Word: asahara
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Asahara established his Aum Shinrikyo religion in 1987, and the movement even put up a number of candidates in the 1990 Lower House Diet elections; all of them lost. Not much later he began conferring on himself such titles as "Today's Christ" and "the Savior of This Century." His community branched out rapidly in Japan. Soon it had established some beachheads overseas--including the U.S. and Germany but notably Russia. Asahara once preached before a crowd of 15,000 in a Moscow sports stadium...
...fortunes prospered, Asahara seems to have grown more reclusive and obsessed with danger. The religion, nominally Buddhist but really a hodgepodge of ascetic disciplines and New Age occultism, focused on supposed threats from the U.S., which he portrayed as a creature of Freemasons and Jews bent on destroying Japan. The conspiracy's weapons: sex and junk food. The guru's sermons predicted the end of the world sometime between 1997 and 2000, and began citing the specific peril of poison-gas attacks...
...nothing else, the sense of crisis and impending doom that Asahara cultivated has kept his followers in his thrall. He always sits one level higher than his devotees, and they have to bow and kiss his toe. A follower recalled, "When he found that I was carrying a picture of an Indian saint, he went berserk and said I should not respect anyone but him." In this way, perhaps Asahara's early life was a foreshadowing of what would come later. "When I look at the way Aum operates," a onetime classmate in Kumamoto said, "I think Matsumoto is trying...
...translates as Aum Supreme Truth. The sect, which started as a yoga school, focuses on the apocalypse to come-perhaps as soon as 1997. Its members insist it merely practices a form of Buddhism; but in reality it is a cult revolving around a long-haired, charismatic mystic, Shoko Asahara, a magnetic misfit who preaches that government efforts to obliterate his movement will coincide with the beginning of the end of the world. Throughout the week, the hidden guru pleaded his innocence via radio broadcast and videotape, then vanished, leaving behind three luxury cars in a Tokyo hotel parking...
...Shinrikyo's lawyers were in full cry. On Tuesday Asahara had released two radio messages through intermediaries. In one he repeated, "I didn't do it. I'm innocent" over and over again in a singsong voice. In the other he exhorted, "Disciples, the time to awaken and help me is upon you. Let's carry out the salvation plan and face death without regrets." His attorney was less cosmic in his approach. Maintained Yoshinobu Aoyama: "We practice our religion on the basis of Buddhist doctrines such as no killing, so it is impossible that we are responsible...