On the morning of Monday, March 20, 1995, publishing house employee Junichi Sugiyama had planned to head to Tsukiji, a Tokyo district served by the Hibiya Line subway station of the same name. He had a meeting with a major advertising agency there, part of a project he was working on whose negotiations had grown contentious. He was feeling exhausted.
The following day happened to be a public holiday, so Sugiyama and his counterpart decided to reschedule and take the day off to get some rest. It was a fateful choice. At a little after 8 a.m., at the peak of morning rush hour, members of the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo punctured bags containing liquid sarin on five train cars on the Hibiya, Chiyoda and Marunouchi subway lines, unleashing an extremely toxic compound that spread through subway cars packed with commuters passing through Japan’s political nerve center of Kasumigaseki.
Fourteen people were killed, including two subway employees, and more than 6,000 were injured, many of them left with long-lasting aftereffects. Tsukiji Station, where Sugiyama was supposed to be that morning, became a scene reminiscent of a war zone with throngs of victims dragged out of the station, gasping for air.
“In hindsight, I could have died if I hadn’t taken that day off. I would have been on the Hibiya Line,” he says.
Still reeling from a major earthquake two months earlier, Japan was shaken again as Aum’s attack shattered a decades-long sense of security that had prevailed since the end of World War II. Targeting Tokyo’s transit system — used by millions — it exposed a new threat: religious extremism.
The attacks also highlighted how trains, buses and shinkansen were vulnerable due to their sheer passenger volume. In response, railway and safety authorities began to introduce new security measures to guard against future threats
“There’s only so much that can be done,” says Sugiyama, now an author of several books on railway transport. “Baggage checks at stations are one option, but given the high volume of traffic, they’re unrealistic.
“I don’t deny the importance of thorough safety measures, but just as efforts to prevent accidents before they occur are important, measures taken after an accident are equally crucial.”
Making transport safe
The Tokyo Metro attacks triggered a security upgrade that has continued and evolved over 30 years.
One of the most immediate changes was the removal of garbage bins from subway stations, a precautionary measure meant to limit suspicious objects from making their way onto platforms. Tokyo Metro, which operates the three subway lines targeted in the attacks, described the measure as temporary. The bins were reinstated in April 1997.
However, after a wave of transit bombings — including attacks in Moscow (February 2004) and Madrid (March 2004) — Tokyo officials again removed station trash bins as part of broader counterterrorism measures.
The bins returned in April 2005 with transparent panels to make their contents visible, but were removed again in January 2022 “due to criminal activities on trains and security concerns,” according to a Tokyo Metro public relations officer.
Meanwhile, strict guidelines were established for handling suspicious objects, prioritizing safety above all else. These included evacuating passengers, immediately contacting emergency services and ensuring staff do not approach or handle suspicious items.
The use of security cameras in train stations expanded nationwide, a process that accelerated following the Aum attacks. In preparation for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, Tokyo Metro began installing cameras inside train cars in 2018, expediting its own deployment timeline by six years. As of now, 98% of installations have been completed.
“These cameras are now common not just among Tokyo Metro lines but in all train stations and cars,” says Tatsuya Edakubo, a former Tokyo Metro employee and urban transportation historian. “Some shinkansen even allow conductors and control room staff to monitor live footage from inside train cars.
“While these measures aren’t the direct results of the Aum case, the attacks helped speed up the adoption.”
Yet, even with heightened security, acts of violence remain impossible to fully prevent.
In 2015, a man doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire aboard the Tokaido Shinkansen, killing one passenger and injuring 26 others. In August 2021, a man stabbed 10 people on an Odakyu Electric Railway commuter train in Tokyo. That same year, on Halloween night, an attacker dressed as The Joker and armed with a knife and gasoline injured 17 people on a Keio Railway train. The latter incident prompted Japan’s transportation ministry to require railroad operators to install security cameras in all new train cars.
“The underlying assumption when it comes to public transportation security is one of good faith,” Edakubo says. “When an anomaly is detected, the focus is on quickly identifying the problem and, if necessary, encouraging evacuation. Railway employees and station staff are trained to respond swiftly and follow protocols during unusual situations, which has made their responses faster.
“However, to be honest, such incidents cannot be entirely avoided.”
Protective policies in place
Last month, ahead of the 30th anniversary of the Aum subway attacks, the Tokyo Fire Department, Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, Tokyo Metropolitan Disaster Medical Assistance Team and railway operators conducted a large-scale joint training exercise in Shibuya Ward.
The drill, which involved around 190 participants, simulated a toxic chemical attack inside a subway train, resulting in mass casualties. When station staff reported that commuters had collapsed on the platform, firefighters in hazmat suits rushed into the underground area, carrying out injured actors. Meanwhile, doctors and the Self-Defense Force’s medical team triaged victims, and specialized police units analyzed the chemical agents.
