Hatred behind troubled Japan knife attacker’s rampage

Satoshi Uematsu, 26, broke into a facility for disabled people by shattering a window at 2.10am, according to a prefectural health official, and then set about slashing the patients’ throats.

Police officers investigate at a facility for the disabled, where a deadly attack by a knife-wielding man took place, in Sagamihara, Kanagawa prefecture, Japan. Issei Kato / Reuters

SAGAMIHARA, JAPAN // Hatred appears to be what fuelled a young Japanese man who went on a stabbing rampage, killing 19 people Tuesday at a facility for the mentally disabled where he had been fired. Months earlier, he reportedly gave a letter to Parliament outlining the bloody plan.

When he was done, Satoshi Uematsu, 26, 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, the deadliest mass killing in Japan in decades. Twenty-five were wounded, 20 seriously.

He drove up in a black car, carrying several knives, to the Tsukui Yamayuri-en facility in Sagamihara, 50 kilometres west of Tokyo, according to security camera footage played on TV news. He broke in by shattering a window at 2.10am, according to a prefectural health official, and then set about slashing the patients’ throats.

Details of how he did that, and if the victims were asleep or otherwise helpless, were not immediately known, although a cryptic letter he sent to Japan’s Parliament in February gave a peek into Uematsu’s dark turmoil.

He calmly turned himself in about two hours after the attack, police said.

Tsukui Yamayuri-en, which means mountain lily garden, was a facility Uematsu knew well, having worked there since 2012 until he was let go in February.

He knew the staffing would be down to just a handful in the wee hours of the morning, Japanese media reports said.

Not much is known yet about his background, but Uematsu once dreamed of becoming a teacher. In two group photos posted on his Facebook, he looks happy, smiling widely with other young men.

“It was so much fun today. Thank you, all. Now I am 23, but please be friends forever,” a 2013 post says.

But somewhere along the way, things went terribly awry.

Uematsu began to tell people around him that disabled people needed to be killed. In February, he tried to hand deliver a letter he wrote to Parliament’s lower house speaker demanding all disabled people be put to death through “a world that allows for mercy killing”, Kyodo news agency and TBS TV reported.

Uematsu boasted in the letter that he had the ability to kill 470 disabled people in what he called “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.

The letter was reprinted by Kyodo after the attack.

“My reasoning is that I may be able to revitalise the world economy and I thought it may be possible to prevent World War III,” the rambling letter says.

The letter, which the Tokyo police got, included Uematsu’s name, address and telephone number, and reports of his threats were relayed to local police where Uematsu lived, Kyodo said.

Kanagawa Gov. Yuji Kuroiwa apologised for having failed to act on the warning signs.

From his time working at the facility, Uematsu was known to people in the area, and some said he was so polite and upstanding that they found the news shocking.

Akihiro Hasegawa, who lived next door to Uematsu, said he heard Uematsu had got in trouble with the facility, initially over sporting a tattoo, often frowned upon in mainstream Japanese society because of its association with criminal groups.

“He was just an ordinary young fellow,” he said.

Mass killings are rare in Japan. Because of the country’s extremely strict gun-control laws, any attacker usually resorts to stabbings. In 2008, seven people were killed by a man who slammed a lorry into a crowd of people in central Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics district and then stabbed passers-by.

In 2001, a man killed eight children and injured 13 others in a knife attack at an elementary school in the city of Osaka. The incident shocked Japan and led to increased security at schools.

As recent as earlier this month, a man stabbed four people at a library in northeastern Japan, allegedly over their improper handling of his questions, although no one died.

In 2010, 14 were injured by an unemployed man who stabbed and beat up passengers on two public buses outside a Japanese train station in Ibaraki Prefecture, about 25 kilometres north-east of Tokyo.

* Associated Press