Japanese Cult

The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo (“Supreme Truth”) was founded by Shoko Asahara in 1984 and started out as a yoga and meditation class before devolving into something quite a bit more sinister. Aum Shinrikyo was responsible for the murder of an anti-cult lawyer and his family, as well as sarin gas attacks in Nagano and Tokyo that resulted in the death of 20 people and thousands of injuries. When the police raided their facilities they found chemicals that could make enough sarin gas to kill 4 million people.
"Some mornings you can hear chanting but it's very quiet right now," says salaryman Tatsuo Kaneko. "Aum claims the building is a printing plant, but what worries us is all those pipes coming out of the side." The cult lied for years about the function of another facility with lots of pipes. It turned out to be a factory making the Nazi-era nerve gas, sarin.
Kaneko and his neighbours are also worried by the giant shipping containers Aum has installed in the compound. The cult claims they are for storing rice, but the locals know it once used the same kind of containers as prisons and torture chambers for anyone who tried to flee the sect. Kaneko has spied something else unsettling through his binoculars: all the cultists have deathly-white faces but lobster-red feet. He believes this indicates Aum has revived an agonising ritual it called "thermotherapy", in which followers are "purified" in a bath of scalding water. The practice has killed at least one follower in the past.
The past is where Sanwa residents thought Aum Shinrikyo belonged, until it turned up on their doorstep. After the Tokyo subway attack, police arrested Aum's partially blind guru Shoko Asahara and hundreds of his devotees. The cult was stripped of its religious status and declared bankrupt, and its facilities near Mount Fuji - including the mammoth sarin factory - were bulldozed to the ground. But while Aum is designated a terrorist group by the US state department, it was never outlawed in Japan, where the authorities seemed to believe it would just fade away. They were very wrong.
Aum's revival is astonishing. Not only has it survived its years in the wilderness, but it is expanding again at an alarming rate. It now has about 2,000 followers, including 500 hard-core devotees living in cult-owned facilities. It earned a staggering £30m last year from its shops, which sell cut-price computers assembled by unsalaried followers. It is distributing millions of booklets in which new recruits explain how Aum teachings have given them supernatural powers. It even has its own pop band, called Perfect Salvation, which performs songs written by the guru himself.
In its continuing crackdown, as well as arresting one follower police have confiscated more than half a million leaflets. Not surprisingly, Aum isn't getting anyone's sympathy: the cult has never apologised or expressed remorse for its past actions. Araki knows an apology is vital before the cult has any chance of a normal relationship with Japanese society, but it appears the cult's six leaders have not come to the same conclusion.