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21.Psychedelic Nightmare Pt. 5: Tokyo's Christ
5 Plays2 years ago
CULT: Aum Shinrikyo/Shoko Asahara
cw: abuse, terrorism, sexual violence, death
Our fifth and final segment of our Psychedelic Nightmare series examines the story of a lesser-known Japanese cult that was responsible for the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack in March 1995 that killed 14 and injured over 5,000 innocent civilians. Aum Shinrikyo was a cult led by - you guessed it - a malignant narcissist, Shoko Asahara. This episode, we explore Shoko's childhood, the development of his cult while also delving deep into its doomsday philosophies that combined a hodge-podge of religious philosophies with Nostradamus-esque beliefs. This story is a wild one with lots of twists and turns tied to religion, Japanese culture, chemical weapons development and more. We touch upon concepts of Shiva, Shakti, & karma in Hinduism, malignant narcissism in cult leaders, and highlight survivor stories and PTSD from the subway attack. You'll see how this story links back to all four others, creating an unlikely and disturbing tie that spans four decades, three cults and three countries while involving multiple government agencies and of course Albert Hoffman's Problem Child -- LSD.
References
Outro last updated April 2023
FYI: we've recently unpublished older episodes as we are in process of re-editing for a smoother flow & audio experience. they will be available again as we finish.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Unpacking the Eerie'
00:00:00
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He definitely does look very strange in this picture.
00:00:04
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He looks like he's about to take a poo, honestly.
00:00:06
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He does look like he's about to take a poo.
00:00:07
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He looks like he has constipation real bad.
00:00:12
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And he put it in a pamphlet!
00:00:14
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Yeah!
00:00:15
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He said, this is why you should probably...
00:00:20
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Hi, I'm Akshi.
00:00:22
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And I'm Shaina, and you're listening to Unpacking the Eerie.
00:00:26
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A podcast that explores the intersections of our dark and morbid curiosities through a social justice lens.
00:00:33
Speaker
You're welcome.
00:00:42
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Before we get started, we want to offer our usual content warning.
00:00:45
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This episode will include conversations about abuse, terrorism, sexual violence, and death.
00:00:54
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Hello.
00:00:55
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Hello.
00:00:56
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Welcome back.
00:00:58
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We're back.
00:01:00
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My brain's a little fried.
00:01:02
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Yeah, we're a little loopy.
00:01:04
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There was a lot of research for this one.
00:01:06
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We've been working on it all day.
00:01:08
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It's 6.40, so, you know?
00:01:09
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Yeah, we usually record during the day, but now it's evening.
00:01:14
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On a Friday.
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On a fucking Friday.
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You're welcome.
00:01:18
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Yeah, you're welcome.
00:01:19
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So, before we jump in, we wanted to...
Fall Ghosty Giver Beneficiary: Fireweed Collective
00:01:27
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tell you about our fall ghosty giver beneficiary for those of you who don't know ghosty giver is a tier of our patreon it's our top tier and 50 of all this all the money that we get goes to a cause related to the stuff that we're talking about
00:01:46
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Check it out.
00:01:47
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Also, we have other tiers that are more accessible.
00:01:49
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Yes.
00:01:50
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$10 and $2 a month if you're interested in supporting our work.
00:01:55
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Yeah.
00:01:56
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So this fall, our ghosty giver beneficiary is the Fireweed Collective.
00:02:00
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It's an organization that offers mental health education and mutual aid through a healing justice and disability justice lens.
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So throughout our podcast, we've seen how lack of mental health care infrastructure exacerbates the conditions for violence.
00:02:13
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Yeah.
00:02:13
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In the Slender Man episode, which was way early, our third one, it's called a Blood Soak Limited 2 shirt.
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We talk about how forensic hospitals essentially operate as prisons and how children are thrust into these systems with no chance for rehabilitation and dismal outcomes.
00:02:31
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In the Elisa Lam episode, which is A Lethal Location Part 1, the first of our Hotel Cecil series, we see how the lack of mental health support during a crisis led to the death of a young woman.
00:02:43
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And during our live show about the Fremont troll, we talk about Seattle's high suicide rate and how the root causes of suffering go routinely unaddressed.
00:02:51
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More recently, this series, Psychedelic Nightmare, puts a spotlight on the corrupt history of abuse in psychiatric hospitals and beyond.
00:02:58
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And consistently, QTBIPOC, the overwhelming recipients of these harms, have the least access to affirming affordable care.
00:03:07
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And so the Fire Week Collective seeks to disrupt the harm of systems of abuse and oppression often reproduced by the mental health system.
00:03:16
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And they do this by offering mental health education and mutual aid through the lens of
00:03:20
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like we mentioned, healing justice, a framework that if you're not familiar, that's rooted in racial justice, disability justice, and economic justice.
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The fireweed collective views severe mental illness through the lens of community and relationships rather than one of pathology, thus divesting from the prison industrial complex and psych wards while centering QT BIPOC in their internal leadership programs and resources.
00:03:43
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Amazing.
00:03:46
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Thank you so much for allowing us to support this incredible work.
Recap of 'Psychedelic Nightmare' Series
00:03:50
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Yeah.
00:03:51
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So before our content for today, we want to give you an overview of our entire series because we know that it was released over the course of a few months, and so maybe a nice recap and closing would be nice.
00:04:05
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Yes.
00:04:05
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So part one of Psychedelic Nightmare, we really were interested in diving into the MKUltra series.
00:04:14
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experiments done by the CIA in the United States of America.
00:04:21
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So we explore our first ever conspiracy theory that ended up being absolutely true.
00:04:27
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and absolutely wild.
00:04:29
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Project MKUltra was a secret CIA project that took place between the early 1950s to the early 1970s, in which hundreds of torturous experiments were conducted on mostly unsuspecting human subjects.
00:04:41
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The project leader, Sidney Gottlieb, aimed to develop strategies and identify drugs such as LSD that could be used for the purposes of mind control.
00:04:50
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And in the first part of that series, we dig into the Allen Memorial,
00:04:54
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one of many institutions where these experiments took place and set the stage for MKUltra.
00:04:59
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And then we also learn about how the Cold War and the Red Scare motivated the creation of this project, the discovery of lysergic acid dithalamide, which is LSD, and its unique characteristics.
00:05:11
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And of course, the project leads Poisoner-in-Chief, Sydney Gottlieb.
00:05:16
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Mm-hmm.
00:05:18
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And yeah, I guess the reason that we're kind of touching on these again is so that we can kind of find the threads because you'll see that they're there.
00:05:28
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So in part two of the series, we talk more about MKUltra and the LSD-fueled experiment.
00:05:36
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So in part one, we're setting the stage.
00:05:38
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This is more specifically what the experiments were and how they came to a close.
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So we take a deeper look at its intersections with racism and criminalization.
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as well as the stark contrast between the trauma and dehumanization experienced by the unknowing test subjects, the most impacted being incarcerated Black folks, and the bohemian counterculture cultivated by white beat writers who were willing participants of MKUltra experiments at their universities.
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We learn more about popular conspiracies that are tied to these experiments and the psychology behind conspiracy-based beliefs.
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We also in this episode talk a little bit about the criminalization of LSD and the Controlled Substances Act, as well as highlighting psychedelic research, especially that being done by BIPOC.
00:06:33
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Yeah, and then part three of Psychedelic Nightmare Unseen, Unknown, Unheard is about a cult that...
00:06:42
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isn't directly related to MKUltra, but you absolutely can see the ties.
00:06:46
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And it's Australia's most notorious cult, or at least that's what the internet says.
00:06:51
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They were called the family.
00:06:53
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They were also known as the Great White Brotherhood.
00:06:56
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So it was like white supremacy meets doomsday meets second coming of Christ meets cultural appropriation of Hinduism and Buddhism.
00:07:04
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Which is a theme that is so present and you'll see it thread through.
00:07:08
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Across the board.
00:07:09
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It's a constant.
00:07:11
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I'm like, what is happening?
00:07:14
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What's happening here?
00:07:15
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I knew you were going to say that.
00:07:17
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What do you mean?
00:07:19
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I knew you were going to say what's happening here right after.
00:07:24
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I heard it in my head and then you said it.
00:07:30
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Anyway.
00:07:30
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Anyways.
00:07:31
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Yeah, the yoga to white supremacist cult pipeline is really wild.
00:07:36
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In the mid-1960s Australia, a doomsday cult was formed by this woman, Anne Hamilton Byrne, a yoga teacher turned cult leader who believed she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
00:07:48
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This story has eerie ties that link to the MKUltra experiments and its LSD abuses, as well as Jim Jones.
00:07:55
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So if you have a listen to that.
00:07:56
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Yeah.
00:07:58
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Rewind.
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In that episode, we learn about how several children were drawn into this cult via bogus adoptions and subjected to years of physical, verbal, psychological, and emotional abuse at the hands of Anne and her followers.
00:08:10
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And through dissecting this shocking story, we also explore yoga as a philosophy, white supremacy in wellness communities, and the impacts of betrayal trauma.
00:08:19
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Then in our most recent episode, came out about a month ago when we're recording this podcast episode, Love Bomber Supreme Psychedelic Nightmare Part 4.
00:08:31
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In that one, we come back to America to one of the most well-known cult murders in American history.
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Charles Manson's racist LSD fueled doomsday cult.
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So in this episode, we talk about his conspiracy and the young people he convinced to execute what we now know as the Tate-LaBianca murders.
00:08:55
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And in this episode, we unpack the evolution of Charles Manson's cult, the historical context of the time.
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That kind of ties back to the beatnik era that we talk about in the second episode.
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We also go into the dynamics of grooming and how mainstream media consistently positions the murders of these Hollywood elite above the horror of Manson's white supremacist history.
Tokyo Subway Sarin Gas Attack and Aum Shinrikyo
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agenda and in this episode we also take some time to uplift the legacy of the black panther party who the cult unsuccessfully framed for these murders that brings us to today where we will be covering another story that you will find has a lot of ties to these previous episodes as well what are we talking about
00:09:42
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So on March 20th, 1995, two physicists, an artificial intelligence researcher, an engineer, a heart doctor, entered the Tokyo subway system during rush hour.
00:09:57
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They carried small plastic bags wrapped in newspaper and umbrellas with sharpened tips.
00:10:05
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After boarding five different trains, they dropped the plastic bags, punctured them before exiting the subway to meet up with getaway drivers.
00:10:17
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As they were driven to a hideout, a deadly gas was contained in these plastic bags began to be in the air and cause havoc.
00:10:29
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By the time the air had cleared, 12 people were dead and over a thousand others were injured through the exposure to the potent nerve gas sarin.
00:10:40
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And it remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in Japanese history.
00:10:48
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So...
00:10:49
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We're going to be talking about a cult that was responsible for this terrorist attack.
00:10:57
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So rewind from the 90s all the way back to... Yeah, so the cult's called Omshin Rikyo, but we're going to start with Shoko Asahara, who is the leader of the cult.
00:11:10
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But just like all these other cult leaders, he changed his name.
00:11:15
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He was born Chizuo Matsumoto, and he was born on March 2nd, 1955.
00:11:22
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Parents were poor tatami mat makers, which tatami is... How do I describe?
00:11:28
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I know what you're talking about, because they have them in India, too.
00:11:31
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It's just called something else.
00:11:32
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It's like kind of bamboo-y material that's like stitched together.
00:11:38
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Or it's a similar... Yes, they make the mats.
00:11:42
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I'm thinking of like installing the floors.
00:11:43
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Hmm.
00:11:45
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But they were the map makers.
00:11:47
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It's made out of rush grass.
00:11:50
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Oh, see, I wouldn't have known that.
00:11:52
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Yeah.
00:11:53
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My grandma has a satami room in her.
00:11:55
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That makes sense.
00:11:57
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Anyway, Chizuo was the seventh of nine kids.
00:12:01
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Wow.
00:12:02
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Middle child.
00:12:04
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And he really looks up to his eldest brother, which I'll get back to later.
00:12:08
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Something I want to note, I looked into his parents, I couldn't find much about him, and I honestly couldn't figure out much about what's happening in the home, except for that they really struggled to make ends meet and they had a huge family.
00:12:20
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But his father was born in what is now North Korea in 1915.
00:12:23
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Oh, shoot.
00:12:28
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probably the reason there's not a lot of information beyond just like people being private.
00:12:33
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Koreans did not have a good time in Japan.
00:12:36
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In 1955 it was really hostile and so there's a lot of shame around that.
00:12:40
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For folks who don't know, Japan occupied Korea for quite some time.
00:12:46
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were responsible for the emergence of comfort stations, which I would love to cover at some point because I have a lot of info on that.
00:12:53
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And much like the United States had a really systematic way of colonizing the space,
00:13:00
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would do things like take the flora and fauna that was native to the land and replace it with Japanese flora and fauna so that it becomes unrecognizable.
00:13:09
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They placed all these arbitrary restrictions about who could speak Japanese, who couldn't speak Japanese, and then all of a sudden everyone had to speak Japanese, you weren't allowed to have a Korean name, you had to have...
00:13:20
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a Japanese name and there's just like all of these restrictions and so this is the landscape in which he is being born into he was also partially blind he was born with infantile glaucoma which is connected to the next part around his school time so he had a hard time in in public school he had a hard time in school in general not because he couldn't keep up but because he was bored honestly I think he had ADHD
00:13:45
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That would try.
00:13:46
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His eldest brother said that he was a kind boy, but he was stubborn about what he thought was justice.
00:13:53
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So apparently he's always been like this.
00:13:55
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But he had a lot of pride from Jump.
00:13:57
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He was ahead of other students, and I think he had a feeling that it was unfair that he had to sit in class writing his name when he already knew how to write his name.
00:14:06
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He's like six years old at this point.
00:14:08
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So he started pranking his classmates.
00:14:10
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One time he stuck fireflies in poop.
00:14:12
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and then tricked some girls into touching it, like brought them into the dark.
00:14:16
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And then of course they freak out, right?
00:14:20
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And then his father learns what he did and he hit him.
00:14:25
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And at that point in time, I don't know if there was an accumulation of events that escalated, but he gets sent off at the age of six to live in a school dormitory at Kumamoto Prefecture School for the Blind, which was two hours away from home.
00:14:42
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It's like a boarding school?
00:14:44
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Yeah, kind of.
00:14:45
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And he doesn't really go back home ever after that.
00:14:49
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At six?
00:14:50
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At six.
00:14:50
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But his eldest brother goes there.
00:14:53
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Because they were so poor, the state subsidized their attendance at this school.
00:14:59
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So his eldest brother was not blind, but he could go there because it was a subsidy.
00:15:05
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and then this guy is partially blind and went there for both of those things.
00:15:14
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So he had an advantage over the other kids.
00:15:16
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Not only is he quick to pick up on things, but he can see clearly enough
00:15:20
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to see the shapes when other classmates had to feel them.
00:15:23
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Apparently he never took notes and he was always drawing and doodling, not paying attention in class.
00:15:28
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Sounds very ADHD.
00:15:28
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Sounds like ADHD.
00:15:30
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And he also starts pranking here, but the parents were never called in.
00:15:35
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I guess they tried to manage it without reporting.
00:15:39
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I don't know if there's like a sense of like the...
00:15:42
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School teachers just decided that he was their responsibility now.
00:15:46
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His eldest brother, who he really looked up to, was described as really money-obsessed.
00:15:50
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And I think that's where you first see seeds planted in this obsession for money and power.
00:15:58
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He also had a lack of that at home.
00:16:02
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So it would make sense that this would just come up.
00:16:05
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He's not liked in class.
00:16:06
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He's not kind.
00:16:08
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You know, he starts bullying people.
00:16:10
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Bully at the blind school.
00:16:12
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Yeah, what the fuck?
00:16:13
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So he was like kind of weird and cruel to these kids.
00:16:19
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One time, apparently, a teacher was like, do you think people like you?
00:16:24
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And apparently that really shifts his approach because he's a child at this point.
00:16:27
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Right, right.
00:16:28
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That's not helpful.
00:16:29
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Yeah, yeah.
00:16:30
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So he kind of changes his tune and starts reading to classmates at this time.
00:16:38
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So he jumps back.
00:16:39
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He's seemingly pretty friendly, compassionate, reading to his classmates.
00:16:47
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He started his own little show.
00:16:49
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He called it the Chizuo Matsumoto Show.
