Terrorist Use of Biological Weapons - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 293

The 1990-1995 Aum Shinrikyo Attacks
The only other known case of attempted mass-casualty bioterrorism oc-
curred in Japan over several years. Like the Rajneesh attacks, it was per-
petrated by a religious cult. However, unlike the Rajneesh, the Aum
elected to try aerosol dissemination of lethal agents. Despite repeated at-
tempts, they were unsuccessful in causing any disease, and in retrospect
it is clear that they did not even make the first substantive step toward an
effective bioweapon.
Rise of the Aum
Chizuo Matsumoto was born in 1955 in Kongo, a village in Kumamoto
Prefecture. He suffered from congenital glaucoma and went to a school
for the blind, eventually obtaining his license for acupuncture. In 1984
he established a small yoga school, Aum No Kai (“Circle of Aum”; Aum is
a Sanskrit syllable taken to symbolize the creation, sustenance, and de-
struction of the world), and began to call himself Shoko Asahara (no spe-
cific meaning). 16 Two years later he declared himself the only person in
Japan to have achieved the highest level of enlightenment, and he reor-
ganized his yoga circle into a religious group. The name of the group was
changed to Aum Shinrikyo (“Religion of the Supreme Truth of Aum”) in
1987, and it obtained official religious corporation status from the Tokyo
metropolitan government in 1989.
Asahara became famous among young Japanese interested in the
supernatural when a magazine featured a photo of him levitating. The
Aum's membership increased rapidly, to more than 15,000 in Japan (plus
many thousands of foreign members), at the time of the sarin incident in
Tokyo. Asahara designed a step-by-step curriculum for developing super-
natural power and told his followers that they would invariably succeed
if they sincerely followed the training course.
Asahara's doctrine was based mainly on Tibetan Buddhism and Yoga,
but other influences, such as the topic of Revelation and the prophecies
of Nostradamus, also helped shape his apocalyptic view. Shiva, the Hindu
god of destruction, was worshipped. Asahara told followers that in order
to attain emancipation, they should be empty vessels to be filled with the
will of the guru.