By Yoichi Shimatsu
Exclusive to Rense
3-19-20

On this 25th anniversary of the Tokyo subway gassing, the mainstream media and online news providers are again running a disinformation operation in denial of COVID-19 being a bio-terrorism weapon armed with HIV and tuberculosis for use against the CISM World Military Games held in Wuhan this past October, which is similar to how the corporate press proved its readiness a quarter-century ago to disseminate the blatantly false claim about the use of "sarin" in the Tokyo subway gassing when chlorine and organophosphate farm chemicals were the actual toxins dispersed inside the underground trains. This non-ending big lie indicates the clandestine role of intelligence agencies in promoting the implicated terrorist cells nestled inside Aum Shinrikyo and now the South Korean Shincheonji.

Even in the chaos that ensued after the first major terrorist strike against a world capital, on March 20, 1995, my team at the Japan Times Weekly immediately quite aware from Day 1 that a false narrative was being spun and foisted on the Japanese public and the international media. A pair of American freelance reporters had who wrote articles for the Weekly under my editorship picked up reports from television news producers in Hong Kong that the state-sponsored NHK channel had just paid $2 million to executives of CNN, BBC and ABC to censor out any prior video clips on the Aum Shinrikyo sect's agitation against a police crackdown. The hush money was dispensed to buy time to hire scenario writers posing as Japanese journalists to pen a fictitious scenario to cloak the Liberal Democratic Party's foreign intelligence operation's longtime connections with the Aum Shinrikyo's hard-core "Vajrayana" arms-trafficking cell. In reality, Aum was not some crazed cult but instead served as an instrument of state-sponsored acquisition of weapons of mass destruction and to assassinate any potential sources of leaks of the secret rearmament program.

Fact-based approach toward the accused

As the official cover-up was being spun and imposed on press coverage, I huddled my small team of reporters and freelancers over one question: Are you, we, willing to take on the risks of breaking this cover-up wide open? No objections were voiced. Their nods were in stark contrast to the palpable fear and knee-jerk obedience of the rest of the national news and foreign press, which did not dare test the limits starting with the official order never to contact Aum Shinrikyo itself.

After getting out a quick weekend edition, I rushed over to the Aum Shinrikyo center in downtown Tokyo, walked past the police barricades as stunned Japanese reporters jaws dropped at my overt violation of their compromised consent to state orders. Once inside the offices and yoga room that reeked of vinegar-like acetic acid, installed in their indoor air system to counter a toxic gassing by the government spies, I told their spokesman Joyu that "Your group is being accused of every crime committed over the past 10 years and all of that cannot be true, so let's make a deal. If you're guilty of something, we'll call it as it is and go after you, but in cases where you're innocent I'll defend you to the end, but we'll need your cooperation in digging out the facts."

Joyu being a charismatic fellow who had graduated Waseda University and worked for a while at Japan's Space Agency replied, "What you are saying is exactly how the press is supposed to function, separating the facts from falsehood. Why is it that you're the only ones doing real reporting?" My response went something like that's just the way it goes nowadays. He added, "There were things done by different departments in our group that many of us still don't understand." He knew what I was getting at. For his followers to survive as a Buddhist sect, the state-sponsored arms-dealing cell had to be outed.

I took a preliminary list of 50 Aum members not yet detained back to my editorial office to divvy up between the reporters along with a slice of the monthly budget for their expenses, and the investigative journalism started up. Due to the government ban on press interviews of Aum members, our weekly was the sole source of interviews and direct reporting on the sect contained in a situation similar to the Clinton-era FBI isolation and demonization of the Branch Davidians holed up in their compound in Waco, Texas.

