Violent offenders in Japan are increasingly seeking the notoriety that comes with being sentenced to death for their crimes
When Kyota Hattori was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder aboard a Tokyo train on Oct. 31, he had an unsettling confession.
It was his intention, the 25-year-old allegedly told police, to stab a passenger to death, and he was fully aware of his actions when he subsequently set a train carriage ablaze using lighter fluid he had carried with him.
His aim was to commit multiple homicides because he knew the likely outcome.
“I wanted to get the death penalty,” Hattori reportedly told police.
With multiple murders a criterion for execution in Japan, the incident raised questions about how the death sentence is — and should be — meted out, and concerns about whether Hattori’s rationale indicated the presence, or absence, of responsibility, not to mention the possibility of copycat crimes should his wishes be granted.
Indeed, such a copycat offense quickly surfaced. An arson attack on a bullet train just a few days later was committed by a 69-year-old man who confessed he wanted to “imitate” Hattori’s Halloween horror.
Experts have looked to explain the motives behind these crimes, and why criminal offenses in Japan, while on the decline overall, are becoming increasingly violent, sometimes involving multiple victims at the hands of suicidal perpetrators.
Masayuki Kiriu, a professor of criminal psychology at Toyo University, says the nature of violent crime has changed significantly since 2000.
Before then, there was a prevalence of multiple killings with “highly abnormal sexual motives,” he says.
The end of Japan’s economic boom years and the “lost decade” that followed triggered a spate of such crimes, many born out of frustration, Kiriu says.
Among them were the spree killings in Tokyo and Saitama in 1988, when Tsutomu Miyazaki kidnapped, sexually molested and murdered four young girls before allegedly dismembering and cremating them in his backyard.
Another chilling example occurred almost a decade later in Kobe, where a 14-year-old boy decapitated an elementary school boy and murdered and dismembered a teenage girl, sexually molesting both, according to Kiriu.
The so-called Kodomo Hyaku-to Ban no Ie neighborhood watch program was established in the aftermath, essentially forcing Japan’s mass killers off the streets, he says.
An early example took place in 2001, when 37-year-old Mamoru Takuma slipped undetected into an Osaka elementary school and stabbed to death eight students and injured 15 others.
Another notable difference was that Takuma’s crime was not sexually motivated, driven rather by jealousy of the children’s “elite” social status, Kiriu says.
Since then, there have been a number of multiple homicide cases in which the culprits are seemingly in search of notoriety through a cathartic self-assertion, such as the 2008 mass murders in the Akihabara district of Tokyo, where perpetrator Tomohiro Kato publicized his crimes online before killing 7 and injuring 10 in a hit-and-run and stabbing rampage.
Furthermore, some perpetrators have committed such crimes without caring if they were caught, even asking for the death penalty after their arrest, Kiriu says.
This apparent self-abandonment means culprits seem less concerned about the presence of witnesses to their crimes, virtual or otherwise, or if they lose their own lives in the process, he adds.
The Dec. 19 arson attack at an Osaka psychiatric clinic, where 26 people were killed, illustrates this trend. Security camera footage provided police with details of the crime, which also left three others in critical condition, including the 69-year-old suspect, who died from injuries sustained in the fire.
“By committing the crime it appears the perpetrator wanted to leave behind proof of his existence,” Kiriu says, adding that evidence found at the suspect’s apartment suggested he had been influenced by the 2019 arson attack at an animation studio in Kyoto, which left 36 people dead and dozens more injured.
An overriding characteristic of the motives of more recent crimes is that they indicate the perpetrators believe their lives are meaningless, Kiriu says, adding that they leave behind “deep scars” as testimony to their own existence.
“In a sense, the motives are very hedonistic and random, and yet very childish, as if the murderers do not think their lives are important,” Kiriu says.
Mitsuru Fukuda, a professor at Nihon University’s College of Risk Management, says such murder-suicide incidents are often called “self-abandonment” crimes, or “extended suicide,” as perpetrators don’t care if they die as a result of their actions.
