DEATH TO SHOKO

Japanese prosecutors have asked for the death penalty for Chizuo Matsumoto, aka Shoko Asahara, convicted for masterminding his cult's 1995 sarin gas attack in Tokyo. Asahara was Japan's version of David Koresh, and was the original WMD terrorist: Sarin is one of the deadliest nerve agents in the world, and his followers released it into a crowded train station during peak traffic. Aum Shinrikyo's actions are behind much of our own fears about what terrorists can do with weapons of mass destruction.

I lived in Japan when this attack occurred. Overnight the country's self-image changed, and not for the better. Prior to the attack at the Kasumigaseki subway station--a station I'd been through many times myself--Japan saw itself as one of the safest nations in the world, perhaps the safest. It was a self-image built in part on truth--Japan had little violent crime--and on its firm belief that its strict gun laws would save it from crime forever. The Aum cult's atrocity proved the latter false: His minions used no guns, but killed and injured many. The manhunt that eventually led to Asahara's capture spanned the entire nation, and played out every night on the evening news. They kept repeating creepy footage of Asahara sitting on a dias and looking drugged like he always did, flanked by a few of his followers and surrounded by more, who kept singing this annoying song based on his name. He'd run for political office a few years before the attack--the footage was from a campaign event. Japan was gripped in fear that he would order another attack, work it out a little more successfully the second time around, if they didn't capture him. If a country can have a panic attack, Japan did throughout most of 1995.

Today, eight years later, Japan is having trouble keeping a lid on violent crime. Roving packs of juveniles regularly accost rail passengers, mugging them for cash, beating and kicking them if they don't comply. They're called the bosozoki, and they're a menace throughout most of Japan's large cities. In a few cases, the bosozoki have killed their victims, but those who witness the crimes are usually too terrified to testify against them. So they get away, to steal and perhaps kill again. Violent crime, without the need for handguns, is on the rise among juveniles generally across Japan. Some of it probably has to do with the stressful education system and its rigid caste-like system, and some perhaps to Japan's stagnant economy, still more to the breakdown of traditional Japanese values of society before self. But some of can be traced back to Kasumigaseki station, in 1995.

Japan is a different place than it was eight years ago. And I hope they hang Shoko Asahara.