Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowThe Terrifying Tale of Aum Shinrikyo, Chapter Two: "Save The World By Ending It"
As the Aum Shinrikyo movements gains national, then global, attention, the founder Shoko Asahara begins to move his followers in a darker direction. Convinced that the world can only truly be saved through mass casualty events, Asahara first predicts massive disasters -- and then orders his followers to create these events themselves. In chapter two of this strange two-part series, Ben and Matt learn how Aum committed multiple acts of terror, murder, extortion and fraud leading up to their infamous sarin attacks on the Tokyo subway... and what happened to the cult in the aftermath.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt. Our colleague Nol is still on an adventure.
But will be returning suit They called me Ben. We're joined with our guest super producer, Gnomes Griffith. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. This is a little bit of an unusual case for us. We're spending the entire week on the notorious infamous death cult Aum Shinrico. So, Matt, what do you say we get that with the housekeeping Listen to part one. Okay, we got to say that part, and then let's just dive in media arrests.
Oh yeah, we already got past all the part where it was a nice, a nice spiritual movement and now we're into full apocalyptic mode. Let's go. So we've got all of this propaganda coming out really pushing hard that this dude Choco a Sahara has some kind of powers, maybe, like is he is so special? And has all these things that even the fluids that come out of his body are special enough that you probably want them. You actually you know what, you need them?
Yeah, and you can have them if you pay for it, right, And these are pretty pricey, but what what isn't worth superpowers? Don't you want to be able to tell the future? Would you like to fly or maybe float a little bit?
Uh?
Well, well, let's let's talk about what these things were, because I've heard rumors. Some of it comes directly from followers, their like quotations, and some of it's honestly hard to believe at times. But we've seen instances of this in the past. There's I believe this thing where you could pay a certain amount of money and you would get his bathwater.
Yeah, very e girl. Find Yeah, who's that act?
There's an actor who just Sweeney. Something Sidney Sweeney just just released and I think a joke way we talked about it on the show.
It was a soap with her bathwater, right.
Yes, yes, or soap made with her bathwater as a part of the thing, you know, because it's special, and that crap sold out immediately. And just imagine it's a spiritual leader that you really do personally look up to you're getting his bath water. There's other fluids. I know. There was at least one person who said they took part in a blood ritual where they ingested what was supposedly the blood of Asahara.
Yeah, we saw that as well. The idea being that this consumption of these it's similar to the idea of imbuing intension and things or some other factors and some pseudo medicinal practices. The concept is that this guy is so powerful, emanates such divine ability that by consuming things associated with him, you are ingesting also some very small portion of his powers.
Yeah, right, and you and everybody goes, oh god, that's gross, and then wait, oh, think about what's the last time you took communion. You're supposedly eating the blood and body of Jesus Christ every time you.
Do that, especially if you practice if you're in a denomination that practices transubstantiation. Right, yeah, not that, not that weak middle of the road stuff where it's supposed to be symbolic. If you're in a denomination that does practice symbolic cannibalism, then let's hesitate to throw some stones.
It's it's weirder than you will let yourself believe. Hearing us talk about it right now, it's weirder than that.
Yeah, check out, check it out, you know what I mean? Just you know what, whatever your visive choice is, makes some make some nice tea, get a stiff drink if that's your jam, Like, Matt, what you got? You got a month Celtius Celsius, Papa Celsius, and then be prepared to lose the afternoon, because this is hectic. This is where we're heading into the darker territory. By this point, outsiders are getting worried, right, where's our daughter? Where's our son? You know what happened to my sibling? The support of followers from the upper class, and the infiltration of those institutions by OHM. As you mentioned, Matt, this provides a certain degree of indemnity, but that is an envelope that can only be pushed so far. Family members are going to the authorities, you know, help us find our kid? Right, where's Toshi? They are also sharing and encountering rumors. Were spreads of these increasingly bizarre practices that start to echo some of the stuff from other Western organizations like the Manson family. Rumors of kidnapping, extortion, torturous marathon, initiation rights. This is a very Manson part with physical abuse and forced ingestion of hallucinogens right where people can really get under the hood of your mind and tinker with your cognitive functions ego death kind of stuff.
Oh yeah, there's a full length documentary you can wash right now that came out in twenty twenty three. It's titled A U m On colon The Cult at the End of the World. Highly recommend that you can watch a trailer or I think you find it on YouTube right now? Yea rent it?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And there are there's a there are another couple of great documentaries about this that dwell maybe a little bit less on the context we're establishing and a little bit more on the events that made this cult known to the world's entire Yes.