Truth-telling carries risks, no doubt, but I told our staffers and press operators that it's riskier to cross the street and be hit by a truck; everyone must die someday, so do what's right and handle the risks with basic security measures. We took our hits but not before putting a few top politicians behind bars for their sponsorship of Aum's weapons smuggling along with the usual crimes of financial malfeasance and political subversion in blatant violation of the antiwar Constitution. That's why the press and journalism exist, after all's said and done, as a watchdog protecting civil liberties and calling out reckless criminal violations by government officials. Yes, and they do kill watchdogs, as happened to our former managing editor in retaliation for his ethical support of press freedom, parliamentary democracy, public safety, the national interest, the rights of every individual and honor of the reigning emperor. He died an unsung hero in the battle for justice and so I bow deeply to his sacrifice.

The Powers that be

The Oklahoma City bombing and Tokyo subway gassing set the precedents for a spree of violent psy-ops including the demolition of the World Trade Center, the subsequent anthrax letters, false-flag nerve gassings in Syrian and the ISIS decapitations. The game-plan is by now familiar, a repugnant slaughter is used to befuddle local police and blackmail the political class, causing the government to impose a self-protective media cover-up. The defensive posture enables the disgruntled elite faction to demand concessions, which are accorded in the panicked reaction. The blame for such self-serving cynical cruelty against innocent victims is then pinned on a convenient patsy groomed for the role of "cultist madman", "religious fanatic" or "deranged lone gunman". It's all so predictable yet the media keeps buying into the same charade over and again, conspiring to deceive the more gullible and smug fools in the population. Not everyone's an imbecile, so cover-ups end up arousing suspicion and distrust, which is why so many people today revile the globalist elite and their controlled mainstream media. The edifice of lies is crumbling, yet there remains an entire history of lies that needs to be reexamined and demolished, including the Tokyo subway sarin deception. The failure to call out the high-level culprits gives them free reign for yet another attack, such as the coronavirus attacks against the special forces of 60 nations at the CISM World Military Games in Wuhan. History repeats itself, at least until we excavate the facts and name names. .

State-abetted terrorism works, which explains why there's been so much of it. The net result of covert ops since the 911 WTC false-flag operation is that USA is no longer a superpower, the postwar system of allied dominance is at end-game disintegration, and nontraditional players like Iran, the Saudis and India are pushing their wider agendas while the old royalist powers Japan and UK-Canada-Australia are determined the turn the clock back to the imperial glory of 1905, all at the expense of the other four Security Council members, who are at present back-biting instead of fighting the obvious perpetration factions. These themes of geopolitical realignment have been in play ever since the subway gassing to now become the irresistible force against the immovable object that is the USA.

Implausible Deniability

Back in the mid-1980s, former ambassador of Japan to Moscow and foreign minister Shintaro Abe, father of the present idiot-son prime minister, perceived the emerging collapse of the Soviet Union to be a golden opportunity to secretly transfer weapons of mass destruction to rearm Japan and overturn by deed the postwar "peace" Constitution, the UN San Francisco Treaty and US-Japan Security Alliance to the worthless pieces of paper they're written on. His agenda for grand larceny of instruments of mass murder was achievable by creating a fake "crazed cult" as cover for his clandestine operations.

Abe Senior had his fingers in all the false fronts, being closely connected with the Unification Church of Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Sukyo Mahikari and the Komeito political operatives backed by Soka Gakkai, those rotten holdovers from the wartime era. Pulling select cadres from these phony new religions into his new circus, Shintaro Abe then found the perfect guru with an apocalyptic martyr complex, a near-blind yoga fanatic from Agon Shu, a Tantric Shiva cult that practices weapons worship and fire-walking. Thus, the monstrous myth of the bearded and frankly disgusting Shoko Asahara was not created but produced for media, as the perfect alibi for his LDP allies to evade any whiff of impropriety.

Abe Senior traveled to back his old haunts in Moscow and Ekaterinaburg (Sverdlovsk) with conservative ideologue Shintaro Ishihara (who later became Tokyo governor) and a Komeito ally named Kusakawa to confer with Boris Yeltsin's national security adviser Oleg Lobov for their creation of the Russia-Japan University (Lobov served as the school chancellor). The university staff were Aum Shinrikyo cadres, meaning undercover operatives of the Japanese intelligence service run by the LDP research bureau. More than 2,400 former Soviet weapons designers were recruited with scholarships and stipends, and all had to participate in "meditation" sessions with electrode-studded helmets and subject themselves to the influence of psychotropic drugs. How easy can it get for spies to pilfer the technical specs for missiles, nuclear warheads, lethal gases and bio-toxins?

