The magnitude 6.3 jolt that just rocked Kobe reminded residents of the killer quake that wrecked the major port of western Japan 18 years ago. For a handful of investigative journalists, police detectives and intelligence agents, however, the temblor triggers total recall of the horrific events of that fateful year, 1995, which was topped by the gassing of the Tokyo subways at the morning rush hour.

While Shoko Asakahara, the bearded guru of the Aum Shinrikyo sect, remains a global icon of apocalyptic terrorism, practically no one outside a small circle of investigators knows the slightest about the political forces that manufactured the cult and ran official cover-up surrounding the murder of 12 commuters and injury to 20,000 others. Separated by only a few weeks, the Kobe-Hanshin Quake in January and the Tokyo subway gassing of March were connected by the fact of illegal development of “superweapons” of mass destruction.

At the time, only two groups of journalists, one at The Japan Times Weekly and other at Takarajima 30 magazine, dared defy the pervasive press cover-up, yakuza death threats and lethal attacks aimed at preventing exposure of the powerful political patrons of Aum Shinrikyo. After years of exile, this essay is the first summary of what really happened and who was responsible for provoking the subway attack.

Many of the guilty politicians, temporarily discredited by the Aum affair, have since regained their positions of power, including the current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Their international partners in terrorist crimes against humanity and false-flag attacks included Russia’s Yeltsin regime and the North Korean hard-liner faction that is now brandishing nuclear warheads to bolster the militarist agenda of their old friend and secret ally Abe.

Precedent for 911

Before 911 in New York and Washington and the 7.7 bombing of the London Tube, the destruction of Kobe and the Tokyo subway gassing set the precedent for politically inspired massacres of civilians inside the very heart of global capitals. Religious fanaticism played a supporting role in all of these terrorist actions, but the underlying motive has always been to advance the political agenda of the war industry, which otherwise could not keep tight control over democratic societies.

Besides Abe, the other chief co-conspirators included: far-right ideologue Shintaro Ishihara, later to be elected Tokyo Governor; Toshio Yamaguchi, espionage chief of the Liberal Democrat’s Research Bureau; Shintaro Abe, the diplomat son-in-law of war criminal Nobusuke Kishi and father of the current prime minister. Their main allies comprised: Oleg Lobov, the national security adviser to Boris Yeltsin, who headed the Aum-run Russo-Japan University, which recruited and brainwashed 2,000 Soviet military scientists to work on secret Japanese weapons program; the Rev. Sun Myung-Moon, head of the Unification Church and North Korean agent; and Kim Il-Sung, the Great Leader of the DPRK and his second wife’s “KGB princess” faction.

The aim of this unholy alliance of spymasters from Japan, North Korea and Russia was to shatter the budding alliance between the USA and China crafted by Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin, presidents of their respective countries. The strategy was to seize Shanghai and Wuhan in a “ninja” attack by Japanese, Taiwanese and Mongol soldiers in PLA uniforms. The counterattack by Chinese garrisons north of the Yangtze River was to be met by clouds of sarin gas and VX, in quantities sufficient to kill eight times the world’s population.

The larger goal was sunder China into nine small countries divided between Japanese, Russia and Korean zones. Had their ambitious plan succeeded, the next step would no doubt have carried out Asahara’s call for Armaggedon, a final war of extermination against the United States with nuclear, biological, chemical and seismic weaponry of the type probably used to destroy Kobe.

In hindsight, it all seems like a late-night sci-fi movie, but in Japan there are still victims who are blind or paralyzed as a result of exposure to the chlorine from mustard gas (sarin was never used against the subways, according to the Self-Defense Force chemical-weapons unit that conducted monitoring tests).The threat of state-sponsored terrorism by Japanese fascists remains undiminished, as we speak, considering the present Chinese fear of novel strains of avian influenza as a bioweapon and suspicion toward their nemesis, Shinzo Abe, who has promised to get Japan’s nuclear “deterrence” program back on track after the Fukushima crisis.

