They Followed One Man… Then Tokyo Changed Forever | Tokyo Subway Attack

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]He convinced thousands of people he could save the world, but his plan would nearly destroy a city. Shoko Asahara was born Chizuo Matsumoto in 1955 in Kumamoto, Japan. He was partially blind from birth and grew up in different circumstances. By his early 30s, he had reinvented himself completely. He claimed he had achieved enlightenment, that he could levitate, that he had received divine visions about the end of the world, and that he alone could lead his followers through it. In 1984, he founded a small yoga class in Tokyo. It grew. He renamed the organization Aum Shinrikyo, a name combining a Sanskrit syllable with the Japanese word for supreme truth. And people came. Not French people, not only desperate or the uneducated. Aum Shinrikyo attracted doctors, [music] engineers, scientists, and university graduates. Young, [music] intelligent people who were searching for meaning and who found in Asahara a figure who seemed to offer answers the outside world could not. He blended Buddhism, Hinduism, and apocalyptic Christianity into a belief system that was compelling enough to draw followers across Japan and eventually internationally.

[00:01:33]>> [music] >> He spoke about a coming world war, about poison gas attacks, about a global catastrophe that only Aum members would survive. Members donated their savings.

[00:01:45]Some gave everything they owned. Some left their family entirely in Aum compounds, cut off the outside contact.

[00:01:52]By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the organization had thousands of members and significant financial resources.

[00:01:59]Asahara had also begun seeking political power. In 1990, all Aum Shinrikyo candidates in Japanese parliamentary elections, all of them lost. Publicly, Asahara accepted the result. Privately, something shifted. Former members who eventually left the organization described a change in atmosphere after the election failure. The teachings became darker. The language around outsiders became more hostile. The boundaries between the commune and the rest of the world became harder. And inside those walls, the scale the secrecy deepened. Asahara was no longer just preaching about the end of the world. It was beginning to plan for it.

[00:02:39]But behind the teachings, something far darker was already building.