00:16:51
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Wow.
00:16:52
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And he just danced and sang in front of...
00:16:55
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the classmates, I guess.
00:16:56
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However, when his brother graduates in 1968,
00:17:00
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he kind of reverts back to this like honorary place.
00:17:03
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Probably that was his like place of stability.
00:17:05
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Right.
00:17:05
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And then his brother leaves.
00:17:07
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And I think there is always like this part in him that's like, kids don't let nobody loves me.
00:17:12
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Right.
00:17:12
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Like I feel abandoned, which is like a common thread through all of these people who become cult leaders.
00:17:17
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Yeah.
00:17:18
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And they're like, Oh, let me create my own family.
00:17:21
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Yes.
00:17:22
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And everyone's going to leave.
00:17:23
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So I'm going to make them stay.
00:17:25
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Yeah.
00:17:25
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Yeah.
00:17:26
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And so he really starts getting kind of scary.
00:17:29
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One time in his dorm room, a teacher came up to him to tell him to turn out his light.
00:17:33
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And he said, if you tell me to turn off the light, then I'll have to light the building on fire to light it up.
00:17:39
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And so this teacher's like,
00:17:40
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I don't know what to do with that.
00:17:42
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Okay.
00:17:44
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Yeah.
00:17:45
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It honestly kind of reminds me.
00:17:47
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So I was at this training or this workshop over the weekend.
00:17:51
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And this was about like restorative practices in youth adult conflict.
00:17:56
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It was like about transforming conflict.
00:17:58
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And there's this quote that they provided.
00:18:00
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It's an African proverb.
00:18:01
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And it's the child who's not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.
00:18:06
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And I was like, damn.
00:18:10
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And I see that.
00:18:11
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I see that for little Chizuo.
00:18:14
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He escalates in behavior.
00:18:16
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He's a bully.
00:18:17
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He would do things like lead classmates to a nearby restaurant, and then they would pay for his meal in thanks.
00:18:22
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But then he created a pattern of this, and then he started convincing them to steal.
00:18:27
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Yeah.
00:18:28
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He's a bad influence.
00:18:30
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He's a bad influence.
00:18:33
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And he got in fights.
00:18:35
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One time he broke a student's eardrum.
00:18:37
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So simultaneously, people were like, I don't know about this person.
00:18:41
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And they were also scared of him.
00:18:43
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So they either kept the distance or clung to him because he was a bad influence.
00:18:48
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You know?
00:18:50
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He ran for class president in middle school and high school and he failed both times.
00:18:54
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This is gonna... Yes, continue.
00:18:56
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This starts a pattern as well.
00:18:58
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Which ties really well into this article about the malignant Pied Piper, which we'll come back to.
00:19:05
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Yes.
00:19:05
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Pin.
00:19:06
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Pin it.
00:19:07
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Pin it.
00:19:07
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He, at this point in time, he's like, in high school, he starts idolizing a politician turned prime minister and
00:19:15
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kakuei tanaka who had a primary level education and then people say he bribed his way into office and you would give bureaucrats money and do this thing where he's like i know you won't let me in by paying you but like let me let me give you this money anyway i think he was taking notes from this man and you can see you can see that in his behavior moving forward as well chizuo bought his way into a job
00:19:40
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I don't know exactly how that happened, but that's what a podcast said.
00:19:42
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And he gets his black belt in judo.
00:19:45
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And for the first time, he gets applauded by his peers.
00:19:50
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And that makes him feel obviously some kind of way.
00:19:52
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Powerful.
00:19:54
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Accepted.
00:19:55
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Celebrated.
00:19:56
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He graduated in 1975.
00:20:00
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He applied for Tokyo University and he didn't get in.
00:20:05
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Lots of rejection.
00:20:06
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Lots of rejection.
00:20:08
Speaker
And you know about rejection sensitivity dysphoria?
00:20:12
Speaker
Well, maybe you don't, but... Maybe you don't.
00:20:15
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Yeah, it's an ADHD thing where you just take rejection.
00:20:20
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It just hits you a lot harder than it should.
00:20:24
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Like, even if you know, like, wow, this isn't that big of a deal, it hurts a lot.
00:20:29
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And it could be something, like, really small, too.
00:20:31
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Mm-hmm.
00:20:32
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Yes, but I feel like that is listed as a symptom when it's one of those things where I'm like, it's a byproduct of ADHD children routinely being pregnant.
00:20:43
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not accepted by their peers.
00:20:45
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Yeah.
00:20:45
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You know?
00:20:46
Speaker
And then pathologized and then, like, disciplined by their teachers.
00:20:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:50
Speaker
I think I... Very true.
00:20:52
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:20:53
Speaker
Like, I went through a training and it was, like, children with ADHD get corrected more than seven times the amount that, like, their non-neurodivergent peers get corrected in any given day.
00:21:09
Speaker
Every day.
00:21:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's rough.
00:21:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's just, like, an accumulation of, like,
00:21:13
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:21:14
Speaker
So, like, how many times do you have to hear that you're existing wrong before your, like, brain is receiving every rejection as, like, some deep felt thing?
00:21:25
Speaker
Right.
00:21:25
Speaker
It makes a lot of sense.
00:21:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:27
Speaker
Anyways.
00:21:27
Speaker
Anyway.
00:21:28
Speaker
Doesn't get into the university.
00:21:30
Speaker
No, and that's a catalyst for him.
00:21:32
Speaker
Just, like, not getting the music gig was a catalyst for Charles.
00:21:37
Speaker
Just, like, losing her...
00:21:39
Speaker
husband and an opportunity to have a family was a catalyst for Kath or what's her name and why do I keep calling her Catherine because Catherine's also from Australia yeah yeah yeah I see wild women from Australia
00:21:54
Speaker
Yes, that could be a whole other... Someone make a podcast.
00:21:58
Speaker
Wild Woman of Australia.
00:22:01
Speaker
Anyway.
00:22:03
Speaker
So he goes to cram school then and studies acupuncture and pharmacology.
00:22:09
Speaker
So cram schools were schools in Japan.
00:22:12
Speaker
They're after-school schools.
00:22:14
Speaker
And they are run by an elite core of teachers who give fast-paced instruction to prepare students for the college entrance exams, which are really brutal.
00:22:25
Speaker
And if they have the resources, high school students will go on the weekends to get this kind of training.
00:22:30
Speaker
And if you fail, you're labeled a Ronin, a term that...
00:22:36
Speaker
describe school-less young people but also a term that's used to describe a masterless samurai oh it has it has roots back to like i looked i looked at it was like the 1100s dang i'm just like feudal japan yeah and that's what they would call people who had um who were no longer under the i guess guidance of like a yeah master samurai in the in the
00:23:02
Speaker
yes yes the meaning is like drifter or wanderer so a samurai became masterless upon the death of his master or after the loss of his master's favor or privilege so if you were let go yeah and it's wild to me that they still use this term but they have placed it onto students who fail this exam dang uh a lot of people who were labeled this died by seppuku
00:23:32
Speaker
which is suicide in a really brutal way.
00:23:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:36
Speaker
So I'm just like, what's being implied here about the worthiness of your life?
00:23:41
Speaker
Yeah, you know, this just reminds me, like, I feel like the importance that's placed upon school is kind of present throughout Asia in that way.
00:23:52
Speaker
In India, there's also like similar like
00:23:56
Speaker
oh, these are classes that you go to to practice for the entrance exams to go to specific universities.
00:24:02
Speaker
And there's a whole epidemic of people dying by suicide because of failing in academia or feeling too much pressure related to academia, which we'll come back to later in this episode also.
00:24:17
Speaker
I mean, in the Richard Energy episode, the one about the Siddiqui murders, we go pretty...
00:24:25
Speaker
We give a good section to the rate of suicide in Japan.
00:24:30
Speaker
And I think you talk a little bit about cram schools in that one, too, because one of the family members had a school out of her house, right?
00:24:39
Speaker
Maybe.
00:24:40
Speaker
Maybe.
00:24:41
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:24:42
Speaker
What's wild is that in 2012, one in four students became Ronin, which... That's a lot.
00:24:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:49
Speaker
It's like a quarter of the population.
00:24:51
Speaker
Right.
00:24:51
Speaker
So a quarter of the population is just sitting here in what?
00:24:55
Speaker
Shame until he can pass his exam.
00:24:57
Speaker
And then a lot of the times, people will study hard and then get into a university.
00:25:01
Speaker
And then sometimes they'll go get a trade, which is also what happened back in the day with the samurai.
00:25:09
Speaker
They would pick up a trade.
00:25:10
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:25:13
Speaker
When I was listening to the Before After Om podcast, they were talking about how he meets his wife in school when he goes back to cram school and then he decides to study acupuncture and pharmacology.
00:25:26
Speaker
There's really no information on her.
00:25:28
Speaker
I don't know...
00:25:30
Speaker
If it's because of privacy or if people just really don't care about his wife.
00:25:38
Speaker
Which would track because the patriarchy.
00:25:41
Speaker
Yeah, which is interesting because she has a pretty... Pretty sure she has a pretty high up role in the cult.
00:25:50
Speaker
It's the patriarchy.
00:25:51
Speaker
So in school...
00:25:53
Speaker
Chizuo meets Tomoko Ishii, who was born in 1958 in Chiba, which was a rural at the time.
00:26:01
Speaker
She was really smart.
00:26:03
Speaker
She was 10th of her class.
00:26:04
Speaker
She was known for her academic prowess.
00:26:06
Speaker
Her classmates described her as calm, quiet, but they also said that she had no social life and they weren't really drawn to her.
00:26:13
Speaker
She was kind of an outcast in that way, which is very similar to what's-his-face, you know?
00:26:19
Speaker
And she also doesn't get in the first time.
00:26:23
Speaker
She applies a second time, but she ends up going to school with him.
00:26:26
Speaker
At this point, she's 19.
00:26:27
Speaker
He's 22.
00:26:29
Speaker
And he's also a love bomber supreme.
00:26:32
Speaker
That makes sense.
00:26:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:33
Speaker
That makes sense.
00:26:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:35
Speaker
Because the podcast was like, you know, he's kind of a weird guy from Jump.
00:26:38
Speaker
He's weird.
00:26:39
Speaker
He's kind of weird looking, you know.
00:26:41
Speaker
He's always got like a weird look on his face.
00:26:44
Speaker
Disheveled hair and I don't know.
00:26:47
Speaker
He's a little unkempt.
00:26:49
Speaker
Yes.
00:26:50
Speaker
I have a funny picture of him, which I'll talk about later, but he definitely does look very strange in this picture.
00:26:59
Speaker
He looks like he's about to take a poo, honestly.
00:27:01
Speaker
He does look like he's about to take a poo.
00:27:02
Speaker
He looks like he has constipation real bad.
00:27:06
Speaker
And he put it in a pamphlet.
00:27:10
Speaker
He said, this is why you should follow me.
00:27:12
Speaker
Actually, this picture, he sent one of his early, early followers, but when it was like 15 people,
00:27:19
Speaker
to editor of Playboy to get, and I heard this in the Before After Om podcast too, where they were trying to get Playboy to run a story about how he can levitate, and this is the story that she took with her to try to convince the Playboy editor to come.
00:27:38
Speaker
Wow.
00:27:39
Speaker
That's a whole side story that's in the Before After Om podcast that you can listen to.
00:27:44
Speaker
The delusions are wild.
00:27:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:49
Speaker
Anyways, all of that being said, pretty immediately he's like, I'm going to marry you.
00:27:55
Speaker
We're destined to be.
00:27:56
Speaker
And really pursued her.
00:27:58
Speaker
And she didn't respond at first, but clearly something worked because they get married.
00:28:04
Speaker
What year is this now?
00:28:05
Speaker
This is 1976, maybe?
00:28:10
Speaker
He graduated in 75.
00:28:12
Speaker
So sometime between then and 77, when he goes off away, they get married.
00:28:17
Speaker
And during this time, it's relevant to note that there's this big political movement around college students who couldn't find a job after university, who then would also go back to cram school because they didn't know what to do with themselves.
00:28:29
Speaker
And so...
00:28:31
Speaker
It's like really fertile breeding ground for cults.
00:28:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:36
Speaker
Right?
00:28:37
Speaker
Like people are feeling like, oh, I had it.
00:28:40
Speaker
I had.
00:28:40
Speaker
I did all the right things.
00:28:42
Speaker
I had a pathway and now I'm lost nowhere to go.
00:28:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:45
Speaker
In a wandering space that they've been probably shamed into being afraid to be their whole lives.
00:28:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:53
Speaker
In 1978, he has his first child.
00:28:55
Speaker
He ends up having six children.
00:28:57
Speaker
who all have varying roles in the cult.
00:29:01
Speaker
Some to this day still stand by their dad, which is, you know, I think a really common response.
00:29:08
Speaker
Like, how do you face the horrible shit?
00:29:12
Speaker
You gotta convince yourself.
00:29:14
Speaker
You either go one of two ways.
00:29:16
Speaker
But we see this over and over, too, with the Manson situation.
00:29:21
Speaker
No remorse.
00:29:23
Speaker
And for some reason, I'm really thinking of people in the military.
00:29:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:26
Speaker
You know, like I've talked to some people who have gone to war and really they're fucked up.
00:29:33
Speaker
They're just fucked up.
00:29:35
Speaker
Their body is fucked.
00:29:36
Speaker
They've got severe PTSD and they'll still just back the military.
00:29:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:42
Speaker
Even after seeing what I'm pretty sure were perspective shifting experiences.
00:29:48
Speaker
Sure.
00:29:49
Speaker
But I'm just like, well, what are you going to do?
00:29:54
Speaker
lose a leg and then sit here and reconcile the fact that maybe it was not for anything.
00:30:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:02
Speaker
Or even worse, like, for the, like, subjugation and violence against, like, communities that had nothing to do with, you know?
00:30:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:11
Speaker
I'm also thinking about Parasite.
00:30:12
Speaker
If you haven't seen Parasite, that shit is amazing.
00:30:16
Speaker
But for those of you who have seen Parasite,
00:30:20
Speaker
Maybe if you want to see it, you skip a little bit.
00:30:22
Speaker
But that scene where there's the two, the couple in the basement, and they're just, like, so committed to this, like, really fucked, aloof, rich family.
00:30:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:37
Speaker
And, like, how when the guy walked in, you realize that he is lighting the floor for him.
00:30:41
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:30:44
Speaker
The way they're committed to these people is wild.
00:30:47
Speaker
Wow.
00:30:47
Speaker
Anyways, check it out.
00:30:49
Speaker
It's brilliant.
00:30:50
Speaker
So back to Shoko or Chizuo.
00:30:55
Speaker
He hasn't changed his name yet.
00:30:56
Speaker
So he goes to school.
00:30:58
Speaker
He gets his like acupuncture, what have you.
00:31:00
Speaker
He opens a business and then he gets arrested in 1982 because he's selling fake remedies.
00:31:07
Speaker
One of the remedies is just orange peel and alcohol.
00:31:09
Speaker
Oh my goodness.
00:31:10
Speaker
And he was just out here selling this to people.
00:31:12
Speaker
Chizuo...
00:31:14
Speaker
The way he's like the audacity, right?
00:31:17
Speaker
To be like doing all these things and you're like, I'm gonna get away with this.
00:31:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:24
Speaker
Some sources say he was never jailed.
00:31:26
Speaker
Another source said he was jailed for 20 days and fined 20,000 yen.
00:31:30
Speaker
I don't know which is which.
00:31:32
Speaker
But either way, the business went bankrupt.
00:31:36
Speaker
And around this time, he really looks to religion as his alternative.
00:31:43
Speaker
And this is when he develops a deep interest in divination and religion.
00:31:47
Speaker
He becomes a member of Agon Shu, which we're not going to go deep into, but if you want to learn more, there's a really thorough and interesting podcast episode about...
00:32:02
Speaker
but then also like the emergence of new religions in japan on the before after om podcast so during this time he dedicated his free time to the study of various religious concepts he started with chinese astrology and taoism
00:32:18
Speaker
And then he started incorporating Western esotericism, yoga, meditation, esoteric Buddhism, esoteric Christianity, just a hodgepodge of nonsense.
00:32:29
Speaker
And then in 1984, 29 years old, he decides, I'm going to go to India to study Buddhist enlightenment.
00:32:37
Speaker
Okay.