Many of these Russian, Ukrainian, Eastern European and Central Asian scientists and lab technicians were sent to Japan, where they disappeared down rabbit holes into secret weapons-production sites, like the actual sarin factory in the Japan Alps while the self-blinded media fixated on the fake lab in the Aum compound near Mount Fuji. My search for the secret nerve-gas factory, discussed further along, was frustrated by the sheer numbers of pesticide operations, Japan being the greatest per capita user of agricultural chemicals in the world, despite the flimsy image of macrobiotics, organic food and the urban myth of being "the world's healthiest diet". Eat the tofu and breathe in the sarin in the Japan Alps and radioactivity from Fukushima, sushi-gobbling Japanophiles!

Earthquake Machine that destroyed Kobe

Meanwhile, the mastermind's son Shinzo Abe was assigned to Kobe Steel's research division (located on the waterfront near the epicenter of the coming earthquake), where he hired Hideo Murai, an astrophysicist with an IQ higher (in the 220-plus range) than Albert Einstein's mere 190. There, Hideo and Shinzo worked on electromagnetic technology from Andrei Sakharov's lab that could instantly disintegrate bonds of steel and reassemble the ionized powder into tiny parts for micro-machines. This system, on a larger scale, had enormous potential for replacing the H-bomb with an EM energy blaster capable of triggering earthquakes, as happened to Kobe in early 1995, according to Murai before he was murdered by a knife-wielding Korean gangster. The grisly scene on the prime-time evening news of the contract killer brandishing a sushi knife as he walked past police officers, watching in amusement, to Murai to stab several times in the gut. The killer then walked up to a police officer, bowed and handed over the bloody knife. The blatant state-sponsored murder was a message to the Japanese populace to keep their mouths shut and look the other way.

After producing the "earthquake machine" that would later backfire on Kobe, Shinzo Abe was then reassigned to the New York City office of JETRO (the Japanese overseas trade organization), taking with him one of our newspaper staffers who was married to a top gamer at Tokyo University. Their mission was to hack DARPA and the Pentagon computer networks for designs of futuristic weapons systems. This precedent helps explain the recent desperate attempt to hack the US Health and Human Services (HHS) network for classified information on the investigation into Yoshihiro Kawaoka's splicing of HIV into flu viruses at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The modus operandi of each player remains the same down through the decades.

While Shinzo Abe was at Kobe Steel, a fellow member of his Unification Church chapter named Kiyohide Hayakawa led a team of 50 Moonies working on secret projects for Japan's Construction Agency in that port city. Hayakawa's entire team, which had close connections with the North Korean regime of Kim Il-Sung, joined Aum Shinrikyo at its inception. Later, Hayakawa made 20 trips from the Soviet-era nerve gas factory at Volvograd (Stalingrad) to Pyongyang, smuggling in enough sarin precursors to kill every human on Earth 20 times over, according to a prominent security journalist who had spend years in Caucasus during the Japanese covert operation to fund and arm the Chechen rebels. The intel agent tried to deny that the Hayakawa notes indicated an attempt to purchase a nuclear-armed ballistic missile from Ukraine. That didn't really matter, since his spook bosses if only out of curiosity hoped my team would just keep churning those sewers of elitist treason. Mid-rankin government types were eager readers of our Weekly as well as the Japanese-language Takarajima-30 (Treasure Island magazine from the Kadokawa press for which I was the English-language consultant), the only presses sleuthing the Aum links with the political bosses and their yakuza allies. Thus, our team benefited from a lot of leaks from inside the system. Our artists humored those benefactors with satirical cartoon cover pages, the only cause for laughter in Tokyo during those dark days.

