Last weekend, I was dancing mad with some new acquaintances in a goth club in Shinjuku. The small venue and rising body heat would push large groups outside periodically, much to the horror of many a casual passerby. Light crept into the Sunday sky and - to my surprise - none of the elaborately costumed wraiths chatting outside evaporated in a plume of smoke. I stuck out not because I was a foreigner, but my last-minute, (mandatory if I hoped to get in) all-black wardrobe appeared to be the bare minimum among the regulars who sported everything including ghoul-white skin, full leather trenchcoats, meticulously laced doll clothing, and rare to see full-color body tattoos. The Japanese goth style is a wonderful balance of cute and creepy, but the really shocking thing is how (typically) polite people with metal spikes in their faces can be. Even if someone is cosplaying in an SS uniform, you'll get a thoughtful sumimasen if they bump into you. They're certainly more agreeable than, say, the police... who are all smiles to foreign tourists but sure as shit don't want you living in the Motherland.
While I was calmly snoozing away after a long night of clubbing, a different fellow was making preparations for his big day of stabbing. The only clean black shirt I had before going out that night was one I wouldn't wear much in public, because it expresses my affinity for Akihabara and its shamelessly unique culture; as either native or foreigner, it's bound to draw smiles and stares. Of course, among the various alternative crowds we met that night, it was a pleasant conversation piece, and never taken the "wrong way." It's strange to think that we were carrying on about how wonderful of a place Akihabara is, when a few hours later there would be blood in the streets.
(not the original image, but same message)Title: I'm going to kill people in Akihabara
Body: I'll hit them with my car, and when I can't use it any more, I'll use a knife. Goodbye, everyone.
Here's the story as reported by one news outlet:
http://www.japantoday.com/category/crime/view/12-stabbed-others-hit-by-assailants-car-on-akihabara-street
http://www.japantoday.com/category/crime/view/mobile-phone-posts-foretold-sundays-stabbing-spree-in-akihabara
It's still unbelievable to all the people I've talked to, but strangely because it's overly real. We've been in those streets, in front of those stores, been a part of that pedestrian crowd on Chuo-dori. Each picture or clip of video that documents the event, we've seen the surreal before - but instead of people dressing up as maids or superheroes, there are people dressed up as paramedics or corpses.
The bustling outdoor bazaar of music, color, and magic is too precious a bastion of raw humanity in Japan to be slain. The crowd may be more solemn in the coming weeks, but this wound is not mortal. One cannot murder a culture dedicated to fun - a culture that spreads at the speed of the electron - laughter is simply too powerful an elixir.
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And now, most importantly, here's the thing to remember:
Japan remains one of the safest places on this Earth.
Don't let sensationalism get the better of you, please! The thing most disgusting to me after the actions of Kato is how some in the media have handled the event, wasting no time in attacking all manner of things - video games included, of course - as accessories to the crime. It's easy to criticize bloggers or wikis or [insert non-traditional medium here] as being full of shit, but the corollary to this observation is that any information outlet is just as likely to be stuffed with it; Sturgeon's Revelation spares nothing.
Concerned people uploaded newscasts of the event to YouTube and they were quickly pounced on and removed by the media companies. Obviously the dissemination of information is secondary to capitalizing as much as possible on (heaven forbid) an event actually newsworthy. On one of the sites I would have linked you to for the story summary, their video first required you watch an advertisement. Who gives a damn about your pathetic circle-jerk sponsorship when there's urgent news! What's it going to be, "This video clip brought to you by Ginsu - it slices, it dices!"? Thankfully in a country where everyone is born with a cellphone in hand, the all-hearing, all-seeing masses can usually provide the needed footage unfiltered by financial interest.
So instead of noting that Kato once drew a video game character in a yearbook, ignoring the fact that correlation does not mean causation, and clocking out early as an investigative journalist (the word "search" on that Google button is a lot like "investigate", right?), let's look at the real problem in Japan: there's just too much stress, too much pressure on everyone to perform perfectly every time, all the time. You are born and soon fed into the Great Japanese Gearwork, where you soon learn that you have to be the best in elementary school so that you can get into a good middle school and work hard there for the chance to join a prestigious high school that might just prepare you well enough (and there's always after-school cram school in case you're worried) for the immensely important entrance exams that will maybe allow you to get into a university deemed worthy by your future employer because that's the only criterion that matters to them in a sick, foreshadowing manner until you realize - hey - you will never amount to anything special in that company because your most sacred and esteemed elders don't want to hear from that last shred of creativity you were hanging on to after all these years but they would, however, appreciate it if you could volunteer a few extra hours for the company because schedules are tight and it's not as though you had other plans or a family or self-respect but it does explain why you've taken to drinking and smoking like many of your co-workers who supplement their loneliness and desire to feel needed with these drugs and an equally damaging workaholism until the completion of your transformation into a shell of a human who is just as bitter about others who try to escape the system that you have all learned to love.
Granted, some people escape the Gearwork and others come out only slightly maimed, but with many Japanese committing suicide (recently an average of 32,000 per year; 25 out of every 100,000 people; five times the number killed in traffic accidents [Japanese Statistics]) and only very recently a growing concern about mental health (due to cultural stigma), one can see where the occasional rampage comes from. Humans simply aren't meant to constantly deal with that kind of stress - they snap. It's my conjecture that with a high number of people willing to kill themselves, a few of them are going to try and go out doing something extreme since they feel they have nothing to lose and no consequences to face. Kato wasn't suffering from psychosis, he was just sick of living and unfortunately took his frustrations out on innocent people. But he was just one of those annual 32,000 with the capacity - the despair - to do something like that.
Good luck getting a Japanese journalist or politician to run with that one. They're the ones with the problem-solving skills, proposing to censor web sites with information about suicide because, well, people might use it to kill themselves. Clearly, they are the ones afflicted by psychosis, who can't wrap their heads around the fact that the people still want to fucking kill themselves. As The Complete Manual of Suicide demonstrates (likely the only book on Wikipedia in the categories "Suicide" and "Self-help"), there is a market for it. In fairness, the government began legislating social programs aimed to reduce the suicide count to 22,000 by 2010 - an impressive goal only eclipsed by how impressively it will fail. Now, I don't feel it is solely the responsibility of the government to solve this problem, but they could certainly pretend to be interested. They are interested at how low birth rates will ultimately cause the economy to rely more on foreigners (the horror!), but can't seem to notice that all these recent trends have to do with young people who aren't interested in getting married or having kids or otherwise terminating their youth by throwing themselves headfirst back into the Great Gearwork that their government has helped to maintain. The youth of Japan are obviously disgusted at the one-way road that has been laid before them, and are detouring it any way they can, for as long as they can: by just scraping enough money together with part-time work to preserve their freedom, to locking themselves into an escapist reality in their rooms, or by ending their existence altogether.
Japan is still a wonderful country, with truly incredible people, but it has a long way yet to go. I will be rooting for them all the way, though. Not for the nationalistic xenophobes that comprise the government today, but for those renegades who dare to challenge the status quo and inhuman expectations of the world around them. They are the radical dreamers who will usurp the established media and entrenched corporations, paving the way for the next generation of Japanese who will have the passion for their lives and the time to exercise it. They are the ones who fill Akihabara with the spirit that on a sunny day can bring a joyful tear to my eye. Here's to you, NEETs, Freeters, Hikkis - you underdogs of society - take your country back, break down that machine, and save the future generations from their own hands.