00:32:38
Speaker
Which is what he then uses to really fluff his ego and he's like, I meant the Dalai Lama.
00:32:43
Speaker
But anyways.
00:32:44
Speaker
Yeah, I have a little story about that.
00:32:46
Speaker
I don't know if this is now or later, but there's other times where he travels as well.
00:32:52
Speaker
But at a certain point of time, he meets the Dalai Lama and he said that the Dalai Lama told him what I've done for Buddhism in Tibet, you will do for Buddhism in Japan.
00:33:04
Speaker
He also visited other religious leaders in places like Sri Lanka and India, had his picture taken with them just like he had his picture taken with the Dalai Lama.
00:33:12
Speaker
And he claimed that they also were saying that, oh, he's this great spiritual master.
00:33:17
Speaker
And the Dalai Lama was asked about it later on.
00:33:20
Speaker
And he said, I received him courteously, but I never said that specifically to him.
00:33:27
Speaker
I just received him in a hospitable way.
00:33:29
Speaker
And then these other religious leaders, they also were followed up.
00:33:34
Speaker
about these visits later on.
00:33:36
Speaker
And one of them said, we had a meeting and then he came back to me a week or two later, said he had achieved final enlightenment.
00:33:43
Speaker
I thought that was rather surprising because it usually takes close to a lifetime to achieve enlightenment.
00:33:49
Speaker
So he's really out here, like, trying to gain favor from all these, like, religious leaders and probably just, like, making up stories about them saying that he's highly enlightened and et cetera, et cetera.
00:34:02
Speaker
Anyways.
00:34:04
Speaker
All right.
00:34:05
Speaker
And this is around the time he changes his name to... I saw online that maybe it was in 1986, but you know, people list different years.
00:34:16
Speaker
And I think it's worth noting that I think the most robust information would be found in Japanese.
00:34:21
Speaker
Yes.
00:34:22
Speaker
And so I don't read Japanese.
00:34:25
Speaker
And so all of the stuff that I am reading has either been translated or, you know... Yeah.
00:34:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:32
Speaker
Picked apart by white people.
00:34:34
Speaker
Exactly.
00:34:34
Speaker
That's worth noting.
00:34:36
Speaker
In 1984 is when Aum Shinrikyo started its early shit.
00:34:45
Speaker
At this point, that's not what it was called.
00:34:46
Speaker
It began actually just as a yoga class.
00:34:49
Speaker
And this was like after he got caught selling...
00:34:53
Speaker
those like illegal pharmaceuticals or like you know fake health remedies and after he's like gotten into all of these like different kinds of religions it's not just like hinduism and buddhism it's like christian teachings but also like nostradamus prophecies and he's bringing that all into his yoga and meditation classes and
00:35:13
Speaker
And at this point in time, it's really small.
00:35:16
Speaker
It's being run out of like a yoga dojo in downtown Shibuya area in Tokyo.
00:35:21
Speaker
And it's like him and 15 followers, many of whom were women.
00:35:24
Speaker
And during this stage of time, the doctrine had a lot to do with the Agonshu faith system, which was related to freedom from karma through magical ritual practices, transformation of the minded body, development of psychic powers through science, and then Kundalini awakening.
00:35:43
Speaker
basically kundalini is like this energy in hinduism that like is at the base of your spine and when it's like awakened it's like kind of like a spiritual experience so in 1985 february he claims that he's experienced levitation which is when he like sends this person with this picture of him looking like he's very constipated but it also looks like he's like jumping on a trampoline so
00:36:11
Speaker
I don't know what's going on there, but it's around the same time he also said that he was on this beach engaging in some kind of meditative practice, and he said that he got this vision that the god Shiva appeared from heaven and declared, I appoint you Abira Ketsu no Mikoto,
00:36:33
Speaker
which means the god of light who leads the armies of the gods.
00:36:37
Speaker
So basically he said Shiva told him that it's his goal in life to create an ideal society made up of people who have magical powers, psychic powers, a society that will be called the kingdom of Shambhala, which is like basically like a utopian thing.
00:36:55
Speaker
myth from Hinduism.
00:36:56
Speaker
So I'm just going to take this moment of time to talk about what Shiva is in Hindu philosophy.
00:37:04
Speaker
And this information I got from my dad, who knows a lot about it and did a good job of condensing it for me, because in general, I think most people who don't really have a good understanding of Hinduism don't realize that Hinduism
00:37:20
Speaker
isn't actually a thing.
00:37:22
Speaker
It's like many things that have been collapsed under this heading of Hinduism, but it has many different sects and sub-beliefs.
00:37:30
Speaker
And prior to like colonization, it was many different things, but it's just like kind of been really unencompassed into this one title when there's many things going on.
00:37:41
Speaker
in Hinduism, it's an extremely complex religion.
00:37:45
Speaker
Even I've done quite a bit of reading on specific parts of Hinduism and it's really hard to understand on a larger scale.
00:37:55
Speaker
So my dad said that the religion of Hinduism as we know it today is based on the Vedantic, which is a more philosophical view.
00:38:05
Speaker
And also the Memansik, which is a ritualistic view of the Vedas, but there's also many other schools of philosophy.
00:38:12
Speaker
There's like a philosophy of logic, there's Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and a lot of those overlap.
00:38:18
Speaker
There's also Kashmir Shaivism, which is a philosophy of Shiva.
00:38:23
Speaker
and many other philosophies that originate in what we know today as South Asia that have been put under this umbrella known as Hinduism, which is an amorphous mixture of many different schools of philosophy.
00:38:35
Speaker
In the past, there was nothing that was known as Hinduism.
00:38:39
Speaker
One unifying concept across many of these philosophies, though, is the concept of Shiva and Shakti, which actually are manifest and unmanifest.
00:38:51
Speaker
So Shiva is the unmanifest, also known as just like pure consciousness or pure energy.
00:38:57
Speaker
And Shakti is like the manifest, so the manifestation of that energy.
00:39:02
Speaker
So Shiva is universal energy.
00:39:05
Speaker
And then Shakti is how it's manifested in our world.
00:39:08
Speaker
So you can think that Shiva is like up there in the spiritual world.
00:39:12
Speaker
And then everything that exists in our material world is like Shakti because it's the manifestation of that energy.
00:39:19
Speaker
So Shakti is like intellectual power, energetic power, emotional power, mental and physical power.
00:39:25
Speaker
Some people think also of Shiva and Shakti as yin and yang, creation and destruction, divine masculine, divine feminine.
00:39:32
Speaker
It's basically just like two sides of the same coin.
00:39:36
Speaker
They can't exist without one another.
00:39:38
Speaker
But at the end of the day, both of those things are concepts.
00:39:42
Speaker
And in Hinduism, there's like a lot of
00:39:44
Speaker
gods and goddesses that are present and they're like illustrated in these very beautiful ways through these myths but at the end of the day they're all concepts and so like this story of like oh Shiva came down and said that I was XYZ doesn't really fit most of the readings that I've done also that are like about different kinds of gods and goddesses in Hinduism they represent all of these aspects in their shadow and they represent all of these aspects in their light
00:40:14
Speaker
And it's about like accepting both the light and shadow in all of existence, which is like non-dualistic thinking.
00:40:23
Speaker
Anyway, over on Hinduism, there's three gods.
00:40:27
Speaker
There's Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the sustainer, and Shripa, the destroyer.
00:40:31
Speaker
And they're the holy trinity.
00:40:33
Speaker
Can think about it in terms of like Christianity too.
00:40:35
Speaker
It's kind of similar.
00:40:37
Speaker
Creation is about creation of ideas, but also it could be like seeds, flowers, birth.
00:40:43
Speaker
Sustenance is like life-sustaining energy, so cycles that sustain life.
00:40:48
Speaker
The food cycle, expelling what's become toxic, menstrual cycles.
00:40:52
Speaker
And then there's destruction, which is destruction of the past to give way to the new.
00:40:57
Speaker
It's about change.
00:40:58
Speaker
If you think about tarot, it's like the death card.
00:41:01
Speaker
The death card.
00:41:02
Speaker
It could also be the tower, but the death card is a slower transition, and then the tower card is a more intense transition.
00:41:08
Speaker
But it's about old ideas giving way to new ideas, and we see the cycle play out.
00:41:14
Speaker
all across nature and each plays an important role in the cycle of life.
00:41:19
Speaker
That's like a little bit about like Shiva and Shakti and from like what he's talking about, Shoko, I don't really see how it ties, you know?
00:41:35
Speaker
But I thought I would use that opportunity to give a little info.
00:41:39
Speaker
on that thanks thanks actually's dad yes thank you to my dad for giving me the very brief summary and then in 1986 this organization is now called om shinsen no kai which means like the deity club or the deity association i don't know why but some articles called it the mountain wizard club
00:42:02
Speaker
But in the podcast before, after Aum, they said it meant the deity association.
00:42:07
Speaker
And this was after he had claimed that he had already reached enlightenment.
00:42:12
Speaker
And up until this point, the group was focused mostly on yoga and like these miracle healing experiences.
00:42:18
Speaker
But there's a this is kind of a point where things shift a little.
00:42:23
Speaker
1987, they have kind of amassed a good amount of money at this point through front companies selling various kinds of services, but also having like membership fees and donations from members.
00:42:35
Speaker
So at this point, the name is changed.
00:42:37
Speaker
It's Aum Shinrakyo, which means Supreme Truths.
00:42:42
Speaker
And between 87 and 89, they gained a lot of popularity through word of mouth and recruitment efforts.
00:42:49
Speaker
They had 1,300 members in 87, 2,300 members by 88, and by 89, they had 4,000 members, including 390 monks and nuns.
00:42:52
Speaker
It's so wild.
00:42:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:52
Speaker
It's so wild.
00:42:53
Speaker
So it's just, like, really increasing pretty fast.
00:42:54
Speaker
Yes.
00:42:54
Speaker
I mean, I think a lot like Anne...
00:43:11
Speaker
one of his strategies was to kind of showcase legitimacy by proxy of all these people he was building relationships with.
00:43:20
Speaker
So he purposefully targeted people who were really respected in their fields, scientists, you know, I'm wondering about these monks.
00:43:31
Speaker
And then he's like the Dalai Lama, you know?
00:43:33
Speaker
So like, I'm wondering, those were both, you know, they're probably like, well, the Dalai Lama said,
00:43:38
Speaker
Which is, I find interesting because he was kind of rejected by academia and now he's like seeking these people who like were able to like rise pretty high in academics and like pull them out of it.
00:43:51
Speaker
So it kind of gives him like validation of, yeah, like academia sucks because all these people who like went through this whole process want to leave and come to my organization.
00:44:00
Speaker
Yeah, or it's like they have power that he does not.
00:44:04
Speaker
And so that's one way of trying to take it back.
00:44:06
Speaker
Yep.
00:44:07
Speaker
Take it away.
00:44:08
Speaker
And I see this with, like, people who abuse, too.
00:44:11
Speaker
Domestic violence!
00:44:14
Speaker
I mean, cults, as we've talked about, is just...
00:44:17
Speaker
this on a or domestic violence on a larger scale absolutely but something that i like a trend that i've noticed is there's a select group of people who abuse who will specifically look for usually usually it's men who look for women who are doing very well and there's misogynistic impulse to take that away i think because the way that i've heard people be like
00:44:47
Speaker
I don't know how it happened, but all of a sudden I don't have my job anymore.
00:44:51
Speaker
And I'm staying home with my kids and I love my kids, but that's never the life that I envisioned for myself.
00:44:57
Speaker
And this person makes me feel like I'm dumb.
00:45:00
Speaker
I'm not dumb.
00:45:00
Speaker
You know, like there's this total like shake of reality and feel like this is kind of what he's doing here.
00:45:06
Speaker
He also like targeted very young people as well.
00:45:09
Speaker
So like that was another arm of his outreach was like,
00:45:12
Speaker
I'm going to make connections with all these powerful people who are well respected and then by proxy I can bring all those people in, but then on the other hand he really targeted young people, teens, who were in this transitional period where I'm sure he knows there's like a sense of like I feel lost.
00:45:29
Speaker
As we mentioned in 1987 with just 10 followers, Shoko founded Aum Shinrikyo as a religious sect and
00:45:38
Speaker
There's this shift during this time, which I'll go deeper into a little bit later, because there's a lot of political context that I think attributes to this rise in new religious movements in Japan.
00:45:55
Speaker
And in Japan, at least whenever this article was written, 1996, this article from the New York Times, it's called A Guru's Journey.
00:46:05
Speaker
A special report, the seer among the blind Japanese sect leaders rise.
00:46:10
Speaker
You know, it's problematic, outdated, you know.
00:46:14
Speaker
They were noting that at that time, there was at least 185,000 religious organizations.
00:46:23
Speaker
I'll get into, like, how many different kinds later.
00:46:25
Speaker
Most are Buddhist or Shinto shrines.
00:46:28
Speaker
But since the 1970s, there's also been a growing number of sects
00:46:31
Speaker
like Aum Shinrikyo.
00:46:33
Speaker
And they're saying that they think young people have been turned off by Japan's materialism and they're searching for something to believe in, to find a home in.
00:46:41
Speaker
I think what it's lacking is like some spark of life, you know?
00:46:45
Speaker
It feels very dark and like foggy.
00:46:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:49
Speaker
No room for creativity.
00:46:52
Speaker
Feels very sterile.
00:46:54
Speaker
This article goes on to say, Susuma Oda, a professor of psychopathology at the University of Tsukuba, suggests that one attraction of the cult is that they offer young Japanese their first real father figure because their own fathers were never home when they were growing up, being breadwinners, but instead were always at the office.
00:47:14
Speaker
You can also see how...
00:47:16
Speaker
levitation, supernatural, magic, like not academia feels like a draw for people like so caught up in a very dry life and are seeking something that's like more exciting.
00:47:34
Speaker
Yes.
00:47:35
Speaker
They also used a lot of anime and manga inspiration for their recruitment materials.
00:47:42
Speaker
They have these videos that are very ridiculous.
00:47:45
Speaker
They are.
00:47:46
Speaker
They are.
00:47:47
Speaker
But they kind of draw you in and make young people feel like they could be a part of their favorite TV shows or what have you.
00:47:55
Speaker
Which...
00:47:56
Speaker
You know, I imagine it's alluring when you're living in a space where you're just living just to live and you have a path that you feel like you should be on, but no one's ever asked you, what do you want to do?
00:48:06
Speaker
Yeah, one of the manga books...
00:48:09
Speaker
has just the story of the Armageddon and how everyone dies except for the Alm cult members.
00:48:19
Speaker
And then one of the articles I read was talking about how this was also approaching Y2K and kind of like targeting fears people had about the apocalypse and the approaching of Y2K.
00:48:30
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:48:33
Speaker
So all of that, it goes together really well.
00:48:37
Speaker
He's having a fun time, too, going on TV shows.
00:48:40
Speaker
He really was doing that shit.
00:48:42
Speaker
Doing all this PR shit.
00:48:44
Speaker
But it's interesting because he's like, I know what these young people want because it's what I needed, you know?
00:48:48
Speaker
It's what I wanted.
00:48:50
Speaker
And that is very parallel to what Jim Jones was doing when he was recruiting for his little group.
00:48:55
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:48:57
Speaker
A former classmate was quoted in one of these articles that will be listed in our sources, and they said, when I look at the way Aum operates, I think Matsumoto was trying to create a closed society like the school for blind that he went to.
00:49:10
Speaker
He's trying to create a society separate from the ordinary society where he can become king of the castle.
00:49:15
Speaker
So like in many ways he is recreating like the ecosystem that he created in his school with whatever limited power he had and put it onto these people who had less power, you know?
00:49:30
Speaker
I also think there's something about if you're not in a society that normalizes building social-emotional skills, what you have is a lot of people who might be really skilled in one area, but are regressed emotionally and socially.
00:49:46
Speaker
And so you're really not going to catch when someone's trying to take advantage of you.
00:49:50
Speaker
You're really not going to catch when people are being manipulative, coercive.
00:49:55
Speaker
Because all that requires that somebody... Like, that we're creating containers where we're talking about boundaries, we're talking about consent, we're talking about, you know... Yeah, that's definitely not happening.
00:50:05
Speaker
It's not happening.
00:50:06
Speaker
OM also really put a lot of emphasis on the use of computers and scientific experimentation, which...
00:50:15
Speaker
was a new thing at the time, you know?
