Sometimes I wonder if the media (Yellow Menace included) does too much to prop up negative stereotypes of otaku behaviour…and then I read this.
A Japanese woman addicted to comics turned to the internet to look for someone to kill her parents after they asked her to clear out her cartoon-filled room, reports said today.
The 36-year-old woman, who was unemployed and lived at home, filled up three rooms with several thousand comic books and videotapes she had collected with an allowance her grandmother sent her, news reports said.
She reportedly became angry after her parents told her to throw away some of her comic books to make space for her sister who was planning to move in.
“I was told to throw away what was precious to me since I was a child. I felt frustrated and angry and wished that my parents would disappear,” she told police, as quoted by Jiji Press and the Sankei Shimbun.
In all fairness, most otaku are (relatively) well-adjusted human beings. This child-woman is clearly fucked up. Sure, I did my share of squabbling with my parents - when I was 17 (and dosed up on loads of 80’s hardcore punk). Don’t think I ever wanted them dead, though.
A murderous firebug torched a so-called ‘video hotel’ stocked with manga, dirty movies, and salarymen in Osaka, killing 15 patrons. These Japanese killing sprees just get more and more weird, don’t they? I’m sure if you set an American hotel on fire, all you’d destroy would be a bunch of Gideon Bibles and bedbugs.
Police identified the alleged arsonist as Kazuhiro Ogawa, who appears to have selected the location to inflict maximum loss of life: like so many of the “manga kissa” comic libraries and adult-video viewing parlours dotted around Japanese cities, the down-market Cats video house doubled as an ultra-cheap hotel and its 32 cramped cubicles were nearly always full.
The apparent use of fire to kill so many people has severely shaken Japan in what has already been an unsettling year of indiscriminate murders: seven people died in June when the central Tokyo shopping district of Akihabara was turned into a bloodbath by a lone knifeman.
Mr Ogawa allegedly set fire to a bag of newspapers in his room in the small hours of Wednesday morning. Investigators believe that he would have almost certainly known that most of the other rooms were occupied and that nearly all of the customers were fast asleep.
Yet another knife-wielding maniac has gone on a killing rampage, this time at the Kuwashima Jinja shrine in central Japan. Actually, ‘knife-wielding’ is a bit inaccurate - the killer wielded a sickle used for harvesting grass. The toll stands at one dead, six wounded.
The suspect, Toshiaki Arai, said he was angry that customers had made fun of him, according to a police statement taken after his arrest at Kuwashima Jinja, a shrine in Hakusan in Ishikawa state.
Witnesses told police that Arai drove a car into the crowd of celebrants at the shrine late Saturday night, jumped out and began indiscriminately slashing people with a curved sickle normally used to cut grass, the statement said.
One of the victims, Yohei Okada, 30, died from severe blood loss, police said. Among the six men injured, two remained hospitalized Sunday afternoon.
A life-size doll wrapped in plastic (a la Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks) was found in a wooded area near Izu City in Japan. Investigators went so far as to order an autopsy before sussing out the fakery.
Investigators found what appeared to be human remains in a forest in Izu City, a seaside resort in central Japan, after an anonymous caller reported seeing it, a Shizuoka state spokeswoman said on condition of anonymity, citing department policy.
Investigators felt it from outside but never actually looked inside, and brought it back to the city police station for a post-mortem examination, she said. Apparently no one doubted a human body was inside until a medical examiner unwrapped it and found a doll there, she said.
A Japanese man seeking medical attention for a venemous snake bite was taken into custody when it was discovered that the snake that poisoned him was only one of fifty-one illegal venemous snakes in the man’s collection. Legal hijinks ensued.
Nobukazu Kashiwagi, a 41-year-old port worker, was bitten on his finger by an eastern green mamba as he tried to feed it.
The eastern green mamba is a highly venomous southeast African snake. Kashiwagi also had another of the world’s deadliest snakes, a six-foot, four-inch long black mamba.
As much as I complain that American corporations are run by a bunch of crooks, I suppose I’m lucky I don’t live in Japan - where the corporations really are run by crooks.