In 1995, first responders were unaware that sarin had been used, leading to injuries among firefighters, police officers and subway staff. In response, the Tokyo Fire Department equipped all pump trucks with protective suits and introduced autoinjectors for nerve gas antidotes, allowing personnel to administer treatment even without a doctor present. Today, annual drills continue to prepare emergency teams for chemical terrorism scenarios.
The Tokyo Fire Department’s review of its response to the Aum subway attacks found that inadequate zoning and decontamination had allowed the toxic gas to spread, contributing to the high casualty count. In response, officials revised safety protocols to include stricter containment measures and standardized decontamination procedures.
“Aum’s subway sarin attacks are considered one of the first instances of indiscriminate urban terrorism, and the fact that a religious organization was behind it had an especially profound impact,” says Ryosuke Nishida, a sociologist and professor at Nihon University’s College of Risk Management in Tokyo. Since then, he notes, heightened security awareness has led to measures such as widespread surveillance camera installation.
Critics argue that such measures increase the risk of Japan becoming a surveillance or control society, adds Nishida. “But after events like the sarin attacks and 9/11 in the United States, public consciousness around crime prevention became much stronger. For better or worse, Japan has maintained one of the highest levels of public safety in the world, and crime rates have halved over the past decade.”
In the wake of the attacks, lawmakers introduced new legislation to address security threats. In 1996, the government sought to dissolve Aum Shinrikyo under the Subversive Activities Prevention Act, though the request was denied the following year. In 1999, authorities enacted the Act on the Control of Organizations Which Have Committed Acts of Indiscriminate Mass Murder. Additional security laws followed, including the Civil Protection Law in 2004 and a 2017 revision to the Act on Punishment of Organized Crimes and Control of Crime Proceeds, which allowed for the prosecution of crimes at the planning stage.
“It’s undeniable that the Aum attacks were a turning point in security policy,” Nishida says. “Yet despite low crime rates, the public’s fear of crime remains high.”
That sinking feeling things are worse
After peaking at 2.85 million reported criminal offenses in 2002, the number of crimes in Japan continued to decline, reaching 568,148 in 2021 — just 20% of what it had been two decades earlier — a spectacular decline even considering Japan’s rapidly aging and shrinking population.
However, with pandemic-induced travel restrictions and social distancing measures lifted, crime figures have rebounded for three consecutive years, largely driven by a surge in investment fraud and social media scams.
In 2024, there were 737,679 crimes reported, a 4.9% increase from the previous year, though still below prepandemic levels. Yet a survey on taikan chian (perceived sense of security or safety) by the National Police Agency in October revealed an interesting contrast: 76.6% of the 5,000 respondents felt that Japan had become less safe in the past decade, reflecting a growing disconnect between actual crime rates and the public’s perceived sense of security.
“The term taikan chian was used by Takaji Kunimatsu around the time of the sarin gas attacks,” says Rissho University professor and criminologist Nobuo Komiya, referring to the then-National Police Agency chief who was near-fatally shot as he was leaving his residence on the morning of March 30, 1995 — 10 days after the subway attacks. The attempted murder was suspected to be linked to Aum, though the case remains unsolved.
“While some point to a gap between perceived security and actual reported crime figures, I actually find the police statistics to be somewhat misleading,” says Komiya. “If an incident isn’t reported, it doesn’t make it into the statistics. So in reality, far more incidents occur than the official police data suggests. Therefore, I trust the general public who say they feel scared and unsafe.”
Komiya suggests that Japan’s conformist culture may play a role in the concealment of crimes, particularly those within organizations, where such incidents are often kept from the public eye. However, he notes that this dynamic is changing, citing high-profile cases such as the sex scandals surrounding the late Johnny Kitagawa, the founder of Japan’s top talent agency, and Fuji TV. These cases, he says, were amplified by social media, which has become an influential platform in public discourse.
“Social media gives victims of crime a platform to raise their voices,” he says, “but it also facilitates criminal activity.”
According to the 2024 police report, illegal and harmful content on the internet, especially the widespread recruitment of criminals via social media, has emerged as a significant security threat. The report also highlighted an increase in the number of cases and financial losses resulting from investment and romance scams carried out on social networking services. Additionally, the number of child victims of crimes originating from SNS remains troublingly high.
Komiya, whose close friend was on one of the subways targeted that fateful March 1995 morning and among the thousands of victims who received treatment, believes that the memories and lessons from the incident 30 years ago are slowly fading into history.
“The Japanese tend to believe in the inherent goodness of people, which is why many young individuals are drawn into yami baito,” he says, referring to the recent trend of unsuspecting people being lured into criminal activity by the promise of high wages. “We need to teach our children that committing crimes has real and serious consequences.”
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