Disloyal Royalists Target the Palace

The Aum Shinrikyo’s nerve-gas shipments were not solely for use against China. Their plans included sarin spraying at all entry points to the Imperial Palace in the heart of Tokyo to prevent National Police units from rescuing Emperor Akihito from his executioners. A false-flag attack to assassinate the scion of the world’s longest-serving royal family was necessitated by the rightist view that the emperor is democratic to a fault and much too apologetic to foreign victims of Japanese militarism in World War II.

Thus, soon after the Tokyo subway gassing in a last-gasp plea for a coup, a professional marksman fired a handgun at the National Police chief on the pavement outside of his apartment, hitting the target in the back with four bullets at a distance of 40 paces. The gunman was seen escaping in a black Mercedes, although the official account is that he rode a bicycle to a local train station, where neither a bike was found nor his image on the security cameras. The police chief, who acts as the head of the Imperial Guard, narrowly averted death. What followed was a reign of terror with gas canisters found in Tokyo’s train stations nearly every day for months.

Under these unthinkable circumstances, it is understandable why even “good cops” participated in the news blackout and disinformation campaign. For the very same reason, homicide detectives and intelligence agents enraged by the shooting of the nation’s law officer had nowhere else to turn to than the only two small publications that dared to print the facts and point the finger. Whenever a cop visited the newspaper or bumped into me in front of my condo, I could never be sure whether he was there to convey a leak or to shoot me.

Terrorist Cells inside a Cult

After the subway gassing, police raids swooped down on Aum headquarters at the base of Mount Fuji, their publicity center in Tokyo and various safe houses. In the public hysteria, the mass media focused solely on the bizarre costumes and technology-assisted meditation methods of the Tantric Buddhism cult, which modeled itself after a secret Vajryana sub-sect run by the Dalai Lama, who flew into Tokyo to bail out his disciple and good friend Asahara.

My team’s interviews with dozens of sect members, which were banned by the official press clubs, disclosed that a special assassination squad was trained in Dharamsala by Tibetan lamas to carry out religious-sanctioned preemptive murders of heretics and external opponents, a practice quietly condoned for centuries by the Tibetan theocrats against their own people. Aum’s Vajryana death squad worked closely with the weapons-smuggling cell of 50 former Unification Church members, comprised mainly of ethnic Koreans and their Japanese spouses.

The Russians weapons designers, who held work visas in Japan, never resurfaced. While the government spokesmen and their stooges in the press clubs made every attempt to convince the mass media that the Aum headquarters was a sarin laboratory, my own science education, along with statements from the head of the Japan Organic Chemistry Society, pointed to the lack of windows and vents, rendering their shed into a suicidal gas chamber. Instead, our team retraced the route of trucks that hauled precursor chemicals from a Yokohama supplier to a housing complex that was the site of an earlier gassing in Matsumoto, Nagano prefecture. Our suspicion was that the illegal state-sponsored gas lab was located inside a distillery deeper in the mountains.

Aum as First Foundation, Fukushima as the Second

Soon thereafter, the police received a warning note from the Vajryana cell, which was undecipherable to their experts, being written in English. Responding to a late-night call, I went to the offices of Takarajima 30 to unravel an excerpt from Frederic Jameson’s response to Susan Sontag’s theory that apocalyptic science fiction is nihilistic. The essay fragment argued instead that these sci-fi narratives focus on bonding between masters and apprentices of science, aiming to create an idealized post-apocalyptic society.

The text corresponded to another “master narrative” cited by Aum science minister Hideo Murai: the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov. In this sci-fi series, two underground bands of dedicated scientists build superweapons to fight against a universal tyranny. The first, more open branch was doomed to be destroyed by the state authorities, but the hidden Second Foundation would remain camouflaged and in the end triumph over the oppressors.

Interspersed throughout the note was an alphanumeric code that, when keyed into the JIS word-processing system, read: “If our leaders are given the death sentence, a nuclear power plant near the capital will be attacked.” Within a few days, human error caused a fire inside the Tokaimura nuclear plant, resulting in radioactive releases over eastern Tokyo that went unreported in the media. Our main newspaper’s reporter on the energy industry told me that the staff at the nuclear facility “is packed with Aum Shinrikyo supporters.”

