So, Roger got me thinking ...

The June 8 incident in Akihabara, in which seven people died, was the worst street stabbing in Japan since the war but, according to the National Police Agency, there have been 67 such "daredemo daijobu" ("anyone will do") knife frenzies in the last ten years.

The Akihabara attacks occurred seven years to the day since 37-year-old former janitor Mamoru Takuma walked into Ikeda Primary School in Osaka prefecture armed with a kitchen knife and began randomly stabbing school children and teachers. He killed eight children, mostly between the ages of seven and eight, and seriously wounded thirteen others and two teachers.

The 'High Score' still belongs to Mutsuo Toi however:
On the evening of 20 May 1938 21-year-old Toi cut the main electricity line to his village of Kaio, close to Tsuyama city in Okayama prefecture, leaving the community in darkness and without telephones. Before embarking on his rampage, at around 1:30am on 21 May, he first killed his 76-year-old grandmother by decapitating her with an axe. He then strapped two electric torches to his head and prowled through the village, entering the homes of his neighbours and proceeding to kill 29 of them over the course of an hour and a half, using a shotgun, a sword and an axe, finally shooting himself at dawn. This was almost half of the residents of the small community, and the incident became known as The Tsuyama massacre. Until the 1982 killing by Korean policeman Woo 'Power' Bum-kon (58 dead, 35 wounded) it was regarded as the world’s worst spree killing by an individual.

Yes, it's true that there are currently upwards of 30,000 suicides a year in Japan (new figures out Friday put the 2007 total at 33,093 - 10% of them in their 20s, and over 500 of them aged 19 or under), but there are murders too
- and some of them are fascinating.

Who can forget Sada Abe who erotically asphyxiated her lover Kichizo Ishida on May 18 1936, then cut off his penis and testicles and carried them around with her in her handbag?
The lovers' story was immortalized in Nagisa Oshima's 1976 film "Ai No Korida"
("In The Realm Of The Senses"/"L'Empire Des Sens").
Here we see Ms. Abe enjoying a joke with some policemen shortly after her arrest:


Or Issei Sagawa who, whilst a student in Paris in 1981 (okay, so not actually IN Japan), killed - and subsequently ate portions of - his Dutch girlfriend. "When I met this woman in the street," he later said to British reporter Peter McGill, "I wondered if I could eat her." Owing to some confusion between the French and Japanese authorities Sagawa was freed shortly after his repatriation to Japan, where he then became something of a celebrity.

And hanged here this last Tuesday, June 17, (the 13th death row prisoner to be executed since last August, and the 10th so far this year) was Tsutomu Miyazaki,
the 'Otaku Murderer':

For his story please refer directly to Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Miyazaki
It's not pleasant reading. This guy was truly a monster, acting out what he saw in horror movies (including the 'Guinea Piggu' series), and posting the charred remains of his child victims back to their parents.
You have been warned.

Most of the following have occurred since I've been here:

The Tokyo Subway Sarin Gas Attack carried out by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult in which 12 people died and over 1000 were injured. Three cult members are still wanted in connection with this attack and the cult is known to have been involved in other incidents, most notably the murder of a prominent lawyer and his family.

The case of Futoshi Matsunaga and his accomplice Junko Ogata:

Another real-life horror story : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futoshi_Matsunaga
Called "Japan's most heinous criminal ... without comparison in the criminal history of our country", Matsunaga's crimes were so atrocious that most mass media were not willing to report the details at the time.
... And seriously, you couldn't make this stuff up.

The Wakayama curry poisoning: Four people (including two children) were killed and 63 injured after eating curry laced with arsenic at a community festival in Wakayama prefecture. A woman, Masumi Hayashi, was arrested and sentenced to death based on circumstantial evidence, but she has never confessed.

The still (technically) unresolved Lucy Blackman case.

The sexual assault and murder of Kaede Ariyama, a seven year old first-grade student from the city of Nara, by Kaoru Kobayashi, a newspaper deliveryman who already had a record as a sex offender.

He used the girl's own cellphone to send messages to her mother, saying: "I've got your daughter", and "I'll take her baby sister next".

The murder of the mayor of Nagasaki by a deluded Yakuza,
and another Yakuza shooting in a hospital.
(Unfortunately, their target had been discharged the day before the attack and they killed the wrong man).

The swimming pool shootings ... ... 2chan still mourns.


The woman who killed her own child, and later a neighbour's,
drowning them both in the local river.

And still wanted is Tatsuya Ichihashi, the only suspect in the murder of young British English teacher Lindsay Ann Hawker. On Mar. 26 2007, the missing girl's body was discovered buried in a bath of sand on the balcony of Ichihashi's apartment in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture. Ichihashi was at home when police called investigating her disappearance, but when they tried to arrest him he ran away, evading 13 of them barefoot. Police believe he may now be dressed like a woman to avoid detection (though with the country's arrest rate at around 25-30%, I'd say he probably wouldn't need to bother).


