July 4, 2025 • 58 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Our colleague Nol is still on an adventure.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
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,
(00:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:49):
actually you know what, you need them?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
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?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (02:09):
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
(02:30):
his bathwater.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Yeah, very e girl. Find Yeah, who's that act?
Speaker 2 (02:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
It was a soap with her bathwater, right.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
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
(03:13):
part in a blood ritual where they ingested what was
supposedly the blood of Asahara.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
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
(03:44):
so powerful, emanates such divine ability that by consuming things
associated with him, you are ingesting also some very small
portion of his powers.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
It's it's weirder than you will let yourself believe. Hearing
us talk about it right now, it's weirder than that.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
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
(05:00):
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
(05:21):
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
(05:43):
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
(06:06):
under the hood of your mind and tinker with your
cognitive functions ego death kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
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?
Speaker 3 (06:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
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
(07:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Yeah, it's kind of a symbolic rebirth as well.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
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,
(07:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
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
(08:28):
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
(08:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
I think private detectives that kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Yeah, gumshoe stuff, right, And so fast forward. It's November
nineteen eighty nine. Sakamoto, his wife, and their baby.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Son fifteen months old.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:56):
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
(10:17):
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.
(10:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
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
(11:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
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
(12:03):
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
(12:25):
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
(12:45):
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.
(13:06):
This still isn't the craziest stuff.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
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
(13:31):
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
(13:51):
injure or kill people.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
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?
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Love it? Love it?
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Hate that.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
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
(14:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
It's hard to grow a whole third hand when you've
already got two great hands on the same body, you know.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
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
(15:40):
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
(16:01):
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
(16:22):
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.
(16:42):
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,
(17:07):
the country on the on the ring of fire by
the Pacific might have an earthquake, do you.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
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
(17:35):
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
(17:56):
group die, it's not that big.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
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
(18:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yeah, it's ridiculously similar.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
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
(18:54):
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
(19:15):
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
(19:38):
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
(19:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
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
(21:12):
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
(21:38):
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
(22:00):
noxious gas? What are these weird smells? What are those
creeps from that cult doing? Officer?
Speaker 2 (22:07):
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,
(22:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
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
(23:08):
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,
(23:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
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.
(24:27):
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
(24:50):
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
(25:13):
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,
(25:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
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,
(26:06):
a wide scale attack, and they just don't seem to
be able to have the effect they want, right.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
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.
(26:41):
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
(27:04):
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
(27:27):
he is in any way involved other than it he's
a farmer with access to fertilizer.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
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
(28:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
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.
(29:06):
The suit is unsuccessful, and he can feel as though
all of those mechanisms are now aimed at him and
closing in on him.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
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
(29:40):
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
(30:04):
dark ocean.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
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
(30:28):
quite honest, a terrorist organization collecting or maybe even like
a high level cartel.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Right, So with the leader who's ready for war.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
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
(31:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Well, let's talk about how these five individuals did this.
It's unfortunately cunning and terrifying.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
And pretty easily executed.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
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
(32:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
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
(32:55):
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
(33:20):
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.
(33:41):
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
(34:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
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
(35:09):
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
(35:33):
Outback earlier, right, we were writing about this right at
the geologist Harry Mason.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Oh yeah, a reminder, this is two years before the
seren gas attack in Tokyo.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
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
(36:10):
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
(36:30):
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,
(36:51):
you know it's actually really difficult to build a nuke
that works, even like a not goodwin is scientifically super impressive.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
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
(37:22):
to do it in a place that nobody's gonna think
twice about, like, oh, I don't know a sheep farm.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
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.
(37:50):
It's beyond a career. Yeah, they believe it. They're radicalized
in their own way.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
And they have access to stealth bombers baby.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
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
(38:21):
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
(38:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Where they still operate today under different names.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
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
(39:29):
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
(39:52):
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
(40:17):
Amazon orders.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
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,
(40:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
That's scary and so on.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Yeah. I think we can all agree they already got
too close.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Yeah yeah, wow, So I guess everything worked out.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
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
(41:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
That's so weird, man, that's this strange thing.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
I don't know, I don't like anybody that much. No offense.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
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.
(43:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
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?
