Shoko Asahara

Shoko Asahara (麻原 彰晃), born Chizuo Matsumoto (松本 智津夫), was the founder and leader of the Japanese doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo.

Chizuo Matsumoto was born on March 2, 1955, the fourth son of a large, poor family of tatami-mat-makers in Kumamoto Prefecture.

He had infantile glaucoma from birth, which made him lose all sight in his left eye and go partially blind in his right eye at a young age, and was thus enrolled in a school for the blind when he was 6-years-old due to being unable to follow on the family trade; he never lived with his family again.

Matsumoto discovered a way to earn money by directing other kids to a candy store, and as he was the only student in the school still capable of having some vision, this led to him becoming somewhat well-liked.

However, Matsumoto was also known to be a bully at the school, taking advantage of the other students by beating them and extorting money from them.

During his adolescence, Matsumoto developed a fantasy about ruling a kingdom of robots with total power and confided in his schoolmates about his aspiration to rule Japan as Prime Minister.

He graduated in 1973 and applied to study Politics at Tokyo University, but was rejected.

He then turned to the study of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, which were common careers for the blind in Japan, and he established a Chinese medicine shop outside Tokyo.

Asahara married the following year and eventually fathered six children, the eldest of whom was born in 1978.

The cult started attracting controversy in the late-1980s with accusations of deception of recruits, holding cult members against their will, forcing members to donate money and murdering a cult member who tried to leave in February 1989.

Kaplan and Marshall alleged in their book that Aum was also connected with such activities as extortion.

In 1981, Matsumoto was convicted of practicing pharmacy without a license and selling unregulated drugs, for which he was fined ¥200,000 (equivalent to about ¥270,000 [£1,500] in 2023).

Matsumoto's interest in religion reportedly started at this time.

Having been recently married, he worked to support his large and growing family.

He dedicated his free time to the study of various religious concepts, starting with Chinese astrology and Taoism.

Later, Asahara practiced Western esotericism, yoga, meditation, esoteric Buddhism, and esoteric Christianity.

Matsumoto let his hair and beard grow and adopted the name Shoko Asahara.

Shoko meaning "an offering of incense" in Japanese, and Asahara being an aristocratic surname, unlike the plebeian surname Matsumoto.

Starting in 1984, Asahara made several pilgrimages to India, where he met Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.

Asahara later claimed to his followers that he managed to achieve Enlightenment, met Shiva, and was given a "special mission" to preach "real Buddhism" in Japan.

The Dalai Lama later distanced himself from Asahara and said that he had met "a strange Japanese man", but denied having any significant relationship with him.

Asahara returned permanently to Japan in 1987 and assumed the title sonshi meaning "guru" before stating that he had mastered meditation to such an extent that he could lift himself with his mind.

He promoted this achievement with pamphlets produced by his own publishing company, but outside a few Japanese periodicals with an occult subject, little publicity was achieved.

Aleph (アレフ), formerly Aum Shinrikyo (オウム真理教), was founded by Asahara in his one-bedroom apartment in Tokyo's Shibuya ward in 1987, starting off as a yoga and meditation class known as Oumu Shinsen no Kai (オウム神仙の会) and steadily grew in the following years.

It gained official status as a religious organization in 1989 and attracted a considerable number of graduates from Japan's elite universities, thus being dubbed a "religion for the elite".

Although Aum was considered controversial in Japan, it was not initially associated with serious crimes until Asahara became obsessed with Biblical prophecies.

Aum's public relations activities included publishing comics and animated cartoons that attempted to tie its religious ideas to popular anime and manga themes, including space missions, powerful weapons, world conspiracies, and the quest for ultimate truth.

Aum published several magazines including Vajrayana Sacca and Enjoy Happiness, adopting a somewhat missionary attitude.

Isaac Asimov's science fiction Foundation Trilogy was referenced "depicting as it does an elite group of spiritually evolved scientists forced to go underground during an age of barbarism so as to prepare themselves for the moment...when they will emerge to rebuild civilization".

It has been posited that Aum's publications used Christian and Buddhist ideas to impress what he considered to be the more shrewd and educated Japanese who were not attracted to boring, purely traditional sermons.

Advertising and recruitment activities, dubbed the "Aum Salvation plan", included claims of curing physical illnesses with health improvement techniques, realizing life goals by improving intelligence and positive thinking, and concentrating on what was important at the expense of leisure.

This was to be accomplished by practicing ancient teachings, accurately translated from original Pali sutras.

These efforts resulted in Aum being able to recruit a variety of people ranging from bureaucrats to personnel from the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.

He was convicted of masterminding the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, and was also involved in several other crimes.

Authors David Kaplan and Andrew Marshall, in their 1996 book, The Cult at the End of the World, claim that initiation rituals often involved the use of hallucinogens, such as LSD.

Religious practices often involved extremely ascetic practices claimed to be "yoga".

These included everything from renunciants being hung upside down to being given shock therapy.

Asahara was sentenced to death in 2004, and his final appeal failed in 2011.

In June 2012, his execution was postponed due to further arrests of Aum members.

He was ultimately executed along with other senior members of Aum Shinrikyo on July 6, 2018.