In stark contrast, President Bill Clinton, tarred by the murder of his wife's law firm partner Vince Foster, took a benign view toward the LDP as good old boy buddies. The US Embassy staffers in Tokyo were swimming in bribes and perks from the LDP bosses, along with the CIA station chief, a running dog of the Chamber of Commerce in bilateral trade talks but otherwise on the LDP payroll. The DIA was genuinely worried about the Aum threat against American military bases and the Seventh Fleet naval yard at Yokusuka. Therefore, the only person in Washington who took notice of the reality of this emerging threat of WMD in the hands of sore losers of World War II was Senator Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, whose staff were avid readers of our reports on the Hayakawa coded notes describing Aum's weapons trafficking.

Rush Hour

Between 7 and 8 a.m. Monday, when commuters inside three subway trains of the Tokyo Metro choked on defrosting gas from inside lunch boxes placed by assailants on overhead baggage racks, the media narrative about the Tokyo subway gassing has been a piled-on layer cake of fictitious nonsense from government-hired scriptwriters. Of the 200,000 commuters traveling to work at that hour, one-tenth or 20,000 were affected by toxic chemicals, with many thousands collapsing on the stairwells and sidewalks after fleeing several underground stations.

Russian and American chemical warfare experts who watched the AP video feeds asserted that the gas could not have been sarin or more than 20,000 would be dead, instead of the 11 reported fatalities. The symptoms of nose bleed and blood spurting out of the mouth were consistent with chlorine poison, better known as mustard gas, as used in World War I, and much different from instantaneous death by sarin.

That assessment confirmed the observations of our daily news reporter assigned to the police beat on the morning of the attack on the sidewalk above Marunouchi metro station where the gassed subway trains converged. After the ambulances hauled away the last of the victims, reporters with the police press club (assignments to specific beats are done in cooperation with the public information offices of government bureaus or corporations) lingered to wait for the belated arrival of the Ground Self-Defense Force NBC unit. Their caravan arrived around noon from their base north of Tokyo due to heavy traffic congestion.

Two soldiers in full protective gear went down the steps and then emerged about 20 minutes later to declare "mustard gas". Our reporter asked how they identified the specific type of toxin. The lead solider show the press club members the indicators on a USA-built detector used by the American military, and in response to her second question replied that it certainly was not an organophospate like sarin.

When the G-SDF team proceeded on to other stations, the officer with the police press club stepped forward and ordered the reporters to destroy their notes and instead report only that sarin was the toxic agent. Our reporter was obviously disturbed by an official order countering what had just transpired with the only team capable of determining the lethal agent. Therefore, our media group's senior editors gave me the silent nod to proceed with the investigative journalism, in only as a "back-up" against the fictitious official narrative, an insurance policy which had never been done when Unit 731 was raging across China. I'd never felt better about press ethics in Japan than at that moment of getting the unspoken green light to push ahead. Our team conducted the only interview with the commander of the G-SDF team, who verified the lack of sarin in the subway tunnels and clarified that a small amount of agricultural chemicals were used in addition to chlorine. That confirmed the accounts of the Russian and American WMD experts who noticed that sarin cannot chemically have burned the flooring and chrome-galvanized poles in the subway cars. Sarin remains a big lie a quarter-century since that terrifying morning.

North Korean links

Later from hospital crews, we learned that a small number of the hospitalized showed dilated eyes, an indicator of poisoning by a mild organophosphate, which was quickly recognized because an annual 3,000 farmers across Japan are annually affected by contact with pesticides similar to malathion. The government forced the media to report that this lesser agent was "sarin" to divert public attention away from the actual state-sponsored sarin production facility operating under cover of an organophosphate agricultural chemical supplier in the Japan Alps region.

