Word: asahara
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...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...
Even before the Matsumoto poisonings, sarin had become a staple of Asahara's rhetoric. A cult publication quotes a March 1994 sermon to his chapter in Kochi: "The law in an emergency is to kill one's opponent in a single blow, for instance the way research was conducted on soman [another Nazi gas] and sarin during World War II." He regularly charged that the U.S. was using the toxic chemical against him and his followers...
Once the police uncovered Aum's huge stockpiles of lethal chemicals, several things changed. In addition to announcing publicly that Asahara is wanted for questioning about the subway poisoning, the traditionally reticent Japanese police revealed that they were entertaining 110 complaints against the cult for offenses including unlawful confinement, assault and theft. The charges seemed to embolden local authorities, who were reported in the press to be investigating a cult hospital in Tokyo's Nakano neighborhood and allegations of electronic bugging in Yamanashi. The Nagano prefectural police, acting on the soil samples that so perturbed the cult's neighbors, have...
...involvement in Kiyoshi Kariya's kidnapping and providing innocent household explanations for the seized chemicals. "I don't understand," he concluded, "why it's said that these can be used to make sarin." A second video was recorded for cult followers and played at 36 local chapters. In it Asahara claimed that Aum members, including himself, had been the object of a poison-gas attack. The origin was "unmistakably...
Religious leader Shoko Asahara, who is being sought for questioning in connection with the subway attack, could strike one as such a figure. Of course, the Japanese are hardly the only people to produce mimics of God or apocalyptic cults. Think of Jonestown or Waco. But what is distinctive about postwar Japan is the number of people pretending to be God. The country is riddled with cults and so-called new religions...