Tokyo Subway Gassing Was Abe’s First Strike

By Yoichi Shimatsu
3-19-15

This essay by the former general editor of The Japan Times Weekly, is the first in a retrospective series of articles on the Tokyo Subway Gassing issued on the 20th anniversary of that precedent-setting attack.

Within three hours of the Tokyo subway gassing that felled 20,000 commuters, our reporting team realized that the government was manipulating and censoring the news media to divert public attention from state sponsorship for terrorist cells planted inside the Aum Shinrikyo cult. In open challenge to censorship and disinformation, our investigative journalists, in tandem with Japanese-language Takarajima 30 (Treasure Island) magazine, exposed the key political heavyweights who had financed and directed secret agents inside the neo-Buddhist sect. The aim of Aum’s sponsors was to obtain nerve gas, nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles from post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine in order to stock Japan’s clandestine arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

Working with the only two news outlets willing to print leaks from honest but disgruntled police detectives and government officials, our editors recognized that the subway gassing was not just a crazed plot to trigger a global Armaggedon, a factually unfounded theme repeatedly cited by the collaborationist media. The untold story is that the subway attack was part of a larger coup attempt by the neo-militarist faction inside the powerful coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Clean Government Party (Komeito). The paralysis of the nation’s capital was a preliminary step toward isolating and eliminating those respected personages who defend the antiwar Constitution.

The retrogressive coup failed for several reasons. First, on the week after the gassing, an assassination attempt against National Police chief Takaji Kunimatsu was foiled by his nearly miraculous recovery from four gunshot wounds. His survival rallied those constitutionalists opposed to the shadowy alliance of neo-militarist politicians, yakuza, defense corporations and the nuclear industry. Second, our tiny remnant of the free press was able to sustain public discussion as well as discredit politicians who sponsored terrorist elements inside Aum Shinrikyo.

Unflinching truth in reporting reversed the pendulum of political opinion against the coup leaders. A few big fish like Liberal Democrat spymaster Toshio Yamaguchi were exposed, removed from office and imprisoned for their role in creating Aum. Other guilty parties got away amid the confusion that gripped the capital. Among those escapees was a WMD specialist named Shinzo Abe, who had acted as mentor of arms dealer Kiyohide Hayakawa and Aum’s “science minister” Hideo Murai.

That an arch-criminal responsible for murder and mayhem in the capital could be rehabilitated and twice elected prime minister is proof of the abject failure of Japanese prosecutors, courts and mass media to uphold the Constitution and defend public safety. Evil does not simply vanish; it must be uprooted or we shall all face destruction, That is the lesson of the subway gassing, and of the Fukushima meltdowns. Unbeknownst to the public, these two events are inextricably linked. Now, late in the game of a manmade apocalypse, resolute action toward swift justice must be taken or the same perpetrators will launch far deadlier assaults against a stupefied global society.

Canaries in the Fumes

“The only job more dangerous than theirs is done by the canary.” - JT Weekly, April 1, 1995, lead sentence in the article “Gas Busters”

The cover of our first edition after the subway gassing was titled “War of Nerves” and it was based on interviews with members of Ground Defense Force Unit 101, a chemical-weapons team that was dispatched southward from its base in Saitama Prefecture in response to the rush-hour gassing.

The first soldier to venture down the steps at Kasumigaseki subway station used a US Army-issued gas detector to determine the types of toxic compounds. When he climbed back up to daylight, reporters with the Tokyo Police press club gathered around him eager for the findings. After removing his safety hood, he held up the detector and pointed to the dial, explaining loudly: “Mustard gas, which is chlorine, and in much lower concentration a weak organophosphate”.

A press officer from the Tokyo Police stepped in front of the soldier and ordered: “Strike that from your notes. The toxic agent is Sarin.”

From that telling moment on, it was clear that the official story was based on disinformation to protect high-ranking politicians, bureaucrats and other insiders behind the notorious cult. The truth is: There was never a sarin attack in Tokyo; that was a gigantic lie told and retold the world around. The fact that the international media still promotes this contemptible falsehood proves the validity of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels’ assertion: “Tell a lie a hundred times and it becomes the truth.”