The terror note-writer’s excellent command of English was probably due to the fact she was a former editor from our newspaper, who had moved to New York with her nerd husband, the former head of the computer gaming club at elite Tokyo University. At the JETRO trade office, the couple hacked into the Pentagon’s DARPA databases for their new boss, Shinzo Abe.

Over subsequent months of driving through the foothills of Ibaraki prefecture, I failed to turn up any sites for nuclear-warhead production. Little did I realize then of being only a few miles from the old uranium-thorium mine in Fukushima Prefecture run by the joint Nazi-Japanese Bund-1 project, nor did it occur to me to inspect the vast nuclear complex known as Fukushima 1 and 2. The connections are there right in front of my unknowing eyes, too close for comfort. It would take the 311 meltdowns to comprehend how far along the Second Foundation’s secret weapons program had progressed.

An Earthquake Machine

Aum chief scientist Hideo Murai’s most notorious statement was that the Kobe Quake was caused by an “earthquake machine.” At a press conference, foreign correspondents guffawed at yet another bizarre statement from the cult. Our team, instead of dismissing his claim, researched the possibility and came across the HAARP designs of ARCO chief scientists Bernard Eastlund from the archives of the US Patent Office.

Interviews with leading seismologists at Tokai and Tsukuba universities disclosed that “unusual electromagnetic fields were detected over Kobe for six months prior to the earthquake.” Upon publication of our findings, the Senate Armed Services Committee under Senator Sam Nunn took sufficient notice to warn of seismic weapons in the hands of terrorists. When confronted with the unknown, the superstitious and ignorant laugh, while the science-minded do their homework.

The North Korean Card

Thus, a clearer picture came into focus. A covert invasion and sarin attack against China and subsequent false-flag raid in Tokyo to kill the Emperor were timed for late spring 1996. The plot went awry when the ailing DPRK leader Kim Il-Sung slipped into a coma. A son by his first marriage, to a peasant woman, emerged to claim control. Since childhood, Kim Jong-Il had bitterly resented the coterie of the Europeanized Soviet-era “KGB” princesses of the second wife, who taunted him for his mother’s lowly origins.

Seizing upon evidence of the North Korean alliance with Japanese rightists and the Zionist Russian elite, Kim Jong-Il turned to Beijing to support his succession claim. Countermanding his father’s orders for the joint attacks on Shanghai and Tokyo’s Imperial Palace, Kim the younger ordered the North Korean infiltrators to shut down of Aum Shinrikyo. After several warning actions, and Japanese police failure to act, the subways were gassed by a renegade Aum team under North Korean control. On the day after the gassing, LDP financier Shin Kanemaru, who earlier had been caught with dozens of unmarked North Korean gold ingots, flew to Pyongyang to take home an unconscious gas-injured assailant. The Japanese police chief for investigations went to Beijing with sincere apologies.

Despite their stubborn resistance and daily sabotage inside the capital, spymaster Tosho Yamaguchi was arrested and jailed, and Shintaro Ishihara resigned from the LDP. To distance himself from Aum and the Unification Church, Shinzo Abe hired a public-relations firm for an image remake as a harmless young politician and paid handsome fees to foreigners who might befriend him.

In Japan’s warped moral system, the good are punished more than the evil. Soon thereafter, Takajima 30 was closed down, I was removed from my editorship, and my direct superior, a veteran journalist and diplomatic translator, was found dead on his doorstep with his skull smashed in.

Kobe as Nazi Capital

Three of the principal players in the Aum affair had roots in Kobe:

• Shinzo Abe, whose first job was as a research manager at Kobe Steel, which was conducting secret experiments with Soviet electromagnetic pulses that could reduce steel beams into powder within seconds

• His protégé, Hideo Murai, an astrophysicist from the social outcaste strata who later became the Science Minister of Aum

• Kiyohide Hayakawa, a Unification Church operative who later as Aum Construction Minister led the 50-member ethnic Korean cell that smuggled sarin and nuclear technology from Volvograd, Russia, via Pyongyang into Japan.

