rogue messiahs, his followers were ordered to be celibate.

During the 1990s, Aum Supreme Truth began to spread all over the world. There had probably not been such a successful cult since Ron Hubbards Scientology. The post-Communist Russians were particularly sympathetic to it, and at the time of writing, Aum Supreme Truth continues to be a powerful movement in Russia.

World success made Asahara think in terms of world power. In 1993, his chief engineer, Kiyohide Hayakawa, was instructed to try and buy an atomic bomb. (In fact, during 1994, Hayakawa made eight trips to Russia trying to buy a nuclear warhead.) When he failed, the cult tried to buy a rural area near Tokyo, where there were deposits of uranium. And when this also failed they decided to buy land in Australia. It was half a million acres of scrubland called Banjawarn Station, which the cult bought for $400,000, in cash, after which it paid a further $110,000 for mining rights. There they began testing nerve gas on sheep whose skeletons were later found by police.

It would seem, then, that as the cults success increased, so did its paranoia. This may seem strange, but in the course of this book, the reader will begin to find it glaringly familiar. It seems to have escalated sharply after the interest the police took in the disappearance of Kiyoshi Kariya, and this persecution in turn seems to have triggered the decision to launch the sarin attack. It certainly made no sense. What possible point could there be to gassing hundreds of people in the Tokyo subway system? Such violence was bound to lead to the kind of backlash that had destroyed so many other cults.