Japanese members of Aum Shinrikyo cult, executed by hanging :

• Shoko Asahara, 63, leader.
• Seiichi Endo, 58, Aum Shinrikyo cult member.
• Kiyohide Hayakawa, 68, Aum Shinrikyo cult member.
• Yoshihiro Inoue, 48, Aum Shinrikyo cult member.
• Tomomasa Nakagawa (ja), 55, participant in Sakamoto family murder.
• Tomomitsu Niimi, 54, Aum Shinrikyo cult member.
• Masami Tsuchiya (ja), 53, chemist for Tokyo subway sarin attack.

Aum Shinrikyo

Aleph (Japanese: アレフ Hepburn: Arefu), formerly Aum Shinrikyo (オウム真理教 Oumu Shinrikyō), is a Japanese doomsday cult founded by Shoko Asahara in 1984. It carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995 and was found to have been responsible for another smaller sarin attack the previous year.

The group never confessed. They claim that those who carried out attacks did so secretly, without being known to other executives and ordinary believers. Asahara broadcast his singing, insisting on his innocence through a radio broadcast on a signal they purchased in Russia and directed toward Japan. On July 6, 2018, after exhausting all appeals, Asahara and six other followers were executed by Japan, as punishment for the 1995 attacks and other crimes.

Aum Shinrikyo, which split into Aleph and Hikari no Wa in 2007, has been formally designated a terrorist organizationby several countries, including the European Union, Russia, Canada, Kazakhstan, and the United States. Japan's Public Security Examination Commission considers Aleph and Hikari no Wa to be branches of a "dangerous religion" and it announced in January 2015 that they would remain under surveillance for three more years. The Japanese government ended surveillance of Hikari no Wa in 2017, but continued to keep Aleph under watch.

Doctrine

Aum Shinrikyo/Aleph is a syncretic belief system that draws upon Asahara's idiosyncratic interpretations of elements of early Indian Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism, as well as Hinduism, taking Shiva as the main image of worship and incorporating millennialist ideas from the Christian Book of Revelation, Yoga, and the writings of Nostradamus. Its founder, Chizuo Matsumoto, claimed that he sought to restore "original Buddhism".

In 1992, Matsumoto, who had changed his name to Shoko Asahara, published a foundational book, declaring himself to be "Christ", Japan's only fully enlightened master, as well as identifying himself as the "Lamb of God".

Asahara's purported mission was to take upon himself the sins of the world, and he claimed he could transfer spiritual power to his followers and ultimately take away their sins and bad deeds. While many discount Aum Shinrikyo's claims of Buddhist characteristics and his affiliations with Buddhism, scholars often refer to it as an offshoot of Japanese Buddhism, and this was how the movement generally defined and saw itself.

Asahara outlined a doomsday prophecy, which included a third world war instigated by the United States. According to Robert Jay Lifton, an American psychiatrist and author:

[Asahara] described a final conflict culminating in a nuclear 'Armageddon', borrowing the term from the Book of Revelation 16:16"

Humanity would end, except for the elite few who joined Aum. Aum's mission was not only to spread the word of "salvation", but also to survive these "End Times". Asahara predicted that Armageddon would occur in 1997. Kaplan also notes that in his lectures, Shoko Asahara referred to the United States as "The Beast" from the Book of Revelation, predicting that it would eventually attack Japan. Arthur Goldwag, author of a book on conspiracies and secret societies, characterizes Asahara as one who "saw dark conspiracies everywhere promulgated by Jews, Freemasons, the Dutch, the British royal family, and rival Japanese religions".

In the opinion of Daniel A. Metraux, Aum Shinrikyo justified its violence through its own unique interpretation of Buddhist ideas and doctrines, such as the Buddhist concepts of Mappō and Shōhō. Aum claimed that by bringing about the end of the world, they would restore Shōhō.[24] Furthermore, Lifton believes, Asahara "interpreted the Tibetan Buddhist concept of powa in order to claim that by killing someone contrary to the group's aims, they were preventing them from accumulating bad karma and thus saving them".

The name "Aum Shinrikyo" (オウム真理教 Oumu Shinrikyō), usually rendered in English as "Aum Supreme Truth", derives from the Sanskrit syllable Aum, used to represent the universe, followed by the JapaneseShinrikyo (meaning, roughly, "Teaching of Truth") written in kanji. (In Japanese, kanji are used to write both words that are originally Japanese as well as Sino-xenic words, but they are not usually used to transcribe those which are borrowed directly from exotic foreign languages.) In 2000, the organization changed its name to "Aleph" (a reference to the first letter of the Phoenician, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets), and it also replaced its logo.