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8 10 9
Copyright © Haruki Murakami 1997, 1998
English translation © Haruki Murakami 2000
Haruki Murakami has asserted his right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the
author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by
way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or
otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in
any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is
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condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Part One first published by Kodansha Ltd in 1997 with
the title Andaguraundo
Part Two first published by Bungeishunjusha in 1998 with
the title Yakusoku sareta basho de
First published in Great Britain in 2002 by
The Harvill Press
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Cover
About the Author
Also by Haruki Murakami
Title Page
Map of the Tokyo Subway
Preface
TOKYO METROPOLITAN SUBWAY: CHIYODA LINE
Kiyoka Izumi: Nobody was dealing with things calmly
Masaru Yuasa: I’ve been here since I first joined
Minoru Miyata: At that point Takahashi was still alive
Toshiaki Toyoda: I’m not a sarin victim, I’m a survivor
Tomoko Takatsuki: It’s not even whether or not to take the subway, just to go out walking scares me now
Mitsuteru Izutsu: The day after the gas attack, I asked my wife for a divorce
Aya Kazaguchi: Luckily I was dozing off
Hideki Sono: Everyone loves a scandal
TOKYO METROPOLITAN SUBWAY: MARUNOUCHI LINE (DESTINATION: OGIKUBO)
Mitsuo Arima: I felt like I was watching a programme on TV
Kenji Ohashi: Looking back, it all started because the bus was two minutes early
Soichi Inagawa: That day and that day only I took the first door
Sumio Nishimura: If I hadn’t been there, somebody else would have picked up the packets
Koichi Sakata: I was in pain, yet I still bought my milk as usual
Tatsuo Akashi: The night before the gas attack, the family was saying over dinner, “My, how lucky we are”
Shizuko Akashi: Ii-yu-nii-an (Disneyland)
TOKYO METROPOLITAN SUBWAY: MARUNOUCHI LINE (DESTINATION: IKEBUKURO)
Shintaro Komada: “What can that be?” I thought
Ikuko Nakayama: I knew it was sarin
TOKYO METROPOLITAN SUBWAY: HIBIYA LINE (DEPARTING: NAKA-MEGURO)
Hiroshige Sugazaki: “What if you never see your grandchild’s face?”
Kozo Ishino: I had some knowledge of sarin
Michael Kennedy: I kept shouting “Please, please, please!” in Japanese
Yoko Iizuka: That kind of fright is something you never forget
TOKYO METROPOLITAN SUBWAY: HIBIYA LINE (DEPARTING: KITA-SENJU; DESTINATION: NAKA-MEGURO)
Noburu Terajima: I’d borrowed the down payment, and my wife was expecting – it looked pretty bad
Masanori Okuyama: In a situation like that the emergency services aren’t much help at all
Michiaki Tamada: Ride the trains every day and you know what’s regular air
TOKYO METROPOLITAN SUBWAY: HIBIYA LINE
Takanori Ichiba: Some loony’s probably sprinkled pesticides or something
Naoyuki Ogata: We’ll never make it. If we wait for the ambulance we’re done for
Michiru Kono: It’d be pathetic to die like this
Kei’ichi Ishikura: The day of the gas attack was my sixty-fifth birthday
TOKYO METROPOLITAN SUBWAY: KODEMMACHO STATION
Ken’ichi Yamazaki: I saw his face and thought: “I’ve seen this character somewhere”
Yoshiko Wada, widow of Eiji Wada: He was such a kind person. He seemed to get even kinder before he died
Kichiro Wada and Sanaé Wada, parents of Eiji Wada: He was an undemanding child
Koichiro Makita: Sarin! Sarin!
Dr Toru Saito: The very first thing that came to mind was poison gas – cyanide or sarin
Dr Nobuo Yanagisawa: There is no prompt and efficient system in Japan for dealing with a major catastrophe
Blind Nightmare: Where Are We Japanese Going?
Preface
Hiroyuki Kano: I’m still in Aum
Akio Namimura: Nostradamus had a great influence on my generation
Mitsuharu Inaba: Each individual has his own image of the Master
Hajime Masutani: This was like an experiment using human beings
Miyuki Kanda: In my previous life I was a man
Shinichi Hosoi: “If I stay here,” I thought, “I’m going to die”
Harumi Iwakura: Asahara tried to force me to have sex with him
Hidetoshi Takahashi: No matter how grotesque a figure Asahara appears, I can’t just dismiss him
Afterword
Copyright
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. He is the author of many novels as well as short stories and non-fiction. His works include Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, After Dark and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. His work has been translated into more than forty languages, and the most recent of his many international honours is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J.M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V.S. Naipaul.
After Dark
After the Quake
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Dance Dance Dance
The Elephant Vanishes
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Kafka on the Shore
Norwegian Wood
South of the Border, West of the Sun
Sputnik Sweetheart
A Wild Sheep Chase
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
1Q84
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Map of the Tokyo Subway showing the lines targeted in the gas attack,
Monday 20 March, 1995
Leafing through a magazine one afternoon, I found myself looking at the readers’ letters page. I really don’t remember why; I just probably had time on my hands. I rarely ever pick up Lady’s Home Journal or the like, much less read the letters page.
However, one of the letters caught my attention. It was from a woman whose husband had lost his job because of the Tokyo gas attack. A subway commuter, he had been unfortunate enough to be on his way to work in one of the carriages in which the sarin gas was released.2 He passed out and was taken to hospital. But even after several days’ recuperation, the after-effects lingered on, and he couldn’t get himself back into the working routine. At first, he was tolerated, but as time went on his boss and colleagues began to make snide remarks. Unable to bear the icy atmosphere any longer, feeling almost forced out, he resigned.
The magazine has since disappeared, so I can’t quote the letter exactly, but that was more or less what it said. As far as I can recall, there was nothing particularly plaintive about it, nor was it an angry rant. If anything, it was barely audible, a grumble under the breath. “How on earth did this happen to us … ?” she wonders, still unable to accept what had out of the blue befallen her family.
The letter shocked me. Here were people who still carried serious psychological scars. I felt sorry, truly sorry, although I knew that for the couple involved my sympathy was irrelevant. And yet, what else could I do?
Like most people, I’m sure, I simply turned the page with a sigh.
But sometime later I found myself thinking about the letter. That “How on earth … ?” stuck in my head like a big question mark. As if it weren’t enough to be the victim of purely random violence, the man had suffered “secondary victimization” (everyday corporate violence of the most pervasive kind). Why could nobody do anything about it? That’s when I began to piece together a very different picture.
Whatever the reason, his colleagues had singled out this young salaryman – “Hey, there’s the guy from that weird attack” – it couldn’t have made any sense to him. He was probably quite unaware of their “them-and-us” attitude. Appearances were deceptive. He would have considered himself a dyed-in-the-wool Japanese like everyone else.
I grew curious to learn more about the woman who wrote in about her husband. Personally, I wanted to probe deeper into how Japanese society could perpetrate such a double violence.
Soon after that I decided to interview the survivors of the attack.
The interviews were conducted over nearly a year between the beginning of January and the end of December, 1996. Most sessions took one or two hours, but some lasted for as long as four hours. I recorded everything.
The tapes were then transcribed, which naturally generated a huge volume of text, much of which digressed this way and that, lost the thread completely, then pulled back into focus. Just like everyday speech. This was edited, re-ordered or re-phrased where necessary to make it more readable, and generally worked up into a manageable book-length manuscript. Occasionally, when the transcript seemed to lack something, I had to go back and listen to the original tape.
Only once did anyone refuse to be recorded. Although I had mentioned over the phone that I’d be recording the interview, when I pulled a tape recorder out of my bag the interviewee claimed not to have been told. I spent the next two hours jotting down names and figures in longhand, then another few hours writing up the interview the moment I got home. (I was actually rather impressed that my own all-too-human powers of recall could reproduce an entire conversation from a handful of notes – no doubt daily fare to professional interviewers, but new to me.) Still, in the end I wasn’t granted permission to include this interview in the book, so all my labours came to nothing.
Two assistants, Setsuo Oshikawa and Hidemi Takahashi, helped me track down the interviewees. We used one of two methods: scanning all previous media sources for listings of “Tokyo gas attack victims”; or asking around by word-of-mouth if anyone knew someone who’d been gassed. Quite frankly, this proved more difficult than I expected. So many passengers were on the Tokyo subway that day, I told myself, getting statements would be easy; after all there was no formal legal ban on “external testimonies” during the trial, except as concerned the court or police investigations. They had a duty to protect people’s privacy, and the same went for the hospitals. All we had to go on were newspaper listings of the hospitalized from the day of the gas attack itself. Names only; no addresses or telephone numbers.
Somehow we came up with a list of 700 names, of whom only 20 per cent were identifiable. How does one go about tracing an “Ichiro Nakamura” – the Japanese equivalent of “John Smith”? Even when we did manage to contact the 140 or so positive identifications, they usually refused to be interviewed, saying “I’d rather forget the whole incident” or “I don’t want to have anything to do with Aum” or “I don’t trust the media”. I can’t tell you how often people slammed down the phone at the mere mention of publication. As a result, only about 40 per cent of the 140 names consented to be interviewed.
After the arrest of the principal members of the Aum cult, fewer people feared retributions, but still the rejections persisted – “My symptoms aren’t really serious, so it’s not worth making a statement.” Or, in more than one case, the survivors themselves were willing but their families were not – “Don’t get all of us involved.” Testimonies from public servants and the employees of financial institutions were likewise unforthcoming.
For practical reasons there are also relatively few female interviewees, because they proved harder to trace by name alone. Unmarried young women in Japan – and this is pure conjecture on my part – don’t appreciate strangers asking too many questions. Nevertheless, some did respond “despite family opposition”.
Thus, out of thousands of victims, we found only 60 willing respondents, and that took a huge amount of dedication.
In the process of shaping the written interviews, drafts were sent to the respective interviewees for fact-checking. I attached a note asking them to let me know if there was anything they “didn’t wish to see in print” and how the contents should be altered or abridged. Almost everyone asked for some changes or cuts, and I complied. Often the forfeited material had illuminated details about the interviewees’ lives, which I, as a writer, was sorry to lose. Occasionally I came back with a counterproposal for them to approve. Some interviews went back and forth as many as five times. Every effort was made to avoid any exploitative mass-media scenario that might leave disgruntled interviewees shaking their heads saying “It wasn’t supposed to be like this” or “You betrayed my trust”. Things took time.
After such delicate and laborious orchestrations, we had a total of 62 interviews. However, as stated previously, there were two last-minute withdrawals, both very incisive, telling testimonies. Discarding the finished texts so late in the game, I honestly felt as though I were cutting away parts of my own flesh, but “No” means “No”, especially when we had made our intention to respect each individual voice clear from the start.
Put another way, every remark in this book is a completely voluntary contribution. And by way of final confirmation – I am very pleased and grateful to say – almost everyone agreed to use his or her real name, which adds incalculably greater impact to the words: their words, their anger, their accusations, their sufferings … (this is not to slight those few who adopted pseudonyms, for whatever personal reasons).
At the beginning of every interview I would ask the interviewees about their background – where they were born, their upbringing, their family, their job (especially their job) – in order to give each a “face”, to bring them into focus. What I did not want was a collection of disembodied voices. Perhaps it’s an occupational hazard of the novelist’s profession, but I am less interested in the “big picture” as it were, than in the concrete, irreducible humanity of each individual. So perhaps I devoted an inordinate proportion of each two-hour interview to seemingly unrelated details, but I wanted to make sure readers had a firm grasp of the “character” speaking. Much of this extra dimension did not, of course, survive into print.
The Japanese media had bombarded us with so many in-depth profiles of the Aum cult perpetrators – the “attackers” – forming such a slick, seductive narrative that the average citizen – the “victim” – was almost an afterthought. “Bystander A” was glimpsed only in passing. Very rarely was any “lesser” narrative presented in a way that commanded attention. Those few stories that got through were contextualized into formulaic glosses. Our media probably wanted to create a collective image of the “innocent Japanese sufferer”, which is much easier to do when you don’t have to deal with real faces. Besides, the classic dichotomy of “ugly (visible) villains” versus the “healthy (faceless) populace” makes for a better story.
Which is why I wanted, if at all possible, to get away from any formula; to recognize that each person on the subway that morning had a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions and dilemmas – and that all these factors had a place in the drama.
Once I’d discovered the real person, I could then shift my focus to the events themselves. “What was the day like for you?”, “What did you see/experience/feel?”, and, if it seemed appropriate, “In what way did you suffer (physically or mentally) because of the gas attack?” and “Did these problems persist?”
The degree of suffering inflicted by the Tokyo gas attack varied considerably from person to person. Some escaped with little actual harm, those less fortunate died or are still undergoing therapy for serious health problems. Many experienced no major symptoms at the time, but have since developed post-traumatic stress disorders.
I interviewed people even if they were virtually unaffected by the sarin gas. Naturally those who escaped with relatively slight injury had been able to return to everyday life more quickly, but they too had their own stories to tell. Their fears, their lessons. In this sense, I did not practise any sort of editorial “triage”.3
One cannot overlook someone simply because they exhibit only “minor symptoms”. For everyone involved in the gas attack, 20 March was a heavy, gruelling day.
Furthermore, I had a hunch that we needed to see a true picture of all the survivors, whether they were severely traumatized or not, in order to better grasp the whole incident. I leave it to you, the reader, to lend an ear, then judge. No, even before that, I’d like you to imagine.
The date is Monday 20 March, 1995. It is a beautiful clear spring morning. There is still a brisk breeze and people are bundled up in coats. Yesterday was Sunday, tomorrow is the Spring Equinox, a national holiday. Sandwiched right in the middle of what should have been a long weekend, you’re probably thinking “I wish I didn’t have to go to work today.” No such luck. You get up at the normal time, wash, dress, breakfast, and head for the subway station. You board the train, crowded as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. It promises to be a perfectly run-of-the-mill day. Until five men in disguise poke at the floor of the carriage with the sharpened tips of their umbrellas, puncturing some plastic bags filled with a strange liquid …
1 I would like to make clear that I borrowed useful ideas towards the composition of this book from the works of Studs Terkel and Bob Greene.
2 Sarin is a nerve gas invented by German scientists in the 1930s as part of Adolf Hitler’s preparations for World War II. During the 1980s it was used to lethal effect by Iraq, both in the war against Iran and against the Kurds. Twenty-six times as deadly as cyanide gas, a drop of sarin the size of a pinhead is sufficient to kill a person. [Tr.]
3 See here. [Tr.]
TWO MEN WERE assigned to drop sarin gas on the Chiyoda Line: Ikuo Hayashi and Tomomitsu Niimi. Hayashi was the principal criminal, Niimi the driver-accomplice.
Why Hayashi – a senior medical doctor with an active “front-line” track-record at the Ministry of Science and Technology – was chosen to carry out this mission remains unclear, but Hayashi himself conjectures it was to seal his lips. Implication in the gas attack cut off any possibility of escape. By this point Hayashi already knew too much. He was devoted to the Aum cult leader Shoko Asahara, but apparently Asahara did not trust him. When Asahara first told him to go and release the sarin gas Hayashi admitted: “I could feel my heart pounding in my chest – though where else would my heart be?”
Boarding the front carriage of the south-westbound 7.48 a.m. Chiyoda Line, running from the north-east Tokyo suburb of Kita-senju to the western suburb of Yoyogi-uehara, Hayashi punctured his plastic bag of sarin at Shin-ochanomizu Station in the central business district, then left the train. Outside the station, Niimi was waiting with a car and the two of them drove back to the Shibuya ajid – Aum local headquarters – their mission accomplished. There was no way for Hayashi to refuse. “This is just a yoga of the Mahamudra,” he kept telling himself. Mahamudra being a crucial discipline for attaining the stage of the True Enlightened Master.
When asked by Asahara’s legal team whether he could have refused if he had wanted to, Hayashi replied: “If that had been possible, the Tokyo gas attack would never have happened.”
Born in 1947, Hayashi was the second son of a Tokyo medical practitioner. Groomed from middle and secondary school for Keio University, one of Tokyo’s two top private universities, upon graduating from medical school he took employment as a heart and artery specialist at Keio Hospital, after which he went on to become Head of the Circulatory Medicine Department at the National Sanatorium Hospital at Tokaimura, Ibaragi, north of Tokyo. He is a member of what the Japanese call the “super elite”. Clean-cut, he exudes the self-confidence of a professional. Medicine obviously came naturally to him. His hair is starting to thin on top, but like most of the Aum leadership, he has good posture, his eyes focused firmly ahead, although his speech is monotonous and somehow forced. From his testimony in court, I gained the distinct impression that he was blocking some flow of emotion inside himself.
Somewhere along the line Hayashi seems to have had profound doubts about his career as a doctor and, while searching for answers beyond orthodox science, he became seduced by the charismatic teachings of Shoko Asahara and suddenly converted to Aum. In 1990 he resigned from his job and left with his family for a religious life. His two children were promised a special education within the cult. His colleagues at the hospital were loath to lose a man of Hayashi’s calibre and tried to stop him, but his mind was made up. It was as if the medical profession no longer held anything for him. Once initiated into the cult, he soon found himself among Asahara’s favourites and was appointed Minister of Healing.
Once he had been called upon to carry out the sarin plan, Hayashi was brought to Aum’s General headquarters, Satyam NO.7, in Kamikuishiki Village near Mt Fuji at 3 a.m. on 20 March, where, together with the four other principal players, he rehearsed the attack. Using umbrellas sharpened with a file, they pierced plastic bags filled with water rather than sarin. The rehearsal was supervised by Hideo Murai of the Aum leadership. While comments from the other four members indicate that they enjoyed this practice session, Hayashi observed it all with cool reserve. Nor did he actually pierce his bag. To the 48-year-old doctor, the whole exercise must have seemed like a game.
“I did not need to practise,” says Hayashi. “I could see what to do, though my heart wasn’t in it.”
After the session, all five were returned by car to the Shibuya ajid, whereupon our physician Hayashi handed out hypodermic needles filled with atropine sulphate to the team, instructing them to inject it at the first sign of sarin poisoning.
On the way to the station, Hayashi purchased gloves, a knife, Sellotape and sandals at a convenience store. Niimi, the driver, bought some newspapers in which to wrap the bags of sarin. They were sectarian newspapers – the Japan Communist Party’s Akahata (Red Flag) and the Soka Gakkai’s Seikyo Shimbun (Sacred Teaching News) – “more interesting because they’re not papers you can buy just anywhere”. That was Niimi’s little in-joke. Of the two papers, Hayashi chose Akahata: a rival sect’s publication would have been too obvious and therefore counterproductive.
Before getting on the subway, Hayashi donned a gauze surgical mask, of the sort commonly worn by many commuters in winter to prevent cold germs from spreading. The train number was A725K. Glancing at a woman and child in the carriage, Hayashi wavered slightly. “If I unleash the sarin here and now,” he thought, “the woman opposite me is dead for sure. Unless she gets off somewhere.” But he’d come this far; there was no going back. This was a Holy War. The weak were losers.
As the subway approached Shin-ochanomizu Station, he dropped the bags of sarin by his right foot, steeled his nerves, and poked one of them with the end of his umbrella. It was resilient and gave a “springy gush”. He poked it again a few times – exactly how many times he doesn’t remember. In the end, only one of the two bags was found to have been punctured, the other was untouched.
Still, the sarin liquid in one of the bags completely evaporated and did a lot of damage. At Kasumigaseki two station attendants died in the line of duty trying to dispose of the bag. Train A725K was stopped at the next station, Kokkai-gijidomae – the stop for the Japanese National Assembly – all passengers were evacuated, and the carriages were cleaned.
Two people were killed and 231 suffered serious injuries from Hayashi’s sarin drop alone.1
1 Ikuo Hayashi was sentenced to an indefinite term of hard labour. At the time of going to press he was serving time in prison and Tomomitsu Niimi was still on trial. [Tr.]
MS KIYOKA IZUMI WAS born in Kanazawa, on the north central coast of the Sea of Japan. She works in the PR department of a foreign airline company. After graduation she went to work for Japan Railway (JR), but after three years she decided to pursue her childhood dream of working in aviation. Even though job transfers to airline companies are extremely difficult in Japan – only one in a thousand “mid-career” applicants is accepted – she beat the odds, only to encounter the Tokyo gas attack not long after starting work.
Her job at JR was boring to say the least. Her colleagues objected to her leaving, but she was determined. It was good training, but the union-dominated atmosphere was too confining and specialized. She wanted to use English at work. Still, the emergency training she received at JR proved invaluable in unexpected circumstances …
At the time I was living in Waseda [north-west central Tokyo]. My company was in Kamiyacho [south-east central Tokyo], so I always commuted by subway, taking the Tozai Line, changing at Otemachi for the Chiyoda Line to Kasumigaseki, then one stop on the Hibiya Line to Kamiyacho. Work started at 8.30, so I’d leave home around 7.45 or 7.50. That got me there a little before 8.30, but I was always one of the earliest to start. Everybody else showed up just in time. With Japanese companies, I’d always learned you were expected to arrive 30 minutes to an hour before starting, but with a foreign company the thinking is that everyone starts work at his or her own pace. You don’t get any brownie points for arriving early.
I’d get up around 6.15 or 6.20. I rarely eat breakfast, just a quick cup of coffee. The Tozai Line gets pretty crowded during rush hour, but if you avoid the peak, it’s not too bad. I never had any problem with perverts copping a feel or anything.
I never get ill, but on the morning of 20 March I wasn’t feeling well. I caught the train to work anyway; got off the Tozai Line at Otemachi and transferred to the Chiyoda Line, thinking, “Gosh, I’m really out of it today.” I inhaled, then suddenly my breathing froze – just like that.
I was travelling in the first carriage on the Chiyoda Line. It wasn’t too crowded. All the seats were pretty much taken, but there were only a few passengers standing here and there. You could still see all the way to the other end.
I stood at the front next to the driver’s compartment, holding the handrail by the door. Then, like I said, when I took a deep breath, I got this sudden pain. No, it wasn’t so much painful. Really it was like I’d been shot or something, all of a sudden my breathing completely stopped. Like, if I inhaled any more, all my guts would come spilling right out of my mouth! Everything became a vacuum, probably because I wasn’t feeling well, I thought; but, I mean, I’d never felt so bad. It was that intense.
And then, when I think back on it now it seems kind of odd, but I thought, “Just maybe my grandad’s died.” He lived up north in Ishikawa Prefecture and was 94 years old at the time. I’d heard he’d been taken ill, so maybe this was a kind of sign. That was my first thought. Maybe he’d died or something.
After a while I was able to breathe again somehow. But by the time we passed Hibiya Station, one stop before Kasumigaseki, I got this really bad cough. By then everyone in the carriage was coughing away like mad. I knew there was something strange going on in the carriage. The other people were so excited and everything …
Anyway when the train stopped at Kasumigaseki I got off without giving it much thought. A few other passengers called out to the station attendant “Something’s wrong! Come quick!” and brought him into the carriage. I didn’t see what happened after that, but this attendant was the one who carried out the sarin packet and later died.
I left the Chiyoda Line platform and headed for the Hibiya Line as usual. When I reached the platform at the bottom of the stairs I heard the emergency alarm go off: Bee-eee-eep! I knew immediately from my time working for Japan Railway there’d been an accident. That’s when an announcement came over the station tannoy. And just as I was thinking “I’d better get out of here” a Hibiya Line train arrived from the opposite direction.
I could see from the station attendants’ confusion that this was no ordinary situation. And the Hibiya Line train was completely empty, not a passenger on board. I only found out later, but in fact that train had also been planted with sarin gas. They’d had a crisis at Kamiyacho Station or somewhere, and dragged off all the passengers.
After the alarm there was an announcement: “Everyone evacuate the station.” People were making for the exits, but I was beginning to feel really sick. So instead of going straight out, I thought I’d better go to the toilet first. I looked all over the station to find the stationmaster’s office, and right next to that the toilets.
As I was passing the office, I saw maybe three station attendants just lying there. There must have been a fatal accident. Still, I carried on to the toilet and when I came out I went to an exit that emerged in front of the Ministry of Trade and Industry building. This all took about ten minutes, I suppose. Meanwhile they’d brought up the station attendants I’d seen in the office.
Once out of the exit I took a good look around, but what I saw was – how shall I put it? – “hell” describes it perfectly. Three men were laid on the ground, spoons stuck in their mouths as a precaution against them choking on their tongues. About six other station staff were there too, but they all just sat on the flower beds holding their heads and crying. The moment I came out of the exit, a girl was crying her eyes out. I was at a loss for words. I didn’t have a clue what was happening.
I grabbed hold of one of the station attendants and told him: “I used to work for Japan Railway. I’m used to dealing with emergencies. Is there any way I can help?” But he just stared off into space. All he could say was: “Yes, help.” I turned to the others sitting there. “This is no time to be crying,” I said. “We’re not crying,” they answered, though it looked like they were crying. I thought they were grieving for their dead colleagues.
“Has anyone called an ambulance?” I asked, and they said they had. But when I heard the ambulance siren, it didn’t seem to be coming our way. For some reason, we were the last to get help, so those in the most serious condition were last to be taken to hospital. As a result, two people died.
TV Tokyo cameramen were filming the whole scene. They’d parked their van nearby. I ran after the film crew, saying: “Now’s not the time for that! If you’ve got transport, take these people to the hospital!” The driver conferred with his crew and said, “All right, fine.”
When I worked for JR, I was taught always to carry a red scarf. In an emergency you could wave it to stop trains. So there I was, thinking “scarf”. Someone lent me a handkerchief, but it was so small I ended up giving it to the TV-crew driver and instructing him: “Get these people to the nearest hospital. It’s an emergency, so honk your horn and drive through red lights if you have to! Just keep going!”
I forget the colour of the handkerchief; it was just some print. I don’t remember whether I told him to wave it or tie it to his wing-mirror. I was pretty excited at the time, so my memory’s not that clear. Later when I met Mr Toyoda, he reminded me “I never returned your handkerchief”, and gave me a new one. He’d been sick in the back seat and used mine.
We managed to lift Mr Takahashi, the station attendant who died, into the back, along with another assistant. And still there was room, so one more station assistant got into the van. I think Mr Takahashi was still alive at that point. But at first glance I thought “He’s a goner.” Not that I’d ever witnessed death, I just knew. I could picture it; he was going to die this way. But still I had to try and help, somehow.
The driver pleaded with me, “Miss, you come along with us”, but I said, “No, I’m not going.” There were still lots of others being brought above ground and someone had to look after them, so I stayed behind. I don’t know to which hospital the van went. I don’t know what happened to them afterwards either.
Then there was that girl nearby, crying and trembling all over. I stayed with her and tried to comfort her, saying “There there, it’s all right”, until finally the ambulance came. All that time I looked after lots of different people, all of them white-faced, completely washed-out. One man, fairly old by the look of him, was foaming at the mouth. I had no idea humans could foam like that. I unbuttoned his shirt, loosened his belt, and took his pulse. It was really fast. I tried to rouse him, but it was no use. He was completely unconscious.
This “old man” was in fact a station attendant. Only he’d removed his uniform jacket. He was pale and his hair was thin, so I mistook him for an elderly passenger. I later found out he was Mr Toyoda, a colleague of the two staff [Mr Takahashi and Mr Hishinuma] who died. He was the only one of the three injured station attendants who survived, and he was one of the longest in hospital.
The ambulance arrived. “Is he conscious?” they asked. “No!” I yelled. “But he has a pulse!” The ambulance team put an oxygen mask over his mouth. Then they said, “There’s one more [i.e. a respirator unit]. If there’s anyone else in pain, we’ll take them.” So I inhaled a little oxygen, and the crying girl took a good long dose. By the time we had finished there was a media stampede. They surrounded the girl and the poor thing was seen on television all day.
While I was looking after everyone, I completely forgot my own pain. It was only at the mention of oxygen that it occurred to me, “Come to think of it, I’m breathing funny myself.” Yet at that very moment, I didn’t make a connection between the gas attack and my condition. I was all right, so I had to look after the people who had really suffered. Just what the incident was I didn’t know, but whatever it was it was big. And like I said before, I’d been feeling under the weather since the morning, so I was convinced my feeling a little off was just me.
In the midst of all this, a colleague from work passed by. He helped me rescue the girl from the clutches of the media. Then he suggested we walk to the office together, so I thought, “Okay, we’ll walk to work.” It takes about 30 minutes on foot from Kasumigaseki to my office. As I was walking, I found it a bit hard to breathe, but not so bad that I had to sit down and rest. I was able to walk.
When we got to the office, my boss had seen me on TV, and everyone was asking “Ms Izumi, are you really okay?” It was already ten o’clock by the time I got to the office. My boss said “How about resting a bit? You shouldn’t tax yourself”, but I still didn’t really understand what had happened, so I just got on with my work. After a while a message came from Personnel: “Seems it was poison gas, so if you start to feel ill you’re to report to hospital immediately.” And just about then my condition was getting worse. So they put me in an ambulance at the Kamiyacho intersection and took me to Azabu hospital, a small place not far away. Twenty people had gone there already.
I had cold-like symptoms for a week after that. I had this asthmatic cough, and three days later a high fever, with a temperature of over 40°C [104°F]. I was sure the thermometer was broken. The mercury shot up all the way to the top of the scale. So actually my temperature might have been even higher. All I know is I was completely immobilized.
Even after the fever resided, the wheezing persisted for about a month; clearly the effects of sarin in my bronchial tubes. It was incredibly painful. I mean, I’d start coughing and never stop. It was so painful I couldn’t breathe. I was coughing all the time. I’d be talking like this and suddenly it would start. In PR you have to meet people, so working under those conditions was really hard.
And I kept having these dreams. The image of those station attendants with spoons in their mouths stuck in my head. In my dreams, there were hundreds of bodies lying on the ground, row upon row far into the distance. I don’t know how many times I woke in the middle of the night. Frightening.
As I said, there were people foaming at the mouth where we were, in front of the Ministry of Trade and Industry. That half of the roadway was absolute hell. But on the other side, people were walking to work as usual. I’d be tending to someone and look up to see passers-by glance my way with a “what-on-earth’s-happened-here?” expression, but not one came over. It was as if we were a world apart. Nobody stopped. They all thought: “Nothing to do with me.”
Some guards were standing right before our eyes at the Ministry gate. Here we had three people laid out on the ground, waiting desperately for an ambulance that didn’t arrive for a long, long time. Yet nobody at the Ministry called for help. They didn’t even call us a taxi.
It was 8.10 when the sarin was planted, so that makes over an hour and a half before the ambulance arrived. All that time those people just left us there. Occasionally the television would show Mr Takahashi lying dead with a spoon in his mouth, but that was it. I couldn’t bear to watch it.
MURAKAMI: Just supposing, what if you’d been one of those people across the road at the time, on your way to work. Do you think you’d have crossed over to help?
Yes, I think so. I wouldn’t have just ignored them, no matter how out of character it might have been. I’d have crossed over. The fact is, the whole situation made me want to cry, but I knew if I lost control that would have been the end of it. Nobody was dealing with things calmly. No one even caring for the sick. Everyone just abandoned us there the whole time and walked on by. It was absolutely terrible.
As to the criminals who actually planted the sarin, I honestly can’t say I feel much anger or hatred. I suppose I just don’t make the connection, and I can’t seem to find those emotions in me. What I really think about are those families that have to bear the tragedy, their suffering is so much bigger to me than any anger or hatred I might feel towards the criminals. The fact that someone from Aum brought sarin onto the subway … that’s not the point. I don’t think about Aum’s role in the gas attack.
I never watch television reports or anything on Aum. I don’t want to. I have no intention of giving interviews. If it will help those who suffered or the families of the deceased, then yes, I’ll come forward and talk, but only if they want to know what happened. I’d rather not be danced around by the media.
Of course society should severely punish this crime. Especially when you consider the families of the deceased, there should be no getting off easy. What are those families supposed to do … ? But even if those criminals get the death penalty, does that solve anything in the end? Perhaps I’m over-sensitive when it comes to human mortality, but it seems to me that however heavy the sentence, there is nothing you can say to those families.
1 Numbers in brackets refer to the age of the interviewee at the time of the Tokyo gas attack. [Tr.]
MR YUASA IS much younger than Mr Toyoda (interviewed see here), or the late Mr Takahashi. He is more their sons’ age. He looks about 16 with his youthful, tousled hair. There is still something naive and boyish about him, which makes him look younger than he is.
He was born in Ichikawa, across Tokyo Bay in Chiba, where he spent his childhood. He became interested in trains and went to Iwakura high school in Ueno, Tokyo, which is the place to be for anyone who wants to work on the railway. He initially wanted to be a driver, so he opted for studies in engine mechanics. He was employed by the Subway Authority in 1988 and has worked at Kasumigaseki Station ever since. Forthright and plain-talking, he approaches his daily duties with a clear sense of purpose. This made the gas attack all the more shocking for him.
Mr Yuasa’s boss ordered him to help carry Mr Takahashi on a stretcher from where he’d fallen on the Chiyoda Line platform to ground level and to wait there at the appointed area for an ambulance – which didn’t arrive. He saw Takahashi’s condition worsen before his eyes, but was powerless to do anything. As a result Mr Takahashi failed to receive treatment in time and died. Mr Yuasa’s frustration, confusion and anger are unimaginable. It is probably for this reason that his memory of the scene is foggy in places. As he himself admits, some details have been completely blanked out.
This explains how parallel accounts of the same scene may diverge slightly, but this, after all, is how Mr Yuasa experienced it.
In high school we studied Mechanics or Transport. The ones who took Transport were mostly statistic nerds, kept train schedules in their desk drawers (laughs). Me, I liked trains, but not like that. They weren’t an obsession.
Japan Railway (JR) was the big thing to aim for in terms of jobs. So many guys wanted to be Shinkansen bullet-train drivers. JR turned me down when I graduated, but Seibu and Odakyu and Tokyu and other private lines were generally popular. Although the catch was that you had to live in areas served by those lines to get the job. Yeah, pretty tough. I’d always wanted to work on the subway and the Subway Authority was pretty popular. The pay’s no worse than anywhere else.
Station work involves all sorts of jobs. Not just ticket booth and platform duty, but lost property and sorting out arguments between passengers. It was tough joining at 18 and having to do all that. That’s why the first round-the-clock duty was the longest. I’d pull down the shutters after the last train and heave a sigh of relief: “Ah, that’s it for the day!” Not any more, but that’s how it was at first.
The drunks were the worst thing. They either get all chummy when they’re pissed, or fight, or throw up. Kasumigaseki’s not an entertainment district, so we don’t get that many of them, but sometimes we do.
