In July 2018, 13 former members of Aum Shinrikyo were executed in
Japan, including Asahara Shoko, the guru of the new religion whose
crimes killed at least 29 people and injured 6500 more. Aum’s offenses
were as heinous as any the country has seen. There was the premeditated
slaughter of attorney Sakamoto Tsutsumi, his wife Satoko, and
their infant son Tatsuhiko in Yokohama in 1989. There was the sarin
gas attack in Matsumoto in 1994, which targeted judges overseeing a
lawsuit involving Aum, and which killed eight people and injured more
than 500. And there was Japan’s crime of the century: a terrorist attack
in which five coordinated releases of sarin gas in the Tokyo subway on
March 20, 1995 killed 12 and injured more than 5500—and which (but
for a bit of luck) could have killed many thousands.