Looking Back on a Day of Terror: Reflections on the Subway Sarin Attacks

A Fateful Morning

On the morning of March 20, 1995, I was on my way to work at the advertising firm Dentsū, when I got on a Hibiya Line train and became a victim of the Aum Shinrikyō sarin gas attack. For some reason, there was an empty seat when I boarded; as I approached, I saw a soaking sheet of newspaper that had fallen down beside it.

The liquid was leaking out onto the floor, but I didn’t pay it much attention, planning to sit down. However, when I saw the expressions of hesitation on the faces of other passengers, I instinctively turned around and walked away. If I hadn’t noticed the way they looked, I’d have stepped on the sarin-soaked floor and taken that seat. I might even have died.

Tokyo Fire Department members in protective suits enter Kasumigaseki Station on March 20, 1995. (© Jiji)

Before becoming a sarin victim, I’d faced other near encounters with death that shaped my outlook on life. These recollections make me think of the Buddhist term zanki, which can mean both “to feel deep shame through long reflection on oneself” and to “speak ill of others.”

I can’t talk about the subway sarin attacks 30 years ago without touching on these, so I’ll do so briefly here.

Before the Sarin Attack

When I was 19, went to see a Hollywood movie with a friend I’d got to know at a Kyoto cram school. Afterward, he told me he wanted to be an interpreter between Japanese and English. This fired up a sense of a rivalry in me, and I replied boldly, “I want to go to Kyoto University and get an MBA in the United States. Then I’ll make films, win an Oscar, and give a clever speech.”

The next spring, he passed the Kyoto University entrance exam, but I failed and had to spend another year preparing for the next one. After that, I called him up on the phone and said I had something I wanted to discuss with him, but we didn’t end up meeting. Some time later, I heard that he’d killed himself, and I determined myself to achieve the promise I’d made to him.

I spent three years after my high school graduation studying to get into university, and finally enrolled in Shiga University. One day, I went on a drive with some students from a higher year. We were in several different cars, and in the one I was meant to be riding in, one of those students and a girl from my year were killed in a traffic accident.

Later, while I was using my English to guide foreign tourists in Kyoto, I met a rabbi who was living in the United States. He encouraged me to take the Kyoto University entrance exam again, and this time I passed it.

At Kyoto University I met David Greenspan, who later won the short film Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Bean Cake; I was the associate producer. I also met people like the Emmy-award-winning news producer Trisha Sorrells Doyle and the entrepreneur Gerrit van Wingerden. When I graduated, Dentsū hired me based on the experience I’d accumulated.

A Difficult Return

The year after the Sarin attack, I left Dentsū to take my MBA, getting help from my rabbi friend with the move to the United States. I completed it at the Haas School of Business, at UC Berkeley, and then stayed in Silicon Valley working at an edtech start-up. Around this time Bean Cake won its Palme d’Or.

That year, I returned to Japan, met a woman, and we decided to get married. Just before I was going to meet her parents, she told me that in the past she’d made a mistake by joining Aum Shinrikyō—the very group that had perpetrated the sarin attack. I still married her, but we got divorced a year and a half later. The Aum issue certainly cast a shadow over our marriage.

I became the head of a nonprofit organization called Recovery Support Center, which worked to support victims of the attack through actions like group health checkups. In 2010, or 15 years after the attack, I published an autobiography.

One day, when we held an RSC memorial event, I posted the facts online about how sarin victims couldn’t get life insurance. After I had told an insurance salesperson the truth about how I got psychiatric treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder in the wake of the attack, the company stopped contacting me. Maybe it was worried about delayed aftereffects.

Around this time, the national government started payments to sarin victims. While I felt these schemes were inadequate, I received ¥5 million via RSC, because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to live. However, I left the organization after it was said at a board meeting that there wouldn’t be any issue with delayed aftereffects. (Incidentally, RSC is set to disband at the end of March 2025.)

Back to Filmmaking

Some years later, my aftereffects became more severe and, finding it difficult to work, I struggled to get by. Then one day, another blow brought me to a critical situation. I was on a flight from Tokushima to Tokyo after a job filming the Shikoku henro pilgrimage when I lost consciousness and suffered a compression fracture in my vertebrae. I don’t know why it happened. I couldn’t continue my work in Tokyo, so I went back, broke and wearing a torso brace, to Kyoto, where my parents were.

I gave up on filmmaking for a while when I returned to Kyoto, but then through an introduction from a studio, I started teaching a directing course at a college in Osaka. This led me to think that I wanted to work on the kind of film only I would be able to make—one that might lead to solutions related to the sarin attack and Aum Shinrikyō. After a year of negotiations, I visited sites connected to the group with Araki Hiroshi, who was then in charge of public relations at Aleph, the Aum Shinrikyō successor group. This was when I started making my documentary Me and the Cult Leader. As a special observer, I shot footage when Takahashi Katsuya, the last of the fugitives who spread sarin on the underground, was brought to trial.

