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Subject: Cult "mind-control" and U.S. plots
Date: 22 Apr 1995 16:39:19 -0400
Subject: Cult "mind control" and U.S. plots...
(Al Bielek...phone Japan.)
Reuter news wire: 3/7/95
TOKYO, April 7 (Reuter) - Not everyone might believe in a guru who says he time-travelled to the year 2006, but his followers in Japan pay $116,000 for "telepathy head gear" just to share visions he says he has experienced.
The estimated 10,000 members of Japan's Aum Shinri Kyo (Supreme Truth Sect) say they even drink tea made from locks of hair of guru Shoko Asahara to enhance such abilities.
The cult is now the target of daily police raids following the March 20 nerve gas attack on Tokyo's subway which killed 11 people and injured thousands. The cult denies any connection to the attacks.
Despite the raids, which have turned up hundreds of tonnes of chemicals, laboratories and secret plants, no formal charges have been made against the sect. Nor have there been any arrests directly linked to the attack.
But what the raids have revealed is that the cult was obsessed with things more dangerous than time-travelling.
Investigators rummaging through the labyrinthine building of the sect's complex at Kamiku Isshiki, at the foot of Mt Fuji west of Tokyo, were silent on exact details of what they found.
But most agreed on one thing. "This is no police matter. This is a national security issue," as one put it.
Day after day, the Japanese public have been fed hours of television footage and newspaper coverage of the details of the bizarre world of the Aum sect.
Some aspects, like its pyramid structure resembling a national government, was straight out of pulp fiction. Its "defence ministry" guarded the premises and kept an eye on would-be escapees. Its "science ministry" ran chemical plants.
Other aspects bordered on the incredible. It repeatedly accused the U.S.military of spraying nerve gas on the cult complex from airplanes. It said cellular phones were actually devices used in a government plot to control people's minds.
Religious commentators said Asahara attracted his following from Japan's youth by appealing to their interest in the supernatural and the occult.
His key prediction is that the world as we know it would end in 1997 in an "Armageddon" of nerve gas and biological wars.
In 1992, he predicted a nuclear war would break out and forced his followers to move to Okinawa. Nothing happened.
In last December's issue of the sect's monthly magazine entitled "Great Prophecy: the Shuddering End of the Century," Asahara said he travelled to the world in the year 2006 and talked to residents who said World War Three was over.
"I asked the people around me what year it was," Asahara wrote in the magazine. "They said it was the year 2006. Mankind had already experienced World War Three."
In a strange contrast to such far-fetched claims, the sect has displayed an extremely realistic attitude over money.
It demands that a devoted follower wishing to live in its ascetic community give every penny he or she has to the sect, including house, land and life savings. The sect wants everything, and that includes stamps in desk drawers and telephone cards.