One of the attackers failed to get off a subway train in time and fell unconscious on the platform due to pesticide poisoning. Following his arrest, the assailant was treated at a hospital from where he allegedly "escaped" and disappeared from the official record, just hours before LDP "senior statesman" Shin Kanemaru flew to Pyongyang on a "good will mission". Shin Kanemaru, the principle campaign funder for the LDP, was earlier implicated by the discovery of 100 kilograms of unmarked gold ingots found in his house, consistent with bullion produced by the North Korean regime. A point to remember is that the Korean Peninsula was a colony of Imperial Japan for nearly a half-century, and whatever the difference in political systems and noisy propaganda, those sorts of high-level political relationships have thrived ever since, and remains a major source of Shinzo Abe's power base. Indeed the tyrannical anti-democratic ideology of the Korean Workers Party and the LDP regime are not in essence different.

Thus, the subway gassing was done as a security operation by the secret service of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) due to a change of guard in Pyongyang. The founding great leader Kim Il-Sung was a veteran of the guerrilla campaign in Soviet Red Army-occupied northern Manchuria. Kim the Elder followed lockstep Moscow's policy, especially since his young pretty second wife was a KGB asset. KJI therefore implemented the Yeltsin-Lobov-Abe plan for a sarin assault against the People's Liberation Army following an uprising by the Wuhan garrison. The mass destruction of Chinese military forces would have enabled his regime to recover Jilin Province and a vast swath of Heilongjiang that was formerly part of the Koryo kingdom annexed by the Ming Dynasty in Peking.

Under this master-plan to dismember the PRC, Russian spymaster Oleg Lobov could gain from a wider buffer zone, including the addition of Uyghurstan to the CIS Central Asian bloc, against the China-USA covert strategic alliance that was operative since the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s. As part of the PLA-CIA cooperative program, the young CIA spy Joe Biden was assigned to monitoring Soviet nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, from a joint CIA-PLA listening post in the Tianshan Mountains. This "old friends" relationship explains why the Bank of China was the biggest investor in Hunter Biden's private equity Rosemont Seneca consulting company. Spell Manchurian Candidate in all caps.

The Korean reversal

When Kim Senior fell into a coma and then died of heart failure in mid-1994, his son Kim Jong-Il took the reins of the Workers Party to begin a purge of his hated stepmother and her coterie of KGB agents and Russian military officers. (This sort of illicit "love affair" goes back to Emperor Nicholas II and his infatuation with Queen Min, which prompted her assassination by Korean democrats supported by Imperial Japan.

Kim the Younger's mother was born on Chinese soil in the Liaoning region, making him an anti-Russian Sinophile. Neither was he especially hostile to the Americans as a nationalist trying to establish middle ground between the four powers. The huge hoard of sarin precursors delivered by Aum-Moonie arms smuggler Kiyohide Hayakawa piqued the younger Kim's curiosity as to its intended purpose, and thereby to his shock the Aum Shinrikyo plot of Lobov and Shintaro Abe came to light. Pyongyang sent signals to Japan's National Police international branch to shut down Aum and the sarin operation, but the LDP-controlled Tokyo Police Agency dragged their feet on the crackdown and gave advance warning of planned raids to LDP spies inside Aum. The half-hearted police raid on Aum's Mount Fuji headquarters and the disappearance of Shoko Asahara enraged Kim Junior, for being another typical Japanese delay tactic.

Therefore one of the special operations teams in place in the Kanto region was called to duty, and chlorine was available at a university laboratory in Tokyo where many Korean and Chinese students were enrolled. The ag chemical came off the shelf from any gardening store. It was a quickly implemented ad hoc plan to arouse Japanese public wrath and pin the blame on Aum and the LDP. Given these circumstances of LDP sponsorship and protection of Aum, the moral issue becomes rather complicated in this rock-and-hard place situation since the alternative was to nuke Tokyo. Luckily KJI was a gentle soul, who just wanted the operation shut down and had no desire to punish the Japanese public for the history of horrific crimes against the Korean people. For sure, they're all a cast of bad guys, but the worst was the Abe clan, which managed to evade justice thanks to John Foster Dulles and the yakuza. Japanese society is rife with these sorts of moral gray areas.

