Violent crime in Japan
The recent horror story of the Akihabara truck rampage/knife murders is deeply shocking and challenges our most optimistic and hopeful inclinations. The scenes of bloody limbs and computer generated simulations of the tragedy impress us with the reality of what, to most of us, is unthinkable. Looking to the murderer’s psychological profile, childhood and troubled relationship with society can give us some clues as to how he might eventually have cracked, but it will never really solve the mystery of how and why this tragedy happened. There are plenty of people with woeful and abusive pasts who would never perpetrate such a hideous slaughter.
For the media, crimes such as this are times to satisfy the public’s morbid fascination with such bloodbaths and uncover as many gory details as possible – many publications also manage to use the opportunity to provide titillating ‘background information’ (see http://www.japaninc.com/node/3395).
The other common theme is that many writers and editors will bring up similar incidents that have occurred recently, for example, one AP report on the incident catalogues various knife crime incidents going back until 2001(http://tinyurl.com/6czwa6).