On Monday, March 20th, 1995, five members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult entered different trains on the Tokyo underground during the morning rush hour. Each carried a plastic bag of sarin in liquid form. Sarin is a nerve gas invented by German scientists in the 1930s as part of Adolf Hitler's war preparations. It is 26 times as deadly as cyanide gas and a drop the size of a pinhead can kill a person. The five cult members donned gauze surgical masks of the kind used by commuters to ward off cold germs.
One by one they dropped the packets at different stations, then punctured them with the sharpened tips of their umbrellas so that small clouds of gas were released, and casually walked away through the throngs of commuters. The gas killed 12 people and left thousands physically and psychologically scarred and Japan traumatised. The after-effects ranged from blindness to paralysis. One commuter was so badly shaken up that he was unable to continue his normal working life. His wife wrote a letter to a woman's magazine describing their miserable existence. By chance the magazine was picked up by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, an innovative writer whose book, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, was shortlisted for an IMPAC award in 1999. The letter intrigued Murakami, and set him thinking about the random nature of the planned violence visited on that man and the other victims.
He decided to interview as many of the casualties as he could find, to establish precisely what happened on the Tokyo subway that day, and to see if what he learned would shed any light on the state of Japanese society. The Aum phenomenon could not, after all, be dismissed as someone else's affair; it was a Japanese thing which distorted the image Japanese had about themselves. So the novelist became a chronicler of a real-life episode with a plot more fitting for a work of implausible fiction or a horror comic. His interviews show that Tokyo was unprepared to deal with a gas attack, though one wonders if any modern city is.
Passengers hurried about their business in ignorance as victims collapsed. Many ignored an old man lying foaming on the ground. Ambulances went to the wrong stations and got stuck in traffic jams. Police did not close train stations or alert emergency medical services. One hospital refused at first to open when a victim was carried from a TV van to its doors. Incredibly, a gas-contaminated train was kept running in service for an hour and 40 minutes after a sarin package was punctured on one of its carriages, and as a result 200 people became seriously ill. The 34 interviews, originally published in Japan under the title Under- ground, are extremely poignant and compelling, making the victims as interesting as the perpetrators. They reveal, too, the basic decency of ordinary Japanese commuters, often stereotyped as work-obsessed salarymen and office ladies. But they do not explain why five people, acting on the orders of the fat, long-haired guru called Shoko Asahara, would do such a terrible thing. The English translation of Murakami's book contains a short additional section in which the author tries to deal with this fundamental question by talking as dispassionately as he can to members of the quasi-Buddhist cult. He found them to be mostly articulate, well-educated people, like Ikuo Hayashi, an outstanding surgeon, devoted to his patients.
Hayashi released sarin gas on the Chiyoda Line, leading to the deaths of two underground workers. "Most likely," Murakami concludes, "it was precisely because he was such a good doctor that he began to mistrust the present-day medical system, shot through as it is with contradiction and defects. As a result he was drawn to the active spiritual world that Aum provided with its vision of an intense, perfect utopia." The common characteristic of the eight typical cult members he interviews is that at a certain point in their lives they abandoned the world and sought a spiritual utopia in Aum Shinrikyo.
The chosen killers - they rehearsed with umbrellas and bags of water - now mostly regret following orders which led them to commit terrible crimes, and they have engaged in some real soul-searching. But the Aum rank and file, while abhorring the deed, still believe that they are at a higher level than ordinary people and have a sense of being specially chosen. The author sees an aberration of the Japanese psyche in this, and compares their actions with the well-educated, talented Japanese who sought fulfilment in the 1930s by carrying out the murderous will of the Emperor in Manchuria.
Much of the answer, however, surely lies in the twisted personality of Shoko Asahara. In Africa, the United States and Europe, where there have been other cases in recent history of cult members killing or committing suicide on a mass scale, there is usually one evil individual at the heart of the darkness. The horror depended on a spell-binding, twisted mystic with a charismatic personality, who uses mood shifts to control inadequate, lonely, impressionable people prepared to surrender their will to a greater force. It is a virus in the human condition which is activated under certain circumstances, and not just a Japanese phenomenon.
Conor O'Clery is the Asia Correspondent of The Irish Times