The upsetting factor for the grand plot against China was the death of partners in crime Shintaro Abe in 1991 and terminal illness of Kim Il-Sung three years later. After several delays by the police to protect the LDP and cast Aum as crazy deviants, the North Korean assault team hit the subways and then were evacuated to Pyongyang aboard Shin Kanemaru's charter flight. My informant network of cult insiders aligned with alternate leader Joyu were determined to remain a Japan-centered Buddhist sect free from these international covert operations, and they referred to the fanatic Korean faction as "Little Pyongyang."

The mass media was totally out of its league in reporting those events, whereas I was fortunate to have savvy senior editors guide me through the hoops of international intelligence affairs and realpolitik. These sorts of grand slam geopolitical moves, the Lobov-Abe-KIS plot to dismember China and the KJI counter-move against Tokyo, operate at a higher level than normal daily existence and way outside the narrow scope of The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic and the rest of the timid mouse pack, which has consistently failed the American readership, well, at least since William Randolph Hearst sank the battleship Maine to trigger the Spanish-American War. Contrary to the prettified myths of consumer capitalism, the facts show the world to be an ugly, messy and dangerous gladiatorial arena.

Sarin mystery

Having worked during my college years in organic chemistry labs, I immediately noticed the lack of ventilation at the supposed "sarin factory" on a visit to the Kamikuishiki-mura cult headquarters on the lower slopes of Mount Fuji. There were no windows or chimneys in the sheet metal walls, meaning anyone who attempted to make sarin inside that sealed building would have been quickly killed. The site was basically a warehouse for agricultural equipment and a workshop, not a laboratory. There were no other signs of chemical production, such as wilted leaves on the nearby bushes or powdery stains discoloring the ground or peeling paint. Yet Aum Shinrikyo had reportedly procured dozens of barrels of chemicals for sarin production. The sect members recalled seeing trucks parked in the afternoon on the perimeter of their base, but these were always gone before nightfall. This meant that Kamikuishiki-mura was used as a cut-out or decoy to deceive the US military helicopters that often flew directly overhead from the Mount Fuji war-games base outside Gotemba.

The barrels of sarin precursors came from a chemical company in Yokohama and that road continued on from the northeast slope of Fuji-san across Yamanashi Prefecture to Matsumoto, in Nagano Prefecture, the site of the first and only sarin poisoning in Japan, more than a year earlier in January 1994.

The media attempts to assign a motive for the so-called Matsumoto sarin attack on an apartment complex were seriously flawed. One of the judges in a lawsuit against Aum Shinrikyo supposedly lived there, but indeed resided elsewhere. A lawyer who tried to sue Aum likewise was not a resident. Here again, only the LDP could have rigged these false claims at the site, which had an unusually large underground parking lot capable of sheltering trucks. Its intrinsic value to Hayakawa as the transporter for the secret sarin plan for the third and final lap into the Japan Alps made it improbable for Aum to release sarin on this cut-out site. My hunch was that a sample of sarin produced in the mountainous hideout defrosted and escaped overnight on a return journey to an inspection lab in Tokyo, killing the Matsumoto residents. Of course, such an unintended leak from a state-financed nerve-gas operation would have to be covered up with media hysteria against patsies Aum Shinrikyo.

From what I could determine at the time is that Aum's drum-laden trucks would park there to evade detection during expected overhead sweeps by US Earth-observation and microwave satellites, with tracking data on their overhead sweeps coming from intelligence agents in Japan's space agency. The trucks would then head to their actual destination, the sarin production facility run by their Russian converts from Stalingrad. There are three major highways out of Matsumoto, one to the city of Nagano, another back-tracking into the grape-growing hills of Yamanashi, and the rather curious 350-degree left-turn into the Ina valley along the Tenryu (heavenly dragon) River. The Japan Sea coast would be too snow-bound for more than half the year for a WMD facility to risk. The factory would "normally" produce ag chemicals as a front, and apparently by March 20, 1995, not yet up to speed for sarin output, meaning organophosphate pesticides had to do. Likelier, the Russian lab technicians may have been scared by the police raid on the cult compound and shut down the plant to prevent detection by chemical-detecting satellites and helicopters and, worse, North Korean search parties.

