In 2007 a sad event occurred in the town of Aizu-Wakamatsu, which is incidentally famous for being the site of a mass suicide of samurai who chose to commit Seppuku rather than become part of a modern, Western-style Japan during the Meiji Restoration. A 17-year-old boy walked into a police station with a shoulder bag containing the severed head of his mother, who the disturbed boy had just killed. Perhaps it’s due to the relative rareness of violent crime in Japanese society, but some of the tragedies that do occur seem especially horrific and at times even creative. Like the man who kidnapped his neighbor at knifepoint then, afraid the police would catch him, killed her and flushed her body down the toilet to dispose of it. (He was sentenced to life in prison without chance of parole this week.) It would be easy, judging from news reports of these sad and bizarre cases, to get a distorted view of Japan, especially when seen through the lens of the Internet. It’s not unlike the perception that the Japanese are always eating bizarre desserts just because some parts of the country sell wasabi or squid ink-flavored ice cream as a novelty. Although it’s not very exotic, the boring reality is that the most popular flavor of ice cream here is vanilla. While any loss of life is tragic, Japan happily remains a reasonably safe country, with a national murder rate lower than that of New York City.
Crime is always sad, and sometimes some really bizarre stuff seems to happen in Japan.