Absolutely. Inside the Endeavor documentary, they describe one of the practices of putting devotees inside a box inside a hollowed out hill. Oh yeah, and like a box that has just enough oxygen to keep multiple people alive for an extended amount of time and zero light. So the idea is you put your followers in there and they go into a state of meditation of some sort, and they endure all of that as a show of faith, as a show of they're essentially at their abilities to withstand all kinds of stuff and discomfort.
Yeah, it's kind of a symbolic rebirth as well.
Oh yeah, it was very intense. It did remind me of some of the scientology like punishments that would happen at Sea Org that we talked about. And there's some other thing. Did you hear about one particular person who was made to be tied up upside down? Yes, yeah, for an extended period of time, and then allegedly, you know, some of the followers said, hey, he doesn't look good. Something's wrong. We need to get him down, and then the leader said, no, this is you know, this is his test. He has to do this, and he ended up passing away.
Yeah, these torturous initiation rights did result in a couple of deaths, even now we're not sure how many because then this is where again, this is the part of the ride in this series where our little roller coaster car starts coasting into the darkness. We're going into the tunnel. Now, we're going into the Mountain. It's mid nineteen eighty nine. These rumors are increasingly credible. There's a guy named Sakamoto Sutsumi. He is a lawyer from Yokohama, and he is getting a lot of complaints from separate families but also groups of concerned parents of all members. These families have connected right of it, similar to evaluating a class action lawsuit. Right. They want to take collective action, and so Sakamoto leads an investigation into the group.
I think private detectives that kind of thing.
Yeah, gumshoe stuff, right, And so fast forward. It's November nineteen eighty nine. Sakamoto, his wife, and their baby.
Son fifteen months old.
Fifteen months yes, still got that new car smell. They disappear, They are gone. The evidence implicating A Sahara and his followers eventually emerges and is reported to the authorities. And what do they do.
They don't seem to do anything, at least according to everybody who's around at the time, who's interested in this case, who is trying to find this family, there's at least the perception is that nothing is done.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I love the way you phrase that, because that's also how had to talk about operations snow white with Scientology. Right, Scientology says it wasn't them, you know, very shaggy. It wasn't me. It was some followers or associates of Scientology. But we didn't tell them to do anything. We had nothing to do with it. And then how do we put it? A lot of people disagreed with that, including the Supreme Court of the United States. Right, So we're being respectful and honest here when we say that the police, according to all reports, yes, didn't do bub gis. You know, they didn't do anything. It was later discovered there was irrefutable proof that the Sakamoto family was indeed murdered in horrific ways, but the authorities didn't know about this until far far after the fact. Whoever did this was a pretty accomplished or very lucky, but definitely brutal. Well.
Yeah, this is what was discussed in the Endeavor documentary, that all free members of the family were abducted in that apartment. They were poisoned, they were strangled. That is actually the mode of death there succording that documentary, they were mutilated in an attempt to make their bodies more difficult to identify. Than they all three were buried in separate remote locations, and that's information that didn't come forward until much much later.
Yeah, and so when we say obviously we're talking about mutilation with the goal of obscuring identity at this point, at the time the murders occurred in nineteen eighty nine D the evidence isn't really a thing. So we're talking about removing teeth, eyes somehow, burning off or damaging or prints that kind of stuff. It's real, real nasty. It's really not happy science. It's not the positive message that Osahara began with. Because all and Osahara are growing increasingly militant and apocalyptic. Osahara is believed to have ordered more murders on occasion, and followers even creating kill list of perceived enemies in the halls of politics, in the halls of journalism, and so on. And the reason it's tough to know exactly how many homicides may have occurred is because there was often no physical evidence left behind. Right, we do know one other case from this period. There's an individual named Karia Kiyoshi was what they would call like a public sector employee killed by a barbituate overdose and then cremated in a commercial size industrial microwave of in February of nineteen ninety five. So these are horrific members. This still isn't the craziest stuff.
Oh no, no, no, not at all. But we do see that there are substances being used here. The poisons that were used in the attack on Sakamoto's family were created by the group. Like we talked about scientists and other specialists who were being recruited, the members of the group were trying to produce their own substances and chemicals that could be used as weapons like that one. There's another instance where a journalist, Shoko Igawa, was writing about this group and somebody through her letterbox sprayed phosgene gas, which is a World War two chemical weapon meant to injure or kill people.
And she gets such a badass in that documentary. I love the frank way she talks about it, and you should tune in to hear her talk about the end days of Asahara as well. Oh, she is not buying the official narrative.
No oh, but hey, let's let's we got to switch gears here a little bit. Uh, we got to talk about how someone who believes in themselves so much the way this leader does. What if they want to get into political stuff?
Love it? Love it?
Hate that.