Was I offended by the clandestine Korean special-ops teams in the Japanese capital? To maintain a high energy level, I'd sometimes go to a little yakiniku, grilled beef, restaurant in my neighborhood near Waseda University, rife with pachinko parlors and mahjong gambling rooms. One of the waiters was a shaven-headed acolyte in Aum Shinrikyo, and the jolly diners there would joke about his friends pulling off the subway gassing. My next-door neighbor was an attractive lady and her corps of bar maids from North Korea, who all had plastic surgery and worked in drinking spots in the Akasaka district near the Diet buildings. What caught my eye was their manner of walking into the elevator, with ramrod backbones and silent stepping one foot in front of the other. They were all well-muscled, indicating their role as a special forces unit to be mobilized on suicide missions against US and SDF bases, or the national parliament and prime minister's office in event of an invasion of North Korea. These pretty young things were the cutting edge in the balance of terror. Their even tougher male teammates accomplished the Tokyo subway gassing, with only one man down, and the Aum cadres were left behind as patsies. That how the real world operates across Asia, and maybe even the West.

Targeting the Imperial Household

Sarin was being produced not just for the planned assault against PLA division converging on a rebellious Wuhan garrison, but also for a deadly attack on the Imperial grounds in the center of Tokyo with the aim of assassinating Emperor Akihito (who currently lives in retirement). Aum had rented apartments and offices along two key roads by the gates of the imperial palace grounds in preparation for regime change. As a key step in the planned coup, the National Police chief who also headed the Imperial guards, Chief Takashi Kunimatsu, was shot in the back four times by a marksman, whose ruthless cowboy-style methods indicated his experience as a "rat hunter" in the underground Cuchi tunnel gun battles during the Vietnam War. The hitman-for-hire had earlier killed a top banker with a shot to his forehead in Nagoya during a massive falling out between the LDP right and liberal wings, their yakuza allies and the major corporate military-industrial complex. The Kobe-base "dark lord" who chaired the "yami" or shadow committee had suddenly died in 1993, leaving a power vacuum. This factional falling out prompted the LDP right to push for a war with China and replacement of the targeted reigning emperor with an ambitious militarist heir. There are other aspects to that stratagem and its players, which probably should not be divulged, at least not quite yet. I recall how on the night of our print-run on the police chief shooting, the pressmen begged me not to publish the lead article based on our interviews with homeless people who had seen the gunman escape from the shooting scene in a black Mercedes-Benz and not on a bicycle as falsely claimed by the Tokyo police, who were involved in the hit. The curt answer was that we all have to die someday, and tomorrow morning was a fine moment for my appointment with death. The press rolled.

Our previous crime reporting linked the attack to the earlier cowboy-style killing. In Japanese tradition, chopping off the head of a foe is acceptable but disfiguring the face is unthinkable and ignoble to victim and perpetrator. After that, the Tokyo Police stationed a team at one end of a little bridge below my apartment to silence me, while the National Police Agency posted a team on the other end of the span to prevent that outcome. In a society with strict gun control, I had to walk home from the subway station through a dark forest, protected only by the thick phone book inside my briefcase, sufficient to catch the first shot and give me a few seconds to rush any gunman and knock him to the ground. I certainly had no burning desire to join Hideo Murai on his way to reincarnation. At my office, whenever mail arrived, I'd smash my incoming mail on the edge of a metal desk. My colleagues asked why, and my answer was that breaking the detonator was the only way to disarm a letter bomb. From that point on, everyone would go to the toilet when the mail arrived. A lot of people were being shot and Aum members were being disappeared across the Kanto Plain, so the long nights were dark indeed, but my reporters and freelancers did not crack under the pressure, to their lasting credit.

