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Lost souls lurking in a virtual underworld

By Kwan Weng Ki (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-06-18 07:36

Tomohiro Kato, who killed seven people and injured 10 on June 8, was most certainly a product of the times.

Unable to deal with the real world, he found both solace and despair in the virtual.

Like many young Japanese of his generation, Kato was said to be a video game fanatic, moving from action games to romances revolving around alluring female characters.

He blogged his actions and deepest thoughts in real time, using a cellphone that seemed glued to his hand.

Kato's life closely parallels the development of computer games and the growth of the Internet in Japan.

He was born in 1982, one year before Nintendo introduced its best-selling game console, the Famicom, and the appearance of popular titles such as Donkey Kong and Mario Bros.

In 1999, one year after Kato entered senior high school, Internet usage started to take off with the construction of high-speed broadband networks and the lowering of connection charges.

The launch of Internet-capable cellphones that same year created a whole new demand for online activity that did not involve a computer.

Over the years, the young Kato was to witness a slew of bizarre killings, many of them committed by children.

In 1997, in his final year at junior school, Japan was shocked by the decapitation of an 11-year-old by a 14- year-old boy in Kobe. The killer, who left the mutilated head in front of the victim's school, also confessed to murdering a young girl.

Then in 2001, soon after Kato graduated from senior high school, a 37-year-old former janitor barged into a primary school in Osaka with a knife, killing eight children and seriously wounding 13 others and two teachers.

It was the second-biggest mass murder in post-war Japanese history, topped only by the Sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway in March 1995, which killed 12 people and injured 50. Kato's killing spree now ranks third.

The dangers of the Internet were keenly felt in 2004 when an 11-year-old girl murdered her classmate in Sasebo, a city in western Japan, by slitting her victim's throat. She told the police she had fallen out with the victim over some online messages.

She was later discovered to have been influenced by some aspects of Internet culture, including quite a few stomach-churning videos.

In recent years, video games have come to feature, along with more realistic images, more graphic violence and gore. A ratings system was introduced to keep the most graphically brutal of the genre away from under-18s.

Kato grew up in a real world that witnessed an increase in violence and a virtual world fraught with danger. The thousands of messages he left on a cellphone website indicated that he also had to put up with extremely strict parents. They supervised his studies closely and dreamt of sending him to medical school.

But he rebelled against them in senior high school and, instead of going on to university, enrolled in a two-year college course to pursue automotive studies.

That proved to be his undoing. Upon leaving college, he found himself, like several million other young Japanese, stuck in dead-end, part-time jobs with little hope of a bright future - part of the so-called "working poor".

Besides the resentment he bore against his parents and society, Kato told police the last straw came earlier this month when he was confronted with the prospect of losing his fifth job in five years.

"To Kato, work was like his last interface with society. He was therefore fearful of losing his job," said criminal psychiatrist Akira Sakuta.

When Kato turned up for work on June 5 and was unable to find his work clothes, he was convinced the company was trying to tell him he was no longer needed.

Several hours later, he wrote: "If one gets too involved with a person, one may kill from a grudge. If one is lonely, one may kill at random. Anyone would do. I kind of understand that."

A straw poll by one TV station of 100 young Japanese born in the same year as Kato found half of them identified with his habit of using his cellphone to post his innermost thoughts, in the faint hope that they might be read.

"If only someone had stopped me," Kato reportedly told police later.

But as it turned out, few stumbled upon the bulletin board he had created, which could be accessed only from a cellphone anyway.

Some young Japanese in similarly desperate straits as Kato choose to end their own lives. Luckily, most do not. Kato, however, chose to run amuck in Tokyo's crowded Akihabara district.

One hopes this sad case will not end with the authorities taking only superficial counter-measures, such as banning daggers or stepping up Internet policing.

The recent killings raise many troubling questions about contemporary Japanese society. They should be addressed so that there will not be more Katos in the future.

The Straits Times/Asia News Network

(China Daily 06/18/2008 page9)