00:50:17
Speaker
It felt like a magical thing, like this boom.
00:50:19
Speaker
Yeah, because of the 80s.
00:50:20
Speaker
Yeah, the boom of technology.
00:50:21
Speaker
Like, that's huge.
00:50:23
Speaker
And the recruits were given special headgear with batteries and electrodes so that they could supposedly align their brainwaves with Shoko.
00:50:32
Speaker
You know, because he was enlightened and he can levitate and stuff.
00:50:37
Speaker
And so in each step, the followers were asked to donate large sums of money.
00:50:41
Speaker
And so little by little, you're stealing someone's autonomy from them.
00:50:45
Speaker
By taking away their only way of living.
00:50:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:48
Speaker
Which reminds me of when one of the last people who joined the Manson family arrived and they were like, dumped all their stuff in the communal pile.
00:50:57
Speaker
They're like, it's for everybody.
00:50:59
Speaker
And also reminds me how Jim Jones got most of his money by the retirement.
00:51:04
Speaker
Like, wasn't it?
00:51:05
Speaker
It was like the retirement money.
00:51:06
Speaker
What the fuck?
00:51:08
Speaker
Yes.
00:51:09
Speaker
Like, you see underneath all of this where they're like, okay, how do I get money?
00:51:15
Speaker
And too.
00:51:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:16
Speaker
So much money.
00:51:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:17
Speaker
Just taken from... Oh my gosh, yeah.
00:51:19
Speaker
So much money.
00:51:24
Speaker
You know what?
00:51:26
Speaker
I bet you...
00:51:28
Speaker
When I'm thinking about the Manson story about, like, just... They just... She just dropped off all her stuff.
00:51:33
Speaker
Now it belongs to everyone.
00:51:34
Speaker
I wonder if that's what conservatives are like.
00:51:36
Speaker
This is communism, you see?
00:51:38
Speaker
Right, right, right.
00:51:39
Speaker
Which also, that whole thing was used as a political ploy, too.
00:51:44
Speaker
They used
Psychological Profiles of Cult Leaders
00:51:45
Speaker
it to demonize the hippies.
00:51:47
Speaker
Yeah, they did.
00:51:48
Speaker
As a collective, which they align with the left.
00:51:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:51:51
Speaker
So... As though they were a representation of it, which...
00:51:57
Speaker
Wild.
00:51:58
Speaker
Well, bitches don't have nuance.
00:52:01
Speaker
And bitches are malicious.
00:52:04
Speaker
The United States government.
00:52:05
Speaker
Yes.
00:52:06
Speaker
So in this article, they're thinking, you know, because the emphasis is on science, maybe the recruitment was easier for bright but discontented university students at top institutions, you know, who were often trained in the sciences and were probably told like,
00:52:27
Speaker
You have all the things, you know, like you did everything you're supposed to do.
00:52:31
Speaker
You should be happy.
00:52:32
Speaker
And there's probably this sense of like, well, why aren't I happy if I'm doing all the things that I was told I ever should be?
00:52:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:39
Speaker
A lawyer who represented the parents who were trying to recover their children said there are so many sophisticated people among the members.
00:52:44
Speaker
They come from elite families.
00:52:46
Speaker
So he really targeted.
00:52:49
Speaker
Some high up people.
00:52:51
Speaker
Mm hmm.
00:52:53
Speaker
So at this point, the doctrine had shifted a little bit from before.
00:52:58
Speaker
The goal at this point is something called Satori, which is a Japanese Buddhist term meaning comprehension or understanding.
00:53:06
Speaker
And the goal of being an Aum is about engaging in meditations to attain this state.
00:53:12
Speaker
And it's through a regimen of strict ascetic practices for the attainment of what is known as Gedatsu, which is the Japanese term for moksha or enlightenment, which is a concept of soul liberation, which is central to many Dharmic religions like Hinduism and Buddhism.
00:53:29
Speaker
And the ways in which you can reach that are through like yoga asana, breath work, postures.
00:53:37
Speaker
And yeah, so that's kind of like what he's...
00:53:41
Speaker
inviting people into like okay you're gonna join this group you're gonna have community but I'm also gonna give you these like clear steps to achieve enlightenment and like give you a path to have a meaning in your life and he also offered like a path of like if you are to go through these practices you can also rise up in the ranks of my organization mm-hmm
00:54:05
Speaker
But it often led to disappointment because he kept adding new stages to it.
00:54:09
Speaker
So there was definitely people who were like, I joined this for a specific purpose and now I'm confused because I feel like you lied to us.
00:54:18
Speaker
But we'll get there.
00:54:20
Speaker
So some examples of scientists who ended up joining the Aum cult and having pretty high up positions are Seiichi Endo, who was 28, left prestigious Kyoto University, where he was doing experiments in genetic engineering, the medical school's viral research center.
00:54:39
Speaker
Masami Suchia, 24, who was a graduate student at the University of Tsukuba, who abandoned his cutting edge work in organic chemistry to join the cult.
00:54:50
Speaker
Fumihiro Joyu, 26, arrived with an advanced degree in telecommunications from the Wasida University, another top school where he was studying artificial intelligence.
00:55:02
Speaker
He had actually gone to work at the National Space Development Agency, but resigned after two weeks because the job was incompatible with his interest in yoga.
00:55:13
Speaker
Okay.
00:55:14
Speaker
So I'm going to go deeply into this one specific person.
00:55:17
Speaker
who we will come back to later because he's a kind of a key player in the attacks.
00:55:23
Speaker
And this is Hideo Murai, who is an astrophysicist and later became the chief scientist of Ohm and the engineer, known as the engineer of the apocalypse, is what the Wired article said.
00:55:37
Speaker
He got into the prestigious Osaka University and gained a degree in astrophysics from its highly competitive graduate school of science.
00:55:47
Speaker
He studied x-ray emissions of celestial bodies and proved that he was really good at computer programming.
00:55:54
Speaker
He joined Kobe Steel, which is a pretty big manufacturing company.
00:56:00
Speaker
in Japan and he worked in their research and development section running experiments to make steel super malleable so basically like melting steel down
00:56:10
Speaker
He worked there for two years, after which his behavior kind of started to change.
00:56:15
Speaker
And he found an own publication in a bookstore.
00:56:18
Speaker
And he was kind of like really drawn in by it and started talking to his colleagues about levitation and telepathy and like psychic powers.
00:56:26
Speaker
And he really started losing interest in his job.
00:56:29
Speaker
He brought his fiance to Nepal for their honeymoon.
00:56:33
Speaker
And then after he came back,
00:56:34
Speaker
He said, I'm leaving Kobe Steel.
00:56:36
Speaker
I'm going to devote myself fully to Om.
00:56:39
Speaker
His parents tried really hard to talk him out of it, but there was no talking him out of it.
00:56:46
Speaker
After he joined, he really started to thrive.
00:56:48
Speaker
One thing that I read that was present across a few articles was like a lot of these people were feeling kind of bored in their day-to-day lives.
00:57:00
Speaker
And when they joined Aum, they were given really high up positions and the freedom to experiment with the knowledge that they had gained in school.
00:57:09
Speaker
So he became one of Asahara's prized disciples.
00:57:15
Speaker
And he even chose to be in solitary confinement on his own because he liked to use it for meditation.
00:57:23
Speaker
He said, this room is very small and dark for those who want to escape.
00:57:27
Speaker
But if one wants to meditate, it's as big as the universe.
00:57:31
Speaker
He also had all these big ideas of how he could use technology to push forward Asahara's ideas using science.
00:57:39
Speaker
There were ways that he could analyze his blood and brain waves and technologies the cult could use to protect itself from the coming apocalypse.
00:57:49
Speaker
So him and other scientists actually, and put a pin in this, started talking also about like
00:57:55
Speaker
Weapons that could hasten the world's end, like lasers, particle beams, chemical and biological agents, and even nuclear bombs.
00:58:05
Speaker
This Wired article states, for Hideo Morai, the astrophysicist, he at last had found a place in the world.
00:58:13
Speaker
What he heard from his master's voice fit perfectly with his own thoughts of the universe.
00:58:18
Speaker
Indeed, all this had been predicted before, he told the others.
00:58:23
Speaker
So he really got lost in it.
00:58:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:26
Speaker
Also, like at this point, like we've been talking about this like doomsday prophecy, apocalypse prophecy.
00:58:32
Speaker
So that's also...
00:58:33
Speaker
part of the doctrine where Asahara stating that there's going to be a third world war, it's going to be a final conflict that results in a nuclear Armageddon and that this is necessary for human relief.
00:58:47
Speaker
This was actually taken from an apocalyptic vision that someone else published in this book in 1934.
00:58:54
Speaker
His name was Sakai Katsutoki.
00:58:57
Speaker
He said that he received this message from God, so he stole this from somebody else.
00:59:03
Speaker
who is also clearly having some apocalyptic visions.
00:59:07
Speaker
He also had conspiracies that were related to Jewish people, Freemasons, Dutch, British royal family, and against rival Japanese new religions as well.
00:59:20
Speaker
So there's a lot of stuff going on at that point.
00:59:24
Speaker
we've been talking about all this shit, and there's like a gap.
00:59:26
Speaker
Like, okay, so he recruited these people, but how did he get them to buy into all the shit?
00:59:32
Speaker
And he did it with a lot of tactics that really mirror MKUltra, which is why this is irrelevant.
00:59:41
Speaker
So some of the rules and regulations, the sleeping hours were regulated.
00:59:45
Speaker
He would deprive them of sleep.
00:59:47
Speaker
Contents of meals were also regulated, so...
00:59:52
Speaker
He would do this imbalance of starvation and gorging.
00:59:55
Speaker
Similar to Anne.
00:59:56
Speaker
Similar to Anne as well.
00:59:59
Speaker
He also used LSD in all of the things which I think probably convinced people, oh, I have magical powers.
01:00:08
Speaker
It's likely that these people had never had experiences like this before, just like all of the other cults.
01:00:16
Speaker
And it's interesting because MKUltra's...
01:00:19
Speaker
was declassified in the late 70s.
01:00:22
Speaker
So he would have had that info.
01:00:23
Speaker
He could have had access to that info, potentially.
01:00:27
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:00:28
Speaker
Yeah, and either way, I'm just feeling like since the cults had such... I mean, Charles Manson's cult had direct ties to the experiment.
01:00:38
Speaker
And then a lot of people were part of the experiments.
01:00:42
Speaker
I could just see those things rippling out.
01:00:45
Speaker
And it clearly touched the whole world.
01:00:47
Speaker
And he had aspirations too.
01:00:49
Speaker
Shoko did.
01:00:51
Speaker
Like make this a worldwide thing, which it is.
01:00:54
Speaker
Yes.
01:00:54
Speaker
And it was.
01:00:55
Speaker
One of the purification rituals, they also had this kind of feeling of like only through Aum Shinrikyo can you, one, get these magical powers, levitation, seeing the future, all this stuff.
01:01:07
Speaker
But also like being a part of this community is a purifying practice.
01:01:13
Speaker
much like ann is like only i can clear your karmic whatever right someone said i was forced to drink 10 liters of warm water from a rubber hose in a container on the wall every morning to purify me i had to take that hose and put it down my throat 30 centimeters and swallow two liters of water five times then i had to vomit some other tactics they used were like beyond psych manipulation social coercion he also like was sexually assaultive right he banned to
01:01:40
Speaker
he banned sex for everybody but himself.
01:01:43
Speaker
And there are a lot of accounts of, um, women in the cult saying that, like, I just didn't feel like I could say no.
01:01:52
Speaker
And they also limited reading and TV except for his sermon.
01:01:56
Speaker
So there's this like repeat of his information over and over and over and over very much like the, um, and Jim Jones and the psych hospitals.
01:02:07
Speaker
Yep.
01:02:08
Speaker
And then also,
01:02:09
Speaker
obviously he's taking over their finances and so...
01:02:12
Speaker
At what point could they leave?
01:02:13
Speaker
And like, with what?
01:02:15
Speaker
With what money?
01:02:16
Speaker
At this point in time, there's an escalation.
01:02:19
Speaker
Om demands that the followers live in the commune and cut all relationships off from their families, which is also really common in occult practices.
01:02:28
Speaker
I'm thinking a lot about Scientology, which led to clashes with the family and like lawsuits were happening.
01:02:34
Speaker
So he's really ramping up and getting everyone else ramped up with him.
01:02:39
Speaker
There were reported cases in which Om had been accused of harassing, attacking, kidnapping, or even killing opponents.
01:02:47
Speaker
So really similar to MKUltra as well, there were these experiments that were going on.
01:02:53
Speaker
that really are very parallel.
01:02:55
Speaker
So there was a doctor, Dr. Ikuo Hayashi, and he is this 48-year-old cardiovascular surgeon.
01:03:02
Speaker
He joined after he almost killed a mother and her daughter in a car accident, and he ended up joining along with his wife, who I think was an anesthesiologist.
01:03:14
Speaker
There's all these stories of different kinds of experiments that he was engaging in.
01:03:18
Speaker
One story is from the book Underground written by Haruki Murakami, which I'll talk about later, but this is a story of Harumi Iwakura.
01:03:30
Speaker
She was a member of the cult.
01:03:32
Speaker
For a long time, she was labeled as one of Shoko's special people.
01:03:38
Speaker
She was working at a job in an office when she was given a pamphlet by a random man at a hair salon, which she was suspicious of first, but he taught her actually the drinking water and vomiting technique and it helped clear her eczema.
01:03:51
Speaker
So then she was like, okay, I'm going to join the cult.
01:03:55
Speaker
So then two months after she joined, she went to live at the commune.
01:03:59
Speaker
And she had a few different jobs while she was working there and she moved around.
01:04:03
Speaker
So she was in Tokyo at one point.
01:04:05
Speaker
She was at their Mount Fuji location at one point.
01:04:09
Speaker
One quote that I thought was really interesting and kind of ties to Charles Manson and just other cult leaders too.
01:04:14
Speaker
She said, the first time that she met Asahara, the feeling I got was amazing.
01:04:19
Speaker
He'd say something about me and he'd be right on target.
01:04:23
Speaker
So there we go.
01:04:26
Speaker
She said he started calling her every day at one point to ask how she was doing.
01:04:33
Speaker
And sometimes the phone calls would stop and she'd think, why isn't he calling me?
01:04:37
Speaker
Like, you know, do that.
01:04:38
Speaker
Yes.
01:04:39
Speaker
Like just some mind games.
01:04:42
Speaker
And then he also would ask her these like weirdly sexually suggestive questions like,
01:04:48
Speaker
He one time asked her, has your period started yet?
01:04:52
Speaker
Like on the phone.
01:04:53
Speaker
And then he, um,
01:04:57
Speaker
when they would be together in person, started trying to engage with her sexually and said things to her like, you'll be undergoing a special initiation soon.
01:05:07
Speaker
And when she asked someone about it, they told her that that meant that she was going to be having sex with him, but she really didn't want to do that.
01:05:14
Speaker
And every time he came on to her, she tightened up and he felt that.
01:05:20
Speaker
And she says he gave up at some point and that didn't end up happening.
01:05:25
Speaker
But so she remembers stuff up until this point.
01:05:29
Speaker
And then her memory goes really blank because she was given electroshock right after this.
01:05:36
Speaker
No.
01:05:38
Speaker
She doesn't know why her memory was erased.
01:05:39
Speaker
She said that no one around her would tell her why.
01:05:41
Speaker
All that they would tell her is that it seems you and a certain somebody was getting to a dangerous point.
01:05:47
Speaker
She literally had no idea what they were talking about.
01:05:49
Speaker
But apparently it seemed like Asahara thought that she was having a relationship with someone else, even though she wasn't.
01:05:56
Speaker
And that's why this happened.
01:05:57
Speaker
She also remembers being in solitary confinement and was told it was because of the karma of ignorance.
01:06:05
Speaker
Later on, after the raids and arrests happened, she went back to her mother's house.
01:06:10
Speaker
But literally her memory was just like very fragmented for this time period.
01:06:15
Speaker
And she works as a beautician now.
01:06:19
Speaker
But that's her story.
01:06:20
Speaker
Pretty fucked up.
01:06:22
Speaker
It's very parallel to a lot of other people's stories where they talk about experiencing experiments and electroshock because they did something that went against
01:06:31
Speaker
what the leadership wanted or what Asahara wanted.