Speaker 3 (43:47):
Is he genuinely to the point of decline where he
is nonverbal, or is it performative exactly.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
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
(44:17):
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
(44:38):
the compound, like a secret room. Yeah, just big enough
for him and some food.
Speaker 3 (44:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
It's just a long time to be hidden like that.
Speaker 3 (44:59):
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
(45:20):
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
(45:41):
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
(46:02):
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
(46:23):
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
(46:44):
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?
Speaker 2 (47:00):
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
(47:22):
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
(47:45):
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,
(48:09):
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.
(48:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
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
(49:05):
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,
(49:27):
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
(49:47):
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,
(50:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
Oh yeah, I think it's elf alf or how do
you spell it?
Speaker 3 (50:32):
Been a L E p H.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
There's also one called Hikari Noah, which is a separate organization.
Speaker 3 (50:40):
Mentioned in that documentary, Right, yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
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
(51:04):
or dangerous organization. So they are subject to pretty intense
surveillance and check ins with authorities.
Speaker 3 (51:12):
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.
(51:33):
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
(51:54):
the faith healing moment. I'm cursing so much in this
Holy shit, are we accidentally arguing for a surveillance state?
Speaker 2 (52:03):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (52:03):
Is that what it gets us too?
Speaker 2 (52:05):
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
(52:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (52:42):
Or you're an intern at a cartel and your only
job is to have snacks.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
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,
(53:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (53:26):
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
(53:46):
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
(54:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (54:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (54:37):
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,
(54:58):
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,
(55:21):
what we got, what do we.
Speaker 4 (55:21):
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.
Speaker 5 (55:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (55:53):
That's how we feel too.
Speaker 3 (55:54):
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?
Speaker 5 (56:17):
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
(56:37):
a fun, whimsical name. I'm on Instagram at nomes.
Speaker 2 (56:42):
Fantastic and Nomes is a huge part of the what
can we say it, the roller derby community here in Atlanta.
Speaker 5 (56:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (57:04):
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
(57:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (57:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (57:54):
There.
Speaker 2 (57:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (58:18):
Entities that read each piece of correspondence we receive. Be
well aware, yet unafraid. Sometimes the void writes back, what
are we talking about? Join us out here in the
dark conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (58:48):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Our colleague Nol is still on an adventure.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
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,
(00:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:49):
actually you know what, you need them?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
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?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (02:09):
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
(02:30):
his bathwater.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Yeah, very e girl. Find Yeah, who's that act?
Speaker 2 (02:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
It was a soap with her bathwater, right.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
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
(03:13):
part in a blood ritual where they ingested what was
supposedly the blood of Asahara.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
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
(03:44):
so powerful, emanates such divine ability that by consuming things
associated with him, you are ingesting also some very small
portion of his powers.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
It's it's weirder than you will let yourself believe. Hearing
us talk about it right now, it's weirder than that.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
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
(05:00):
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
(05:21):
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
(05:43):
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
(06:06):
under the hood of your mind and tinker with your
cognitive functions ego death kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
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?
Speaker 3 (06:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
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
(07:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Yeah, it's kind of a symbolic rebirth as well.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
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,
(07:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
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
(08:28):
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
(08:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
I think private detectives that kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Yeah, gumshoe stuff, right, And so fast forward. It's November
nineteen eighty nine. Sakamoto, his wife, and their baby.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Son fifteen months old.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:56):
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
(10:17):
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.
(10:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
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
(11:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
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
(12:03):
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
(12:25):
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
(12:45):
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.
(13:06):
This still isn't the craziest stuff.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
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
(13:31):
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
(13:51):
injure or kill people.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
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?
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Love it? Love it?
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Hate that.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
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
(14:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
It's hard to grow a whole third hand when you've
already got two great hands on the same body, you know.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
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
(15:40):
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
(16:01):
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
(16:22):
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.
(16:42):
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,
(17:07):
the country on the on the ring of fire by
the Pacific might have an earthquake, do you.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
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
(17:35):
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
(17:56):
group die, it's not that big.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
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
(18:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yeah, it's ridiculously similar.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
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
(18:54):
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
(19:15):
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
(19:38):
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
(19:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
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
(21:12):
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
(21:38):
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
(22:00):
noxious gas? What are these weird smells? What are those
creeps from that cult doing? Officer?
