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That was the poisoned state of affairs on March 19, when the Osaka police broke into one of the cult's offices and freed a student they claimed was being held there against his will. The raid had been a long time in the planning, both in order to assemble evidence and because the Japanese authorities are particularly sensitive to charges that they are persecuting religious groups. Nonetheless, concerns about Aum's possible connection with sarin and other sect-related tensions prompted them to act. In response, the cult's leaders had its lawyers file suit. And the next day, Japan is whispering, it did more.
Once the police uncovered Aum's huge stockpiles of lethal chemicals, several things changed. In addition to announcing publicly that Asahara is wanted for questioning about the subway poisoning, the traditionally reticent Japanese police revealed that they were entertaining 110 complaints against the cult for offenses including unlawful confinement, assault and theft. The charges seemed to embolden local authorities, who were reported in the press to be investigating a cult hospital in Tokyo's Nakano neighborhood and allegations of electronic bugging in Yamanashi. The Nagano prefectural police, acting on the soil samples that so perturbed the cult's neighbors, have begun investigating Aum's link to the deaths in Matsumoto.
The guru himself laid low. He released a videotape answering questions posed by the nhk television network in which he echoed his lawyers' earlier line, denying involvement in Kiyoshi Kariya's kidnapping and providing innocent household explanations for the seized chemicals. "I don't understand," he concluded, "why it's said that these can be used to make sarin." A second video was recorded for cult followers and played at 36 local chapters. In it Asahara claimed that Aum members, including himself, had been the object of a poison-gas attack. The origin was "unmistakably" the U.S.
By Saturday most of the patients who survived the subway gassing had left St. Luke's Hospital in central Tokyo and were improving steadily. But new cases keep streaming in. These patients' ailments are not physical but psychosomatic. Yet they come by the hundreds, and they truly believe they have been poisoned.
In a way, they have. They represent the damage done not to an individual nervous system, but to a city's--perhaps a nation's--sense of security and self. As the Asahi Shimbun editorialized, "While it is hard to build a safe society, it is very easy to destroy it." One senior security official looked a reporter in the eye on Thursday and said, "Yes, I am very worried about another attack, a revenge attack."
For some, the sense of dread extends beyond the fear of more sarin, reaching deep into the nature of Aum and the sort of person Aum attracts, whether the cult was behind the killings or not. There is a word for a certain kind of young person in Japan: otaku, which translates as obsessed to the point of being asocial, almost communally autistic. The word describes a whole generation of children for whom family life barely exists: father is always at work, and child is at cram school, preparing for the next exam. The father often does it because he remembers Japan just after the war--the desolation and the deprivation--and believes only money and success can assuage that pain. The child does it because society says he must.