The Joyu Factor

The chem-war soldier’s account was verified by the commander of Unit 101. It turned out that The Weekly was the only press to interview that SDF unit. No other news organization contacted the sole force on the ground equipped with gas detection equipment. American and Russian experts in Washington DC who viewed video clips from Tokyo were dismayed by the media’s sarin claim. According to top-level American and Russian chemical-warfare specialists, the thousands of commuters who were rubbing their eyes would have been dead had the toxin been sarin. Their physical symptoms, particularly profuse bleeding from the nose and mouth, were consistent with mustard gas and not sarin.

After distribution of our first story, Aum media spokesman Joyu raised a copy of our newspaper at his appearance on TBS channel’s popular morning talk show called Sunday Focus. Joyu shouted: “This is the only press in the world that dares tell the truth.” His correct assessment that our team would seek out facts and nothing but the facts, no matter how troubling the implications, rather than promote propaganda led to the Weekly becoming the only English-language press that interviewed more than 50 Aum members.

John Parker, pen name for one of our stringers, explained in his commentary “Tabun, it’s Tabun” (in Japanese that means Maybe it’s Tabun): “NHK, the semi-official TV network, is allegedly purchasing the exclusive rights to foreign-produced video feeds on the subject (of the subway gassing and Aum Shinrikyo) and not broadcasting this footage in Japan.”

His source was a producer with a major network bureau in Hong Kong, who said that the NHK affiliate World Media KK was secretly paying astronomical sums to CNN, NBC and BBC for rights to any video material on Aum and the early hours of the subway gassing. This meant that if the Japanese government was buying everything from foreign media, it must have been confiscating footage from local networks in order to hide every shred of evidence about their secret agents inside the cult.

From Unit 731 to Fukushima nukes

The modus operandi of disinformation and denial of evidence in the current Fukushima nuclear crisis is rooted in what happened in that spring and summer of 1995. The very same cast of characters is involved in both catastrophes caused by Japan’s secret weapons program. Further back in modern history, the original sin occurred in the militarist-created puppet state of Manchukuo where the infamous chemical-biological weapons Unit 731 conducted live experiments on prisoners and unleashed their innovative toxins against armies and civilian settlements, all under a cloak of secrecy.

The subway gassing is situated along a continuum of Japan’s oft-hidden militarist agenda, which spans three generations of the Kishi-Abe family. Grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, the wartime munitions minister took charge of requisitioning funds and materials for the infamous chemical-biological warfare Unit 731 and for the Japanese atomic bomb program in Konan (Hungnam), northern Korea, and inside Fukushima Province. Kishi’s son-in-law Shintaro Abe was a mastermind behind the Aum Shinrikyo-run college in Yeltsin-era Moscow, which served as a recruitment center for Soviet weapons designers. Next the third-generation scion, Shinzo Abe supervised Aum’s research into advanced weapons technology and is now desperately trying to save Japan’s clandestine atomic bomb program in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The port city of Kobe, which was opened in the Era of Unfair Treaties as the German-dominated treaty port, served in the wartime period as the intelligence liaison center for the Nazi Party in Asia and the Gestapo with the Japanese military police known as the Kempeitai and officers in chemical-biowarfare Unit 731. Following the defeat of the Axis in 1945, Kobe retained its fascist legacies at medical schools run by former Unit 731 researchers and in the defense-related sector headed by the Kawasaki group. The Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest yakuza organization, could be counted on by the far right to suppress dissenters and support a militarist revival.

The large Korean community in Kobe’s Nagatacho and Nishinomiya districts was a recruiting center for covert operations in the Korean War. The front for Japanese espionage on the Peninsula, the Unification Church, had a strong presence in the city. In the 1980s, among its most active agents were arms-smuggler Kiyohide Hayakawa and weapons researcher Shinzo Abe, operating under the cover of manager at Kobe Steel.

Therefore, when the LDP Research Council decided to create a “new religion” for the purpose of infiltrating the Soviet Union’s weapons complex during Gorbachev’s perestroika initiative, the spymasters transferred their human assets from the Moonies to the newly created Aum Shinrikyo.

