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Asahara established his Aum Shinrikyo religion in 1987, and the movement even put up a number of candidates in the 1990 Lower House Diet elections; all of them lost. Not much later he began conferring on himself such titles as "Today's Christ" and "the Savior of This Century." His community branched out rapidly in Japan. Soon it had established some beachheads overseas--including the U.S. and Germany but notably Russia. Asahara once preached before a crowd of 15,000 in a Moscow sports stadium.
As his fortunes prospered, Asahara seems to have grown more reclusive and obsessed with danger. The religion, nominally Buddhist but really a hodgepodge of ascetic disciplines and New Age occultism, focused on supposed threats from the U.S., which he portrayed as a creature of Freemasons and Jews bent on destroying Japan. The conspiracy's weapons: sex and junk food. The guru's sermons predicted the end of the world sometime between 1997 and 2000, and began citing the specific peril of poison-gas attacks.
If nothing else, the sense of crisis and impending doom that Asahara cultivated has kept his followers in his thrall. He always sits one level higher than his devotees, and they have to bow and kiss his toe. A follower recalled, "When he found that I was carrying a picture of an Indian saint, he went berserk and said I should not respect anyone but him." In this way, perhaps Asahara's early life was a foreshadowing of what would come later. "When I look at the way Aum operates," a onetime classmate in Kumamoto said, "I think Matsumoto is trying to create a closed society like the school for the blind he went to. He is trying to create a society separate from ordinary society in which he can become king of the castle."
--Reported by Edward W. Desmond/Tokyo