01:06:35
Speaker
So a worker at the compound who tried to escape received 11 shocks while a male follower accused of having sexual relations got 19 during one three-month period.
01:06:46
Speaker
And this is later on in the, in 94, Dr. Hayashi administered more than 600 electric shocks to 130 followers.
01:06:50
Speaker
So it was happening in,
01:06:56
Speaker
at a very high frequency.
01:06:58
Speaker
Afterwards, some of them literally forgot their entire life.
01:07:02
Speaker
They forgot what cult they were in.
01:07:04
Speaker
They forgot what Asahara was called.
01:07:06
Speaker
And they even forgot their own names because of this electroshock.
01:07:09
Speaker
So very parallel to MKUltra.
01:07:12
Speaker
Yes.
01:07:13
Speaker
Very, very parallel to MKUltra.
01:07:16
Speaker
There was a 25-year-old bodyguard for Asahara who vaguely remembers that he was given something to drink.
01:07:24
Speaker
He passed out, and when he came to, there were swollen spots on his head that he believes were surgical incisions.
01:07:31
Speaker
What the fuck?
01:07:33
Speaker
And then there's stories from the Murakami book where people talk about these incisions.
01:07:39
Speaker
initiations called Christ initiations, where they were given a drug that they believed to be LSD, but they weren't told what it was either.
01:07:49
Speaker
It was many people's first experience with it.
01:07:52
Speaker
And some of the stories in this book say that people literally went crazy after some of these initiations.
01:07:59
Speaker
And it was a turning point for a lot of them to wonder, should I leave or not?
01:08:04
Speaker
Because this is not feeling great.
01:08:07
Speaker
anymore.
01:08:08
Speaker
There was also like these bizarre trainings that they were asked to do.
01:08:13
Speaker
They were being hung upside down and anyone breaking commandments had their legs tied up in chains, were hung upside down.
01:08:21
Speaker
A lot of it was like breaking the vow of chastity, it seems like, or being suspected as a spy, or like you said, having a comic book in your possession.
01:08:30
Speaker
So not only were they not allowed to do those things, they were like abused and
01:08:35
Speaker
if they were found or even just suspected of doing something like that.
01:08:40
Speaker
And they think you can read minds.
01:08:42
Speaker
So they're like terrified, which is like very similar to Anne.
01:08:45
Speaker
They also thought that she could read their mind.
01:08:48
Speaker
A lot of similarities to MKUltra.
01:08:51
Speaker
And apparently a lot of these experiments are being led by this doctor, Dr. Ikuo Hayashi.
01:09:00
Speaker
So we could just see that this is really escalated.
01:09:03
Speaker
to this boy yeah 1989 was a catalyzing year not only were there movements like there was a in the sunday my niche which is one of their best-selling magazines there was an article called give back my child which featured six families who said that om shinrikyo stole their teens and
01:09:27
Speaker
At this point, they're responding in a more violent way, which is when the kidnapping, the murders, the suspected murders, the attacks, like it was never proven.
01:09:38
Speaker
They also attribute this escalation to, in August 1989, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government granted the official religious corporation status.
01:09:52
Speaker
And the law provided Aum with privileges, including massive tax breaks, and then immunity from official oversight and prosecution.
01:10:00
Speaker
So it was really hard to, you know.
01:10:04
Speaker
There's also a doctrine shift at this point that escalates from a point of, like earlier I was talking about how they were trying to teach people how to get to the state of enlightenment.
01:10:14
Speaker
And at this point, it changes from being individually, how do I get to enlightenment to how can I create a doctrine in a way that I can justify murder, pretty much.
01:10:26
Speaker
So there's a branch of Tibetan Buddhism that has this idea of Powa, which means
01:10:33
Speaker
sacred killing in the name of a guru.
01:10:35
Speaker
So people can be killed if they accumulate bad karma.
01:10:39
Speaker
In this case, Poha helps them to be reborn with better karma in the next life.
01:10:43
Speaker
And just a quick little side note about karma.
01:10:47
Speaker
Also, thanks to my dad for giving a little info on this.
01:10:50
Speaker
To quote my dad, karma is a bitch, but you can't kill yourself to get rid of karma, and you can't kill other people to get rid of karma.
01:10:59
Speaker
Wow.
01:11:00
Speaker
And no, like, philosophy of Hinduism says that.
01:11:04
Speaker
Excuse me, what are you doing?
01:11:05
Speaker
Mr. Orbex!
01:11:07
Speaker
Hey!
01:11:07
Speaker
He's gonna ruin your best furniture.
01:11:12
Speaker
Silly goose.
01:11:14
Speaker
Karma is pretty much the law of action and reaction which governs life.
01:11:18
Speaker
It says the soul carries with it impressions received in earthly life and that passes on to the next reincarnation.
01:11:27
Speaker
It's pretty much just about like balancing out the law of action and reaction.
01:11:33
Speaker
The soul reaping the effects of its own actions.
01:11:37
Speaker
i.e.
01:11:37
Speaker
if we cause others to suffer, then the experience of suffering will come to us.
01:11:41
Speaker
If we love and give, we will be loved and given too.
01:11:43
Speaker
That's pretty much what karma is.
01:11:46
Speaker
And I have this like oracle deck that has like this beautiful quote about karma being like an opportunity for us to have like a second chance and a third chance.
01:11:55
Speaker
And it just like gives you a lot of chances to make up for past mistakes and past wrongs.
01:12:00
Speaker
So what he's talking about here is murdering people to get rid of their karma.
01:12:06
Speaker
And he's saying all these people have accumulated bad karma, especially if they're not part of OM.
01:12:12
Speaker
And we need to like help save them.
01:12:16
Speaker
by killing them so that they can be reborn with better karma in the next life.
01:12:21
Speaker
So at this point onwards, in Asahara's point of view, anyone who has acquired bad karma could be killed and it was for their benefit.
01:12:30
Speaker
And because he's facing all of this resistance from society as well, he's saying everyone who is not part of Aum are agents of evil.
01:12:39
Speaker
And the world is headed towards Armageddon.
01:12:41
Speaker
And he uses examples of like the escalating situation in the Middle East, the arrival of the Halley's Comet, increasing UFO sightings.
01:12:49
Speaker
Wow, he's pulling in everything.
01:12:51
Speaker
Yeah, he says all of this is a sign that we're headed to nuclear Armageddon.
01:12:57
Speaker
So it shifts from being a doctrine about individual enlightenment to salvation through violent means.
01:13:07
Speaker
Yikes.
01:13:08
Speaker
So we can see how the doctrine shift then helps to justify these violent acts of kidnapping and potential murder and et cetera, et cetera.
01:13:18
Speaker
Apparently when this whole thing happened, he starts calling himself the Holy Pope or the savior of the country or Tokyo's Christ.
01:13:25
Speaker
Tokyo's Christ!
01:13:28
Speaker
So as I was mentioning, this law, which offered massive tax breaks and immunity from the recite, which people are attributing as a big part of why OM became so deadly, under the Japanese Religious Corporation Law, after a group is recognized, authorities are not permitted to investigate its religious activities or doctrine.
01:13:52
Speaker
Oh, shit!
01:13:53
Speaker
See their lovely doctrine and then how this happened at the same time.
01:13:59
Speaker
And they knew that.
01:13:59
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:01
Speaker
They did know that.
01:14:03
Speaker
So, I mean, it's broadly interpreted to cover pretty much everything a religious group does, including what would normally be viewed as a corporate interest, like for-profit activities.
01:14:14
Speaker
So he's taking money and shit, which, wow.
01:14:17
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:18
Speaker
Even though the police can investigate a religious group for criminal activity, Japanese cult experts and government officials in that practice said that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to do because of the law and the government's reluctance to investigate religions.
01:14:34
Speaker
You know who's partially responsible for this broad interpretation of the religious corporation?
01:14:40
Speaker
Who?
01:14:41
Speaker
The United States.
01:14:42
Speaker
Ugh.
01:14:45
Speaker
This law was enacted in 1947, which was right after World War II, which is when the U.S. decided we're going to occupy your asses.
01:14:56
Speaker
And it was a reaction to, this article calls them, excesses against the religious groups by the former Japanese imperial government.
01:15:03
Speaker
So in the Before After Om podcast, they talk more deeply about this, but basically there's this belief that, like,
01:15:11
Speaker
the prime minister has like uh divine connections much like british parliament it sounds like you know that was really stringent and extreme and there were like ramifications for people who weren't practicing shinto buddhism but the united states really used as an opportunity to be like well haven't you heard of our freedom of religion you know
01:15:37
Speaker
So the law was enacted to protect religious beliefs from government interference, or at least that's what they said.
01:15:43
Speaker
But I also think that it was an opportunity to push Christianity because Christianity just really skyrocketed during this time.
01:15:50
Speaker
And then after that, approximately 200,000 religious groups have been recognized.
01:15:55
Speaker
Wow.
01:15:57
Speaker
People are really just trying to find their way.
01:15:59
Speaker
And then the membership exceeds the population of Japan by almost 70 million because they'll join multiple memberships.
01:16:09
Speaker
And so Aum knew this and they made recognition as a religious group a high priority.
01:16:16
Speaker
They did some aggressive lobbying, which included picketing the offices of the agency that made the decision, which I think... What's his face?
01:16:26
Speaker
Chizuwo...
01:16:27
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:28
Speaker
Thinking about his, like, idol when he was younger.
01:16:32
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:16:32
Speaker
Of the person who, like, bribed his way into politics.
01:16:35
Speaker
He's like, I've seen this.
01:16:36
Speaker
We can make it happen.
01:16:38
Speaker
And so, like, there's, like, a person who had been following their activities for a long time.
01:16:44
Speaker
And they were, like, they called their efforts scandalous and out of character with other religious groups, which is what put, like, a pin in them.
01:16:51
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:52
Speaker
They also aggressively lobbied local politicians to put pressure on the Tokyo government to approve their application.
01:16:57
Speaker
So there was like a lot of powerful people from like a lot of these prestigious universities putting pressure on government officials about this.
01:17:07
Speaker
They felt emboldened to do that because they were so protected by this law.
01:17:10
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:11
Speaker
So this marks the time where the cult's becoming more aggressive, as Akshay was saying.
01:17:16
Speaker
The doctrine changed.
01:17:18
Speaker
They're protected by this law.
01:17:19
Speaker
They're lobbying all this shit.
01:17:22
Speaker
And then people are questioning whether or not they want to be a part of this anymore, so then you buckle down.
01:17:28
Speaker
So they're super hostile at this point.
01:17:32
Speaker
It's also around this time that I think there's some accusations that they're holding people against their will.
01:17:38
Speaker
Yes.
01:17:39
Speaker
Pretty soon after they gained recognition by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, there's been this lawyer who's like working, he's known as an anti-Om lawyer, and he's been working with the family members of people who are in the cult to kind of like help get them back.
01:17:58
Speaker
And in November of 1989, this lawyer, Tsutsumi Sakamoto, his wife and their one-year-old son disappeared.
01:18:07
Speaker
Ohm's involvement was suspected, and so there was even more opposition against them after this.
01:18:13
Speaker
But the police were unable to resolve the case during that time, and it was not until after the Tokyo subway attacks that their bodies were found and to have been dumped in separate locations by cult members.
01:18:26
Speaker
So it was them.
01:18:27
Speaker
It just wasn't proven until six years later.
01:18:31
Speaker
And then in 1990, Shoko was just like...
01:18:38
Speaker
Om needs to be a government entity because religious activities are not enough to lead to the salvation of humanity.
01:18:46
Speaker
So that kind of reminds me of how he also ran for middle school president.
01:18:50
Speaker
Yes.
01:18:51
Speaker
So him and 25 members of his inner circle attempt to run for office in the 1990 parliamentary elections.
01:18:59
Speaker
Their political party was called Shinrito or Truth, and they ran for the lower house of parliament.
01:19:07
Speaker
every single one of them was defeated.
01:19:10
Speaker
He was very mad about that.
01:19:12
Speaker
He said the Japanese rigged the election.
01:19:15
Speaker
Okay.
01:19:16
Speaker
So some parallels with Donald Trump there.
01:19:22
Speaker
And then his doctrine kind of just like escalates and becomes more apocalyptic at this point.
01:19:27
Speaker
And it becomes even more so like
01:19:30
Speaker
Om versus everyone else.
01:19:33
Speaker
They're also doing some weird shit at this point where they're like wiretapping potential donors and enemies.
01:19:41
Speaker
In 1992, he escalates.
01:19:44
Speaker
He writes this book, Declaring Myself the Christ, and states that he's Japan's only fully enlightened master.
01:19:50
Speaker
And he's identified as the Lamb of God.
01:19:53
Speaker
Not the Lamb of God.
01:19:55
Speaker
It also says that he was very sensitive to his public image and often responded to any criticism while trying to use the media for their own purposes.
01:20:04
Speaker
So during this period of time, there...
01:20:07
Speaker
is some sympathy that's garnered for them through the media somehow.
01:20:12
Speaker
But because of that, their membership rises even more dramatically.
01:20:17
Speaker
And it's probably also because he's saying that the Armageddon is going to happen by year 2000, and it's going to destroy 90% of the urban population and that you have to be part of OM to survive it.
01:20:31
Speaker
Maybe people are also joining based on this fear tactic.
01:20:36
Speaker
But by 1992, they had 10,000 members in Japan.
01:20:40
Speaker
By 1995, they had 50,000 members worldwide.
01:20:44
Speaker
That is so fucking wild.
01:20:47
Speaker
Almost 50% of those living in the commune were in their 20s.
01:20:52
Speaker
And more than three quarters of them were either in their 20s and 30s.
01:20:54
Speaker
So they were pretty young, the people living in the commune.
01:20:58
Speaker
In 1989, their net worth was 430 million yen, which is 4.3 million US dollars.
01:21:06
Speaker
By 95, it was over 100 billion yen, which is a billion US dollars.
01:21:14
Speaker
Jesus Christ.
01:21:17
Speaker
And they used this to expand operation to have bases in Australia, Germany, Indonesia, Russia,
01:21:24
Speaker
Taiwan, and the U.S. and had over 130 front companies globally.
01:21:30
Speaker
Front companies?
01:21:30
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:21:33
Speaker
So they were operating out of these companies.
01:21:35
Speaker
They began purchasing chemicals, biological agents, developing software, data mining, and then procuring weapons materials, as well as acquiring helicopters and training pilots.
01:21:49
Speaker
In 93, it's suspected...
01:21:54
Speaker
that they considered engaging in assassinations of several individuals who were critical of the cult, so heads of Buddhist sects such as Soka Gakkai and the Institute for Research in Human Happiness.
01:22:08
Speaker
They also went after a cartoonist who was making cartoons that were satirizing the cult.
01:22:14
Speaker
He survived even though an assassination attempt was made on him in 93.
01:22:19
Speaker
At this point, that dude that I was talking about earlier, Hideo Morai, who is like the astrophysicist, starts talking about like death rays and how the Americans had created a death ray and used it in Iraq.
01:22:34
Speaker
They were planning on using it in Japan and how OM would survive it because enlightened believers produce an electromagnetic field.
01:22:44
Speaker
They also said that Russia was doing something similar to
01:22:47
Speaker
but own believers would be safe from it.
01:22:49
Speaker
So there's just a lot of like the world is about to end and you need to be part of our group to survive it.
01:22:57
Speaker
It's a lot of stuff that really doesn't make a lot of sense, which is just kind of wild because these are all like really intelligent scientists and they're saying stuff like your body can withstand high heat if you engage in these meditation practices.
01:23:13
Speaker
Their leadership also changed and they had their own military section.
01:23:18
Speaker
And they had a lot of people from the Japanese self-defense force and also police.
01:23:24
Speaker
who were part of their organization at this point.
01:23:27
Speaker
There were nearly 40 active duty members of the self-defense force, 60 veterans.
01:23:32
Speaker
There was a first lieutenant who helped to leak classified data to OM.
01:23:39
Speaker
They found suppliers of military hardware through the Soviets.
01:23:45
Speaker
And they also had connections to the Yakuza, veterans of the KGB.
01:23:50
Speaker
And they were trying to manufacture assault rifles...
01:23:54
Speaker
But we're not successful in doing that.
01:23:57
Speaker
So this is what they're doing in the early 90s.