Moonie Mafia Turns Buddhist

Considering the fact that his grandfather Kishi was a former prime minister and exceedingly wealthy due to his criminal looting of occupied Manchuria, Shinzo Abe had a notably undistinguished academic record, attending Seikei University, a kindergarten for under-performing children of politicians and bureaucrats. Abe is not bright, just devious.

His official biography places him at Kobe Steel from 1979 to 1982, and then puts him into an ill-defined assortment of jobs for the Japan’s Foreign Ministry, typical cover for spooks. His colleagues in Aum Shinrikyo cited a much later resignation date of 1986-87, because Shinzo Abe was the research manager at Kobe Steel for a bright new employee named Hideo Murai. The graduate of astrophysics from Osaka City University would soon become notorious as the so-called science minister of Aum Shinrikyo.

Murai reportedly had an IQ higher than Einstein’s, but his family’s caste status as burakumin (the underclass assigned to dirty work such as butchery, tanning and cremation) resulted in his rejection by Tokyo University and other elite universities. The class system is especially in his case to blame for the brightest and best ending up in a grotesquely evil deep-cover operation hatched by nitwit drunkards in the LDP.

One of the steel-related experimental technologies that Shinzo Abe assigned to Murai had been secretly obtained from the former Soviet Union. Known as “cold casting”, the electromagnetic (EM) beam generator could liquify particles of steel for molding into micro-components, such as tiny gears. Cold casting is a dual-use technology, since it can also be used to destroy ballistic missiles during flight.

Another application for the same focused EM energy beam, as Murai later told our reporters in an earnest scientific disclosure, was for “the earthquake machine that destroyed Kobe” earlier that year, in January 1995, a topic to be revisited in an upcoming article for this retrospective series. Was Shinzo Abe responsible for the destruction of Kobe with an artificially triggered earthquake? Was the Hanshin quake a deliberate crime against humanity or accident? Similar questions can now be raised about the nuclear-weapons related disaster at Fukushima, which is also covered with Abe’s greasy fingerprints.

In defiance of the March 1995 police crackdown on Aum Shinrikyo, Hideo Murai stated “I am innocent (of the subway gassing and previous murders of Aum’s opponents)” and told our reporters that he would divulge “everything” within two weeks. Just one day before his planned disclosure, an ethnic Korean gangster with the Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza group named Hiroyuki Jo strolled past policemen while gripping a long knife and stabbed Murai to death in front of television news camera.

At evening prime time on April 23, horrified Japanese viewers watched the assassination broadcast into their living rooms. The LDP cabal meant for the message to be brought home to the Japanese public: This is what happens to anyone who dares challenge the yami (lords of darkness). The silencing of Murai, notably, aided Shinzo Abe’s evasion of justice and rise to power.

Hacking DARPA

Around 1987, Abe surfaced at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) offices in New York City. One of our junior editors resigned from The Japan Times to work at his office as a translator. Before departing Tokyo, she became a convert to Aum Shinrikyo and married a fellow sect member who was leader of Tokyo University’s Computer Gaming Club. Their mission was to hack the computers of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The Joint Chiefs, the CIA and FBI had been duped by their peaceful little ally, as shown by the CIA, DIA and FBI’s total lack of intelligence on Aum weapons-dealing at a Senate committee hearing on high-tech terrorism, including earthquake technology, led by Sam Nunn in the wake of the subway gassing. Abe’s forte, how he gets away with the goods, is duplicity along with his recognition that the watchdogs are either sleeping or watching a movie on their cell phones.

Meanwhile, Abe’s co-believer in the Unification Church and newly appointed construction minister of Aum Shinrikyo, Kiyohide Hayakawa, was leading a 50-person weapons-smuggling team that moved 20 cargoes of sarin gas precursors from a Volvograd weapons plant into Pyongyang. The sarin was transferred under a covert alliance between Yeltsin and the LDP. In the chaos of the Soviet Union collapse, Yeltsin’s national security adviser Oleg Lobov met with a delegation of three Japanese politicians to establish the Russo-Japan University as an Aum-operated recruitment center for Soviet weapons designers.