I have to ask you specifically whom you're referring to, oh A Sahara Okay, still in Japan? Tight, yeah, special powers, yes, yeah, okay, okay, I was thinking of someone else. So Asahara also wants political power, as you said, Matt, he uh, he starts his own political party, which is way easier to do in Japan to start a viable alternative political party. Right. It's it's a little bit more tricky here in the United States because both of the primary political powerhouses, which is rather you didn't, you know what I mean, They would just rather you didn't, and they've got a lot of money to impact their wishes. Right.
It's hard to grow a whole third hand when you've already got two great hands on the same body, you know.
Yeah, it's just an inact, but impact works as well. You nailed it there. So am through its new political party, and this is happening in conjunction with front companies abroad, which we'll get to in a second. Their political party fields or nominates twenty five candidates for Japan's upper House primo political positions, and of course, in a burst of humility, Asahara also presents himself as a candidate. Every single candidate from the OM party loses by a pretty significant margin. Asahara himself gets less than two thousand votes and eighty five and so, you know, let's practice a little empathy here. Let's say we're a cult leader, we're the Tokyo Christ and we got less than two thousand votes. This is a big blow to the old ego. Maybe something's wrong with the world. It's not me, it's everybody else. So on becomes darker, darker. Asara, through those vast spiritual powers you mentioned, Matt receives a prophecy natural disasters he realizes will destroy Japan. And to step out of the context here for a second, that's not really a crazy prediction. Japan has a more than a share of natural disasters. That's arguably if you want to be cynical, and if you if we are looking at this through the lens of a con artist instead of a guy drinks his own flavor eighth, then we have to admit it's a lot like saying I've had a vision July and Atlanta will be somewhat warm, you know what I mean? Oh, the country on the on the ring of fire by the Pacific might have an earthquake, do you.
Tell Yeah, But I guess I would just say there's also a sprinkling in there of the people that he doesn't say the quiet part out loud as in like these enemies will be destroyed kind of thing. But what he is saying is if people die who are not followers who understand the truth. You know that we all understand in this group, if they do die, then they will get to be resurrected and try again, and maybe they'll do better next time and learn the truth and join us. So really, if people who aren't in our group die, it's not that big.
Of a deal, right, because if you think about it, we're helping them. With that in mind. Since you are the small quadre of people smart enough to follow me, you are fast forwarding to enlightenment and get this, you can help other people along the way. This is the point where Asahara kicks it up a notch, similar to how Charles Manson went from predicting a race war in the US to trying to enact to begin a race war in the US via Helter Skelter.
Yeah, it's ridiculously similar.
Yeah, Asahara again, it's infinite wisdom and humility. He says to his followers, you know, we have to kind of be the change. We can't wait for these disasters because here's another thing about the prophecy. We got to create them. We've got to serve the greater good by creating mass casualty events. The world and all the people in it who are not followers of all must be destroyed to be saved. And this is where, oh, this is a diversion, I know. I mean, this is a series, so we're okay with a couple of sidetracks, but this is what we have to mention, the creation of mass casualty events already kind of like you said, the quiet part out loud there, because he's got some boffins who are radicalized working with chemical weaponry and bioweapon development. But then something curious happens. This is nineteen ninety three. Something strange occurs in Australia. May twenty eighth. There's a small disturbance out in the middle of nowhere in the western out back, like twelve some hours east of Perth, which is already a cartoonishly isolated city. Sorry Perth. In Geoscience Australia, the folks who monitor this for a living, they clock this temblore, this tremble under the ground at three point six on the Richter scale. They record it. You can find this online. They write it down and they're like, Okay, that's lunch. I guess ten o'clock out has three point six on Richter scale for them at the time in that part of the world.
Eh, we get those in Atlanta, like on a pretty frequom basis if we're in the surrounding parts of Atlanta. Very small little rumbles.
Yeah, tem blows. Yeah. So this is a tease, folks, remember it for later. Right now. That happens May twenty eighth, nineteen ninety three. No one cares.
Nobody cares. Let's also remember that in February of that same year, little thing called the Waco Siege begins and lasts for a while. It's a weird time in the world in nineteen ninety three.
Yes, very much so. And it's also a busy time for all that same year and inner circle of a Sahara's closest followers make some breakthroughs. They're teaching themselves to create an enormously dangerous substance, saren gas. And when they're doing this, this is occurring at Kami kushiki mura, pardon my pronunciation. They're pretty sloppy with their opsec and their hygiene and their sanitary conditions, so much so that it's kind of like if you've ever had the dubious privilege of driving by a home based methamphetamine entrepreneur, you know what I mean. There's a smell to it, right, and a lot of times those poor folks end up seriously injuring themselves because they're not sure what they're doing. And so everybody in this neighborhood is going to the police at this point and they're saying, what is this phenomenal noxious gas? What are these weird smells? What are those creeps from that cult doing? Officer?
