The perpetrators were never identified.
They were arrested, tried, sentenced and, in the capital cases, executed. Status is convicted.
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
Notoriety90
Mystery18
Scale85
Evidence88
Legal impact86
Culture80
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Quick answers
What happened on 20 March 1995?
Aum Shinrikyo members released sarin on five Tokyo subway trains during the morning rush toward Kasumigaseki. Thirteen people were later counted as official dead (twelve at first; one added after a 2008 survey). Thousands sought medical care. This page does not describe the release method.
Who was convicted?
Asahara Shoko (Matsumoto Chizuo) and a group of senior members were convicted. Asahara’s death sentence became final in 2006; he was executed on 6 July 2018 with other Aum convicts. About 190 members were found guilty in related cases. Status is convicted, not unsolved.
Was this a war?
No. It was a domestic criminal and terrorism case against a civilian transport system. It belongs in an investigations family, not in a wars file.
What was Aum Shinrikyo?
A Japanese new religious movement founded in the 1980s by Matsumoto Chizuo, who took the name Asahara. It mixed Buddhist and Hindu language with apocalyptic teaching and, in its criminal core, organised murders and two sarin attacks. After 2000 the main successor body used the name Aleph.
What was the Matsumoto case?
On 27 June 1994, sarin was used in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, killing eight people. Once linked to Aum, it became the prior chemical crime in the same investigation family as 20 March 1995.
What laws changed?
Aum’s religious-corporation status was revoked. The Religious Corporations Act was revised in 1995. The 1999 Act on the Control of Organizations Which Have Committed Acts of Indiscriminate Mass Murder created ongoing surveillance of successor groups.
Convicted is the correct status. Aftermath is surveillance and commemoration.
English aftermath is mostly the 2018 hangings replayed as 1995.
Still open
- Successor groups — Aleph and splinters remain lawful to exist under watch. How tight that watch should be is a standing security argument.
- Medical aftercare — Long-term effects among survivors are a health file; a 2020 death was added to the fatality list.
- Dated death totals in English — Many English pages still say 12. Official Japanese accounting moved to 13 in 2008.
- New-religion stigma — How far Aum’s crimes should colour unrelated Japanese new religions remains a domestic civil-liberties debate.
- Translation of the trial — Full judgments are thinly present in English beside a large popular literature.
Myth vs record
The attack was an act of war by a foreign state.
Courts found a domestic group’s crime. It is not a wars-app case.
Exactly twelve people died, full stop.
Twelve was the first official figure. A 2008 survey made 13 the standard count; a 2020 death has been recorded as a fourteenth.
Aum appeared from nowhere on 20 March.
Matsumoto 1994 and earlier murders were already in investigators’ orbit. The subway attack was a second chemical crime, not a debut.
Local notes
Wire English, March 1995
“Nerve gas,” “doomsday,” and a map of the ginza and marunouchi lines: the first 48 hours taught English readers a cult story, not a statute story.
Waco and Oklahoma City
English editors analogised Aum to American millenarian and domestic-terror cases the same season, a frame that travelled better than “religious juridical person.”
Execution-day English, 2018
Reuters and the BBC reused the 1995 safety-myth line. Few recapped the 1999 control act.
The Tokyo subway attack is a convicted investigation whose English afterlife is a cult headline, not a code citation.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.