Word: asahara
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...began raiding the main compounds of a religious sect, Aum Shinrikyo, seizing what appeared to be laboratory equipment and tons of chemicals. Police have confirmed that they found a stash of 22 lbs. of gold ingots and yen valued at more than $7 million. The cult's leader, Shoko Asahara, denied any link to the attack...
...SHOKO ASAHARA, THE FOUNDER OF AUM SHINRIKYO (AUM Supreme Truth), may be the man of whom all Japan is terrified right now, but not so many years ago he was simply a failed purveyor of health tonics. Bushy-bearded and usually pictured wearing satiny pajamas, Asahara, 40, admires Hitler, boasts that he can levitate and offers to bestow superhuman powers on his disciples. Yet a look at his life reveals a rather pathetic figure at war with the world because he could not find an easy place...
Most of what is known about Asahara was uncovered by Shoko Egawa, a widely respected journalist whose book on Asahara and his movement came out in 1991. According to Egawa, Asahara was born Chizuo Matsumoto in 1955 on Kyushu, one of Japan's main islands, just south of Honshu. At birth he was sightless in one eye and purblind in the other, so his father, a craftsman who made tatamis (straw mats), sent him at age six to the city of Kumamoto, where he could attend a subsidized school for the blind. There a child with any sight...
...apothecary specializing in traditional Chinese medicaments. A turning point in his life appears to have occurred in 1982, when he was arrested for selling fake cures. Authorities detained him for 20 days and fined him 200,000 yen--about $800 at that time. The business went bankrupt, and Asahara was reputedly shattered by the incident. Out of shame at what neighbors thought, for some time afterward he and his wife only left their home to buy essentials...
...quite successful. Even if a former student recalls that in those days "we were not followers but members," the time was ripe for gurus. Japan's galloping economic miracle in the 1970s and '80s also spawned a boom in "new religions" offering spiritual refuge to Japanese alienated by materialism. Asahara's messianic self-image expanded to help fill this void. After a visit to a Himalayan retreat, he boasted of having achieved satori, the Japanese term for nirvana or enlightenment. At this point he also claimed his first success at self-levitation...