Well, yeah, well, because it let's talk about this saren If you are unfortunate enough to smell saren gas, you will likely get the sensation of paint thinner if you've ever smelled that before, similar chemicals like that, that there's a specific smell to it. But if it's not concentrated, you know, to a certain extent. Theoretically, I'm not going to say you're gonna be okay, but you're not going to pass away. If you're just smelling some weird stuff that's like the other chemicals used to make this thing.
Yeah, that means yeah, if they're precursor chemicals, it still means it's time to scooch yes ctfo, as the Internet used to say. Because saren is an extremely powerful nerve agent is what we call it, which means that even if you let's just establish this, saren itself is what we'll call a volatile colorless odorless liquid in that in that form, exposure is lethal. Very very tiny doses kind of like fentanyl, can kill you in less than a few grains. If you directly inhale a lethal dose of saren, you are dead within sixty seconds to maybe ten minutes, and you're going to die due to respiratory paralysis unless someone gets to you in that window of time, which is a very short window of time. And even if you get a non lethal dose, friends and neighbors, you'll need immediate medical treatment to avoid serious damage. Neurological stuff that will haunt you for the rest of your life.
Yeah. And just to clarify there, I am talking about the other chemicals used to like generate yeah, a version of saren gas that would be used as a weapon.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Saren is widely it has always been considered a weapon of mass destruction, and as we'll see, is a big time for Sarah in the nineteen nineties. In nineteen ninety seven, across the world, the production and stockpiling of saren was made illegal, like hard stop. This is not one of those things where you can say, oh, there's like, you know, peaceful medical uses. Oh my Honda runs on saren. It doesn't. There's only one reason to make that stuff. Yeah, and it's an evil reason anyway. So they go to the police. They're reporting, as you said, Matt, these precursor chemicals that are used in the creation of saren and those have a smell, like you said, those having order an odor, and the police don't do anything. They they don't do anything. And because and I hate to say it this way, but because they did not do anything for one reason or another. We fast forward to June twenty seventh, nineteen ninety four, ALM conducts their first pilot program of releasing saren and they do this in the Kida Fukashi district of Matsumoto. Seven people, innocent people die as a result. Hundreds are injured. And some of those folks who have injuries, like injuries to their eyes, their respiratory tract, things like that, some of them recover, but a lot of them get hit with long term disabilities that follow them to the great you know what I mean. And now, like you're the police, you got to do something.
Right, Yeah, something, something has to be done. Is this the incident where they were attempting to attack like politicians and lawmakers, but they ended up hurting innocent people instead. I can't remember. There's there are like two or three versions of this where they, yeah, attempt to use an attack, a wide scale attack, and they just don't seem to be able to have the effect they want, right.
It doesn't hit the order of magnitude nor the specific people that they're aiming for. And a lot of times at this point, they're trying, as you said, to go after government employees. You know what. We're gonna pause here just for a moment for a word from our sponsors. We'll be back in a jiffy and we have returned. The police do act. They find a local farmer who is just super unlucky in this regard. He's a genuinely not bad guy. He's not a member of AM at all. His name is Kono Yoshiyuki. And the authorities say, look, this guy is responsible for this mass casualty event, but he's not a terrorist. He's just a dummy. And he mixes his fertilizer all wrong, and he's like, I'm the farmer guy. Fertilizer is like a thing I make and I do it so I can grow food for you jerks, you know what I mean. And he's jammed up for a year, even though there's like no real evidence that he is in any way involved other than it he's a farmer with access to fertilizer.
Yeah, and you know it's possible that this guy could have done it. Well, we'll put him away. Well, it isn't until a while later, I think a full year later, after some of the other attacks that we're going to talk about occur, that individual members come forward and claim responsibility. And we do have to point out it is not the organization claiming responsibility. It is individual members of the organization.
Yeah, they're lining up to take the fall, right, to fall on the sword for the sacrifice themselves for the good of the organization as they see it. That's logic. But because of this, a conspiracy unfolds in the public eye. Journalists like the one we mentioned earlier, many many journalists at this point have already held serious concerns about individual cases connected with all and they start to link these disappearances, these criminal acts that may have seen, like, you know, terrifying. One offs, they say, hey, there's a common thread through all of this, the shadow of Asahara.
And so then in nineteen ninety five, as Are actually ends up taking the law into his own hands and he sues one of these papers that's writing about him and his group for libel. You know, you're you're saying untrue things about us, and you're harming us. And kind of like his other attempts to use the mechanics of society for his own gain, this is unsuccessful. It doesn't work. The suit is unsuccessful, and he can feel as though all of those mechanisms are now aimed at him and closing in on him.
