Japan attack: Biggest danger country faces is overreaction

Mass killings are rare in Japan. Guns are heavily restricted and almost impossible to come by outside of the closed world of yakuza gangsters: police recorded just a single gun fatality for the whole of the country last year. The weapon of choice on the isolated occasions when someone runs amok is usually a knife.

In 2001, a former school janitor later diagnosed as mentally ill stabbed eight elementary school children to death and injured 13 others with a kitchen knife. Mamoru Takuma, who told police he "wanted to die" and take others with him, was executed for the murders three years later.

In June 2008, Tomohiro Kato, murdered seven people by driving a truck into a crowd of shoppers in Tokyo’s Akihabara district and jumping out to slash pedestrians with a knife. Kato had posted details of his attack online before setting off.

In letters to his surviving victims, he subsequently attempted to explain the origins of his murderous rage, saying he had been abused as a child. Kato traced his failures in life and his vertiginous descent – aged 25 – into the insecure world of dispatch employment and despair – on the pressures of high school. But he added: “The crime I committed is all my responsibility and I can’t possibly blame it on others. I should accept all the blame.”

Bizarre plot

Japan’s most infamous modern mass murder came in 1995 when the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult gassed the

Tokyo

subway in a bizarre plot to take over the government. Twelve people died and 5,000 were injured in what remains the nation’s worst terrorist attack.

Aum's founder Shoko Asahara said he could commune with the spirits and told his disciples, some of who were from Japan's best universities, that they would elevate their victims to a higher spiritual stage. Asahara was sentenced to hang in 2004 and remains on death row.

Each of these horrific events has triggered much soul searching and handwringing that Japan is becoming as crime-ridden as anywhere else. Those statistics simply do not bear that out: the number of recorded crimes last year fell to a post-war low and the country has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world.

Japan incarcerates fewer of its citizens (55 per 100,000 people) than most other advanced countries, including Britain (149) and America (716). Random street crime of the type that blights many western cities is almost unheard of.

The main danger from Tuesday’s attack, in which at 19 were killed in a residential care home for the mentally disabled near Tokyo, may be overreaction. Takuma’s murderous spree in 2008 is the reason why security guards stand outside schools across Japan to this day – a sad reminder to millions of children that the world can be a frightening place.

Japan’s most popular newspaper, the Yomiuri, said on Tuesday that care homes for the elderly and disabled may now have to consider following suit. Security is weak and many facilities lack secure doors or gates. Whatever follows, however, is unlikely to protect everyone from the actions of one alienated citizen determined to do harm.