Japan cult spinoffs persist two decades after sarin attack
TOKYO: More than two decades after Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult plunged Tokyo into terror by releasing a nerve agent on rush-hour subway trains, its spinoffs continue to attract new followers. Cult head Shoko Asahara is on death row, along with 12 of his disciples, for crimes including the subway attack, which killed 13 people and injured thousands.
He was arrested in 1995 in the wake of the sarin attack, but the Aum cult survived the crackdown, renaming itself Aleph and drawing new recruits into its fold. Aleph officially renounced ties to Asahara in 2000, but the doomsday guru retains significant influence, according to Japan’s Public Security Intelligence Agency. “It (Aleph) is a group that firmly instructs its followers to see Asahara as the supreme being,” an agency investigator told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“If someone says ‘guru Asahara wants to bring down Japan’, there would be followers who would act. The group poses such a potential danger,” he said. Raids on Aleph facilities have found recordings of his teachings as well as a device used by the Aum cult known as a
“Perfect Salvation Initiation”, a type of headgear that emits weak electric currents which members believe connects them to Asahara’s brainwaves.
Aleph and other splinter groups, which deny links to Asahara despite the claims of authorities, have 1,650 members in Japan and hundreds more in Russia, according to the Public Security Intelligence Agency. It says the groups attract around 100 new followers annually via yoga classes, fortune-telling and other activities that do not mention the cult’s name, often targeting young people who do not remember the 1995 subway attack. “Young female followers go to ‘training’ places with their children... We are worried there is an increasing number of children who have been inculcated by the Aum since they were very young,” the investigator said.
Horrendous ordeals
Asahara and his wife Tomoko had four daughters and two sons, and most of the family remains within the cult. One daughter who left in 2006, aged 16, has described horrifying ordeals during her childhood, including being forced to eat food with ceramic shards in it and being left in the cold in little clothing. “It was an environment unthinkable in modern-day Japan. I was afraid I would be killed if I rebelled, so I felt tense, as if I were on a battleground, for 16 years,” she said in a statement last year. “I strongly hope no more children will grow up in the Aum’s successor groups.” In early March, on Asahara’s 63rd birthday, investigators were keeping their usual close eye on the headquarters of an Aum splinter group in a quiet Tokyo residential area. —AFP