Aum Shinrikyo

Aleph (Japanese: アレフ, Hepburn: Arefu), better known by their former name Aum Shinrikyo (オウム真理教, Oumu Shinrikyō; lit. 'religion of Aum Supreme Truth'), is a Japanese new religious movement and doomsday cult founded by Shoko Asahara in 1987. It carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995 and was then found to have been responsible for the Matsumoto sarin attack the previous year.

The group says that those who carried out the attacks did so secretly, without their plans being known to other executives and ordinary believers. Asahara insisted on his innocence in a radio broadcast relayed from Russia and directed toward Japan.

On 6 July 2018, after exhausting all appeals, Asahara and six followers on death row were executed as punishment for the 1995 attacks and other crimes. Six additional followers were executed on 26 July. At 12:10 AM, on New Year's Day 2019, at least nine people were injured (one seriously) when a car was deliberately driven into crowds celebrating the new year on Takeshita Street in Tokyo. Local police reported the arrest of Kazuhiro Kusakabe, the suspected driver, who allegedly admitted to intentionally ramming his vehicle into crowds to protest his opposition to the death penalty, specifically in retaliation for the execution of the aforementioned Aum cult members.

Aum Shinrikyo, which split into Aleph and Hikari no Wa in 2007, had already been formally designated a terrorist organization by several countries, including Russia, Canada, Japan, France, Kazakhstan, and the European Union. It was previously designated by the United States as a terrorist organization until 2022, when the State Department determined the group to be largely defunct.

The Public Security Intelligence Agency considered Aleph and Hikari no Wa to be branches of a "dangerous religion" and it announced in January 2015 that they would remain under surveillance for three more years. The Tokyo District Court canceled the extension to surveillance of Hikari no Wa in 2017 following legal challenges from the group, but continued to keep Aleph under watch. The government appealed the cancellation, and in February 2019, the Tokyo High Court overturned the lower court's decision, reinstating the surveillance, citing no major changes between Aum Shinrikyo and Hikari no Wa.

The movement "evolved out of a yoga school founded by Asahara Shoko in the Shibuya district of Tokyo in February 1984". The movement was known as Oumu Shinsen no Kai (オウム神仙の会, "Aum Heavenly Sage Association") 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, from the beginning, considered controversial in Japan, it was not initially associated with serious crimes. It was during this period that 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 to prepare themselves for the moment...when they will emerge to rebuild civilization". Lifton 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.