As suggested by Murai, electromagnetic pulse technology probably triggered the Kobe-Hanshin Quake of 1995, although it remains uncertain if the source was the HAARP station in Alaska or Russian arrays on the Kamchatka Peninsula. The other real possibility is that the EM pulses from the waterfront steel mill triggered the Awaji Island fault line by activating the natural electric current flowing through the nearby Akashi-Awaji Bridge, a megastructure then under construction.

Kobe has been a center for secret research into esoteric technologies, ever since the collapsing Nazi regime sent over U-boats to transfer advanced weapons-systems like jet fighters and hover craft to “the German port in Japan”. Before the city’s firebombing by the US Air Force, the Gestapo Far East bureau declared Kobe to be the world center for the future of Nazism. That status lasted only for a few months.

With defeat imminent on the Asian Continent, the Japanese Army’s notorious Unit 731 biological warfare group relocated its labs to Kobe’s universities, a story that was recorded only in the “Black Jack” comic series by manga artist Osamu Tezuka.. North Korean fascist elements, serving in military police units, retreated to Kobe, where they were integrated into the yakuza underworld following the Emperor’s surrender order. Today, some 80 percent of yakuza members are North Korean by ethnic origin, representing a political force of dubious loyalty and potential double agents.

As a schoolboy, I attended a Kobe missionary school whose headmaster was a Bavarian Nazi. Many of my classmates were from “good families”, a codeword for fascists from Austria, Scandinavia, Italy, and the Netherlands, along with yakuza clans. In this motley crew, which could never reconcile themselves to the American victory or democracy, arose a second generation of neo-fascists, and hence the present-day core of the Liberal Democrats loyal to Aum’s case officer Shinzo Abe.

The regrouped fascist alliance of Abe and the current North Korean leadership have put the Aum-subway fiasco behind them and once again are challenging the US-China relationship, this time with a phony missile crisis. Will Shinzo Abe condone a North Korean missile strike against Tokyo to consolidate his political power? His faction has already planned to launch a regicidal false-flag attack on the Imperial Palace in the heart of Tokyo; no outrage is beyond their ambition. Never before have any qualms arisen over killing innocent civilians or even underlings like Hideo Murai.

The Assassination was Televised

As the fantasy world of Aum crumbled, Murai promised our reporting team (the only journalists who reported their side of the story with a modicum of fairness) that he would “disclose everything” within two weeks. By this, the Aum science chief meant that he would name the top politicians and bureaucrats involved in the sect’s arms smuggling and planned coup against the Emperor.

Just two days prior to his big disclosure, an ethnic Korean gangster stabbed Murai in gut with several sharp blows, as 10 policemen did nothing to stop the vicious attack, which was broadcast live on the evening news to a horrified national audience. The assailant, Hiroyuki Jo, then dropped the bloody knife on the pavement and turned around to be arrested. He still refuses to reveal who gave the hit order.

For all their evasions and refusal to face up to their monstrous crimes against humanity and treason against Japan’s royal family, stern justice will catch up Abe and Ishihara. Their present ploy of the North Korean nuclear card will not succeed, not after the Tokyo subway affair and not after the Fukushima meltdowns. There will be no more comebacks, because we won’t be fooled again. Dreams of conquest die hard, and this time around we must be sure that Abe and company are put down and removed from the world stage once and for all. Their old friends and crime partners in Pyongyang, too, will face a day of reckoning for their lethal betrayal of the only half-decent member of their gangland clan, Kim Jong-Il.

Justice will be delivered, for the dead still cannot rest. Only days ago, another quake rattled Kobe resurrecting the ugly past, or maybe the rumble was just the ghost of Hideo Murai knocking at the door.

Yoichi Shimatsu was an editor who led the investigative reporting into the Tokyo subway gassing for The Japan Times Weekly and served with the Takarajima magazine probe into the Aum affair.