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Conflicted: A History Podcast · Evergreen Podcasts

The Tokyo Subway Sarin Attacks 1995 – Part 2

January 16, 2026·1 hr 51 min·3 clips
A metal musician's unexpected side hustle: hand-making VHS tapes for a retro-loving audience
Tokyo begins orderly. The episode opens in a business and administrative district with polished skyscrapers, apartment blocks, working crossing signs, and clean streets, the sort of place where chaos looks even louder. Then the tires scream. A white Tokyo TV van barrels through the streets, too fast for the neighborhood and too urgent for a routine stock-footage job. The host does not make it graceful. The van is ugly, durable, and wildly wrong for its sudden Fast and Furious turn through the city. At the wheel is Minoru Miyata. The host says his name aloud, then holds on him long enough to make him more than a shape inside Channel 12's breaking-news rush. Most days, Miyata gets crews where they need to go. Today, the newsroom pulls him away from harmless shots of trees, bees, birds, and background filler and sends him toward Kasumigaseki Crossing, near the government ministries. Something big is happening there. The line lands because the episode lets the confusion breathe. Routine work has just tipped into catastrophe, but no one in the van fully has the shape of it yet. That is where the scene works best: ordinary city systems, news cameras, traffic, and a driver doing his job, all being dragged toward the subway junction. The narration stays grave without turning stiff. Even the dry jokes about traffic fines and action-movie driving make the subject feel darker, not lighter. By the end, the lens shifts. Breaking news gives way to Sachiko, the others on the subway, and Kazuo's diary. Breath becomes the thing to watch. The final diary line is blunt and aching: hold on, live hard, face tomorrow again.

As heard by us

A measured history episode that stays with the Tokyo subway sarin attacks' aftermath.

Conflicted closes its two-part look at the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attacks by staying with the aftermath. It follows a news van toward Kasumigaseki Crossing and uses the business and administrative district to anchor the scene, which keeps the episode grounded in place as the…

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Why you'd press play

You want the final installment of a two-part look at the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attacks, told with care and a human face.

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