NONOICHI, Ishikawa Prefecture--A man reflected on what went wrong in his family after learning through news reports that his son, Yoshihiro, had been executed.
“I was a complete failure as a father,” he says in his memoirs. “Did Yoshihiro ever feel happy that he had been born into this world?”
The father also says, “I myself, not my son, am to be judged.”
Yoshihiro Inoue, 48, was sent to the gallows on July 6, 2018, for a number of heinous crimes carried out by the Aum Shinrikyo cult, including mass murder on Tokyo’s subway system in 1995.
A book containing letters from the former senior Aum member and his father’s memoirs was released by the Gendai Shokan publishing house exactly five years after the execution. It is titled “‘Aum Shikeishu Chichi no Shuki’ to Kokka Kenryoku” (“Memoirs of an executed Aum convict’s father” and state power).
The book, priced at 2,000 yen ($14), excluding tax, provides Inoue’s accounts of self-reproach and explains the inner struggles of his family.
The book was written by Toru Takahashi, a 64-year-old resident of Nonoichi, Ishikawa Prefecture, who was previously a reporter for Hokuriku Asahi Broadcasting Co., a TV station based in the prefecture.
Late in 2018, Takahashi gained an opportunity to report about the letters that Inoue had addressed to the head priest of Josenji, a Buddhist temple in Kahoku, Ishikawa Prefecture.
The priest and Inoue had both attended the same senior high school.
Takahashi’s coverage was part of a broader project looking back on the Heisei Era (1989-2019), which was soon to end with the emperor’s abdication.
A passage in one of Inoue’s letters says: “From day to day, I tell myself that my execution is probably still ahead, but I have second thoughts, like, ‘Oh no, how could I tell?’ So, I am afraid of a new daybreak.
“But I also feel sorry for victims about the very fact that I am obsessed with such emotions. Still, I am not free from the thought that I wouldn’t want to die like this.”
Takahashi created a documentary program titled “188 letters of an executed Aum convict,” which aired in 2019.
He learned during the process that Inoue’s father was writing memoirs.
He communicated extensively with the father as part of his continued research on the theme.
The father says he regretted that his son joined Aum Shinrikyo, but he partially blames himself for that decision.
Inoue had been drawn to the cult since he was in junior high school, partly because his father had not taken an interest in his son, the memoirs say.
The father also writes that he contacted Chizuo Matsumoto, the cult leader, ahead of his son’s graduation from senior high school. He urged the bearded guru, who went by the name Shoko Asahara, not to encourage his son to become a full-time Aum follower.
Inoue, however, rose through the ranks of Aum Shinrikyo.
When Inoue’s trial began, his father hoped his son would look squarely at the fact he had taken human lives.
“Your father hopes from the bottom of his heart that you will confess honestly to everything so you have no qualms about looking up at a cloudless summer sky,” he wrote in one letter to his son.
For a series of Aum’s crimes, Inoue was given a sentence of life imprisonment by a district court.
But he was later sentenced to death by a high court mainly for his role in a terrorist attack that shocked the world.
On March 20, 1995, Aum Shinrikyo members in five subway trains on the Hibiya, Chiyoda and Marunouchi lines used sharpened umbrella tips to puncture plastic bags containing sarin nerve gas as they were approaching Kasumigaseki Station in central Tokyo.
The dispersed nerve gas killed 14 people and injured more than 6,000.
Inoue was described as a general coordinator of the morning rush hour attack.
The Supreme Court finalized his death sentence in January 2010, and he was hanged on July 6, 2018, while he was requesting a retrial.
Thirteen senior cult members were sentenced to death for the subway attack and other crimes. They were all executed, in two stages, in July 2018.
Matsumoto was hanged at the age of 63.
On the basis of the memoirs of Inoue’s father, Takahashi made another TV program, titled “Telementary 2020: Atonement--Memoirs of an executed Aum convict’s father.”
And partly encouraged by feedback from viewers, he adapted additional findings from his research into the latest book.
Takahashi, who saw up close the difficulties suffered by Inoue’s family members, hopes to share their inner struggles through the published memoirs.
“All we were allowed to do as family members of an offender was to keep enduring everything with patience,” the father says. “And that stands to reason.”
But he also says, “Family members of a suspect lose all privacy and portrait rights from the very day they are branded as such.”
Takahashi asked rhetorically: “Are family members of an offender also offenders themselves? How much do we know about the death penalty system? Couldn’t we discuss a system that would allow offenders to face up to victims and atone for their crimes while they’re alive?”
Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was fatally shot in July last year.
The suspected killer said his mother had donated the family’s fortune to the Unification Church, and he cited Abe’s ties to the religious group as the reason behind the attack, according to investigators.
The assassination brought the issue of religious cults and children of cult followers to public attention.
Takahashi said problems with religious cults continue to exist in Japan.
“The case of Aum Shinrikyo is a historical landmark of the Heisei Era. It should have left a variety of lessons, but it hasn’t. In other words, I feel the Aum case has yet to be closed,” he said.
, Y. Doi, July 22, 2023
