WI: Aum Shinrikyo launched 9/11-style attacks?

[Zachariah]

Know that there've been plenty of 9/11 threads, with a few of them addressing the question of alternative perpetrators. But no-one's ever explored this possibility before. So then, what if, instead of planning, orchestrating and launching the Tokyo subway sarin attacks, in five coordinated attacks on the Tokyo Metro in the middle of rush hour, the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo had instead elected to co-ordinate and orchestrate a 9/11 style attack instead- hijacking multiple commercial airliners simultaneously, and using them to carry out kamikaze suicide bombings against the United States? Let's say that the POD for TTL is that Kiyoshi Kariya's note is destroyed by one of the cult members who kidnapped and killed him, instead of being left behind to implicate the cult and provide the necessary justification for the Japanese police to raid the cult's facilities which it did IOTL. As a result, Shoko Asahara never orders the sarin attacks, since there's no pressing need to divert police attention elsewhere, and continues to steadily increase Aum Shinrikyo's membership, power and influence with relative impunity.

And with this extra time, he gives his approval to whoever proposes this plan to him to go forward with organizing it, with the actual attacks themselves taking place in September 1997 (the month when he'd declared that the nuclear armageddon of WW3 between the USA and Japan would occur, and thus bring about the End Times- with Aum Shinrikyo's 9/11 launched by Asahara as a means to try and self-fulfil his own 'divine prophecy'). The attack ITTL consists of five separate hijackings, with Aum Shinrikyo's alt-9/11 attacks targeting either Seattle's Columbia Center or Los Angeles' U.S. Bank Tower in addition to the same other four targets as OTL's Al-Qaeda led 9/11 plot. The hijackings and suicide attacks also occur in the middle of the day instead of early in the morning, and as a result, their attacks take a toll of somewhere between 4x and 5x as many fatalities and casualties as OTL's 9/11 attacks.

So then, how do you lot think that the US and rest of the world would be likely to react to TTL's alt-9/11 attacks, in which they were carried out in 1997 as an act of Japanese elitist religious anarcho-terrorism? What sort of retaliation might there be, not just against Aum Shinrikyo but against the Japanese government for allowing them to go unchecked, grow so quickly and gain so much power? And how much extra negativity and hostility might there be against Japanese people, and the 'Yellow Menace' in general, as a result of Aum Shinrikyo's alt-9/11 attacks? Especially if there were follow-up attacks comparable to the attempted attack on Tokyo's Shinjuku station IOTL, utilizing Aum Shinrikyo's biological and chemical weapons stockpiles?

 

[Archibald]

They did launched a nuclear strike against Nagoya. See @MaskedPickle a giant sucking sound TL.

 

[Archibald]

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/a-giant-sucking-sound-a-president-perot-tl.208277/

 

[Maoistic]

This thread is dumb, but I'm a weak sucker for this sort of discussions.

I honestly doubt East Asians in general and Buddhists and Daoists in particular would have suffered as much racism and discrimination as Arabs and Muslims. The media would have been far more understanding and there wouldn¿t be as much demonisation, nor endless debates about Japanese religions. Anti-Islamic sentiment predated 9/11 and was already very strong. 9/11 just served as a catalyst to exacerbate that pre-existing anti-Islamic hatred.

This is because of the dumb narrative the West has created of "Islam is violent, Buddhism is peaceful" with both being the complete antithesis of each other.

 

[Zachariah]

This thread is dumb, but I'm a weak sucker for this sort of discussions.

I honestly doubt East Asians in general and Buddhists and Daoists in particular would have suffered as much racism and discrimination as Arabs and Muslims. The media would have been far more understanding and there wouldn¿t be as much demonisation, nor endless debates about Japanese religions. Anti-Islamic sentiment predated 9/11 and was already very strong. 9/11 just served as a catalyst to exacerbate that pre-existing anti-Islamic hatred.

This is because of the dumb narrative the West has created of "Islam is violent, Buddhism is peaceful" with both being the complete antithesis of each other.

Thing is, anti-Japanese sentiment was also at its height in the early 1990s, especially in the USA, and only really faded out in the late 90s IOTL. Just watch Rising Sun (1993) to get an idea of the kind of negative 'Nipponophobia' which was quite commonplace at the time. So, just imagine if you had some Japanese doomsday cult, which also happened to be one of the largest growing religious movements in the world, and which had been protected by having several members in the Japanese police forces and government, launching a successful terrorist attack on the USA on this scale. East Asians in general, and Buddhist and Daoists, probably wouldn't suffer as much racism and discrimination as Arabs and Muslims, sure. But the Aum Shinrikyo cult, and the Japanese- how would they be perceived? How many truthers would there be ITTL saying that the attack was co-ordinated and planned by the Japanese government directly, especially given how well-connected Aum Shinrikyo was? How many people would be citing the attacks, in conjunction with the kamikaze attacks in WW2, as evidence that the Japanese people were all inherently suicidal 'banzai crazies'?