Rough Going

In 2014, I spent two days talking to Jōyū Fumihiro, the former public relations manager for Aum Shinrikyō, who formed a breakaway group called Hikari no Wa. The next year I published the book Chikatetsu sarin jiken 20-nen: Higaisha no boku ga hanashi o kikimasu (Twenty Years After the Subway Sarin Attacks: I’m a Victim and I’m Listening).

In the afterword, I was going to write, “I listened to Jōyū for two days, despite my status as a victim of his group’s crimes, and am sharing what he has to say in this work. This should be his last words to say to the public: I’d like to see him cease all statements and media appearances.” Confronted with this, though, Jōyū said, “There will be people who watch your film and become Aum Shinrikyō believers.” I was determined for this not to happen.

I had someone lined up to edit my film, but I called that off. With my money running out, I tried to edit it myself, but my aftereffects meant my eyes were tired, my hands and feet were numb, and (perhaps because of some subconscious defense mechanism) I became extremely sleepy when reviewing the footage. It was rough going. Still, I needed to make my film out of a sense of responsibility to society and history. Even if the release was delayed, I couldn’t give in and give up—in large part because of what Jōyū had said.

While my editing was bogged down, I heard there was an event supporting completion of partly made films, and I entered and won a prize. I also had the good fortune of being introduced to a Japanese editor living in Paris, and my film moved toward completion.

In 2018, the Aum Shinrikyō leader Matsumoto Chizuo (known as Asahara Shōkō at the time of the attacks) and other members of the group were executed. Meanwhile, Jōyū later admitted being present at the killing of a female believer in the early days of the cult. This meant that he’d concealed a vital piece of information—one that would make it very hard for Aum Shinrikyō to attract new members—despite claiming that some people who saw my film would join the group. He now leads Hikari no Wa, but has shown that his words no longer have any meaning. Mind control is a frightening thing.

An extra edition of a newspaper in Tokyo reporting the execution of Aum Shinrikyō leader Matsumoto Chizuo on July 6, 2018. (© Jiji)

A New Support Group

Hearing from my lawyer that a group representing victims of the subway sarin attack wasn’t accepting new members, I remembered my late father’s recommendation that I make one myself. In 2021, I founded a new group for both victims of the subway attack and the earlier attack in Matsumoto, Nagano, in June 1994. It aims to help victims communicate with each other, publish information in Japan and overseas to stop memories from fading, and provide economic and other support to allow victims to be independent. Every year we make offerings of flowers at the sites of the two attacks. The group is now included on a list of victim support organizations on the National Police Agency website.

Through my own efforts, Me and the Cult Leader opened on March 20, 2021, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. I couldn’t say it was a box office success, but it won praise at international documentary festivals and got 100% good reviews from critics on the Rotten Tomatoes review-aggregation website. It also won the Grand Prix at South Korea’s EBS International Documentary Festival, and was the only Asian film on the shortlist of 30 for the prestigious IDA Documentary Awards, which are seen as a prelude to the documentary feature Oscar.

A Life to Live

In March 2022, I made an announcement at the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare press club about a new project: one that would share videos online of sarin victims speaking about their experiences. I wanted people to know that there were lots of victims enduring the pain of aftereffects.

Some people talked about “synchronicity” in that the death of my friend who made it into Kyoto University and the sarin attack happened around the same time. But the wounds inside me were deeper than I imagined. I couldn’t find a way to live with my energy, knowledge, and English ability, none of which seemed adequate for what I wanted to accomplish.

Despite all this, I founded an edtech company in 2022 with one of my students at Osaka Metropolitan University, where I work as a part-time lecturer. I had a great education myself and got to know many people, and I wanted to pass something on to the next generation. My student will graduate this spring, and the company is set to blossom.

I also enrolled at Utsunomiya University to complete the latter stages of a doctorate in engineering, a degree I’m going to receive in spring 2025. The research is based on a reformulation of dialectics taught to me by my late friend from cram school.

With the cooperation of some university teachers, I’m working on a way of having my film used in liberal arts education. I’m planning to use half of the profits from the screening in this plan to help other victims. While writing this article, I also decided to make Me and the Cult Leader available to watch online for a fee.

My life was always a little strange, but after going through the sarin attack, it became much more volatile. In the future, I’d like to go overseas and try my hand at standup comedy in English. I also want to live my best life, putting in every effort across the board, including education, building businesses with the next generation, writing, and making films. After all, I’m still alive.

(Originally published in Japanese on March 7, 2025. Banner photo: A specialist Ground Self-Defense Force team decontaminates a subway car on March 20, 1995, after the Tokyo sarin attack. Courtesy Ground Self-Defense Force; © Jiji.)