Yeah, like Han Solo and Star Wars, you know what I mean. The halls are pushing in. But this guy is no Han Solo, right, and his mental state, depending upon whom you ask again, his mental state is deteriorating. That's what we get from a lot of the reports. Combining this with the possibility of being arrested, the sunk cost of creating a small army of radicalized people who genuinely believe the key to salvation, to saving the world can only be mass casualty events. Now Asa harr is passed the point of no return logically, like in game theory. Now he has nowhere to swim but further into a dark ocean.
Oh yeah, and we should mention he and his followers are amassing an arsenal of conventional weapons. Yeah, there are photographs, video evidence of the actual arms laid out. And we're not just talking rifles and pistols and things. We're talking explosives like RPGs, things that you would see, to be quite honest, a terrorist organization collecting or maybe even like a high level cartel.
Arsenal right, right, right, or private militia. This is military grade stuff, you know what I mean. These aren't p shooters. That's a fantastic point. So they are you could argue, organizationally, they are being forced into by the consequence of their own actions. They're being forced into further and increasingly extreme acts.
Right, So with the leader who's ready for war.
Yeah, whether the leader is not saving anything for this swim back, right, he has passed the point of de escalation. This is where we fast forward just a little bit further to March twentieth, nineteen ninety five. It's eight am. It's busy, busy time in Tokyo. This is where all members launch five concurrent attacks, releasing saren gas into three subway lines. And if you've ever been in a rush hour, then you know, you know they kind of suck. And the thing about Tokyo's amazing public transit system is that even it gets overloaded because there are just a ton of people who live in Tokyo and there's like no room on the train. It's very, very crowded.
Well, let's talk about how these five individuals did this. It's unfortunately cunning and terrifying.
And pretty easily executed.
Yeah, each individual of these five people had a plastic bag wrapped in newspaper to look like an innocuous object, and they had an umbrella that had a specially sharpened tip to it. So imagine just seeing somebody on the subway who's carrying something in newspaper and an umbrella, you wouldn't think twice, probably each of them, when the attack is being carried out, dropped this object covered in newspaper on the ground, then stabbed it with the umbrella they're carrying, releasing seren gas.
Yeah, yeah, it happens quickly. And look, we're we're pointing out missteps by the authorities. But in this kind of situation, at this point in time, that's simply not something people would have checked for. There are so many people, right, and there are so many ways to hide device or mechanism or a process of this of this size. They're prioritizing routes that are likely to serve government employees. They want to hit people going to work at Japanese at the Japanese National Diet. Right, so the legislative body, twelve people die immediately, a thirteenth person die shortly after, thousands are injured to some degree, and some of them again are going to be permanently disabled for the rest of their lives. As a result of these injuries in this mass casualty event, some people will solder on for a few months and then expire later. This is an absolute disaster. This is a horror. The police realize that this time, there is no denying that this has to be the group that previously did this. There's a little bit of initial wondering whether it's a copycat, but that's just the investigative process. They know what's going on, so they raid all locations, they raid homes and known locations of members, and when they do, they discover enough saren to kill more than one million people. For perspective nineteen ninety five, right, population of Japan's about one hundred and twenty five million or more one hundred and twenty five point five million or so one million people.
That's astounding, just that they could produce enough to do that. And it wasn't the only gas like the weapon that they were producing, the only chemical weapon they were producing. They were again working on all kinds of different things they could be used to take out humans.
Yeah, exactly, by hook or by crook, which shows us that they were definitely exploring multiple avenues, of multiple paths toward an act. These apocalyptic visions of their leader. The arrest roll in Okay and the Japanese authorities apprehend something like two hundred members of all. And remember at this point it's still a pretty big organization. A lot of people are associated with it, but they don't get the Golden Goose. Police cannot initially find the kingpin. Tokyo's christ Asahara is in the wind. And this is where we bring back that weird tremble we mentioned in the Australian Outback earlier, right, we were writing about this right at the geologist Harry Mason.
Oh yeah, a reminder, this is two years before the seren gas attack in Tokyo.
Yeah, yeah, So nineteen ninety three, Earth has a little little fartsy, little templore, a little shiver in its buddocks that nobody offense Australia, just like in the ground, and nobody really pays attention to it because like everybody farts, right, and now with all this news, these revelations about this conspiratorial death cult at this point in Japan, Harry Mason starts looking back into this. He is a geologist, he does have the expertise, He's got a lot of experience mining, and he says, I don't think this three point six Richter scale disturbance was a natural earthquake and earthfart. I think these lunatics from all have conducted a secret weapons test out there in the middle of nowhere. And I think he says it was a nuclear device. That is terrifying. And also, if you've listened to any of our previous episodes on this, if you have studied nuclear non proliferation, you know it's actually really difficult to build a nuke that works, even like a not goodwin is scientifically super impressive.
