Why the 1995 Tokyo Subway Attack

Finally figured out after all these years why Japan's Aum Shinrikyo placed sarin gas in Tokyo's subway system in 1995.

Apparently, founder Asahara Shoko (pictured above right) lost a bid for election to the Diet, as did several adherents of Aum who also stood for election.

Having predicted victory, Asahara, according to Helen Hardacre, was shocked to find that society had overwhelmingly rejected him.

As Hardacre wrote: "Thereafter, Asahara gave up the idea of peaceful coexistence with society in favor of creating an alternative government with himself as theocrat."

Hence on the night of June 27, 1994, he celebrated the completion of this new system with his closest leaders and ordered them to carry out the religion's first attack using sarin gas. The attack was aimed at the District Court of Matsumoto, which was conducting a trial challenging Aum's purchase of land. It later emerged that Aum had been developing weapons technology through a science and technology team that had experimented with sarin gas on an Australian sheep property since 1993.

Fearing a police investigation, Asahara ordered the March 20, 1995, attack on the Tokyo subway system as a diversionary tactic.

Five Aum members boarded subway trains bound for Tokyo's government center. Each man got off his train a station or two in advance, dropping two small plastic bags to the floor, piercing them with the sharpened tip of an umbrella, and mingling the contents to produce sarin gas.