Speaker 2 (22:07):
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,
(22:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
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
(23:08):
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,
(23:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
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.
(24:27):
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
(24:50):
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
(25:13):
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,
(25:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
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,
(26:06):
a wide scale attack, and they just don't seem to
be able to have the effect they want, right.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
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.
(26:41):
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
(27:04):
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
(27:27):
he is in any way involved other than it he's
a farmer with access to fertilizer.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
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
(28:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
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.
(29:06):
The suit is unsuccessful, and he can feel as though
all of those mechanisms are now aimed at him and
closing in on him.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
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
(29:40):
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
(30:04):
dark ocean.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
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
(30:28):
quite honest, a terrorist organization collecting or maybe even like
a high level cartel.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Right, So with the leader who's ready for war.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
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
(31:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Well, let's talk about how these five individuals did this.
It's unfortunately cunning and terrifying.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
And pretty easily executed.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
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
(32:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
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
(32:55):
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
(33:20):
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.
(33:41):
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
(34:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
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
(35:09):
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
(35:33):
Outback earlier, right, we were writing about this right at
the geologist Harry Mason.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Oh yeah, a reminder, this is two years before the
seren gas attack in Tokyo.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
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
(36:10):
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
(36:30):
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,
(36:51):
you know it's actually really difficult to build a nuke
that works, even like a not goodwin is scientifically super impressive.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
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
(37:22):
to do it in a place that nobody's gonna think
twice about, like, oh, I don't know a sheep farm.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
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.
(37:50):
It's beyond a career. Yeah, they believe it. They're radicalized
in their own way.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
And they have access to stealth bombers baby.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
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
(38:21):
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
(38:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Where they still operate today under different names.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
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
(39:29):
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
(39:52):
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
(40:17):
Amazon orders.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
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,
(40:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
That's scary and so on.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Yeah. I think we can all agree they already got
too close.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Yeah yeah, wow, So I guess everything worked out.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
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
(41:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
That's so weird, man, that's this strange thing.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
I don't know, I don't like anybody that much. No offense.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
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.
(43:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
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?
Speaker 3 (43:47):
Is he genuinely to the point of decline where he
is nonverbal, or is it performative exactly.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
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
(44:17):
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
(44:38):
the compound, like a secret room. Yeah, just big enough
for him and some food.
Speaker 3 (44:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
It's just a long time to be hidden like that.
Speaker 3 (44:59):
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
(45:20):
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
(45:41):
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
(46:02):
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
(46:23):
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
(46:44):
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?
Speaker 2 (47:00):
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
(47:22):
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
(47:45):
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,
(48:09):
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.
(48:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
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
(49:05):
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,
(49:27):
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
(49:47):
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,
(50:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
Oh yeah, I think it's elf alf or how do
you spell it?
Speaker 3 (50:32):
Been a L E p H.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
There's also one called Hikari Noah, which is a separate organization.
Speaker 3 (50:40):
Mentioned in that documentary, Right, yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
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
(51:04):
or dangerous organization. So they are subject to pretty intense
surveillance and check ins with authorities.
Speaker 3 (51:12):
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.
(51:33):
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
(51:54):
the faith healing moment. I'm cursing so much in this
Holy shit, are we accidentally arguing for a surveillance state?
Speaker 2 (52:03):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (52:03):
Is that what it gets us too?
Speaker 2 (52:05):
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
(52:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (52:42):
Or you're an intern at a cartel and your only
job is to have snacks.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
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,
(53:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (53:26):
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
(53:46):
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
(54:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (54:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (54:37):
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,
(54:58):
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,
(55:21):
what we got, what do we.
Speaker 4 (55:21):
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.
Speaker 5 (55:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (55:53):
That's how we feel too.
Speaker 3 (55:54):
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?
Speaker 5 (56:17):
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
(56:37):
a fun, whimsical name. I'm on Instagram at nomes.
Speaker 2 (56:42):
Fantastic and Nomes is a huge part of the what
can we say it, the roller derby community here in Atlanta.
Speaker 5 (56:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (57:04):
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
(57:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (57:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (57:54):
There.
Speaker 2 (57:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (58:18):
Entities that read each piece of correspondence we receive. Be
well aware, yet unafraid. Sometimes the void writes back, what
are we talking about? Join us out here in the
dark conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (58:48):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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