On June 8th, 2008 Tomohiro Kato drove a rented truck into a crowd shopping in Akihabara, killing three and injuring two. He got out and, armed with a dagger, went on to stab twelve more people, killing four and injuring eight.
The incident sent shocked a nation well-known for its relative absence of violent crime, sending legislators to review knife laws and the practice of closing off streets for pedestrian traffic on weekends, a time Kato calculated before beginning his rampage.
Hiroshi Yuasa, a 55-year old taxi driver who was injured in the attack, recently received a six-page-long, handwritten letter of apology from Kato. In it Kato wrote:
"However much I repent, however much I apologize will never be enough to make things right, and since my crime deserves death 10,000 times I think I will be sentenced to death...I decided that I had to apologize as a person... I have almost no memory of it at all, but I have absolutely no intention of running from what I've done."
Kato also likened the victims' pain to "the uncontrollable anger [he] felt when [his] online self was killed on the forum [he] spent all [his] time on by trolls."
Yuasa commented, "From the way he wrote so politely, you wouldn't have thought someone like that could have done such a thing. I want to hear the whole story at the trial."
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Whoa whoa whoa. Is he seriously comparing the "anger [he] felt" over some sort of online bickering match to the kind of pain and loss that he inflicted on the victims and their families? No matter how miserable his Internet social life is, it's nothing compared to the misery caused when you kill *actual people*.
Aside from the "I'm sure that when I stabbed you, you felt as angry as I do when I get trolled" bit, that's a pretty awesome thing to do. Most people wouldn't handwrite six pages of apology, if even one typed page of "Sorry, bro."
People are people and we act how ever we want. We have our own rational thoughts outside of what people consider the norm or the norm that most constructed. Like Trebz said, at least he wrote a sincere apology in his won words with his own thoughts; instead of those shitty one page typed letters.
So what if he apologizes? That's not going to bring back the dead. If he felt so terrible, and felt he deserved 10,000 deaths for his acts, he shouldn't have committed them in the first place.
@Gee-Man: "I have almost no memory of it at all, but I have absolutely no intention of running from what I've done."
He was probably drunk or high at the time. Not to excuse it because of that and an apologetic note, of course.
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