Yeah, well, think about how difficult it is just to get your hands on the fissile materials needed to create a nuke. And once you've got that, you have to build a mechanism that can effectively start a chain reaction, which is not easy to do. Yeah, and then you got to set it off somehow safely, and you got to do it in a place that nobody's gonna think twice about, like, oh, I don't know a sheep farm.
Right, And you also have to uh, all the components you need. In addition to that, fissile material are closely monitored by very powerful institutions who stay up around the clock just waiting up your day. If you're trying to make a nuke like that is there, that's their vocation. It's beyond a career. Yeah, they believe it. They're radicalized in their own way.
And they have access to stealth bombers baby.
Yeah right, And look at this. There's all sorts of crazy stuff in the news, so it's very difficult to discern facts from fiction. But the more you hear about what Mason is saying at this time, the less crazy it seems. Because we later could confirm that members of ALL did indeed visit Australia and they were looking likely for a place to test something one of those biochemical weapons or some other evil thing they cooked up. And they did as you said, Matt, they honed in on a large sheep farm. It's like three hundred and seventy five miles northeast of Perth, twelve hour drive if traffic is good in the outback. We're not qualified to speak on that part, but this you'll see it sometimes referred to as a station instead of a sheep farm, but that's just another word for sheep farm. And they bought this through a front company. Later investigations also showed they made some troublingly similar overtures in Russia.
Where they still operate today under different names.
Very much so, very much so. Who doesn't love a front company. So Mason realizes something screwy is up because this is this is not primo real estate. It is out in the middle of nowhere, but it's a lot of land, hundreds of thousands of acres of land. They buy this and a small group of followers from all stay on this Australian property, purpose unknown, and then suddenly, in October of nineteen ninety four, for reasons no one can divine, they sell it at a massive loss and then boom, they skip down, They leave the country. They ghost, they skidattle. What happens after the proving chemical attacks? Mason is certain that they have tested a nuclear device, and he also notes the property we did have a high grade source of uranium. What yeah, right, which is still not the same thing as making a bomb. That's very tricky, and those guys will get you if you have the wrong You have the wrong list of things on your Amazon orders.
So wait a second, are we saying that potentially a group of cult members got on this sheep farm because it had some uranium underneath it, and then had the tools and know it and know how to get the uranium out and then somehow make a dirty bomb I guess out of it.
They Yeah, I don't think we can say that, okay, because his history would be really different, and I'm glad that we cannot say that. But I think, yeah, we're doing a little bit of myth busting here because you clearly pointed it out right. The tools, the expertise, they're not the same thing. It's just knowing where the uranium is, so we do so they had the ambition. We do know that at least a few high ranking members of all purposely were there. Like they wrote this down in notebooks authorities found. They said, this sheep farm, we're buying it because it has uranium. We're gonna mind the uranium.
That's scary and so on.
Yeah. I think we can all agree they already got too close.
Yeah yeah, wow, So I guess everything worked out.
Oh yeah, yeah yeah. Speaking with Weiss later, they have a great article on this. A geology professor at Princeton named doctor Gregory Vandervink. He says this was quote a rather unusual seismic recording. Though it was not a nuclear weapons test, the seismic signal was not characteristic of the type produced by explosions, So this one geologist, Mason, believed it was very much nuclear tests. Other scientists, the majority of other scientists who have looked at this, will maintain that it was not a nuclear test. But it was definitely in the car, so it's definitely something that all members wanted to do to please Asahara weird.
That's so weird, man, that's this strange thing.
I don't know, I don't like anybody that much. No offense.
Well, I do wonder if it could have been an attempt, if it wasn't an explosive, you know, seismic event, then maybe it's not what I'm about to say, but I can imagine it being an attempt to use dynamite or large explosives to get at the uranium, to get to it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, especially if you know, if you know, you have a very small chance of being noticed. Right, Yeah, that makes sense to me. That does feel like if it's man made, that feels like the most likely explanation. But it doesn't work out like so many other of Osahara's ambitions. He is eventually captured in Japan. It's May sixteenth. He's discovered in a I believe, a hidden room in an a compound. The world is waiting for the trial. The trial begins in the next year, on April twenty fourth. The legal proceedings continue till February twenty seventh, two thousand and four. This takes a long time. Yeah.
Well, part of the big trouble with the trial is that his mental state was in question throughout the entire trial, and it was a big thing about whether or not this guy could actually stand trial. Is he mentally fit to even go through these proceedings and be convicted in these ways for these things?