01:24:02
Speaker
It seems very scary, but also chaotic.
01:24:07
Speaker
Like, they don't actually know what they're doing, and they're just doing all of these different things.
01:24:13
Speaker
It really scared journalists.
01:24:15
Speaker
They were like, I can't write about it because I don't know how to predict their behavior.
01:24:18
Speaker
I mean, they try to assassinate this cartoonist.
01:24:21
Speaker
That's true.
01:24:22
Speaker
That's true.
01:24:23
Speaker
Oh, my gosh.
01:24:25
Speaker
Apparently, in this article, I feel like it's around the same time, a group of Tokyo residents were really angry that the OMA office was next door to them because they said that there was a stench burning flesh.
01:24:38
Speaker
It was around the same time.
01:24:40
Speaker
It was because they tried to cause an anthrax epidemic and it failed, but they just got all of these odor complaints because of it.
01:24:49
Speaker
So we can see they're trying to do stuff that's actually pretty scary, but they're not organized enough to succeed, which is a good thing.
01:25:00
Speaker
Did you hear what Shoko said in response?
01:25:04
Speaker
So apparently he agreed to meet this representative of the neighborhood, Hirokazu Matsukawa, and I guess this guy recalls that Shoko said very politely and calmly,
01:25:19
Speaker
totally serious, that the odor came from soybean oil and Chanel No.
01:25:23
Speaker
5.
01:25:23
Speaker
Oh my god.
01:25:25
Speaker
And he said, I couldn't smile or laugh when he said that, but when Asahara left, I explained what he said to the neighbors and everyone laughed.
01:25:35
Speaker
He's wild.
01:25:36
Speaker
So... I found this book that is missing a bunch of pages because it's on Google Books, so...
01:25:45
Speaker
I'm just going to give you what I can get from it.
01:25:48
Speaker
But it's called Malignant Pied Pipers, A Psychological Study of Destructive Cult Leaders from Reverend Jim Jones to Osama Bin Laden.
01:25:57
Speaker
And it's written by Peter A. Olson, who is a psychiatrist, which is interesting because I was thinking about how Al-Qaeda and this group has some similar overlap.
01:26:11
Speaker
Anyway...
01:26:14
Speaker
That being said, this was an interesting take, so take it as you will.
01:26:18
Speaker
For folks who don't know about the legend of Pied Piper of Hamelin, I'm going to read the way the story is presented in this book.
01:26:25
Speaker
Since medieval days in Germany, the legend of Pied Piper of Hamelin has been passed down in folklore and tales.
01:26:31
Speaker
As the story goes, the memorable figure popularized during the 19th century by poet Robert Browning was hired by town fathers of Hamelin to rid the town of a plague of rats and mice.
01:26:40
Speaker
Called Pied, in quotes, because of his two-colored costume,
01:26:44
Speaker
He skillfully played unusual and curiously irresistible tunes on his flute.
01:26:49
Speaker
The rats and mice, mesmerized, followed the Pied Piper to a river and, still under his spell, went straight into a water to drown.
01:26:56
Speaker
When the ungrateful citizens and leaders of Hamelin refused to pay the Piper his price as greed upon, he was wounded and became enraged.
01:27:04
Speaker
In revenge, the Piper...
01:27:07
Speaker
turned his focus upon the children of the village.
01:27:09
Speaker
He charmed them with his music and led him away into a magical mountainside that swallowed them.
01:27:16
Speaker
They disappeared forever.
01:27:17
Speaker
The community of Hamelin was left to face profound grief, loss, and regret.
01:27:22
Speaker
Wow.
01:27:23
Speaker
So... Very culty.
01:27:25
Speaker
Very culty.
01:27:27
Speaker
This author says, "'The term Pied Piper has become a descriptor for any person who entices and deceives others to follow him or her, especially to their doom.'
01:27:36
Speaker
And as we will show, it's not only the childlike who are seduced by the music of this malevolent type of leader.
01:27:42
Speaker
For more than 30 years, I have studied destructive and apocalyptic cult leaders like Jim Jones, David Koresh, Shoko Asahara, Marshall Applewhite, Charles Manson, and Luke Joray, and Joseph DiMambro.
01:27:58
Speaker
I don't know.
01:27:59
Speaker
I don't know who that is.
01:28:00
Speaker
More cults in the future sometime.
01:28:02
Speaker
Not anytime soon, though.
01:28:04
Speaker
Not soon, though.
01:28:05
Speaker
I'm over it.
01:28:06
Speaker
I'm done.
01:28:06
Speaker
I don't need to hear about cults ever again for a long time.
01:28:09
Speaker
Yeah.
01:28:10
Speaker
Maybe a couple of years.
01:28:12
Speaker
Yeah.
01:28:16
Speaker
These cult leaders, the mesmerizing malignant Pied Pipers of our time, led idealistic, father-hungry, or disillusioned young people away from their homes toward destruction, which was also a conclusion that we were talking about psychologists were making during the time around really craving a father figure in a society that really overvalues...
01:28:38
Speaker
I don't know, the role of men, right?
01:28:42
Speaker
Anyways, and undervalues the role of not men.
01:28:47
Speaker
Having an understanding of cult mentality and the pathological personalities of cult leaders is essential, for there are striking similarities between these deadly leaders.
01:28:56
Speaker
In our newest example...
01:28:58
Speaker
And they talk about Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, which could be conceptualized as a cult.
01:29:06
Speaker
And then it goes on to talk about the death toll.
01:29:07
Speaker
The death toll from Jonestown, the Branch Davidian disaster to Waco and other cults in the last 30 years is horrendous.
01:29:14
Speaker
Estimated death toll altogether, Jim Jones being at the top of Jonestown, 918.
01:29:18
Speaker
Yeah.
01:29:19
Speaker
The total amongst like six cult leaders is 1,168 people.
01:29:26
Speaker
And then he goes on and talks about the narcissism of cult leaders and members.
01:29:30
Speaker
And I'm immediately going back to our episode on Jack Unterweger.
01:29:36
Speaker
where I go into an article about malignant narcissism, and I feel like this is very tied together.
01:29:42
Speaker
Jack Gunter-Waker very well could have been a cult leader, he just wasn't.
01:29:46
Speaker
He was just a serial murderer.
01:29:48
Speaker
But the way he was like, I'm gonna be on TV, be on all this stuff, he's very shoko.
01:29:52
Speaker
It's just that he was enabled for longer because of who he was.
01:29:57
Speaker
So it says,
01:30:18
Speaker
Involved in the psychology and group dynamics of cult leaders and their followers.
01:30:22
Speaker
Psychologically, during childhood or adolescence, these destructive cult leaders all experienced very similar things.
01:30:27
Speaker
He goes on to talk about, like... Attachment ones.
01:30:30
Speaker
Yes, their childhood.
01:30:32
Speaker
And then later...
01:30:34
Speaker
adolescent or young adult dark epiphanies, he calls them, which are like the experiences that echo their past wounds and then catalyze them into their next phase, feeling rejected or abandoned, intensifying what's already kind of like not right there.
01:30:52
Speaker
And then it goes on to say, of course, not every person who experiences traumatic childhood goes on to become a malignant Pied Piper, but every malignant Pied Piper I've studied
01:31:00
Speaker
started life with a love-starved, emotionally-deprived childhood.
01:31:03
Speaker
For a sensitive and vulnerable child with a higher-than-average emotional IQ, which most of the cult leaders seem to have, these childhood wounds become insurmountable.
01:31:12
Speaker
And then he goes on to talk about NPD, which we've already covered before.
01:31:18
Speaker
I'm going to review Malignant Narcissism again because it's been a while.
01:31:22
Speaker
So, as described by Otto Kernberg, who I think coined it, it
01:31:27
Speaker
is characterized by paranoid regressive tendencies with in quotes paranoid micro psychotic episodes which feels right because remember i was like what is the line between these delusions of grandeur and this conspiracy based beliefs yeah between that and like what someone would clinically say is psychosis it feels blurry to me and
01:31:55
Speaker
Like we've said before, most mental health issues do not present in a violent way, and psychosis is included in that.
01:32:02
Speaker
These brief episodes of narcissistic rage involve loss of contact with reality and serve the function of punishing external enemies in order to avoid internal pain, which totally captures...
01:32:14
Speaker
All of these people and arguably all of the serial killers we covered.
01:32:20
Speaker
Yes, 100%.
01:32:21
Speaker
The second is chronic self-destructiveness or suicidal behavior as a triumph over authority figures.
01:32:27
Speaker
The malignant narcissist makes empathetic followers or family feel his own hurt by initially seducing but eventually hurting them.
01:32:35
Speaker
Malignant Pied Pipers do this to their followers and even to their own children.
01:32:39
Speaker
This is a really gendered paper, by the way.
01:32:41
Speaker
And I think the sample is...
01:32:45
Speaker
The sample size is with men, which makes a lot of sense under patriarchy.
01:32:51
Speaker
Number three, major and minor dishonesty.
01:32:55
Speaker
In parentheses, they put psychopathy, but I think that that's an outdated term at this point.
01:32:59
Speaker
Malignant narcissists manipulate and exploit others for profit for their own satisfaction or for imagined glory.
01:33:05
Speaker
And then four, malignant grandiosity with overt sadistic efforts to triumph over all authority.
01:33:11
Speaker
This triumph represents satisfying turning of the tables for malignant narcissists who, for instance, may have been abandoned without remorse by his father.
01:33:20
Speaker
By killing or vanquishing authority, the malignant narcissist feels as though he has achieved revenge against his uncaring father.
01:33:30
Speaker
I'm like, oh, Sigmund Freud would be quite pleased with this.
01:33:35
Speaker
Yes.
01:33:37
Speaker
He has daddy issues.
01:33:38
Speaker
Yes.
01:33:39
Speaker
Extreme daddy issues.
01:33:40
Speaker
Extreme daddy issues.
01:33:41
Speaker
That's the title of the episode.
01:33:43
Speaker
Well, maybe not, because we don't hear about his dad that much.
01:33:48
Speaker
That's a whole other tangent, but why do we fucking gender daddy issues as these self-destructive women when clearly...
01:33:57
Speaker
Dudes have tons of daddy issues, too.
01:33:59
Speaker
They do.
01:34:00
Speaker
And then why is it not the daddy who's the issue?
01:34:03
Speaker
Yeah.
01:34:03
Speaker
I'm sorry.
01:34:04
Speaker
That's true.
01:34:05
Speaker
What the fuck?
01:34:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:34:08
Speaker
Anyways.
01:34:09
Speaker
No one's going up to men being like, you're a daddy issue.
01:34:12
Speaker
Yeah.
01:34:13
Speaker
You're the issue.
01:34:14
Speaker
I have some people.
01:34:15
Speaker
Solve it.
01:34:15
Speaker
I could say that, too.
01:34:17
Speaker
Anyways.
01:34:17
Speaker
Okay.
01:34:17
Speaker
So...
01:34:22
Speaker
Otto Kernberg's delineation of the malignant narcissist tunes into the destructive cult leader, the malignant Pied Piper, in an uncanny way.
01:34:30
Speaker
He says that the malignant narcissist grandiosity and self-pedestalization are reinforced by the sense of triumph over fear and pain through inflicting pain on others, which brings in almost sexual pleasure in this interpersonal process, which also tracks because they always used sex in their cultish behavior.
01:34:49
Speaker
Right.
01:34:50
Speaker
Always.
01:34:50
Speaker
Yeah.
01:34:51
Speaker
Which... We see here, we see it with Charles Manson.
01:34:56
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:34:59
Speaker
And sexual violence being an integral part of the way our society is structured in such conquest.
01:35:05
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:35:06
Speaker
And then he goes on to say, these types of narcissistic personalities exhibit a joyful cruelty.
01:35:11
Speaker
This was particularly true for Charles Manson, that allows them to obtain a sense of superiority and triumph over life and death through their own suffering and that of their chosen followers and victims.
01:35:22
Speaker
Destructive cult leaders invariably are heavily laden with malignant narcissism.
01:35:28
Speaker
And then it quotes Jim Jones talking about talking to the people in his cult that they were stupid piss ants and reptiles who are lower than primates.
01:35:39
Speaker
Oh, my God.
01:35:40
Speaker
He said, you fuckers, I like to look at you now because you don't know how clever I am.
01:35:47
Speaker
In one of his all-night sermons, he said that.
01:35:49
Speaker
So he goes,
01:36:07
Speaker
and co-ordered psychiatric evaluation during his murder trial.
01:36:10
Speaker
But basically, he's had encounters with multiple cult leaders, and then some he learned about them by proxy.
01:36:18
Speaker
But he was like, none of these are going to have meaningful therapeutic contact, and I can't trust what they're saying.
01:36:23
Speaker
There's no effective psychotherapeutic exploration of their personality or their inner conflicts because they will not ever show
01:36:31
Speaker
themselves.
01:36:32
Speaker
Yeah.
01:36:32
Speaker
In that way.
01:36:33
Speaker
In that way.
01:36:34
Speaker
Yeah.
01:36:34
Speaker
Like they're controlling their own image as well.
01:36:37
Speaker
So there's that as a limitation.
01:36:39
Speaker
And then he goes, my conclusion on the diagnosis is that all malignant Pied Pipers in my study have predominant characteristics of NPD and the additional elements of malignant narcissism.
01:36:49
Speaker
I do not quibble with colleagues who favor or add the diagnosis of antisocial or psychopathic personality disorder because there's a lot of evidence to support that idea.
01:36:57
Speaker
Some observers can point to grandiose, paranoid, and delusional qualities in the thinking and teaching of all the malignant Pied Pipers I discuss.
01:37:05
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:37:06
Speaker
And then he was like, I do not deny these phenomenon, but the pattern of severe personality disorder, rather than psychosis, seems to me to be the more enduring diagnostic issue here.
01:37:16
Speaker
People with severe personality disorder, as opposed to anxiety disorders or neurosis, depression, and so on, rarely come to a psychiatrist with their experience of inner pain from guilt and shame.
01:37:27
Speaker
And this is certainly true of malignant Pipers.
01:37:30
Speaker
So this is interesting because...
01:37:33
Speaker
He goes in to talk about cults as like, are all cults bad?
01:37:37
Speaker
Are there some benign?
01:37:38
Speaker
And I was like, all right, let's hear it, sir.
01:37:42
Speaker
There's a triad of cultic relationships, he said, and not just a static definition of what a cult is.
01:37:48
Speaker
And so this definition names three dynamic factors.
01:37:51
Speaker
The origin of the group and role of the leader.
01:37:54
Speaker
Like, what is it?
01:37:55
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:37:56
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:37:57
Speaker
What is the power structure or relationship between the leader and the followers?
01:38:01
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:38:02
Speaker
And is there a use of coordinated program of persuasion called thought reform or brainwashing?
01:38:09
Speaker
And like how many ways can you reshape?
01:38:12
Speaker
the term brainwashing, you know?
01:38:15
Speaker
And then goes into different types, which we're not going to get into, but uses this as a baseline and reference point when he's looking at destructive cults, but also is naming that this researcher helps us avoid demonizing or pathologizing cult leaders or groups.
01:38:34
Speaker
It sounds to me that this person thinks that all religion is a benign cult, or at minimum.
01:38:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:38:41
Speaker
I mean, we talked about that in the Jim Jones episode.
01:38:44
Speaker
We went through definitions of cults versus definitions of religious groups, and there was significant overlap between the two.
01:38:53
Speaker
And I mean, you know, a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about in this episode is, like, extremism using religion as...
Aum Shinrikyo's Militarization and Attacks
01:39:07
Speaker
a justification for violence.
01:39:10
Speaker
And, you know, Al-Qaeda does the same.
01:39:14
Speaker
ISIS does the same.
01:39:18
Speaker
Yes.
01:39:18
Speaker
I mean, even Anne Hamilton Byrne did the same.
01:39:22
Speaker
Maybe Charles Manson didn't, but there's a lot of cults that use religion as a justification for violent behavior.
01:39:30
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:39:32
Speaker
And I mean, even religions that are not classified as cults by the general population use religion to be mostly emotionally violent to people who are, like, they believe are not pure, like, gay people, trans people.
01:39:54
Speaker
I can't think of a cult that doesn't have religious undertones or, like, overtones.
01:40:00
Speaker
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
01:40:02
Speaker
I think that's present in pretty much all of them.
01:40:08
Speaker
It's like the obsession with the absolute truth.