“In these cases, the desire to attack others and the desire to commit suicide seem to be 2 sides of the same coin,” he says.
Such crimes are not entirely new to Japan. The earliest dates back more than eight decades, when an attack by a man armed with a shotgun, ax and sword wiped out almost half the population of the village of Kamo in present-day Tsuyama, Okayama Prefecture.
Believing he had been ostracized by the community, 21-year-old Mutsuo Toi slayed 30 of his neighbors, including the grandmother who had raised him, before turning the gun on himself.
A suicide note indicated resentments toward young women in the village who had rejected his sexual advances due to the tuberculosis he had contracted a year earlier, an illness that had also prevented him from entering the military and claimed the lives of his parents when Toi was a toddler.
The 1938 “Tsuyama Massacre” inspired bestselling novels and films, and is also at the heart of many multiple homicides that succeeded it, says Wataru Oue, a professor of criminal psychology at Fukuoka University.
“The pattern and structure are similar to indiscriminate killings that have occurred (since),” says Oue, whose current research focuses on the mechanisms that lead to indiscriminate killings by people who have been ostracized by and isolated from society.
Oue notes, however, that while many multiple homicide cases overseas, such as shootings at universities and schools in the United States, often end with the perpetrator committing suicide, such cases in Japan remain relatively rare, even though suicide has less of a stigma here than in some societies and murder-suicide — albeit within families — has historically been viewed as honorable since feudal times.
A 2019 incident in Kawasaki, in which a 51-year-old man stabbed 18 elementary schoolchildren and 2 adults, before taking his own life, is one exception, but overall it’s more likely offenders will request the death penalty after they are arrested, Oue says.
“There are many cases of indiscriminate killings where the real motive is a desire to be executed,” he says, adding that a case in Osaka in 2012 involved a man who had intended to commit suicide, but unable to go through with it took the lives of two passersby believing he would be given the death penalty for the crime.
According to Justice Ministry research, indiscriminate killers often admit to making suicide attempts, meaning their offenses “can be regarded as acts to end one’s own physical or social life.”
Indiscriminate cases, however remain relatively rare, Oue says, and are increasingly likely to be carried out on complete strangers in places some distance from the perpetrator’s own home where they are unknown — Akihabara killer Kato was from Aomori Prefecture, while Tokyo train perpetrator Hattori was reportedly from Fukuoka.
Such offenders are a mixture of those with no criminal history and others with criminal records, including an increasing number who have only been out of prison for a matter of days and have failed to re-adapt to social life, Oue says.
They commit the crimes out of a desire to be re-incarcerated, which itself is a kind of social suicide, he adds.
Regardless of criminal history, however, perpetrators tend to share a history of difficulties, he says.
“In most of the recent cases, a combination of social isolation and setbacks in life have led to a desire to give up on life itself, and there are many instances where this resulted in indiscriminate killings to achieve that,” Oue says.
Kiriu agrees, adding the recent coronavirus pandemic and “the waning of real human contact” has likely heightened this tendency.
He also believes such a pessimistic life outlook is a result of a deterioration in societal structure and values.
Since the Edo Period (1603-1868), officious governance and bothersome, sometimes costly, official procedures spawned a society that dealt with issues on a local level, ultimately creating what Kiriu calls a “creepy” system of community surveillance, where neighbors kept a close eye on the activities of their peers.
The so-called “mask police” during the COVID-19 pandemic provides one contemporary example, Kiriu says.
“Such group control and peer pressure have always been there, but are starting to come apart at the seams,” Kiriu says. “I feel that people who commit murder-suicide believing they are not inconveniencing others by doing so are starting to surface.”
This is a development over previous offenses: Immediately before the 2008 Akihabara killings, the perpetrator had erased all contacts and messages from his mobile to avoid inconveniencing people he knew.
