Tokyo subway sarin attack — Tokyo subway attack · 197

The attack was a criminal and terrorism investigation, not a war. Police had already been moving toward Aum after the June 1994 Matsumoto sarin case (eight dead) and earlier crimes, including the 1989 murder of lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto and his family. Asahara Shoko, born Matsumoto Chizuo, was arrested on 16 May 1995. He was sentenced to death in 2004; the sentence became final in 2006. He and other Aum convicts were executed beginning on 6 July 2018.

Legal aftermath included revocation of Aum’s religious-corporation status, a 1995 revision of the Religious Corporations Act, and the 1999 Act on the Control of Organizations Which Have Committed Acts of Indiscriminate Mass Murder. Successor groups remain under public-security watch. English-language memory framed Aum as a “doomsday cult” that ended Japan’s reputation for public safety.

Tokyo 20 March 1995 is the type investigation in which arrests, chemistry identifications and a decade of trials left almost no mystery — and still remade how Japan watches religious corporations. Five coordinated releases occurred on Teito Rapid Transit Authority (now Tokyo Metro) lines during the Monday rush, aimed at trains passing Kasumigaseki, the ministry quarter. Station staff and passengers were among the dead. Hospitals treated thousands for exposure. The page stops at that public sequence.