01:40:10
Speaker
Yeah.
01:40:11
Speaker
It's funny because Aum Shin Rukyo means supreme truth.
01:40:20
Speaker
They think they're so clever.
01:40:21
Speaker
It is always just regurgitation of past same shit.
01:40:26
Speaker
Anyway.
01:40:28
Speaker
Chapter four is all about Charles Manson and Shoko Asahara and goes, why include these two malevolent cult leaders in this book?
01:40:35
Speaker
I include them because they each developed a unique apocalyptic scenario, which they use to build their delusional cult group identity and manipulate their followers.
01:40:44
Speaker
They both use their charismatic personality traits and typical malignant Pied Piper indoctrination and mind control techniques to influence and lead their followers toward group homicidal behaviors as opposed to group suicide.
01:40:55
Speaker
And then he goes, I think both of these men could have been spotted early on, which we've already talked about.
01:41:01
Speaker
And then we can see the way power and control in that way is like...
01:41:06
Speaker
Doesn't happen in vacuum, right?
01:41:07
Speaker
Yeah.
01:41:08
Speaker
It's like shaped by our conditions.
01:41:10
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:41:11
Speaker
So anyways, I just thought it was an interesting take.
01:41:13
Speaker
I had never heard of the term malignant pied pipers.
01:41:16
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:41:16
Speaker
And I think it speaks to a very particular storyline that gets recycled and recycled and recycled and shows up in different ways even though people... Yeah.
01:41:25
Speaker
Even if they don't have a direct, like, knowing.
01:41:28
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:41:29
Speaker
of it or all of the ways that it shows up in all these other cults but still the same patterns arise and so I'm just like if that's so natural and intrinsic to you like not just like you gaining power and control through like external like pushing your like internal pain out but like in doing that are able to like easily generate these patterns of power and control tell us a lot about
01:41:59
Speaker
how we're just naturally socialized to normalize these kinds of behaviors and be able to use them accordingly.
01:42:06
Speaker
And in these cases, they use them in a really horrifying way.
01:42:13
Speaker
So I'll stop there.
01:42:16
Speaker
Thanks for sharing.
01:42:18
Speaker
Yeah.
01:42:19
Speaker
Okay.
01:42:20
Speaker
So back to 1993.
01:42:29
Speaker
So they just did the whole thing where they try to cause an anthrax epidemic, but it fails, and you told a funny story about the stinky odor Chanel No.
01:42:40
Speaker
5.
01:42:40
Speaker
At this point in time, they also start producing sarin.
01:42:44
Speaker
They had built a automated plant to mass produce sarin, which is actually was used in World War II by the Nazis.
01:42:53
Speaker
And then Frank Olson in CIA.
01:42:55
Speaker
Yeah, the Frank Olson in CIA.
01:42:56
Speaker
We talked about that in the MKUltra episode.
01:43:00
Speaker
They also were working on creating mustard gas, VX, and other kinds of chemical killers.
01:43:06
Speaker
They actually tested sarin on sheep in a property they had in Western Australia.
01:43:11
Speaker
And I'm like, rip to those sheep.
01:43:14
Speaker
poor sheep.
01:43:18
Speaker
Anyways, all of this work and all of this like militarization that I was talking about earlier as well is supposedly to help them survive the apocalypse.
01:43:30
Speaker
Okay.
01:43:30
Speaker
In June, 1994, they engage in their first chemical attack against civilians.
01:43:37
Speaker
They released sarin in the city of Matsumoto Nagano and
01:43:42
Speaker
They did this by releasing a cloud of it from a refrigerator truck, and they were driving by near the homes of judges who were overseeing real estate-related lawsuits against them.
01:43:58
Speaker
This attack killed eight people and harmed over 500 people.
01:44:02
Speaker
And sadly, the police investigations focused on an innocent local resident, Yoshiyuki Tadokuro.
01:44:10
Speaker
Kouno, and failed to implicate the cult.
01:44:12
Speaker
At the time, it was only after the subway attack.
01:44:15
Speaker
They were like, oh, must have been them too.
01:44:18
Speaker
This poor dude.
01:44:20
Speaker
It's the end of 94.
01:44:21
Speaker
They tried to steal military weapons, such as tanks and artillery from the Hiroshima factory of Mitsubishi.
01:44:28
Speaker
Chaos.
01:44:29
Speaker
Wow.
01:44:33
Speaker
Okay, in December 94, January 95, one of their scientists synthesizes 100 to 200 grams of VX, which is also a nerve agent, which was used to attack three people.
01:44:45
Speaker
Two people were injured and a 28-year-old man was killed.
01:44:49
Speaker
He's believed to be the first fully documented victim of VX as a nerve agent.
01:44:54
Speaker
He was suspected to be a spy by Shoko, which is why he was attacked.
01:44:58
Speaker
He died 10 days later after going into a coma right after they had sprinkled a nerve agent on his neck.
01:45:07
Speaker
And again, the cause of the death was only pinned down after the subway attack.
01:45:12
Speaker
So then February of 95, the 69 year old brother of a member who had escaped was kidnapped, taken to a compound near Mount Fuji and killed, Kiyoshi Kariya.
01:45:22
Speaker
His corpse was destroyed in a microwave powered incinerator and his remnants was disposed in a lake.
01:45:30
Speaker
microwave yeah and before he was abducted he had been receiving threatening phone calls demanding to know where his sister was and he left a note saying if i disappear i was abducted by om shinrikyo oh fuck it's like a movie plot it is this poor man r.i.p okay so by this point i guess the police have some kind of idea that they're like engaging in violent behaviors and
01:45:57
Speaker
So they had plans to raid the facilities, but because there were members of the police who were members of the cult, they were tipped off.
01:46:08
Speaker
And rumor has it that Shoko Asahara planned the Tokyo subway attack to divert the police's attention away from the cult.
01:46:20
Speaker
I see.
01:46:22
Speaker
It's March 1995.
01:46:25
Speaker
By this point, they've accumulated enough chemicals to make sarin gas that would kill millions of people.
01:46:33
Speaker
Wild.
01:46:34
Speaker
He assigns people to plan the attack.
01:46:36
Speaker
Of course, one of them is the dude that I was talking about earlier who seems to love doing chaotic shit, which is Hideo Murai, the astrophysicist.
01:46:48
Speaker
He's assigned as the supervisor of this whole thing.
01:46:51
Speaker
And then Kuo Hayashi, the dude who was doing those experiments.
01:46:55
Speaker
Tomomasa Nakagawa, who is Asara's personal doctor.
01:46:59
Speaker
Seichi Endo, who is the health and welfare minister of Aum.
01:47:04
Speaker
So basically they had a whole structure that was built like the government.
01:47:08
Speaker
So they had the Ministry of X and they had leaders for each of them.
01:47:11
Speaker
They had tons of different ministries.
01:47:15
Speaker
Yeah, they had like Ministry of Commerce, Ministry of Construction, Ministry of Healing.
01:47:19
Speaker
The ministry that was led, headed by Hideo Mourai was the Ministry of Science and Technology.
01:47:27
Speaker
And they were the main perpetrators of all of this shit, essentially.
01:47:34
Speaker
So on the 20th of March, 1995, at around 3 a.m., the five people who had been assigned to carry out the attack
01:47:45
Speaker
met up to do like a rehearsal of like, okay, we're going to get these bags and then we're going to puncture them.
01:47:52
Speaker
And so they practiced.
01:47:55
Speaker
And then I'm going to read from a review of Haruki Murakami's Underground because I feel like it does a good job of summarizing what happened.
01:48:04
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:48:05
Speaker
Over 20 times as powerful as cyanide, a drop the size of a pinhead can kill an adult.
01:48:11
Speaker
Sarin was invented by German scientists in World War II and was later used by Iraq against Iran and the Kurds.
01:48:19
Speaker
On that deadly Monday morning in Tokyo, the perpetrators, who I will name, Ikuo Hayashi, Kenichi Hirose, Toru Toyoda, Masato Yokoyama, Yasuo Hayashi,
01:48:33
Speaker
And then the getaway drivers were Tomomitsu Nimi, Koichi Kitamaru, Katsuya Takahashi, Kiyotaka Tonezaki, and Shigiyo Sugimoto.
01:48:43
Speaker
Armed with plastic bags of sarin wrapped in newspapers, went on to prearranged trains during rush hour.
01:48:51
Speaker
And the Tokyo subway is one of the world's busiest commuter systems, so keep that in mind.
01:48:58
Speaker
And it's like 7am on a Monday.
01:49:02
Speaker
Think about yourself also just like getting on the train 7 a.m.
01:49:06
Speaker
on a Monday.
01:49:07
Speaker
Probably already just like, lard.
01:49:10
Speaker
And then they release sarin by poking the bags with a pointed end of the umbrella and then they all just like get off the trains.
01:49:18
Speaker
Once the gas was released, they would flee and meet up with the designated getaway drivers.
01:49:24
Speaker
So here are some stories.
01:49:26
Speaker
Traveling to work as usual that Monday, Kiyoka Izumi, a 26-year-old PR worker for an airline,
01:49:32
Speaker
suddenly started to have trouble breathing.
01:49:34
Speaker
People around her were coughing, yet at first none of them had any idea anything unusual was happening.
01:49:40
Speaker
But when she got to the station, the alarm was going off and there were obviously sick people all around her.
01:49:46
Speaker
Having had some emergency straining, she started to help, but soon felt so ill that she was taken to the hospital.
01:49:52
Speaker
A cough and high temperature lingered for weeks, but she eventually recovered.
01:49:56
Speaker
So scary.
01:50:13
Speaker
really almost immediately and they had no idea what was going on too so like some of the bags were like noticed and taken off of the trains and cleaned up but there was still like residue left on the trains and so the trains were still running they thought it was an explosion at one point one of the trains they didn't even notice the bag for a little while and
01:50:38
Speaker
It was very chaotic.
01:50:39
Speaker
So it says, initially there was much confusion.
01:50:41
Speaker
One of the trains on the Marunouchi line was allowed to continue on its route for an hour and 40 minutes after the sarin packet was punctured.
01:50:51
Speaker
Ultimately, some 200 on that train alone were being affected.
01:50:55
Speaker
Word was slowly getting out and nearby hospitals were not prepared.
01:50:58
Speaker
They were soon overrun and most did not know how to treat sarin.
01:51:02
Speaker
Assistant Station Master Isho Takahashi of Kasumi-Gaseki Station tried to clean up the sarin-soaked newspapers and plastic bags before the contents were known.
01:51:14
Speaker
As he and a co-worker, Toshiaki Toyoda, were cleaning, they quickly showed symptoms.
01:51:19
Speaker
Takahashi later died.
01:51:21
Speaker
Toyoda recovered but suffered from sudden unexplained outbreaks of anger.
01:51:26
Speaker
For months afterward, many of the victims would experience nausea or be overcome by headaches and fatigue.
01:51:33
Speaker
Short-term and long-term memory loss was common.
01:51:35
Speaker
People couldn't sleep or many experienced repeated nightmares.
01:51:39
Speaker
Many of the victims complained about the lack of interest from people around them.
01:51:43
Speaker
Mitsuo Arima, a 41-year-old who works for a cosmetics company, put it this way with disarming honesty.
01:51:50
Speaker
Oddly enough, I didn't feel any sense of crisis.
01:51:53
Speaker
My reaction was, well, I'm okay.
01:51:56
Speaker
I'd been right at the epicenter, but instead of shuddering at the death,
01:52:00
Speaker
I felt like I was watching a TV program as if it was somebody else's problem.
01:52:04
Speaker
If someone had fallen down right in front of me, I like to have think I'd helped.
01:52:08
Speaker
But what if they fell 50 yards away?
01:52:10
Speaker
Would I go out of my way to help?
01:52:12
Speaker
I wonder.
01:52:13
Speaker
I might have seen it as somebody else's business and walked on by.
01:52:17
Speaker
If I'd gotten involved, I'd have been late to work.
01:52:20
Speaker
And then there are some stories in the book about people literally feeling so sick and then going to work and then staying at work the entire day.
01:52:27
Speaker
Oh, man.
01:52:28
Speaker
Yeah.
01:52:29
Speaker
This is all.
01:52:31
Speaker
It's very, very chaotic.
01:52:34
Speaker
688 people were transported to hospitals and ambulance.
01:52:36
Speaker
More than 5,000 people were affected.
01:52:38
Speaker
12 people were killed and over 1,000 were injured.
01:52:42
Speaker
There was a shortage of sarin antidotes and they had to be delivered from rural hospitals.
01:52:47
Speaker
Oh my God.
01:52:48
Speaker
Yeah.
01:52:51
Speaker
And the Metro canceled all service for the affected lines for the rest of that day.
01:52:55
Speaker
Shoko, the fucker, praised followers who carried out the attack, welcoming them back with sweet rice cakes and juice.
01:53:03
Speaker
He told them, meditate and chant 10,000 times the phrase, this is good with the blessing of the guru, the great god Shiva.
01:53:11
Speaker
Shiva is like...
01:53:13
Speaker
not supporting of this and then he also said trust the ministry of science and technology to get the job done and then he was talking about how he was like astral projecting to make sure that they were all like doing their job correctly or some shit i found this research article that actually came out in 2020 it's called the tokyo subway sarin attack has long-term effects on survivors a 10-year study started five years after the terrorist incident
01:53:45
Speaker
And conclusions of that study, they analyzed subjective symptoms of 747 victims, corresponding to about 12% of the people affected.
01:53:59
Speaker
In the case of the Tokyo attack, they say symptoms in most victims reportedly disappeared after one month.
01:54:05
Speaker
However, their study revealed high percentages of symptoms such as fatigability of eyes,
01:54:12
Speaker
Blurred vision, difficulty in seeing far and nearby, difficulty in focusing that persisted even 5 to 14 years after the attack.
01:54:21
Speaker
The prevalence of it did not decrease over this period of time.
01:54:24
Speaker
There was other physical symptoms that were reported by other studies, like eye movement disorder, reduced accommodation ability.
01:54:34
Speaker
And the results suggest that serin toxicity can cause long-lasting eye symptoms, which, that sucks.
01:54:41
Speaker
Damn.
01:54:41
Speaker
In regards to some... That is so ironic.
01:54:45
Speaker
Oh my god, it is!
01:54:47
Speaker
It is.
01:54:48
Speaker
Did he do that on purpose?
01:54:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking now.
01:54:52
Speaker
Wow, like if he chose it on purpose, it's like, oh, I'm partially blind?
01:54:57
Speaker
Everyone has to be partially blind too.
01:55:00
Speaker
Yeah.
01:55:00
Speaker
Dang.
01:55:02
Speaker
What a POS.
01:55:04
Speaker
In regards to other somatic symptoms, tiredness, headaches, dizziness were reported by a large percentage of subjects.
01:55:13
Speaker
Some people started experiencing numbness in certain limbs after like 12 years.
01:55:20
Speaker
About 40% of the subjects reported that.
01:55:22
Speaker
Yeah.
01:55:23
Speaker
And there was also other kind of like neuropathy symptoms that they found.
01:55:26
Speaker
And this is like, yeah, like 10 years after the attack or even longer.
01:55:30
Speaker
In regards to psychological symptoms, the rates of recollections of the event, fear of places related to the event remained at around 40% over 10 years.
01:55:40
Speaker
Insomnia, complaints, restlessness, and irritability, forgetfulness were also common that arose over the attack.
01:55:48
Speaker
The prevalence of like PTSD and they use the post-traumatic stress response scale for that.
01:55:55
Speaker
And they found that it was 35.1 percent and there was no change over like the 10 years that they studied.
01:56:02
Speaker
It just stayed the same.
01:56:04
Speaker
They also say.
01:56:06
Speaker
that this incident is the only case in which civilians have been exposed to sarin.
01:56:11
Speaker
However, in a military context, soldiers in the Gulf War in the 90s were also exposed to sarin, and veterans complained of multiple health disorders for a long period afterward, consistent with the results of the study.
01:56:23
Speaker
This article was published in 2020, and people who literally were just going to work on a Monday morning, not thinking about anything,
01:56:37
Speaker
are still feeling the impacts of it so many years later okay you know what i'm also thinking about how like clearly he's like very politically attuned and it reminds me of how japan consistently like started asserting themselves as like
01:56:58
Speaker
Oh, so cute.