In just the last month we've seen:
A disgruntled salaryman push a High School boy in front of a train.
A Junior High School girl's bound and naked body fished out of a rice paddy.
The case of the guy who, rejected by his extremely attractive neighbour, cut her up and flushed the pieces down her toilet. (An overly loquacious interview on national TV led to his arrest).
And a young Tokyo woman who was drugged and abducted in a car, but who managed to send distress calls from her cellphone. Both her alleged kidnapper and her cellphone have been found, but she is still 'missing' I believe.

Of course it's extremely upsetting when children are the victims, but the cases I find really disturbing are the ones where children are the perpetrators.
These are perhaps the two most infamous:

Sakakibara Seito : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakakibara_Seito
On May 27 1997 the head of Jun Hase, a special education student at Tainohata Elementary School, was found in front of the school gate hours before students arrived for classes. Hase had been beheaded with a hand saw. A note, written in red pen, was found stuffed in his mouth. The nation was shocked when, on June 28, a 14-year-old junior high school student known only as "Shonen A" was arrested as a suspect. Shortly after his arrest, "Boy A" also confessed to the hammer-murder of 10-year-old Ayaka Yamashita, and assaults on three other girls. Boy A became eligible for parole in 2004 and was freed in 2005.

Nevada-tan : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada-tan
Nevada-tan is the Internet moniker of the 11-year-old schoolgirl who, on June 1 2004, murdered her 12-year-old former best friend, Satomi Mitarai, in an empty classroom during the lunch hour at Okubo Elementary School in Sasebo, Nagasaki. After slashing Mitarai's throat with a box-cutter knife she left the murder scene and returned to her own classroom, her clothes covered in blood. The girls' teacher, who had noticed that both were missing, found the body and called the police.

But there have been others:
The high school girl who took an axe to her sleeping policeman father.
The 12-year-old boy who forced an 11-year-old boy to strip naked, then pushed him from the top of a multi-storey car-park.
And the son of a dentist who killed his older actress/model sister when she teased him about his poor grades. (The way he mutilated her body has led some to suppose that his interest in her was more than just filial).

With my own eyes I have seen a young man draw a knife on two female clerks who tried to stop him leaving a drugstore with an armload of what looked like Chinese medicines. (He ran away, and no-one was hurt). And, amongst other problems the area has had, there was recently a string of muggings of foreign tourists in Akihabara.
And don't start me talking about rape. This is a country where, according to urban legend, a young girl can be attacked on a moving train while 20 or more other passengers just sit by and do nothing.

You can talk about the causes of these crimes, and the merits and demerits of the penal system, if you want to. It has not been my purpose to start or enter into such a discussion here, just to present you with some facts. Me, I stand firmly for freedom of expression, and I believe that those who have received the Death Penalty thoroughly deserved it. Some of these people, I would happily throw the switch myself.
Others, I feel sorry for ...

http://i70.photobucket.com/albums/i85/A ... adatan.jpg

Inb4 "Amerika is worse",
LOL, Japan! Statistically, one of the safest countries in the world.



(My thanks to all the writers whose work I have shamelessly plundered,
and sincere apologies to any murderers I may have inadvertantly forgotten).

What I found interesting about the Japan knifing rampages is that in the US, one argument in favor of gun control is that without the US's easy access to guns, especially handguns, these sort of murderous rampages would not occur, or would occur much less often. Obviously if one is sufficiently determined, a knife will do - Though it is impossible to know whether these events would be less common here if guns were as tightly controlled in the US as they are in Japan, or would be more common in Japan if guns were as ubiquitous there as they are in the US.

The man who slaughtered his village in their sleep is one thing, but in the 'public,' daytime knife rampages, it does seem that the killers could have been overpowered by people nearby. Do you think (as in the train-rape mentioned) that there is a cultural aspect of Japan which makes people hesitant to interfere even with a killer?

Here in FL, virtually anyone can get a permit to carry a concealed handgun, simply by listing 'concern for personal safety' as the reason (!!!). And people do it, too - It always shocks me when some apparently demure young 100-pound banker or schoolteacher or real estate agent in a Liz Claiborne suit reaches into her purse and pulls out her Glock. I think if someone tried a public daytime shooting rampage here in FL, it would not take long at all before he encountered an intended victim who was more heavily armed ... and who might well also be a better shot!

It is almost impossible to dispute that the massive differences in per-capita murder rates in the US vs. the UK (and Japan, and other nations that strictly control handguns) are the direct result of the ubiquity of handguns in the US - Cultural differences just can't account for it. It's simply a lot harder to kill someone without a gun, and the mere presence of a gun makes a bad outcome much more probable every time some American gets drunk and angry.

My liberal instinct is in favor of the strictest possible gun control, though that's tempered by my thinking that Jefferson may have been correct and we should all be armed, so that we can more effectively overthrow our own government.

