Houston Chronicle Sunday

Police say suspect in Japan studio fire had arrest record

- By Motoko Rich

TOKYO — Moments after a lighter was put to a pool of gas at a renowned anime studio in Kyoto, Japan, igniting an explosive fire that killed 34 people, Shinji Aoba tried to run away from the scene.

Aoba, who has been named a suspect in the alleged arson, did not get far, as he was badly burned himself. Chased down by studio workers, he fell to the ground, and several witnesses captured the scene on their cellphones. The police swarmed around him as he lay on the street.

“I did it because they stole my novel,” he said, according to police cited by NHK, the public broadcaste­r.

“They plagiarize­d my work,” he said. “Call the president. I have something to tell him.”

The picture emerging of Aoba was of an unstable 41year-old with a troubled past. Police sources cited by NHK said he had served prison time for robbery and was being treated for an unspecifie­d mental illness. Aoba has not yet been officially arrested because police officials said his medical needs are too critical.

On Saturday, Aoba was transferre­d from a hospital in Kyoto to a university­based center in Osaka that has a specialize­d burn unit. Video footage on NHK showed him on a stretcher, both legs swathed in white bandages, before hospital workers covered him with a pale blue sheet as they loaded him onto a helicopter.

The nation was shocked by the blaze at the studio, Kyoto Animation, which appeared to be the worst mass killing in Japan in decades. The victims have not yet been identified publicly; according to the Kyoto Police, some of the bodies are burned so badly they are difficult to identify.

With the police and the public searching for explanatio­ns of the devastatin­g crime, experts said they feared the tragedy could lead to the stigmatiza­tion of people with mental illness, particular­ly as it comes less than two months after a man who lived as an extreme recluse stabbed 17 schoolgirl­s and two adults at a bus stop in a Tokyo suburb.

There was no indication that Aoba also suffered from the same psychiatri­c condition — known in Japan as hikikomori — but reports that he had been treated for mental illness concerned many experts.

“I am very worried that just after this kind of incident many people will fear people with psychiatri­c illness,” said Dr. TakahiroKa­to, a psychiatri­st at Kyushu University. “We should remember that the majority of mentally ill people have no such risk” of committing violence.

According to sources cited in several news outlets, Aoba was arrested in 2012 on a charge of robbing a convenienc­e store in Ibaraki, northeast of Tokyo. Aoba served more than three years in prison.

Aoba eventually moved to his own apartment in Saitama, a suburban area north of Tokyo, although police sources said it was not clear whether he held a job.

Hideaki Hatta, who founded Kyoto Animation with his wife, Yoko Hatta, in 1981, told the Mainichi Shimbun that the company had received a number of death threats in the past two years, although he said Aoba’s name did not appear in any of the threatenin­g emails.

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