Letter foretold Japan rampage
19 mentally disabled killed
SAGAMIHARA, Japan — Months before a young Japanese man went on a stabbing rampage Tuesday at a facility for the mentally disabled where he had been fired, killing 19 people, he gave a letter to Parliament outlining the bloody plan and saying all disabled people should be put to death, officials said.
When he was done, Kanagawa prefectural authorities said, 26-year-old Satoshi Uematsu had left dead or injured nearly a third of the almost 150 patients at the facility in a matter of 40 minutes in the early Tuesday attack. It is Japan’s deadliest mass killing in decades. The fire department said 25 were wounded.
Sagamihara fire department official Kunio Takano said the attacker killed 10 women and nine men. The youngest was 19, the oldest 70. Details of the attack were not immediately known.
The suspect calmly turned himself in about two hours after the attack, police said. Mr. Uematsu had worked at Tsukui Yamayuri-en from 2012 until February, when he was let go. He knew the staffing would be down to just a handful in the wee hours of the morning, Japanese media said.
Not much is known yet about his background, but Mr. Uematsu once dreamed of becoming a teacher. But somewhere along the way, things went terribly awry.
In February, Mr. Uematsu tried to hand deliver a letter to Parliament’s lower house speaker that revealed his dark turmoil. It demanded that all disabled people be put to death through “a world that allows for mercy killing,” Kyodo news agency and TBS TV reported. The Parliament office also confirmed the letter.
Mr. 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 ($5 million) in aid and plastic surgery so he could lead a normal life afterward.
“My reasoning is that I may be able to revitalize the world economy and I thought it may be possible to prevent World War III,” the letter says.
The letter was delivered before Mr. Uematsu’s last day of work at the facility, but it was unclear whether the letter played a role in his firing.
The letter included Mr. Uematsu’s name, address and telephone number, and reports of his threats were relayed to local police, Kyodo said.
Kanagawa Gov. Yuji Kuroiwa apologized for having failed to act.
Mass killings are rare in Japan. Because of the country’s extremely strict guncontrol laws, any attacker usually resorts to stabbings.
Because such massacres are rare, Japan is overconfident about its safety, a criminologist said. For crime prevention, the country relies on its social system in which a group mentality sacrifices individual freedom for collective safety, said Nobuo Komiya, a criminology professor at Rissho University in Tokyo.
As a result, it has neglected risk management, he said.
“Japan has put an emphasis on not creating criminals, but it is reaching a breaking point,” Mr. Komiya said.