Daughters seek answers from terrorist father

TOKYO -- Like good daughters anywhere, Mayumi and Kaori Asahara worry about their father's declining health. They are alarmed that he looks so thin and won't see a doctor. They fret that he refuses to wear the new clothes they gave him to replace his fraying old ones.

But they desperately need something back from their father, too. They are seeking an explanation why the man who taught them to cherish even the life of an ant could be a cult leader responsible for Japan's worst terrorist attack.

''I need to ask my father directly what happened," says Kaori Asahara, who was 12 when her father ordered the Aum cult's sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 that killed 13 people and sickened thousands.

From death row, Shoko Asahara isn't talking to anyone. Not to his daughters who visit him regularly, not to his own lawyers who have tried in more than 140 meetings to get him to help formulate a defense that might save his life.

Asahara, 50, has been sentenced to death, and his time for final appeals has been exhausted. In Japan's secretive penal system, he faces the gallows at any time. But the prospect that he will provide any insight into his motives is getting slimmer and slimmer.

Still, Asahara's daughters say he should not be executed. They say their father is mentally ill and incapable of understanding what is happening to him. They say he is a helpless cripple who must wear diapers to keep from soiling his clothes. He sits in a wheelchair, head lolling to one side. His left hand scratches idly at a leg or his chest.

He does not speak. He only mumbles, making no requests and seeking no last-minute mercy.

Mayumi Asahara, who has visited her father 28 times over the past 19 months, says he ''is like a doll."

That is not the image the rest of Japan holds of Asahara. Prosecutors and prison officials contend that Asahara is feigning mental illness in an effort to escape justice.

And when Japanese close their eyes they still see Asahara as he was when he was orchestrating mayhem: the white-robed guru with a flowing black beard and glass eye, a man who twisted the minds of well-educated men and women who seemed indistinguishable from everyone's else's sons and daughters. The image has become the icon of evil in modern Japan.

But the man in the picture is also a flesh-and-blood father whose children are paying heavily for his sins.

They have been bullied and banned from schools and fired from numerous jobs. They say they are still are trailed by police and chased by media that manage to find them every time they move.

Now in their 20s, they grew up in the Aum cult and recalled a very happy childhood.

''We were told: Do not kill and be kind to other people," Kaori said in an interview with three non-Japanese journalists at the offices of her father's defense team. ''Now we are told my father directed others to kill people, so there is a very big gap.

''I think the image of the last 11 years is more famous now," she says, tears welling in her eyes.

It is the only time during the interview either daughter, both dressed in sober business suits, will cry. Both acknowledge it's ''a fact" that the gas attack victims suffered, but say they do not have words to express their feelings about what happened.

Their father's lawyer said they agreed to talk with foreign media because they see it as their last chance to pressure authorities to provide psychiatric help instead of executing him.

The sisters say there is no point talking to Japanese media, which are more interested in reporting salacious details about Asahara's prison life.

''Some Japanese media say you are the children of devils so you don't have any rights," said Kaori. ''Whatever I do is all broadcast and most of it isn't true. . . . Rather than try to change our image, we just want them to forget about us."

But the family has never been able to get below the radar. Their mother was found guilty in 1999 of conspiring with her husband to murder another cult member. She was released from jail in 2002.

The Aum cult was declared illegal in the wake of the gas attack.