A drifter named Mamoru Takuma has wrecked that illusion. Takuma, 37, a psychiatric outpatient with a history of aggression, walked onto the grounds of Ikeda Elementary School last Friday morning around 10:15, just as the first and second graders were taking a break between lessons. Takuma had a six-inch kitchen knife in his hand. He entered a second-grade classroom and, as a shocked teacher looked on, stabbed three boys at the blackboard. One school girl later told reporters that Takuma was growling and trembling as he descended on the youngsters. Then the attacker turned, storming down the corridor into two other second-grade classrooms where he continued his rampage.
Bleeding children fell on their desks; others staggered out to the street, one screaming: “Murderer, murderer!” One boy reached a store and passed out from his wounds as a startled clerk frantically called police. Inside the school, a young girl reached the school’s public-address system and cried for help. When teachers at last subdued Takuma, 10 minutes after the attack began, eight children ages 6, 7 and 8 (seven girls and one boy) were dead. Fifteen other people, including two teachers, were wounded. It was the worst mass killing in Japan since 1995, when the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway, killing 12 people.
Police say Takuma was a vagabond with a history of mental problems. Over the past few years he had held at least 10 jobs, the last as a cab driver. After his arrest, Takuma told police that he had taken 10 times his normal dose of prescription tranquilizers before the attack. “I’m sick of life,” he said. “I’ve attempted to kill myself many times but failed. I want to be hanged.” Later in the police interview, he fell asleep. Takuma had already had a date with authorities on the day of the massacre. At 2 p.m. he was due at the Osaka District public prosecutor’s office to explain why he beat up an Osaka hotel employee in October.
Takuma reportedly quit high school in November 1981 to join Japan’s Self-Defense Force. He resigned from the service a year and a half later, saying that he hated to work for others. He meandered from job to job–driving a truck, working for a real-estate agency. “We never wanted him to make it big or be rich,” Takuma’s 68-year-old father told the Mainichi Shimbun, a newspaper. “But for some reason, he suffered an inferiority complex.” In March 1999 Takuma was arrested on suspicion of spiking four teachers’ tea with tranquilizers at an elementary school in Itami, Hyogo prefecture, where he worked as a janitor. He was not indicted, but local authorities hospitalized him for mental illness.
Now Japan is searching its soul over the school stabbings. Although the violent-crime rate remains very low, the country has been plagued by a string of bizarre murders over the past eight years. Sociologists suggest that the decade-long economic contraction has led to an upswing in crime. In fact, robberies and rapes have dramatically increased, and Japan’s suicide rate is double that of the United States.
Many recent violent crimes are said to have been random, with the assailants having no apparent motive other than the need to vent rage. In buttoned-down Japan, even an ordinary layoff can be a humiliating experience. “There are a tremendous number of individuals who have lost a sense of their own worth,” Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, associate professor of psychology at the University of Tokyo, told NEWSWEEK. “And there is a cultural taboo against anger itself.” Keeping it bottled up, says Murphy-Shigematsu, means that people “don’t develop the psychological sophistication to distinguish between their emotions and their actions.”
As social stresses mount, experts have begun to debate how best to treat the mentally ill. Susumu Oda, a criminal psychologist, says Japan has no system to decide whether a mental patient with a violent history is ready to go back to society. According to Oda, that’s why many emotionally disturbed individuals like Takuma are institutionalized for only a short time before being released with a packet of prescription medicine and no professional supervision. The psychologist says: “There is a line between protecting the human rights [of a mental patient] and preventing him from committing such crimes.”
That’s no comfort to the families of the Ikeda Elementary School victims. Shinichi Kiso, 40, who lost his daughter Yuka, is learning to speak of his daughter in the past tense. In an interview with Kyodyo News, he recalled Yuka learning to ride a unicycle a few weeks ago. To mark the achievement, he gave her a handmade ‘‘unicycle driver’s license." ‘‘Seven years, [she] only lived for seven years,’’ Kiso sobbed to reporters. It was a tragedy that all of Japan was trying to comprehend.