Is he genuinely to the point of decline where he is nonverbal, or is it performative exactly.
It was a huge thing. You can read all about that. Just that the trial of his trial, or the tribulations of his trial, I don't know, whatever, is trying to go biblical. Yeah, okay, let's take another break. We'll be right back. Oh, thank goodness, we've returned. Okay. One thing to really point out here is that time between the attack on March twentieth, and then him finally being apprehended on May sixteenth, and the fact that he was on the compound, the primary headquarters compound, the entire time, at least most people think, because when he was discovered he was in one of those little Heidi hole places on the compound, like a secret room. Yeah, just big enough for him and some food.
Apparently, makes wonder how many times they checked it, right, and to what extent they checked it and who those specific authorities were conducting the search, right, No accusation.
It's just a long time to be hidden like that.
Observation asking questions, So don't get me jammed up at passport control. Yeah, that's a really important point in the trial. Legal proceedings begin with a reading of the individual names three thousand something victims. Right, this is just a horrific thing to happen. Osahara is spoiler ultimately convicted. He is sentenced to death. There is an appeal system in the Japanese courts, just like in most modern court systems. His appeals are exhausted. The time limit on them runs out of March twenty seventh, two thousand and six. Aside from Osahara twelve senior All Members are also convicted. They are sentenced to death. Right. There are other convictions, but the thirteen people are sentenced to execution. The very last appeal expired in January of twenty eighteen, and so that summer July twenty eighteen, the notoriously secret of Japanese justice system says all of the convicts have been executed. The last batch was Asahara and six other all members. They were hanged to death on July sixth, and I think off air we've discussed this in the past, but we need to bring it up. The Japanese prison system has some marked differences to Western prison systems. One of the things that surprises people a lot is that if you are on death row in Japan, it's not uncommon that you will not know the day of your execution yea one. You will live day to day until one day a prison guard comes to you and says it's time to go. Which is a torch sure?
You know, yeah, for sure. But you know, if you listen to some of the journalists who were reporting on it, who were even there at you know, I don't think they actually go to the execution in Japan the way you know, in America, when there's an execution, it's like people are invited to it, like it's an event. I don't know how functions in Japan, but several journalists were talking about the people that they knew right who were victims, who were loved ones of people who died, just the relief that was felt when the people were gone. Yeah, but it's not as though it stops there, because in like two years before the executions in Russia, there were raids on compounds that were allegedly run by the same group by Amshinrikyo, and ten people ended up getting arrested, and forty four Russians were expelled from other places like Montenegro who were being investigated for strange actions, illegal actions being taken in other countries, and not just in Russia, in lots of places where this group proliferated, and for most accounts, at least for people who are still in the organization, none of this kind of stuff exists anymore. The anti government, anti people, creating weapons that those concepts kind of left when the leader was taken away and stopped. But it does. I don't know, I can understand why it would make law enforcement organizations nervous knowing that the group is active in your neck of the woods.
Absolutely, yeah, And that international piece is vital because again Asahara went from predicting natural disasters in Japan to attempting to enact disasters. But through the twisted logic of the organization, to really save the world, you need more mass casualty events outside of Japan's. So this is a very, very dangerous thing, right, This is what they would see as a holy war. And the point you make about about just how fundamentally this rocks authorities in law enforcement, not just in Japan but the world abroad, it cannot be overstated. Likewise, we can't really articulate just how profoundly this affected Japanese society, this vast international conspiracy going for decades. It rocked the perception of new religious movements. It violated understanding of the social compact and the sense of safety. This is a society that rightly or wrongly, prides itself is one of the safest places on the planet. And they fell victim not to the foreign hordes that xenophobia often you know trays as the villains, but instead to an enemy within. And the events of those terrible days or decades past now, but the shadow, the horror of all remains, you know, and like you said, it still exists today, the organization called ALAPH And maybe we talk a little bit about how our friends in the Japanese government approach those folks.
Oh yeah, I think it's elf alf or how do you spell it?
Been a L E p H.
There's also one called Hikari Noah, which is a separate organization.
Mentioned in that documentary, Right, yeah.
That splintered off again like similar concepts, but without the you know, all the leader stuff. These groups still remain, are still allowed to exist, but they are considered, at least by Japanese authorities to be dangerous organizations. I think that's how they put it, something like a dangerous group or dangerous organization. So they are subject to pretty intense surveillance and check ins with authorities.
Right on a routine and thorough basis. And this is this occurs even though members of these offshoot groups or members of the direct descendant ALIP, even though they are often you know, they're not part of the inner circle. Right, they were investigated, there was not really a crime to convict them of. They did not participate in the attacks. Many will claim they had no knowledge of the terrors that Asahara sought on the horizon. But it shows us how quickly these groups can coalesce and escalate and function in relative open silence before it's too late to react. And this is okay, this is another. This is like the faith healing moment. I'm cursing so much in this Holy shit, are we accidentally arguing for a surveillance state?
