shinrikyo

In this episode we are joined by Maizie Moran, daughter of Weird US founder Mark Moran. We uncover the evil behind one of Japan's most infamous cults, Aum Shinrikyo, and dive into the unnerving cult that lived in a castle in Maizie's own hometown!

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Independent Aum Shinrikyo researcher Sarah Hightower tells us how the Japanese death cult became a terrorist organisation with more than 10,000 members. They produced Sarin gas, they built their own assault rifles, and they even tried to buy bombs from the former Soviet Union. To this day Aum Shinrikyo still exists. 

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What do 11 Royal Navy ships, 44 merino sheep from the Cape of Good Hope and a Japanese doomsday cult have in common? You're about to find out.

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We had no idea that behind the station we reported on in this programme would later be responsible for a Sarin gas attack in Tokyo. But that was three years later. Spanish Foreign Radio is working on a relay station in Costa Rica. Radio Miami has done a deal with a station in Honduras. The Megaphone Newsreel marches across the continent. Radio Vilnius is worried about its relay in Moldova. Baltic Radio International is going to make money, so Paul Rusling claims. AWR Europe's World DX News signs off. Radio Norway plans special transmissions for Burma. Radio St Helena may return to the airwaves. Paul Ballster has found a new station in Wimbeldon. Radio Free Asia cancels a visit to Beijing.

In the summer of 1992, if you tuned up and down a shortwave radio in many parts of the world you could hear what sounded like a Yoga meditation class on several dozen frequencies. At this time, the Russian authorities were hiring out shortwave airtime to anyone who wanted to pay for it. Radio Moscow World Service, the Russian external broadcaster had been downsized well before it became the Voice of Russia. As a result, many shortwave transmitters were lying idle. Aum Shinrikyo bought a major amount of airtime....42 simultaneous transmitters. The movement was founded by Shoko Asahara in his one-bedroom apartment in Shibuya, Tokyo as a meditation class known as Aum-no-kai ("Aum club") and began steadily growing in the years that followed. It gained the official status as a religious organization in 1989. Because it attracted such a considerable number of young graduates from Japan's elite universities that it was dubbed a "religion for the elite". The Wikipedia entry goes on to explain that at the end of 1989 there were rumours that some public figures who criticized the "religion of truth" were being eliminated. At the end of 1993, the cult started secretly manufacturing Sarin nerve gas nerve and VX (nerve agent) Aum tested their sarin on sheep in remote parts of Western Australia. Both sarin and VX were then used in several assassinations (and attempted assassinations) in the course of 1994. The most notable was on the night of 27 June 1994, when the cult carried out the world's first use of a chemical weapon in a terrorist attack against civilians when they released sarin in the central Japanese city of Matsumoto, Nagano. The gas killed eight and harmed 200 others. However, police investigations focused only on an innocent local resident and failed to implicate the cult at that point. Flashback to 1992, when enquiries that we did in Moscow revealed that the cult hadn't made much in the way of new programming. All these transmitters were being fed from a DAT recorder put into a continuous playback loop the central transmission control centre in Moscow. It played Side A for 57 minutes then switched over to side B. Little did we realise that these rather poor presented programmes were fueled by such cruel actions. Note that the group reformed in the early parts of this century and the chapter on this Japanese cult is far from closed, even though they are no longer in the headlines.