Yoshiyuki Kouno

Who is Yoshiyuki Kouno?

Yoshiyuki Kouno was a victim of the Matsumoto incident, a sarin attack that killed seven people and sickened many more in Matsumoto, Japan, on the evening of 27 June and the following morning on 28 June, 1994. Despite the fact that his wife was one of the people who has been gassed and was comatose at the time, the investigating police considered Yoshiyuki Kouno a prime suspect in the crime. Due to the deliberate leak from the local Nagano police force, Japanese media treated Kouno as the perpetrator, dubbing him the "Poison Gas Man" and he subsequently received hate mail and death threats. It was revealed that Kouno had a large amount of pesticides stored at his residence. The left-wing historian Keiichi Tsuneishi claimed the nerve agent is synthesizable from organophosphorus pesticides on the Asahi Shimbun, the second most circulated newspaper out of the five national newspapers in Japan, although sarin cannot be manufactured from pesticides.

However, after the much larger attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, Kouno was cleared of blame, Aum Shinrikyo was deemed responsible. The head of National Public Safety Commission Hiromu Nonaka and media publicly apologised to Kouno. However, Nagano police did not directly apologise to Kouno until 2002.