Aum Shinrikyo (cult rant pt 3)

Welcome to part 3 to where to talk about Cults

Part one: https://friendrewind.com/blog/heavens-gate-cult-rant-pt-1-2862

Part two: https://friendrewind.com/blog/los-narcosatnicos-cult-rant-pt-2-5143

Aum Shinrikyo 

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Were the teachings of yoga always so extreme?

In February 1984, Asahara Shoko evolved his small yoga school in the Shibuya district of Tokyo into a religious movement known as Ōmu Shinsen no Kai (オウム神仙の会, "Aum Heavenly Sage Association") or just Amu Shinrikyo for short

In 1989 they gained official status as a religious organization. And Asahara Shoko soon became obsessed with Biblical prophecies and he began to tie in western religious ideas with popular manga and anime themes like space missions, (call back to Heaven's Gate lol) and the quest for ultimate truth. 

 Asahara Shoko then took parts from the ideology of Isaac Asimov's science fiction Foundation Trilogy which was basically a doomsday. civilization will end, and you have to prep to rebuild it, type of thing and he mixed that western ideas in with the Buddhist teachings. Which interested enough people to join Amu Shinrikyo. 

A cover of the first volume of "Harmagedon" (滅亡の日), a propaganda manga published by Aum Shinrikyo in 1989

What makes this religious movement into a cult?

Well first their.. questionable practices and initiation rituals involved giving newcomers LSD, and the followers were forced to live a very disciplined life, such as being hung upside down and given shock therapy but they labeled that as 'Yoga'

In the 80s is when they started to get some real attention from the public though, with claims of followers being held against their will, forcing members to give money and even murdering a follower who attempted to live the cult in 1989. And a lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto threatened to sue the cult which later that month his wife and child went missing from their home. 

Poison Sprees 

On July 1993 members of the cult attempted to cause an anthrax epidemic by spraying large amounts of liquid containing Bacillus anthracis spores from a cooling tower on the roof of Aum Shinrikyo's Tokyo headquarters but it ended up failing and just caused a bad smell lmao. 

Then at the end of 1993 Amu Shinrikyo began manufacturing a deadly nerve agent called Sarin and another called VX . 

June 27th 1994 is when the Matsumoto incident took place which followers of the cult sprayed Sarin in the central area of the city Matsumoto and it resulted in 8 people dead and harmed 500 more. But somehow the police were unaware of the cults involment at the time. 

In late 1994 and early 1995, personal murders and posion attacks were made, victims like Noboru Mizuno who was in serious condition after being posioned, Tadahito Hamaguchi, whom Asahara suspected was a spy, who died after a follower of the cult attacked and poisoned him. Kiyoshi Kariya, a brother of a former member of the cult, was kidnapped and murdered. 

The Tokyo subway attack 

On March 20th 1995 members of the cult released Sarin onto five subway trains, which ended up killing 13 commuters, seriously injuring 54, and affecting 980 and more. The incident resulted in the police being tipped off about Aum Shinrikyo, and so the police raided their headquarters and found tons of drugs like LSD, the laboratories for the Sarin and a safe containing million of US dollars. And over the next six weeks over 150 cult members were arrested. 

This footage of Asahara Shoko in meditation with the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, was filmed only 6 days after the attack.

30 March 1995, Takaji Kunimatsu, chief of the National Police Agency, was shot four times near his house in Tokyo and was seriously wounded. On 23 April 1995, Hideo Murai, the head of Aum's Ministry of Science, was stabbed to death outside the cult's Tokyo headquarters. 

On May 5th, luckily, a hydrogen cyanide device stuffed in a toilet in Tokyo's busy Shinjuku station was found before it could be released, but if it had been released, it could've killed up to 10,000 commuters.  

Finally on May 16th 1995 Asahara Shoko was found hiding within a wall of a cult building in the Kamikuishiki complex and was arrested. He was initially charged with 23 counts of murder and 16 other offenses, and he was found guilty and was sentenced to death. Which other members were also sentenced to death with him. 

On 6 July 2018, Asahara Shoko and six other Aum Shinrikyo members were executed by hanging. 

Afterwards, the youngest daughter of Asahara Shoko urged her relatives and cult members to "put an end to the Aum and stop hating society"

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wowie this one is long

I worry that when people see these longer blogs, they just click off cuz they don't feel bothered enough to read all dis but ahh I feel bad when I leave out info 

so i try to add image/gifs/videos to make it look more interesting than just a wall of text lol