The Virginia Tech shooting: Japanese media coverage (Video)

Like many of you in Japan, I woke up this morning and turned on the TV to find out that there had been a horrible shooting at Virginia Tech. Of course, the coverage here is probably nothing compared to the non-stop reporting it’s probably getting in America, but it is a top story. The reports seemed to cover all the main facts released so far regarding the case, but there were a few things different from the coverage in America. For example, the news spend some time talking on the phone with a Japanese student at VT who narrowly avoided the shooting:

In a telephone interview with Kyodo News, Mariko Uno, 23, from Kyoto Prefecture, said she was attending a class in a building next to the site of the rampage when an unidentified gunman opened fire, and was scheduled to attend a separate class at the site of the shooting in the afternoon.

She said she and some 20 classmates were ushered to a separate room that can be locked from the inside and stayed there for some 2 1/2 hours. As dozens of patrol cars gathered at the campus, Uno, who began her studies at Virginia Tech two years ago, said she gradually realized how grave the situation was.

In the part of her interview that aired lived in FTV this morning, Uno said she hadn’t even heard any gun shots, but I guess the Japanese press was desperate to find a Japanese-speaking person who sort-of witnessed the shooting (I think they may have said in a report that there were only 17 Japanese students at the school). The only other noteworthy part of this morning’s press coverage would have to be this Japanese report’s live slip-up:

Reporting on the alleged ethnicity of the shooter: “The suspect was Afric…errr..Asian…” He did get it right the other 3 or 4 times he made the report this morning, though…

Update: An interesting video clip from the news in which the shooter rambles on about Jesus, Osama Bin-Laden, Kim Jong-Il, and Bush. He’s definitely a nutcase: