This record documents two distinct clusters concerning Aum Shinrikyo, addressed by different arms of the Japanese state and reaching different kinds of outcome.
The first is the group's mass casualty violence. On 20 March 1995 Aum members released the nerve agent sarin on the Tokyo subway, killing thirteen people and injuring thousands; the group had already released sarin at Matsumoto in June 1994. Founder Shoko Asahara and twelve senior followers were tried in Japanese criminal courts, convicted, and executed in July 2018, more than twenty three years after the subway attack.
The second is an administrative matter, decided in a different forum with a different outcome. In 1996 the Public Security Investigation Agency petitioned to have the group dissolved under the 1952 Subversive Activities Prevention Act, a law never before invoked against any group. The Public Security Examination Commission rejected the petition on 31 January 1997, finding no continuing threat of subversive activity. The government pursued new legislation instead: the Diet approved measures in November 1999, usually rendered in English as the Organization Control Law, placing a group meeting the law's criteria under quarterly reporting and facility inspection requirements rather than dissolving it outright. Aum's successor organizations, Aleph and Hikari no Wa, were placed under that surveillance regime beginning in January 2000, and it has been renewed repeatedly since, including through litigation in 2017 and 2019 specifically over Hikari no Wa.