The liquid was sarin, a lethal nerve gas invented by German scientists in the 1930s. Aum had learnt to make it. According to The Cult at the End of the World, an investigation by David Kaplan and Andrew Marshall, it had come up with a song to celebrate the discovery. One verse went: "It came from Nazi Germany, a dangerous little chemical weapon, Sarin Sarin. If you inhale the mysterious vapour, you will fall with bloody vomit from your mouth, Sarin! Sarin! Sarin - the chemical weapon."
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Murakami is not alone in seeing 1995 as key. "This was exactly when Japan went from being the land of economic miracle to the land of interminable slump," says Jeff Kingston, a US academic and long- time resident. "In 1995, people saw the powerful Hanshin earthquake in Kobe and the gassing of Tokyo commuters by religious fanatics as omens that things were very wrong in their realm."
A minority of Japanese had long felt something was wrong. In the 1970s and 1980s, people looking for inspiration beyond the cult of GDP were not short of alternatives. L. Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology, the Unification Church of Reverend Sun Myung Moon and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's movement all flourished. By the 1980s, a hundred new religions were emerging every year in what one scholar termed "the rush hour of the gods".
It was fertile ground for Asahara, the son of a tatami-mat maker born in 1955 as Chizuo Matsumoto. Blind in one eye and bullied as a child, Matsumoto grew up ruthlessly determined to succeed. After failing an entrance exam for Tokyo university, the elite institution from where many Aum recruits would later be drawn, the embittered Matsumoto had his first run-in with the law when he was arrested for punching a fellow employee at a massage parlour. His second arrest followed in 1982 after he had duped elderly patients out of $200,000 by selling them Almighty Medicine - tangerine peel in alcohol solution - at $7,000 a pop.
In 1984, the 29-year-old Matsumoto set up the Aum Association of Mountain Wizards, a yoga and health-drink club. Things got more sinister when he reinvented himself as Shoko Asahara and started travelling to the Himalayas. He renamed his group Aum Supreme Truth, whose ideology was stapled together from Shiva the Destroyer, Nostradamus, the 16th century doomsayer, and Biblical notions of Armageddon. He began to predict a nuclear war that would soon lay waste to civilisation. Naturally, only devout - paid-up - members of Aum would survive.
Thousands of Japanese fell for this bizarre sales pitch. Of course, other societies are susceptible to false prophets, not least the US where in 1997, to cite just one example, 39 members of Heaven's Gate committed mass suicide with the aim of floating away behind the Hale-Bopp comet. In Russia, which underwent wrenching social change in the 1990s, Aum's membership grew to 30,000.
What distinguished Asahara was that he attracted a higher class of cultist. Many of those who signed over all their possessions and cut ties with society were recruited from elite universities. Well- educated young people, who might otherwise have joined prestigious companies or powerful ministries, found themselves participating in bizarre rituals. In one, which cost $7,000, initiates would drink a small vial of Asahara's blood. In another they would gulp down his dirty bathwater, known as Miracle Pond, at $800 a quart. Cut- price initiates could seek enlightenment through the guru's beard clippings, a snip at $375.
Before long, Aum shifted its focus from surviving Armageddon to precipitating it. Lieutenants scoured the world for chemical and biological weapons, even a nuclear bomb. Back in Japan, hundreds of young Japanese donned electrode caps intended to synchronise their brain waves with those of Asahara.
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