Japan’s powerful yakuza organised crime syndicates are mounting a widespread and “infectious” assault on the country’s financial markets that may have left hundreds of listed companies riddled with mob connections.
In a surprisingly stark admission of the crisis, the National Police Agency (NPA) says it is locked in a battle for the “economic soul” and international reputation of Japan.
Police investigations suggest the yakuza have become voracious traders and manipulators of listed Japanese stocks, and – via a network of about 1,000 apparently legitimate front companies – occupy hefty positions on the shareholder registers of many companies that may not even be aware of the connection.
The new activities of the nation’s largest crime syndicates, said one veteran expert on the yakuza, has effectively turned the mob into “the biggest private equity firm in Japan”.
Man, if I had a dime for every ‘escaped simian’ story we posted, I’d be blogging this from my beachfront property in Tahiti. Yet another crazed monkey has eluded the elite Tokyo MCC (Monkey Catching Corps). The monkey, which entertained the crowd with its’ cop-dodging antics, is now on the loose, and is probably gathering henchmen to help steal some experimental kryptonite laser or somesuch.
“It’s a monkey - it’s not like it did anything bad,” a police spokesman said, adding that the animal was still on the loose.
The monkey was spotted hopping around by the automatic ticket gates at a train line in Shibuya Station in central Tokyo at about 9:40 a.m.
It then ran downstairs to the entrance to another line, climbed up and down a pillar and ran around the ticketing machines before taking refuge on top of a train information board for two hours, a spokeswoman for railway operator Tokyu Corp said.
Gary Glitter, who was recently released from a Vietnamese prison where he did three years for diddling children, is ‘in transit’ at Bangkok airport after refusing to board a flight to London. I don’t know about you, but after spending 3 years in a Vietnamese prison, I’d gladly fly just about anywhere other than Vietnam. Maybe he should charter a flight to Washington D.C. - he could buy John McCain a beer and they could swap Vietnamese prison stories.
“The last information we have is that shortly before the flight to the UK departed he declined to board. We were last aware that he remained in transit,” a spokesman said.
British newspapers, who had reporters on the plane with Glitter as he left Vietnam, said he had collapsed in a bedroom at the Tavern, complaining of heart problems and demanding to be taken to hospital.
He had a series of confrontations with British embassy officials and Thai immigration police, who refused him entry to Thailand because of his conviction in Vietnam for child sex offences, the newspapers reported.
Authorities freed British glam rocker Gary Glitter from prison in southern Vietnam on Tuesday, sending the convicted child molester into an uncertain future after nearly three years of confinement.
BONUS VIDEO: Seriously, was anyone surprised when he was caught?
China doesn’t fuck around, folks. And I am guessing this story is not the kind of publicity they want at the moment either. But hey, people deserve to know about stuff like this.
The AP reports that another knife-wielding lunatic went batshit crazy, wounding 7 commuters at a train station in Hiratsuka, Japan. I’m still waiting with baited breath for an ‘otaku’ reference to crop up somewhere in connection to the spree…
The woman attempted to cut her wrist with an army knife at a shopping mall Monday night near the train station in Hiratsuka, 43 miles southwest of Tokyo, but someone bumped into her and she became angry, said police official Hidetoshi Yukitake.
“She was screaming as she was slashing people at random,” Yukitake said.
None of the seven men stabbed were seriously injured, he said.
The woman was arrested at the scene after being overpowered by onlookers.
“She said she was frustrated. She was also angry at her father,” Yukitake said.
As much as I complain that American corporations are run by a bunch of crooks, I suppose I’m lucky I don’t live in Japan - where the corporations 
Man, if I had a dime for every ‘escaped simian’ story we posted, I’d be blogging this from my beachfront property in Tahiti. Yet another crazed monkey has eluded the elite Tokyo MCC (Monkey Catching Corps). The monkey, which entertained the crowd with its’ cop-dodging antics, is now on the loose, and is probably gathering henchmen to help steal some experimental kryptonite laser or somesuch.