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is
wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts
they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions,
it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...
And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure." - Thomas Jefferson

interesting read, thanks Alice.

I can think of two possible reasons for this off the top of my head (at least for the more recent incidents). I think some of this can be attributed to Japan being a more "introverted" society than places like the US. In Japan people generally keep to themselves and their own circle and don't directly interfere with people who fall outside of that. This doesn't mean people don't care about others, there's the ubiquitous story of the drunk businessman falling asleep in the station only to have someone else put his glasses in his shirt pocket for him, and I've lost my wallet and been surprised not only to have it returned, but to have it returned with all the money/credit cards still inside. It's not that people don't care at all about those around them, but if someone is acting in a strange or obnoxious way people will usually isolate them rather than confront them. I think that causes what might have originally been manageable problems to fester and grow until you see the kind of explosive breakouts you hear about on the news.

The Akihabara killer said that he didn't have any friends or a girlfriend, and that was one reason why he did it. Now granted, a guy like that would probably have trouble making friends wherever he went, but I do think Japan can be a bit more unforgiving socially than other countries.

Another factor is a deteriorating family structure. It's not at all uncommon for guys in Japan to work 10 or 12 hour days five days a week, with that stretching to six during peak seasons. So it's pretty safe to assume that there are a lot of kids out there who don't have a very strong father figure in their life (because what dad even has the energy to spend time with their kids after working a 70 or 80 hour week?). Of course, this also means that the wife doesn't have an actual partner in the marriage, just someone who pays the bills. So, instead of getting love and attention from her husband she latches onto her kids for love and does whatever it takes to get their approval.

This usually results in a weird relationship where on the one hand the kids get everything they want, but on the other hand have ridiculously high expectations placed on them ("Sure you can have a $500 purse in high school, but you also have to study 7 hours a night to get into a good university because I'm pinning all my hopes and dreams on YOU!"). Of course not all of those kids end up getting into the best universities (there are only so many seats, after all). And you're not going to be happy spending your days working at 7-11 when you were treated like the center of the universe for the first 20-odd years of your life. Not to mention that spending 7 hours a night studying isn't exactly conducive to building social skills.

I'm definitely NOT saying that every family is like this, there are some great fathers and mothers in Japan. I just think this culture does exist, and this kind of family is a lot more prevalent here than it is in places like the US. But I think that almost everyone over here (whether they want to admit it or not) realizes that the system needs an overhaul, and things are changing, albeit slowly.

OK, that's enough armchair sociology for one night. It's just really sad to see things like this happen, because most of the time in Japan it seems like societal illness and not mental illness. I really think a little bit of love and kindness could have prevented most of these atrocities from happening.

Thanks for taking the time! One more question - What's the pattern in Japan as these children age?

Here in the US, there seems to be an increasing trend of kids moving back in with their parents after college, often for prolonged periods. My conversations with 20-somethings seem to indicate that living with 'the Units' (parents) well into your 20s, which would previously have been a source of some real shame, is more and more accepted and expected (at least among the kids - the parents are significantly less enthused about this trend).

Over here there's not so much emphasis on the "nuclear family", so you see a lot of families with their post-college kids and also grandparents living at home. Generally young people of both genders will live at home until they either get married or have to change where they live because of work. Culturally that was never seen as a big problem, but then starting in the 90's the average age for couples to get married started getting higher and higher, which was primarily caused by young women who realized that living rent/expense free at home and working a full time job gave them enough discretionary income to take lots of vacations around the world and buy lots of Louis Vuitton.

A lot of parents weren't very happy about that because traditionally if a girl wasn't married by the time she was around 28 or 30 in Japan you could pretty much write off getting a good husband. It's not really uncommon over here for guys to have wives/girlfriends 10 years younger than themselves, so for women youth was traditionally seen as a big "selling point". Outside of urban areas a lot of girls start getting pretty stressed out if they're still searching for a husband at 29 or so.

For guys, on the other hand, nobody seems to really care. It still shocks me, but there are guys I meet at client companies who are well over 40 and still living at home. Generally, they just see no incentive to move out on their own. Ever see those $300 tokusatsu DVD sets up on Amazon Japan? Or maybe the designer $900 business shoes? Or, to hit even closer to home, the guys bidding upwards of $400 on relatively recent vinyl on YAJ? Well, there has to be a market for it somewhere...

I'm really curious to see what the demographic landscape of Japan will be in 20 or 30 years...the population is aging pretty rapidly (there are a lot of Baby Boomers just like the US) and young people are reportedly having fewer and fewer babies, so I'm wondering how things will go in the long run.

its normal for people to live with their parents until the late 20's in alot of asian cultures (japan especially), girls slightly moreso.

I left home for good at 17, never really looked back. although I care for and respect my parents, I dont think I could live w/ them again.