Author: Peter Drysdale

Two weeks ago, on the eve of Kevin Rudd’s visit to Japan, Tomohiko Kato, a 25-year old high school drop-out and casual worker from Shizuoka, drove a truck into a crowded shopping mall in Akihabara, the popular electronics shopping district in Tokyo, slaughtering 7 people and wounding many others in a stabbing rampage that followed.

Another young crazy whose psychosis could just as well have rent innocent lives apart in Melbourne, San Francisco or Madrid but for where he happened to be born?

Not if you believe the collective outpouring of self-analysis that has been going on in Japan ever since. This was a peculiarly Japanese story, in a society that does not give anyone a second chance.

Japan is undoubtedly a very rich country. But it is a rich country without the ostentatious displays of wealth that remain in America, for example, and income inequality as it is conventionally measured has always been by international standards been very low. Merit and effort appeared, for years of growing Japanese prosperity, to define life’s chances.

But income inequality is rising and there is a growing underclass of casual workers who, no matter how they get there and what their abilities, never get a second chance. This is a society – so the analysis runs — where you catch the right escalator out of college or university or you miss the stairway to security and middle class heaven. This is a society of two classes: the secure and the comfortable or an underclass who are not only less secure (there are billions of them in the world who somehow get on with life even in quite awful circumstances) but who are left totally without hope.

Young Kato missed the escalator and certainly was a bundle of resentment about the straws he’d drawn in life. Hardly an excuse for what he did (see the widely-read Vox Populi, Vox Dei column in Asahi Newspaper link below), but certainly his circumstance is one that is encouraging many Japanese to think deeply about how their country can give its citizens a second chance and the prospect of hope when they’ve made a mistake or two or haven’t used all the opportunities they might have in lock-step with their countrymen (and women a pace or two behind).

Asahi Shimbun, Vox Populi, Vox Dei, 14 June 2008

Novelist Budai Irokawa (1929-1989), who was also an inveterate gambler, likened life to a sumo tournament in Uraomote Jinseiroku (‘Jottings on both sides of life’), published by The Mainichi Newspapers.

‘If you finish with eight wins and seven losses, that’s quite a respectable record. A 9-6 record would be even better. But I guess life usually hands you as many wins as losses.’

Life is a repetition of triumphs and defeats, big and small. There is no such thing as an unbroken winning streak or a losing streak. But Tomohiro Kato, the 25-year-old suspect in the bloody rampage in Tokyo’s Akihabara that left seven people dead and 10 injured on June 8, summed up his life after senior high school as a “losing streak.”

The monologues Kato posted on Internet message boards are filled with bitter negativism, describing his desperate unhappiness about having no girlfriend, hostility toward happy couples and complaints about his parents and workplace.

He described himself as a total loser, but the truth of the matter appears to be that he never bothered to fight fair and square in the first place. Kato was sulky toward society, chose to remain in isolation and wrote everything off as hopeless. He ultimately kicked himself out of the “arena” with his unforgivable “foul play.”
Many people who have a hard time at work manage to find happiness in their family life or hobbies. One of the reasons Kato flitted from job to job was that he was a habitual no-show. He escaped into a virtual world of Internet message boards, but there was no conversation.

‘I wanted someone to stop me,’ he reportedly told police.

This sort of infantile refusal to take responsibility must at heart have been one of the reasons he committed this horrendous crime.

While we can’t ignore the helpless feelings of dispatched factory workers like Kato, it would be wrong to explain away his deed as the evils of social disparity. Hasty generalizations will blur the elements that belong to this particular individual. The same mistake is made by those who dump the entire blame for such crimes on “post-World War II education.”

Obviously, society cannot ignore its working poor. To prevent those in despair from finding a violent outlet, society should become a place where people can be given a second chance and be rewarded for trying again.
Irokawa, who categorized those who ‘lost as many times as they won’ as winners, also wrote about a way of life that allows even losers to ‘win slowly but steadily.’

Unless we learn from the lessons of the Akihabara killing spree and change our society, Kato’s seven victims will have died in vain.