Sarin gas attack survivor recalls near miss on Tokyo subway
Aum Shinri Kyo released gas on subway 20 years ago, claiming 13 lives
Twenty years is a long time. But to Atsushi Sakahara, the morning commute he took exactly two decades ago today will stay with him forever.
"I remember getting in the third door from the front of the first carriage after the train pulled in at Roppongi Station," Sakahara said. "I was holding a newspaper and I saw a free seat and I moved towards it, but I saw a folded newspaper on the floor leaking a clear liquid. I nearly stepped on it.
"I sensed concern in the other passengers and I turned around and went the other way down the carriage."
Not sitting down probably saved Sakahara's life.
"I remember very clearly that I was reading an article about the arrest the evening before of a senior member of the Aum Shinri Kyo cult when my eyes began to feel strange," he said. "I could not focus."
Unable to shake his sense of unease, 48-year-old Sakahara opened the connecting door to the next carriage and stepped through. A couple of people followed him, including a pregnant woman.
"I heard someone behind me say a man in the other carriage had lost consciousness and I looked through the window at him," he said. "As we came into Kamiyacho Station, some of the passengers carried him and another man off the train. I heard that one of them later died."
Japan will today mark the 20th anniversary of the day on which domestic terrorists in the guise of a religious group launched a series of coordinated attacks that shook Japan's sense of national security.
Thirteen commuters and station workers died after members of the cult calmly pierced sachets of sarin gas with the sharpened tips of umbrellas.
The attacks were, however, the final throes of an organisation that had for more than two decades been convincing the young and the gullible that its leader, the half-blind former yoga instructor Shoko Asahara, was a reincarnated god.
Asahara's followers had previously abducted and murdered a lawyer fighting the cult through the courts, along with his wife and their infant son, before Aum purchased assault rifles and a Russian helicopter.
It was allegedly attempting to purchase the components for a nuclear weapon, while its chemists began manufacturing sarin and VX gas in 1993.
Eight people died in an attack in June 1994 on a court hearing a case against the cult in the city of Matsumoto and, when the cult realised in early 1995 that a raid on its headquarters was imminent, it went on the offensive.
The subway sarin attack was reportedly designed to destabilise the government and cause sufficient chaos to enable Asahara to seize power.
Survivors reacted in different ways, says Sakahara. He decided to resign from his job at an advertising agency and move to the US, where he completed an MA and produced a documentary, titled , that won a Palm d'Or at Cannes in 2001.
But he was unable to escape his past even after moving half-way across the world. He met a Japanese woman and, once more back in Japan, they planned their marriage. Just days before the ceremony, she revealed that she had been a member of Aum Shinri Kyo while at university. The marriage went ahead, but they were divorced within 18 months.
Today, he is close to completing a new documentary movie that focuses on Hiroshi Araki, the head of public relations for Aum Shinri Kyo.
"People ask me if I am some sort of fan of Aum and my response is of course not," he said. "My message is that I want to believe in fellow humans. Even if people kill each other in the name of religion, in the name of a country or a race, I still want to believe in the goodness of humans."
