It is March 20 in Japan and today we mark not only the Vernal Equinox, but also the 30th anniversary of the sarin gas mass murders committed in the subway in Tokyo by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in 1995. The media is alive with coverage looking back on that domestic terrorism and looking at the present of some of the survivors.
It was a high-profile incident and a long, high-profile trial, leading to the criminals being executed 23 years later, in 2018 at the Tokyo Detention House, something I was told about just a few months later as I started what would be a 35-consecutive-day interpreting assignment at that same facility, in a case that was also certainly also high profile and in the news for months, but that did not involve mass murders, or any violence, for that matter.
The successor of the Aum Shinrikyo, Aleph, is still apparently operating as a cult, collecting “believers” and their money, and is still considered a dangerous group.
That said, Japan has not been very good at neutralizing such cults. Perhaps it’s because some of them lay claim to being religions and Japan has a rather dark history of being nasty to religions that it doesn’t like. It has had a dificult time bringing The Unification Church to justice, and that group is still open for business under a different name, but with the same goals of sucking up money from victims.