Yeah?
Is that what it gets us too?
I think that's where're at. Well, here's the problem. The lowest level members of the group. Right, we as humans are unaware of the small things we do that end up aiding a much larger action. Right, So something as simple as going to get somebody water. Right, Let's say you're a gopher on a film set. Sure, and you're the person who goes and gets water for some of the talent that's on screen. Or you're the person that runs over to the craft services table and gets a quick plate for the director because he's he or she's too busy to go do that.
Or you're an intern at a cartel and your only job is to have snacks.
Well, yeah, but are you're part of the organization. And if you don't do your thing, does the thing still happen? Yeah, it still happens. But it is strange to imagine all of us as time any pieces in whatever complex machine we're operating within, right, Yeah, so it is weird to imagine it just I would say personally for all of us, like, what are the things we do every day that ends up enabling something crazy to happen. I don't mean to put it that way. I'm not saying we're all bad doing bad things. I just mean we're all connected in every little action that we take in some way in these in these strange ways.
And they are connections that the average person has on some level willfully chose to ignore, to not investigate too closely, because when you turn on the flashlight, you always find something that was in the dark. You know that. And I would say further, there's always going to be the deep ethical dilemma of, in addition to wilful ignorance, how far and how long can you reasonably function in an organization like this without knowing there's something terrible afoot? You know, Like, oh, yeah, I was in the Snola cartel. My street name was snacks because that was my job. I was just supposed to have beef jerky. Now, yeah, the guys were intense, but I had no idea what they were really doing.
Yeah yeah, well yeah, I mean, you know, I'm just imagining that moment when you're completely actually unaware of the stuff and you open the wrong door and the compound and you see the arsenal of RPGs or something and you just kind of slowly close the door and be like, all right.
You're a pa. It's an excellent career opportunity to work for Weinstein, right, Oh, how far do you push the envelope, especially when in combats when it may contradict your own self interest. The biggest thing here for me now, and I think for a lot of us, is that this constructs, this vast conspiracy does can instruct a valid argument for a surveillance state. Very uncomfortable with that. Don't know where to take it. So glad that we made this a two part or big banks, big thanks to Gnomes. We hope, we hope this wasn't too terrible. We want to hear from you, folks, so please let us know your thoughts. Nomes, what we got, what do we.
Got Yeah, well I've had a great time, not just because Matt's my EP obviously, these cults are always so interesting to me, and it's truly like, but yeah, what y'all were saying about, like the innocuous ways that you can be involved, and then all of a sudden it's like, oh, oh my god, oh my.
God, that's what it was. Yeah, I would have never if I had known that that's what it was, maybe I would have turned around. Uh yeah, yeah, I don't know. I always find it so interesting and then also scary.
That's how we feel too.
Nomes fantastic, So again shout out to our guest souper producer for Marathon series, the One and Only Nomes Griffin Hey Nomes. While we're at it, I always like to ask I always like to ask guests this, and you're our VIP guest board tonight. Don't look too closely into the doors behind me. Where can people learn more about your work?
Oh that's a great question. You can follow me on Instagram. I'm at Nomes. It's like garden Domes, but it's spelled different and if you switch the in the M it's g n o e ms. The fun thing about being trans is that you get to make your own name and nobody can fight you on that. So I have a fun, whimsical name. I'm on Instagram at nomes.
Fantastic and Nomes is a huge part of the what can we say it, the roller derby community here in Atlanta.
Yeah, yeah, you can see me. Well, this will not be out but or this will have happened already. We have games on Saturday. I'm playing in two of them. I'm looking forward to getting my butt kicked by my friends.
And in addition, Nomes is an absolute legend amongst our cohort of producers, engineers, and your hapless hosts who are ending the episode now. While you're on the Internet checking out the grams, sip in the social meds, you can find us online conspiracy stuff, show conspiracy stuff in the places that use an at sign. Look and you will find us time after time. You can also call us on the phone or send us a good old fashioned email. Maybe we do the phone thing. Huh when the last time you hopped on a phone.
Matt Hey, pick up your phone, go to the thing, the part of it where you can dial actual numbers, and then dial one eight three three, STDWYTK. You got to turn the letters into numbers.
There.
You'll figure it out when you do call in. You've got three minutes. Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if we can use your name and message on the air. If you've got more to say, they can fit in a three minute voicemail. If you've got links, if you've got pictures, if you've got other cool stuff, why not instead send us a fax? Oh wait, no, wait, that's that's not it. It's an email. We are the.
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