No, I never sat for the driver qualification. I had the chance to several times, but I thought it over and didn’t. At the end of my first year there was a conductor’s test, but after one year I’d only just got the hang of station work so I let it pass. Sure there were drunks, like I said, stuff I didn’t care for especially, but still I thought I’d better learn the ropes a bit more. I suppose my initial impulse to be a driver just changed over time while I was working around the station.
Kasumigaseki Station has three lines coming in: the Marunouchi, the Hibiya, and the Chiyoda. Each has its own staff. I was with the Marunouchi Line at the time. The Hibiya Line Office is the biggest, but the Marunouchi and Chiyoda Line both have their own offices, their own staffrooms.
The Sunday before the gas attack I was on round-the-clock duty in the Chiyoda Line Office. They were short-staffed and I was filling in. A certain number of personnel has to be there for overnight duty. The staff on the other lines help each other out, like one big family.
Around 12.30 we lower the shutters, lock up the ticket booths, shut off the ticket machines, then wash up and turn in just after 1.00. The early shift finish work around 11.30 and are asleep by around 12.00. The following morning the early shift rises at 4.30 and the late shift at 5.30. The first train leaves around 5.00.
Wake up and first thing it’s clean up, raise the shutters, prepare the ticket booth. Then we take turns eating breakfast. We cook our own rice, make our own miso soup. Meal duty’s posted up there with all the other duties. We all share.
I was on late shift that night, so I woke up at 5.30, changed into my uniform, and reported to the ticket booth at 5.55. I worked until 7.00, then went to have breakfast from 7.00 to 7.30. Then I went to another ticket booth and worked there until 8.15 or so, then called it a day.
I was walking back to the Office after the hand-over to my replacement when the Chief Officer, Matsumoto, came out with a mop. “What’s that for?” I asked, and he said he had to clean inside a carriage. I’d just gone off-duty and had my hands free, so it was, “Fine, I’ll go with you.” We headed up the escalator to the platform.
There we found Toyoda, Takahashi and Hishinuma with a bundle of wet newspapers on the platform. They’re stuffing it all by hand into plastic bags, but there’s liquid coming from them and spilling onto the platform. Matsumoto mopped up the liquid. I didn’t have a mop, and most of the newspaper had been bagged, so I wasn’t much help. I just stood to one side, watching.
“What’s this all about?” I wondered. There was a very strong smell. Then Takahashi walked over to a rubbish bin at the end of the platform, probably to fetch some more newspaper to wipe up where it was still wet. Suddenly he sinks down in front of the bin and keels over.
Everyone ran towards Takahashi shouting “What’s wrong?” I thought maybe he was ill, but nothing too serious. “Can you walk?” they asked, but it’s obvious he can’t, so I called the Office over the platform intercom: “Send up the stretcher!”
Takahashi’s face looked awful. He couldn’t talk. We laid him on his side, loosened his tie … he looked in really bad shape.
We carried him down to the Office on the stretcher, then phoned for an ambulance. That’s when I asked Toyoda, “Which exit is the ambulance supposed to come to?” There’s protocol for situations like this, saying where ambulances are supposed to pull up and so on. But Toyoda’s tongue-tied. Kind of odd, but all I could think at the time was he was probably too confused to speak.
Anyway, I dashed up Exit A11. Yes, before carrying Takahashi up, I got up there myself and waited to signal the ambulance when it came. So I’m out of the exit and waiting by the Ministry of Trade and Industry.
On the way to Exit A11 I ran into one of the Hibiya Line staff, who tells me there’s been an explosion at Tsukiji Station. Nothing more was known. A suspicious object had been found in our station that month on the 15th, so I’m thinking as I wait for the ambulance: “This is turning into one weird day.”
But I wait and I wait and no ambulance. Soon other Office staff come up and it’s, “No ambulance yet? What’ll we do?” We decide we ought to bring Takahashi up above ground. I’ve been outside all this time, but these two or three people who came up from the Office tell me they’ve all started feeling sick down there. So they don’t want to go back. It turns out they kept whatever it was in those plastic packets in the Office, and that’s what’s to blame.
Well, Takahashi still has to be carried up, so we all head downstairs again. Back at the Office, there was a woman passenger who felt ill, sitting on the sofa by the entrance. Takahashi’s behind her on a stretcher on the floor. By then he wasn’t moving, practically frozen stiff. A lot worse than he looked before, barely conscious. The other staff were trying to talk to him, but there was no response. The four of us carried him above ground on the stretcher.
But we wait and wait and still there’s no sign of an ambulance. We were getting pretty frustrated. Why wasn’t anything coming? Now I know that all the ambulances had rushed over to Tsukiji. You could hear sirens in the distance, but none coming this way. I couldn’t help feeling anxious, thinking they’d got the wrong location. I almost felt like shouting out: “Hey, over here!” Actually, I did try running in that direction, but I felt dizzy myself … I put it down to not having had enough sleep.
When we carried Takahashi up, there were already newspeople at the exit. This woman with a camera was snapping away at Takahashi lying there. I shouted to her: “No photos!” Her male assistant came in between us, but I told him too: “No more photos!” – but taking pictures was her job.