The founders of the Russo-Japan University included: LDP rightist Shintaro Ishihara, Komeito conservative Shozo Kusakawa and former Foreign Minister and Moonie supporter Shintaro Abe, the father of Shinzo. Lobov and his Japanese guests reached the shared conclusion that a rising China potentially allied with the USA was emerging as the main strategic threat to Japan and Russia. A joint preemptive strike by a multinational force of defense contractors (Japan, Russia, Taiwan and the Koreas) was needed to split apart China into bickering fiefdoms. Military success against the People’s Liberation Army depended on an ample supply of sarin gas. Thus, by the time of its demise, Aum had accumulated sufficient sarin precursors from Japan’s civilian chemical industry to wipe out 20 billion people.

Hayakawa delivered the chemical components for sarin from the Volga region to Yeltsin’s military cronies in North Korea. This transfer was possible because of the political vacuum during Supreme Leader Kim Il-Sung’s many months of hospitalization, reportedly in a coma. Once their war plans were disrupted by stepped-up National Police surveillance against Aum facilities, the sect and its sponsors launched the coup in Tokyo, starting with the gassing of subways.

The Rationale for Creating Aum

Aum Shinrikyo was an artificial and eclectic religion, assembled from pieces of other sects by the Japanese intelligence services. Its cadre came from: Sukyo Mahikari, elements of Soka Gakkai, and Agon-shu.

- Sukyo MahikariL One of three separate branches of the Mahikari movement, which practices reiki or energy-based healing, Sukyo Mahikari asserts the Jewish origins of the ruling class of Japan, Korea and Mongolia, and the occult theory of race origins from alien ancestors, that is, “the gods”. After the exposes by the Japan Times Weekly and the Archipelago website, former Sukyo Mahikari activist Garry Greenwood exposed its mind-control activities in Australia and its founding in 1954 by a rightist Kodama Okada, a veteran of World War II. Sukyo Mahikari has “colonized” Australia as a survivalist haven because Okada advocated the covert planting of nuclear bombs to annihilate the corrupt civilizations of the Northern Hemisphere. Fact is stranger than fiction when one realizes Shinzo Abe is implementing the Okada agenda by selling nuclear reactors, like the ones that exploded in Fukushima, to the UAE, India, Turkey and Vietnam.

- Soka Gakkai: The Nichiren sub-sect and one of the world’s largest lay Buddhism movements, engaged in a threatening harassment campaign against The Japan Times Weekly for exposing its role in setting up the first Aum headquarters called Renge-mura (Lotus Village) inside a volcanic crater on the Mount Aso range overlooking Kumamoto. The governor at the time was Morihiro Hosokawa, scion of a warlord family that was closely allied with the Nichiren movement during the murderous Onin civil war conflict against followers of Shin Buddhism in the 15^th century.

Representatives of SG chief Daisaku Ikeda vigorously denied their role in setting up Aum, but admitted “our membership is very large in number and it is possible for outside agents or fanatics to penetrate the group and establish some sort of secret cell.” Soka Gakkai, however, never answered our questions about the role of Komeito Party veteran Kusakawa in founding Aum’s Russo-Japan College.

- Agon Shu: Compared with Sukyo Mahikari and Soka Gakkai, Agon was a mere speck in the sea. The mountain worshiping esoteric religion, known for its fire walking festival, is influenced by Shiva Hinduism and Mikyo (Tantric Buddhism). One of its devotees, Shoko Asahara, was appointed guru of Aum Shinrikyo. His sight-impairment kept him under control of his government handlers, and he was amenable to their often-lethal experiments in mind-control through drugs, scalp electrodes and month-long solitary-confinement meditation ordeals similar to the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program.

Honest Reporting Entails Risk

Tracking down the bosses behind Aum Shinrikyo was no piece cake for our reporters and their sources who persisted with the investigation while facing a constant threat to their lives. For a year following the March 20 attack, there were daily incidences of poison releases in public places, especially train station facilities. At least a dozen mysterious murders and near-misses also occurred, including a marksman’s near-fatal gunshot attack on National Police chief Kunimatsu.