01:56:59
Speaker
You know, we're so soft.
01:57:00
Speaker
We're so cute.
01:57:01
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:57:02
Speaker
After they... Kawaii.
01:57:03
Speaker
Yes, kawaii culture.
01:57:06
Speaker
After they straight up were the... Like, had the Imperial Japanese Army, you know, and partnered with Germany during Hitler times.
01:57:14
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:57:15
Speaker
And then after that, like...
01:57:17
Speaker
kind of their power was taken from them because of the u.s and so they didn't have access to the things that they needed to be that way but um now they're trying to assert themselves as a soft military power and they're doing that by like trying to put embassies all over the globe they're also trying to control the narrative around comfort stations and so like countries who had put up like
01:57:40
Speaker
statues honoring comfort women they were like well if you want your sister city then you're gonna have to take that down you're disparaging Japan and so I'm thinking a lot about Shoko's propaganda and his like manga anime yeah right like very true another thing that I'll say is like I read a lot about
01:58:11
Speaker
like Haruki Murakami did a lot of research for this and the, there's a chapter for each one of the trains that this happened on with like really long descriptions that are taken from probably trial testimonials of the people who are perpetrators.
01:58:30
Speaker
I just didn't really want to send her their stories because a lot of them, even though they were saying, oh, they were like facing resistance, but they did it anyway.
01:58:39
Speaker
Like,
01:58:40
Speaker
I just didn't want that to be the center of this, but if you're curious, you can look that up yourself.
01:58:48
Speaker
Did he bring all the cult members that were with him on these trains, or did he select specific ones?
01:58:54
Speaker
He selected five specific people.
01:58:56
Speaker
That's right.
01:58:57
Speaker
Yeah, and then they had five getaway drivers.
01:58:59
Speaker
Okay.
01:59:00
Speaker
He was not there.
01:59:00
Speaker
Because Charles Manson did the same thing.
01:59:02
Speaker
Yeah.
01:59:03
Speaker
He wasn't there.
01:59:04
Speaker
He was there to meet them afterwards.
01:59:07
Speaker
And then he would test them.
01:59:10
Speaker
Could you be like me?
01:59:11
Speaker
Are you crazy like me?
01:59:13
Speaker
And similarly, I think his whole, oh, well, you are joining this cult.
01:59:19
Speaker
And he didn't call it cult, but you're joining our group, our family.
01:59:23
Speaker
All of them also seemed to think that they had to do this together.
01:59:26
Speaker
for whatever belief that they had.
01:59:29
Speaker
Yes.
01:59:29
Speaker
They were like, I'm doing this for the Mahamudra, whatever the heck that means to them.
01:59:36
Speaker
Because a lot of them were like facing resistance because it like one of them was like, oh, I saw this mom and this like little girl.
01:59:43
Speaker
And I was like, I don't want to do this.
01:59:47
Speaker
But then it's like, I can't let everyone else down.
01:59:50
Speaker
Does it anyway?
01:59:51
Speaker
How old were all of them?
01:59:54
Speaker
Were some of them the teenagers?
01:59:55
Speaker
Yeah.
01:59:56
Speaker
No, I think they were in their 20s and 30s, so they weren't like older, but they weren't teenagers.
02:00:04
Speaker
What happened after?
02:00:05
Speaker
As the police began their investigation into the attack, they quickly began making the connections between this attack and earlier incidents that...
Aftermath and Legacy of Aum Shinrikyo
02:00:19
Speaker
you know, people were complaining about, like, the anthrax thing, and were suspicious of Aum Shinrikyo.
02:00:25
Speaker
And then two days after the incident, the police had a raid on the Aum offices in Tokyo and its laboratory headquarters in Kamikuishiki, I think.
02:00:37
Speaker
Anyways.
02:00:37
Speaker
And then one of, like, the big clues about where these were located, or at least where the lab was, was the sect members continued to buy really expensive melons,
02:00:49
Speaker
that he really loved, and no one else in the sect was entitled to have these melons.
02:00:53
Speaker
But they were easily followed because it was such a specific ask, and they kept doing it anyway.
02:01:00
Speaker
And when the police got there, the training compound in the village, they found 50 people in an advanced state of malnutrition and dehydration, and some were barely dead.
02:01:12
Speaker
conscious and the authorities were like what the fuck yeah and arrested four doctors who were there on charges of imprisoning other people the followers remained in the chapel and refused medical attention my goodness they're still like committed to this narrative which is so wild like where is your brain yeah have to be anywho eventually they they apprehended what's his face chizuo yeah shoko and
02:01:39
Speaker
And he was sentenced to death in 2004.
02:01:42
Speaker
His final appeal failed in 2011.
02:01:45
Speaker
In June 2012, his execution was postponed due to further arrests of OM members.
02:01:50
Speaker
And he was ultimately executed on July 6th of 2018.
02:01:54
Speaker
Yep.
02:01:54
Speaker
Yeah, the capital punishment in Japan is usually applied for aggravated murder, treason, and military insubordination.
02:02:05
Speaker
And their executions are by hanging.
02:02:08
Speaker
So there's that.
02:02:11
Speaker
Since 2118 people have been executed in Japan.
02:02:14
Speaker
13 people who were part of the OM cult, including Asahara, were executed in July of 2018.
02:02:21
Speaker
Seven of them on the 6th of July.
02:02:23
Speaker
And...
02:02:26
Speaker
six of them on the 26th of July.
02:02:29
Speaker
There was one person who was not executed and is serving a life sentence.
02:02:35
Speaker
I think it's Ikuo Hayashi, who is the doctor.
02:02:40
Speaker
And it was like, I think because he was like,
02:02:44
Speaker
remorseful and like cooperative in some way anyways he's the only person that didn't get executed but he's serving a life sentence chizue takahashi um whose husband was a subway worker that died after removing one of the sarin packages said i think it's right he was executed my husband's parents and my parents are already dead i think they would find it regrettable that they could not have heard the news of this execution kiyo iwata whose daughter died in the attack
02:03:13
Speaker
said the news had given her peace of mind.
02:03:16
Speaker
She said, I have always been wondering why it had to be my daughter and why she was killed.
02:03:21
Speaker
Now I can visit her grave and tell her this news.
02:03:24
Speaker
Mr. Asahara's fourth daughter, who said she was abused by her parents and wished to have no relationship with them, said last year that she was at peace with her father's sentence.
02:03:35
Speaker
She said, I don't wish for his execution and never said so.
02:03:38
Speaker
But given the weight of the crimes my father committed, there is no other way to take responsibility except carrying out the death penalty.
02:03:46
Speaker
It's fair and the sentence should be carried out.
02:03:48
Speaker
On New Year's Day 2019, at midnight, nine people were injured when a car was deliberately driven into the crowds celebrating New Year in Tokyo.
02:04:00
Speaker
And this dude, Kazuhiro Kusakabe, was arrested, and he admitted that he was intentionally trying to do that to protest his opposition to the death penalty, specifically in retaliation for the execution of the OM cult members.
02:04:19
Speaker
Oh, that's another thing where they'll like the right wing.
02:04:24
Speaker
Yeah.
02:04:24
Speaker
People will take that and twist it and be like.
02:04:27
Speaker
this is the future liberals want.
02:04:29
Speaker
Yeah.
02:04:30
Speaker
Seriously.
02:04:32
Speaker
Anyway, I'm not going to share a ton about it, but there is a version of the cult that still exists today.
02:04:38
Speaker
They changed their name to Aleph and Shoko's preteen son replaced him as the leader.
02:04:46
Speaker
They apologized for attack.
02:04:47
Speaker
They established a victim compensation fund and they took out a bunch of their like doomsday doctrines.
02:04:53
Speaker
Right.
02:04:55
Speaker
Then later on, they split into two different groups.
02:04:58
Speaker
They have been designated as a terrorist organization by many countries.
02:05:03
Speaker
It was a terrorist organization in the U.S. till this year, when the State Department determined that they were no longer doing anything.
02:05:11
Speaker
And they were under surveillance by the Japanese government for a long time.
02:05:16
Speaker
I think they still might be...
02:05:18
Speaker
But they've also been investigated by Russia in 2016.
02:05:23
Speaker
And they were raided in Japan in 2017 as well.
02:05:28
Speaker
So throughout this episode, I've been talking about Murakami's book, Underground.
02:05:34
Speaker
And I just want to highlight it.
02:05:36
Speaker
It's how I learned about this case several years ago.
02:05:40
Speaker
I had never heard about it before.
02:05:42
Speaker
And I'm just a fan of Murakami's fiction.
02:05:45
Speaker
But this is a nonfiction book that he wrote.
02:05:48
Speaker
And he says, the Japanese media had bombarded us with so many in-depth profiles of the OM cult perpetrators, the attackers, forming such a slick, seductive narrative, that the average citizen, the victim, was an afterthought, which is why I wanted, if at all possible, to get away from any formula.
02:06:07
Speaker
to recognize that each person on the subway that morning had a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions, and dilemmas, and that all these factors had a place in the drama.
02:06:19
Speaker
Furthermore, I had a hunch that we needed to see a true picture of all the survivors, whether they were severely traumatized or not, in order to better grasp the whole incident.
02:06:29
Speaker
So that was in the preface of the book.
02:06:32
Speaker
He was able to systematically track down 140 survivors,
02:06:36
Speaker
Only 40% of whom were interviewed because many simply wanted to forget about it or were afraid of retribution from the cult members.
02:06:46
Speaker
Yeah.
02:06:47
Speaker
Most profiles take the same shape.
02:06:48
Speaker
There's a short biographical sketch that he writes followed by a description.
02:06:53
Speaker
of the person's normal day-to-day routine, details of what happened that day, any long-term effects they experienced, and occasional remarks on what they thought about it, and also what in Japanese society specifically or humankind generally could have led to an event like this.
02:07:10
Speaker
I quoted some stuff from the book and I shared some stories from the book, but I would highly recommend that you check it out yourself because each chapter is like so full and detailed that you get a picture of like each person that he interviewed.
02:07:26
Speaker
And then the second half of the book, he actually interviews people who were members of the OM cult as well.
02:07:34
Speaker
No one who was involved in the attacks, but
02:07:36
Speaker
but other members, some of whom I have mentioned earlier.
02:07:40
Speaker
But it's a really cool book, and I really like how it centers the survivors of the attack rather than the perpetrators, and also is kind of an investigation on Japanese culture and the Japanese culture.
02:07:54
Speaker
psyche and how that is tied into both the cult and the attack.
02:08:00
Speaker
He felt the need to write this book because he had spent a lot of time in the US for school and he had just returned to Japan when this happened and so it was a way for him to also reconnect with his community.
02:08:17
Speaker
Yeah.
02:08:19
Speaker
So that's that book.
02:08:20
Speaker
Thank you for sharing.
02:08:22
Speaker
So one of the chapters in Underground is an interview of Dr. Yanagisawa Nobuo.
02:08:30
Speaker
And he wasn't present at the Tokyo gas attack, but he was a huge part of helping many of the people that were harmed in the Matsumoto incident, which was the year before.
02:08:44
Speaker
And he said, the biggest lesson we learned from the Tokyo gas attack and the Matsumoto incident was that when something major strikes on
02:08:51
Speaker
The local units may be extremely swift to respond, but the overall picture is hopeless.
02:08:56
Speaker
There is no prompt and efficient system in Japan for dealing with a major catastrophe.
02:09:01
Speaker
There is no clear cut chain of command.
02:09:03
Speaker
It was exactly the same with the Kobe earthquake.
02:09:06
Speaker
In both incidents, I think medical organization responded extremely well.
02:09:11
Speaker
The paramedics were also on top of things.
02:09:13
Speaker
They deserve praise.
02:09:15
Speaker
As one American expert said, to have 5,000 sarin gas victims and only 12 dead is a miracle.
02:09:21
Speaker
All thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the local units, because the overall emergency network was useless.
02:09:27
Speaker
To be perfectly honest, the way things are with us doctors in Japan, it's almost unthinkable that any doctor would go out of his way to send unsolicited information to a hospital, which is what he did, because he heard...
02:09:40
Speaker
from someone about 9am that something weird had happened in Tokyo and he had just finished writing a report about the Matsumoto incident and so he sent the report to all these doctors at the hospitals which is why so many people were able to be saved so it was just like kind of like a luck thing.
02:09:58
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
02:09:59
Speaker
He said, but with a gas attack, I had other motives too.
02:10:02
Speaker
One of the seven people who died in the Matsumoto incident was a medical student here at Shinshu University.
02:10:08
Speaker
Someone who's extremely bright, who by rights ought to have been at that day's graduation ceremony.
02:10:14
Speaker
So...
02:10:16
Speaker
There's a reason that a lot of people survived, and that's because of the paramedics, that's because of two station attendants who passed away cleaning up, and not the police and emergency system.
02:10:37
Speaker
Okay, so last thing, I've been talking a lot about this podcast series, Before After Aum, and it's a 15-part series.
02:10:48
Speaker
You think this shit's long?
02:10:49
Speaker
It's a 15-part series with a survivor of the attack, Atsushi Sakahara, and it's like a back-and-forth kind of interview, but also storytelling about how the cult came to be and so on and so forth.
02:11:03
Speaker
And it's going to be turned into a documentary, or was turned into a documentary,
02:11:07
Speaker
His experience.
02:11:09
Speaker
Yeah, there's a substack, aganai.substack.com, A-G-A-N-A-I.substack.com, that has all of the episodes, a little bit of backstory, and a bit about the documentary.
02:11:24
Speaker
The documentary is not readily available to the public right now, but probably sometime in the next few years it will be, because it just came out last year.
02:11:34
Speaker
Cool.
02:11:35
Speaker
Well...
02:11:39
Speaker
That's all for today.
02:11:41
Speaker
I'm extremely exhausted by this story.
02:11:43
Speaker
Yes, I'm over it.
02:11:45
Speaker
Yeah, I'm over it.
02:11:47
Speaker
And this is the end of our series.
02:11:49
Speaker
We did it.
02:11:49
Speaker
We made it.
02:11:52
Speaker
We started in June.
02:11:53
Speaker
Wow.
02:11:54
Speaker
So...
02:11:56
Speaker
We're probably going to be taking a little break from long episodes after this.
02:12:02
Speaker
Yeah, maybe some mini-sodes.
02:12:03
Speaker
Some mini-sodes.
02:12:05
Speaker
So if there's silence on our end, you know that we're just exhausted by the psychedelic nightmare.
02:12:11
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
02:12:13
Speaker
So we hope you enjoyed it though.
02:12:15
Speaker
Yes.
02:12:15
Speaker
And learned a lot.
02:12:16
Speaker
Yes.
02:12:17
Speaker
Maybe enjoy is the wrong word.
02:12:18
Speaker
Hope you learned a lot.
02:12:21
Speaker
I know too much about cults.
02:12:23
Speaker
Which is good because then you won't accidentally join one.
02:12:27
Speaker
It's not that hard to accidentally join a cult.
02:12:30
Speaker
It's true.
02:12:31
Speaker
So just keep those traits in mind.
02:12:42
Speaker
Thanks for listening and for supporting us.
02:12:45
Speaker
You can find us on Instagram and Facebook at Unpacking the Eerie, on Twitter at Unpack the Eerie, and on our website at www.unpackingtheerie.com.
02:12:57
Speaker
Yes, and special thanks to all of you who subscribe to our Patreon.
02:13:02
Speaker
As we've mentioned before, we do all the research for this, we edit, and we don't have any sponsorships or ads.
02:13:11
Speaker
So Patreon support is super helpful in just keeping this project sustainable, keeping the Buzzsprout subscription going, paying for the website, all the stuff.
02:13:21
Speaker
So thank you so much.
02:13:23
Speaker
Sari, Liz, Clifton.
02:13:26
Speaker
Jill, Victoria, and Lindsay.
02:13:28
Speaker
Lauren, Vivian, Valerie.
02:13:30
Speaker
Micheline, Montana, Katrina.
02:13:32
Speaker
Raina, Allie, Jake.
02:13:34
Speaker
Drithi, Daphne, and Katie.
02:13:37
Speaker
Vern, Meredith, H, and Vince.
02:13:40
Speaker
To April, Aaron, and Ellen.
02:13:42
Speaker
And to Brittany, Alyssa, and Meredith R. Yay, thank you so much.
02:13:47
Speaker
Thank you.