An additional factor, Kiriu says, is another global pandemic spreading in Japan: mental illness. Indeed, the Justice Ministry study into indiscriminate killings concluded that a relatively high percentage of perpetrators were diagnosed as having a history of mental health issues.
Instabilities, brought about by stress and uncertainties about the future, can result in irrational behavior, Kiriu says, illustrated in the recent stabbings during an entrance exam at the University of Tokyo by a 17-year-old who reportedly had also intended to commit suicide.
“In the past, hurdles to crime were considered too high and perpetrators needed to really put their foot on the gas to get over them,” Kiriu says. “Increasingly, however … there are those who simply can’t hit the brakes.”
Research in Japan and overseas has looked at the characteristics that differentiate those who end their lives through suicide and those who commit crimes in order to do so.
While commonalities do exist, such as dissatisfactions with work, a major difference between those who choose crime over suicide is a tendency to shift the blame for their life problems, Fukuoka University’s Oue says.
“A psychological trait of such people is that they have a strong tendency to hold others, such as parents or society, accountable for their own failures and setbacks,” he says. “At the same time, they have a strong sense of victimhood.”
Such feelings lead to a likelihood of repeating those setbacks and mistakes, which over time damages self-esteem, leading to a sense of worthlessness, he says.
“A conceivable thought process of such people is that they are seeking ways to relieve their own personal frustrations and resentments by making society take responsibility, committing indiscriminate violence against multiple victims as a form of retribution or revenge,” Oue says, adding that thought processes are also characterized by so-called dereistic thinking — a disconnect from reality.
Our social media-centered society only serves to aggravate this tendency, with perpetrators being constantly reminded of the successes of peers who have achieved things in life that the offenders themselves believe they should have, but couldn’t attain, he adds.
This deflection of responsibility is at the core of concerns raised about the type of sentence handed down in self-abandonment cases.
Cabinet Office surveys show that public support for capital punishment in Japan has exceeded 80% for more than 20 years, and the killing of two or more persons is one guiding principle in a death penalty ruling.
However, in cases when the accused in multiple homicides petitions for the death penalty, execution is not absolutely guaranteed, especially when extenuating circumstances exist, according to law attorney Yohei Suda.
Regardless of intent, the sentence will depend first and foremost on whether anyone actually died, Suda says, adding other “aggravating circumstances” may also be taken into account.
“Selfish motives” are usually considered as aggravating circumstances, but often a person who commits such a crime is somehow isolated from society, Suda says. “If that person tries to connect with society looking for help, such as getting support from the government, and a lack of support is considered inappropriate, then this can be seen as mitigating circumstances.”
Crimes that could be linked to a failure by the state to provide support with caring for a perpetrator’s sick or elderly parents, for example, may be judged more leniently, particularly if the mitigating circumstances are verifiable, Suda says.
Perpetrators such as Hattori, or Toi before him, could argue similarly that they were the victims of community or peer discrimination, but such claims would unlikely to be taken into consideration if unprovable.
“It all depends on whether the accused can establish that the crime was a result of something beyond his or her control, and that this led to social isolation taking place,” Suda says, adding that diminished capacity, if similarly provable, may also influence sentencing.
A danger also exists that a sentence of death for those petitioning for capital punishment can set a dangerous precedent, encouraging copycat crimes, he says.
However, the gravity of the crime, including the number of victims and how it was committed, will always trump the wish to die, Suda says. The impact on society — including the need to prevent copycats — will also be a major consideration, he adds.
“However, the emphasis will be put on how to avoid the social isolation of a person who has become so desperate to the extent of committing extended suicide,” he says.
If you or someone you know is in crisis and needs help, resources are available. In case of an emergency in Japan, please call 119 for immediate assistance. The TELL Lifeline is available for those who need free and anonymous counseling at 03-5774-0992. For those in other countries, visit International Suicide Hotlines for a detailed list of resources and assistance.
Source: The Japan Times, Staff, April 25, 2022
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde