Japanese Crimes こわいそう

At around 12:30 p.m. a rental truck was driven through pedestrians as they walked across an intersection along the wide Chuo Dori in Akihabara. The road is closed to traffic on Sundays and becomes a "pedestrian heaven" in Japanese. On Sunday it was closer to hell.

Some entries were posted to Japanese online discussion board before the tragedy happened.

At 5:21 a.m. on Sunday morning, "I'm going to Akihabara to kill people. If my car is destroyed I'll use a knife. Goodbye everyone." and then seconds later, "I'm tired."

At 6:31 a.m., "It's time, I'm leaving."

At 9:48 a.m., "I've entered Kanagawa [prefecture, en-route to Tokyo], I'm taking a rest."

At 11:45 a.m.: "I've reached Akihabara. Today it's a pedestrian area, I think."

Then, finally, at 12:10 p.m., "IT'S TIME."

The truck had hit several pedestrians. A man were running from the truck towards the busy intersection it's just passed through. Seconds later, everyone was fleeing in the opposite direction to escape the killer. Within minutes, Tomohiro Kato, a murderer, was on the ground, subdued by a police officer.

The detained suspect and a survival knife, apparently blood-stained, lied nearby. Pools of blood lied on the road. The death toll rose through the afternoon to hit seven by the end of the day. They ranged in age from 19 to 74-years-old, six are men and one is a woman. An additional 10 people were injured and hospitalized.

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Japan has one of the lowest crime rates in the developed world. In 2005, the homicide rate was just 1.1 per 100,000 people against 2.9 for Germany, 3.2 for U.K. or 5.6 for U.S. But, "What was wrong with the social life in Japan?" is still a question.

More and more these days, there are signs that the social fabric that has held Japan together for so long is slowly coming apart at the seams. Where once people had jobs for life and everyone looked out for their neighbors, now many Japanese take temporary jobs to makes ends meet, live in anonymous one-room apartments in vast cities and rarely speak to those around them.

Japan is now facing a serious suicide problem. It has the highest suicide rate of any developed nation. In 2006, just over 32,000 people killed themselves -- approximately 87 people per day. While many commit suicide alone, in the last few years group suicides have become more common. The disillusioned often meet up online, make a plan to meet somewhere, and then kill themselves together. As on Sunday, some choose to take the lives of others rather than their own.

• 1995 poison gas attack on Tokyo's subway by a religious cult was the start of it all. Twelve people were killed in the attack and thousands were hospitalized.

• In 1997, the nation was shocked by brutal murder of a school girl in Kobe. She had been killed and her head left on a stake outside the school. A bigger surprise came to the killer where he is a 14-year-old school boy.
  

The list of gruesome murders has grown longer with time. 

• In 2001, Sunday's attack started. A man entered an elementary school in Osaka in western Japan and killed eight children with a knife. In the same year, a teen hijacked a highway bus in western Japan killing one person.

• More recently, March 2008, a man wanted by police on suspicion of murder stabbed and killed a woman and injured seven others in a shopping mall in Ibaraki, north of Tokyo. And in January, a high school student injured two with a knife on a shopping street in Tokyo.

src: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/146858/akihabara_killer_chronicled_massacre_plans_online.html