Would the USA accept that the Japanese government was still competent and fit for purpose, after having allowed such a vociferously insane and anti-American religious extremist terrorist organization to expand its membership so much so rapidly, to freely acquire so much funding, military equipment and cutting-edge WMDs, and to orchestrate such a massive and devastating terrorist attack against the USA, easily eclipsing Pearl Harbor? Would it place the blame solely on the doomsday cult, or would it hold the Japanese government accountable instead, demanding re-compensation of some kind? And how much more financial fallout and turmoil would TTL's 9/11 cause, given that you'd have had the world's largest economy and sole military superpower baying for blood, vengeance and retribution against the world's second largest economy and arguably most technologically advanced nation of Japan, instead of against the poverty-ridden under-developed third-world failed state that was Afghanistan IOTL?

 

[Maoistic]

Thing is, anti-Japanese sentiment was also at its height in the early 1990s, especially in the USA, and only really faded out in the late 90s IOTL. Just watch Rising Sun (1993) to get an idea of the kind of negative 'Nipponophobia' which was quite commonplace at the time. So, just imagine if you had some Japanese doomsday cult, which also happened to be one of the largest growing religious movements in the world, and which had been protected by having several members in the Japanese police forces and government, launching a successful terrorist attack on the USA on this scale. East Asians in general, and Buddhist and Daoists, probably wouldn't suffer as much racism and discrimination as Arabs and Muslims, sure. But the Aum Shinrikyo cult, and the Japanese- how would they be perceived? How many truthers would there be ITTL saying that the attack was co-ordinated and planned by the Japanese government directly, especially given how well-connected Aum Shinrikyo was? How many people would be citing the attacks, in conjunction with the kamikaze attacks in WW2, as evidence that the Japanese people were all inherently suicidal 'banzai crazies'?

Would the USA accept that the Japanese government was still competent and fit for purpose, after having allowed such a vociferously insane and anti-American religious extremist terrorist organization to expand its membership so much so rapidly, to freely acquire so much funding, military equipment and cutting-edge WMDs, and to orchestrate such a massive and devastating terrorist attack against the USA, easily eclipsing Pearl Harbor? Would it place the blame solely on the doomsday cult, or would it hold the Japanese government accountable instead, demanding re-compensation of some kind? And how much more financial fallout and turmoil would TTL's 9/11 cause, given that you'd have had the world's largest economy and sole military superpower baying for blood, vengeance and retribution against the world's second largest economy and arguably most technologically advanced nation of Japan, instead of against the poverty-ridden under-developed third-world failed state that was Afghanistan IOTL?

What anti-Japanese sentiment? If there was, it's nothing compared to anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment that was also very high during the 1990s. If you cite movies as evidence, none of the movies of the period portraying Japanese and East Asians in general hold a candle to the racism of True Lies, Rules of Engagement, Air Force One and Not Without My Daughter. When you also have Hollywood movies during the 90s that portrayed Buddhism positively, such as Seven Years in Tibet, Kundun and Little Buddha, whereas there's no movie exalting Islam or portraying it positively other than maybe Disney's Aladdin (and if that is mentioned, there's Mulan), the comparison becomes even more disparate if we talk about racism in US entertainment and popular culture.

Then of course there was the sentiments accompanying the Gulf War, the bombing of Kosovo, the invasion of Somalia and the bombing of Sudan. You simply can't compare anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry with anti-Japanese or anti-East Asian bigotry during the 90s.

Also, Aum Shinrikyo (AS) was a marginalised, kooky sect with no more than perhaps a few thousand members, and that is vastly exaggerating; I would say the core members didn't number more than a few dozen. Even Western media treated AS like that during their coverage of the Sarin attacks AS perpetrated. If AS had perpetrated 9/11, the media would continue portraying them as a kooky sect unrepresentative of the Japanese people and of Buddhists and Daoists. There certainly would be hate crimes and hateful internet sites and groups springing up, but hardly to the level Muslims have endured.

The US would have certainly scolded Japan, but there wouldn't be any armed retaliation, at most the US would only be increasing the number of soldiers in Okinawa and other US bases in Japan, and doing an extensive criminal investigation in Japan that would lead to an increase in authoritarianism, but absolutely nothing like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. I don't think it would displace Pearl Harbor either as the preeminent Asian crime against the US, mostly because Pearl Harbor is cited as if it was something the Japanese nation did as a whole, while AS, like I said, would be treated like a kooky, marginal sect that has all the blame while the Japanese people and government would be free of it in this scenrio.

Thus an AS 9/11 would only be seen as another Pearl Harbor, but nothing like the unique crime that it is now seen as due to it having been perpetrated by Muslims. 9/11 sentiment wouldn't even last a decade if it was AS who did it. This really goes on to show how anti-Islamic bigotry changes the perspective of everything.

 

[Arkenfolm]

Certainly. It seems hard to spin Aum Shinrikyo no matter their crimes into a general indictment against Japan when the point of contention America had with Japan is the fact the Japanese were outcompeting American industry everywhere. Aum was a cult disliked/ignored by the majority of Japanese. There's many cults like that in Japan, including other marginal and bizarre cults like the Pana Wave group, Aum was treated the same way before they committed large-scale acts of violence.

 

[water123]

IMO you'd need a group with a far bigger base than AS to be able to really do something like this. As aforementioned far better than I could put it, AS was seen as a kooky sect with no real power. You'd need to get a group that was way bigger, way more evangelistic, and way more overall dangerous to be able to do something like this.