When I went to meet Mr. Asahara for the first time, the investigation had been going on for about half a year.
‘If you plead guilty, we won’t dissolve your community and apply to it the Subversive Activities Prevention Act’, they urged. And Mr. Asahara perturbed and exhausted with everyday interrogations similar to tortures, which continued day by day, and deceived by sweet promises of the prosecution, decided to shoulder part of the guilt for the lawyer Sakamoto and Mr. Otida Kotaro murder cases and [some] others. Then, for a while, when he saw that the prosecutor wanted just to trap him, he refused to testify against himself, but later he continued to do so. The situation was that difficult.
I persuaded Mr. Asahara with fervor, ‘All prosecutor’s promises are lies because he alone won’t be able to keep them. And if you plead guilty [for something] once, then it will be impossible to deny it in court. You won’t be able to change anything if you sign the transcript. You’d better not sign any transcripts, you’d better keep silent. Try to keep silent’. But not once in the process of investigation Mr. Asahara was given the chance to enjoy the right to keep silent guaranteed by the Constitution.
‘We won’t let you keep silent! You must have perpetrated all that, that’s why you’re keeping silent! Are you trying to avoid responsibility? If you go on to keep silent, we’ll drag you through one arrest after another. We won’t release you on bail, and we’ll arrange it so that you’ll be found guilty, that’s for sure!’ There was no end to swearing, abuses and threats. ‘And if it is your lawyer who advised you to keep silent, then we’ll put pressure on your family and he will be removed!’ Such was the real state of things during the investigation.
Thanks to our persuasion Mr. Asahara stopped to answer questions once again. The prosecution and the police were simply enraged by that obstacle in the path of investigation. If everything went as smoothly as before, the officials from those two departments would probably win great fame for ‘making this accomplished villain, Shoko Asahara, confess all his crimes’. But because the course of affairs took such a turn, their dream vanished. After that, though the interrogations continued for another four months, he kept silent and did not say a word to the investigators.
I went to see Mr. Asahara whenever I had some time. He told me a lot of things, and I told him a lot, too. Sometimes we started to talk in the evening and finished at 6.00 in the morning the next day.
The Tokyo Police Agency has got four rooms for the purpose. But every time I came, the visit always took place in the same room. I suspected that they installed special equipment and the room was bugged. But we had our conversations disregarding the fact.
Once it snowed in Tokyo. The next day Mr. Asahara greeted me joyfully, ‘Last night I was flying over Tokyo in the falling snow! And the parliament building was covered in snow, too. It was so beautiful!’
‘In 2003 the US will provoke the last world war on religious grounds. They will drop a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima again. This is not a prophesy. I’ve really been to Hiroshima of 2003 and seen it [1]. On the scorched field I came across a man who had radiation sickness and I asked him what had happened. He explained using the local dialect. When I passed his exact words to my disciples, one of them, who knows how they speak in Hiroshima, said, “This is the Hiroshima dialect for sure”. Then I realized: what I saw was a reality’.
‘There will be an earthquake in Tokyo on such-and-such day of such-and-such month. So please leave soon. And pass it to all the lawyers, please’.
I don’t quite remember when it happened, but once Mr. Asahara had been talking for a long time when suddenly the light in the room went out. We were in complete darkness. Not a beam of light penetrated through the window. But his voice did not change a bit, he went on speaking as before. After a time there was light again. But he continued talking as if nothing had happened. Till the end of my visit he did not say anything like, ‘[Tonight] the light went suddenly out, didn’t it?’
I used to have various groundless suspicions, ‘Is he really unable to see or is his blindness only feigned?’ and the like, but then I became convinced that actually Mr. Asahara could not see at all. After that I decided to ask him straight out if he could see anything. He said, ‘Usually I can see nothing. But when I’m in a very good state and if I focus my attention, I can see the faintest light, but only with one eye’.
Being in total darkness with nobody to take care of him, put in the cage of a cell, he endured 46-hour interrogations without a single complaint, because he thought all that was his [spiritual] practice.
Mr. Asahara advised me to read the main yogic sutras. He explained that otherwise I would be unable to understand AUM, I did not follow his advice. I thought that I was defending him personally, not his religion or religious community, and there was no need [for me] to touch upon religious issues. But now looking back, I understand that it was a mistake.
Mr. Asahara is a person for whom religion is everything. And he was persecuted and prosecuted because of that, too (he was like a thorn in the flesh of Japanese society). Regardless of whether he had committed any crimes or not, it would be impossible to defend him without understanding his religion.
If they passed the verdict of guilty, that would only mean the death penalty. And if it was the death penalty, I was afraid he would be executed earlier than anybody else. [I thought] ‘It must be stopped in any case. Even if he turns out to be guilty, he mustn’t be put to death’. On the other hand, Mr. Asahara once said, he wouldn’t be executed until his state lawyers stayed with him, and he would probably have time to accomplish his mission in this life. I felt an unbearable burden of that responsibility.
[1]Mr. Asahara is talking about his experience in meditation, referring to the future. (–editor)next>>>
