Japan cult widow speaks 30 years after subway attack
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Only seven years into her marriage did Yuki Niimi first touch her husband — at a morgue where she collected his body after he was executed
and kissed him in a coffin.
Before that a glass screen had always separated her from her death-row spouse Tomomitsu Niimi, a notorious member of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult that 30 years ago orchestrated a nerve agent attack on Japan’s capital.
On March 20, 1995, Aum members released sarin on five Tokyo subway trains, killing 14 people and sickening thousands more.
“Until the very end, he gave no apology to those who died. He didn’t regret what he did. He just followed the path he believed in,” Yuki, 47, told AFP in an interview.
Yuki herself is a former member of an Aum successor group who despite her denials was once convicted for using intimidation to try to recruit an acquaintance for the sect.
Given the magnitude of her husband’s crimes, she believes the death penalty was “unavoidable”, and that “paying restitution” is the only way Aum cultists can atone.
Under the thrall of the wild-haired, near-blind guru Shoko Asahara, Aum devotees believed Armageddon was coming and saw massacres as an altruistic way to elevate souls to a higher realm.
Disaffected young people in Japan, including doctors and engineers who later manufactured toxins, took solace in Asahara’s doctrines.
Among his most loyal mentees was Tomomitsu, who was behind bars when he met Yuki, and when they married in 2011.
Their relationship consisted of letters and 15 to 30 minutes of conversation, almost every day, under a guard’s supervision.
But it ended abruptly with his execution in summer 2018, along with 12 other Aum members including Asahara.
After his hanging, the widowed Yuki caressed the still-warm body of Tomomitsu, whose neck was wrapped in a bandage to conceal the mark left by the noose.
She then spent the next three days until his cremation lying alongside him at home.
“He didn’t look like he suffered at all. He might as well have been asleep,” she said.
Tomomitsu, who died aged 54, is sometimes called Aum’s “most blood-stained” disciple — having helped perpetrate all of the group’s seven deadly attacks, including the subway strike in which he acted as a driver.
He also fatally suffocated a sleeping one-year-old in the 1989 slaying of an anti-Aum lawyer and his family.
The Aum cultists, who shut themselves away incommunicado in the pre-internet era, “believed everything” Asahara said and “honestly thought they were helping his act of salvation”, Yuki said.
She showed AFP a photo of a youthful, smiling Tomomitsu, sitting cross-legged with the cult leader behind him, both dressed in loose, bright white robes.
However, around a month before Tomomitsu’s execution, she sensed his allegiance to his leader finally crumbling.