The last in the string of suspicious deaths, at least that I an aware of, was of my immediate supervisor and former managing editor, who was found dead at his doorstep with the back of his skull smashed in.

These follow-up killings, on top of the reported 12 dead in the subway gassing, were done by the yakuza in close cooperation with the capital’s political enforcers, also known as the Tokyo Police Agency, and their bosses in the LDP. A similar trend is happening again with the mystery “suicide” of a news producer and reporter in charge of the Fukushima nuclear beat. Again, the trail of blood leads to the same suspects.

Justice Catches Up

The relentless hunt for the culprits and refusal to cave into official pressure eventually resulted in a couple of trophy heads nailed to the editor’s wall. Investigative journalism resulted in the imprisonment of Liberal Democrat intelligence chief Toshio Yamaguchi, the sudden resignation of Diet member Shintaro Ishihara and the disappearance of several other heavyweights from political life. The slow-moving official inquiry into the abortive coup with its executive hit list prompted the untimely demise of a top culprit, LDP power broker Ryutaro Hashimoto.

Terrified for his career future due to his connections with Aum Shinrikyo, the coward Shinzo Abe hired a public-relations team to sanitize his image, erase his dirty career record and bribe off his detractors. A motley crew of media talents, intellectuals and foreigners were recruited, many of them without any knowledge of his hand in Aum’s weapons trade.

The only reason Shinzo Abe is not serving a prison sentence on death row is that his father, Shintaro, one of the three masterminds behind the creation of Aum Shinrikyo, had died four years before the subway gassing. The sentimental Japanese authorities made the foolish mistake of leniency toward his whimpering brat of a son.

Shinzo Abe knows perfectly well that he is among the guilty parties for the mass murder in Tokyo. His guilt became clear when I exposed his hand in Aum’s arms dealing on a televised interview during the 2007 Singapore ASEAN meeting, which led to the cancellation of a planned summit with Vladimir Putin. His subsequent “stomachache”, which ended in resignation of his first term as prime minister, was no doubt due to severe indigestion from a subway sandwich of cultism and nerve gas.

Shinzo Abe made his comeback to a second term as prime minister but, to say it again as boxing champ Joe Lewis put it: You can run but you can’t hide.

End Game

The Tokyo subway gassing set the precedent for urban terrorism in the heart of global capitals, occurring six years prior to 911 in downtown New York and a full decade before the London Tube bombing. The official cover-up over the political sponsors of Aum laid the template for the Fukushima nuclear disinformation campaign.

There is another direct link between the subway gassing and events at Fukushima. In December 1995, after Asahara was charged with murder in a court of law, I was phoned at late night by editors at Takarajima 30 magazine, requesting me to rush over to their office to decode a terrorist message demanding the guru’s release, typed in English. A part of that message threatened an attack against a nuclear plant. Subsequently two fires caused by “human error” erupted at the Tokai-mura nuclear power station, the second incident sending radioactive fallout over eastern Tokyo.

Our daily newspaper’s energy reporter answered in affirmative to my question about Aum sympathizers inside the nuclear facility. The nuclear industry was in full support of Asahara’s call for a Final War. That chilling discovery kicked off my search for secret nuclear-weapons production facilities northeast of Tokyo. That long-held suspicion was answered in spades with the 311 blasts at Fukushima No.1 and the unreported destruction of underground weapons labs nearby.

The nuclear connection to the subway gassing will be discussed in a coming article titled “Foundation(s) Revisited”. The heady mix of occult Final War prophecy and esoteric weapons technologies shut down Tokyo on a fine spring day, and now a related nuclear disaster is starting to make unlivable much of the Northern Hemisphere. Governments, law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and the mass media are ignoring the present danger, just as they did two decades ago. By the time they wake up, it will be too late for by then their children will have died in the cradle. What happened in Tokyo in 1995 and Fukushima in 2011 are not mere accidents but catastrophic acts of war against humanity.

Yoichi Shimatsu, general editor of The Japan Times Weekly at the time of the subway gassing, is an independent science journalist involved in radiation research inside the Fukushima exclusion zone.