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THE MAN IN THE SUBWAY WORE BIG SUNGLASSES, brown trousers and a blue-or maybe it was beige-coat. He had on a surgical mask; but then, a lot of people in Tokyo wear masks during hay-fever season. The witnesses agree he boarded the eight-car B711T train on Tokyo's Hibiya line when it originated at 8 a.m. at the Nakameguro station. Since the sunny Monday fell before a Tuesday holiday celebrating the first day of spring, the Hibiya train was less crowded than usual; the masked man easily found a seat and, according to a witness quoted anonymously in the Tokyo papers, almost immediately began fiddling with a foot-long rectangular object wrapped in newspapers. At the next stop he set the package on the floor and strode briskly from the train. By then, says a witness, a moist spot had appeared on the wrapping.
Michael Kennedy, an Irishman in Tokyo to train Japanese jockeys, boarded the B711T at Roppongi station and saw that the spot had turned into "a pool of oily water on the floor. I noticed this quite offensive smell that I can't really describe." Others smelled it too and edged away. By Kamiyacho station, 11 minutes after the strange man had boarded, commuters panicked. Says Matthias Vukovich, an Austrian student who was in the car: "Everyone just ran off, and I didn't know what was going on. Someone yelled, 'It's gas!'" Looking back, Vukovich, whose eyes and head were beginning to hurt, glimpsed the puddle. Next to it sat an immobile old man. His name, it turned out, was Shunkichi Watanabe; he was a retired cobbler. He was already dying.
"I saw several dozen people on the platform who had either collapsed or were on their knees unable to stand up," recalls Nobuo Serizawa, a photographer. "One man was thrashing around on the floor like a fish out of water." Those who could walk staggered up three flights of stairs to the clean, fresh air. Some vomited; others lay rigid. Kennedy emerged, but he couldn't see; the gas had temporarily blinded him. Three young women clung together like small birds in a nest, trembling and crying. Yet they made no sound; the gas had silenced their voices.
Within half an hour, similar scenes had unfolded at five other subway stops on three lines. Police arrived within minutes, administered some first aid and spirited thousands to hospitals, where doctors who suspected what had happened administered atropine, a sarin antidote. But for some it was too late. Kazumasa Takahashi, an assistant station manager at the Kasumigaseki stop, overstayed his shift to mop up the mystery liquid and dispose of the package that leaked it. He died a few hours later, and a colleague who helped him perished the next day.
The thousands of surviving victims of the gas attack were understandably bewildered. Said Kiyo Arai, a 22-year-old government employee who was stricken at the Kodenmacho station: "We're just innocent, ordinary people. It frightens me to think how vulnerable we are." It was not lost on authorities that the three poisoned train lines converge at Kasumigaseki, the hub for top government offices, including the national police. If the trains had continued on schedule, all three would have arrived at that station between 8:09 and 8:14, the apex of rush hour. Said Atsuyuki Sassa, former director general of the Cabinet Security Affairs Office: "This is a declaration of war against the Japanese government."