The goal of the LDP conservatives was to install an Meiji-style emperor with near-absolute powers, implemented by genro, or senior ministers with a dictatorial grip on government and society. This, in a dilute version, is very much in line with the centralized powers, including over war-making, implemented under Shinzo Abe, who is a direct product of the Aum affair and wartime imperialist ideology. Hard-line royalists have a pathological gut hatred of democracy, as learned by the democratic Americans in 1776 and 1812. In Japan, the far right disdained Emperor Akihito for his support of parliamentary democracy and apologetic stance on Japanese aggression against Asia and the United States, whereas our editors at The Japan Times admired his courage in facing up to the healthy reforms needed to modernize Japan and expand the civil rights of ordinary citizens to prevent the comeback of fanaticism that led to the destruction of every city in Japan other than Kyoto.

Abe the Younger survived the National Police crackdown after the Tokyo subway gassing by hiring a PR agency to scrub the media and craft his image as an innocent Stanford graduate (which he is not, attending only a foreign-studies session). Luckily for that coward, his father Shintaro had died in May 1991, leaving LDP research chief Toshio Yamaguchi to take over the Aum operation. Spymaster Yamaguchi assessed Shinzo as a spoiled brat of low intelligence with a record of strike-outs, an astute estimate when considering all of Abe's subsequent failures at Fukushima decomissioning, the multi-billion dollar Olympics fiasco and the blowback to Japan from his biological warfare project against Wuhan. A slithery fraudster whose regime is based on support of low-life yakuza and Mizuho Bank's theft of the international charity funds for Fukushima relief, Abe deserves what was meted out to Hideo Murai, a thrust to his soft-fat belly, though perhaps it's been better to watch him dangling helplessly from his own failed delusions.

Lesson - Punish the wicked

Western politicians and military leaders who still try to play legalistically tolerating this war criminal, while their populations are living in fear of contagion, are morally complicit with Abe's devious schemes, therefore proving themselves unfit to govern. The lesson of the Tokyo subway gassing, a quarter-century later, is that the bad guys can get away with crimes against humanity, whatever the verdicts at the Nuremberg and Tokyo war-crimes trials. So the game must go on until there's a long line of hypocritical globalists at the gallows.

Our persistence paid off with the arrest of the chief of the LDP research bureau, the spymaster Toshio Yamaguchi, who was charged with complicity in the Kyowa and Anzen credit union embezzlement, which not only triggered the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble but was also used to finance Aum Shinrikyo and its research base in Banjawarn Station in Kalgoorie, Western Australia. Yamaguchi's sister, an Aum operative, was also sent to prison and her whereabouts or demise has gone unreported. Other culprits such as LDP heavyweight Ryutaro Hashimoto were punished in less visible ways, so as not to cause a scandal, in so typical a Japanese manner. They should have all been publicly hanged as in the case of their grandfathers who should have been strung up in a noose by the Tokyo war-crimes tribunal. Swift stern justice, as in the battle hymn of the Republic, is the only effective method for dealing with mass murderers. The moment that the Romans relented, out of soft hypocritical ethical feelings, was exactly when the decline and fall of Rome and its laws began.

There's much more to the Tokyo subway gassing, for example, the nuclear sabotage at the Tokaimura power plant that spread radioactivity over Tokyo in 1997 and 1999, the bogus "executions" of the government agents who ran Aum, the overdue deaths of coup conspirators Prime Ministers Ryutaro Hashimoto and the brain-scrubbed Yasuhiro Nakasone. The coronavirus outbreak could not have been more perfectly timed as retribution, arriving nine years after the Fukushima meltdowns, to ruin Abe's pet-project Tokyo 2020 Olympics. For all the innocent victims and just individuals murdered over the past 25 years by his criminal cabal, all I can say is that the pursuit of justice continues for as long as necessary, so that the multitude of innocent victims and martyrs for justice might rest in peace. The battle for truth and justice goes on. Struggle on, Gambare!