Sagamihara - Hatred appears to be what fuelled a young Japanese
man who went on a stabbing rampage, killing 19 people on Tuesday at a facility
for the mentally disabled where he had been fired. Months earlier, he
reportedly gave a letter to Parliament outlining the bloody plan.
When he
was done, Satoshi Uematsu, 26, had left dead or injured nearly a third of the
almost 150 patients at the facility in a matter of 40 minutes in the attack early
on Tuesday, the deadliest mass killing in Japan in decades. Twenty-five people were
wounded, 20 of them seriously.
He drove
up in a black car, carrying several knives to the Tsukui Yamayuri-en facility
in Sagamihara, 50 kilometres west of Tokyo, according to security camera
footage played on TV news programs. He broke in by shattering a window at 02:10,
according to a prefectural health official, and then set about slashing the
patients' throats.
Details
of how he did that, and if the victims were asleep or otherwise helpless, were
not immediately known, although a cryptic letter he sent to Japan's Parliament
in February gave a peek into Uematsu's dark turmoil.
He
calmly turned himself in about two hours after the attack, police said.
Tsukui
Yamayuri-en, which means mountain lily garden, was a facility Uematsu knew
well, having worked there since 2012 until he was let go in February.
He knew
the staffing would be down to just a handful in the wee hours of the morning,
Japanese media reports said.
'Disabled people should be killed'
Not much
is known yet about his background, but Uematsu once dreamed of becoming a
teacher. In two group photos posted on his Facebook, he looks happy, smiling
widely with other young men.
"It
was so much fun today. Thank you, all. Now I am 23, but please be friends
forever," a 2013 post says.
But
somewhere along the way, things went terribly awry.
Uematsu
began to tell people around him that disabled people needed to be killed. In
February, he tried to hand deliver a letter he wrote to Parliament's lower
house speaker demanding all disabled people be put to death through "a world that allows for mercy killing,"
Kyodo news agency and TBS TV reported.
Uematsu
boasted in the letter that he had the ability to kill 470 disabled people in
what he called was "a revolution," and outlined an attack on two
facilities, after which he said he will turn himself in. He also asked he be
judged innocent on grounds of insanity, be given 500 million yen (R72 million)
in aid and plastic surgery so he could lead a normal life afterwards.
The
letter was reprinted by Kyodo after the attack.
"My
reasoning is that I may be able to revitalise
the world economy and I thought it may be possible to prevent World War
III," the rambling letter says.
The
letter, which the Tokyo police got, included Uematsu's name, address and
telephone number, and reports of his threats were relayed to local police where
Uematsu lived, Kyodo said.
Kanagawa
Governor Yuji Kuroiwa apologised for
having failed to act on the warning signs.
‘Just an ordinary fellow’
From his
time working at the facility, Uematsu was known to people in the area, and some
said he was so polite and upstanding that they found the news shocking.
Akihiro
Hasegawa, who lived next door to Uematsu, said he heard Uematsu had gotten in
trouble with the facility, initially over sporting a tattoo, often frowned upon
in mainstream Japanese society because of its association with criminal groups.
"He
was just an ordinary young fellow," he said.
Yasuyuki
Deguchi, a criminologist, said Uematsu's actions were typical of someone who
bears a grudge and seeks revenge because
it appeared he planned out the attack, and then he turned himself into police.
"Accomplishing
his goal was all he wanted," Deguchi said on TV Asahi.
Michael
Gillan Peckitt, a lecturer in clinical philosophy at Osaka University in
central Japan, and an expert on disabled people's issues in Japan, said the
attack speaks more about Uematsu than the treatment of the disabled in Japan.
"It
highlights the need for an early-intervention system in the Japanese mental
health system. Someone doesn't get to that state without some symptoms of
mental illness," he said.
Mass
killings are rare in Japan. Because of the country's extremely strict
gun-control laws, any attacker usually resorts to stabbings. In 2008, seven
people were killed by a man who slammed a truck into a crowd of people in
central Tokyo's Akihabara electronics district and then stabbed passers-by.
In 2001,
a man killed eight children and injured 13 others in a knife attack at an
elementary school in the city of Osaka. The incident shocked Japan and led to
increased security at schools.
As
recent as earlier this month, a man stabbed four people at a library in north-eastern
Japan, allegedly over their improper handling of his questions, although no one
died.
In 2010,
14 were injured by an unemployed man who stabbed and beat up passengers on two
public buses outside a Japanese train station in Ibaraki Prefecture, about 40
kilometres northeast of Tokyo.
