Mall Knifings

This video is a brief TBS news clip about the Tsuchiura mall knifings perpetrated by Masahiro Kanagawa. Well, there you have it folks. Soon, more international coverage of violent crime in peaceful Japan will follow. He was wanted for murder already, and wound up killing another person and injuring seven others before he called police to claim credit and was subsequently taken into custody. He reportedly claimed that he “just wanted to kill anyone.” Lovely sentiment, that. Here is a brief excerpt from the BBC’s coverage of the event.

A man armed with a knife has run amok outside a shopping centre in a Japanese city near Tokyo, killing one person and wounding seven others.

….

Police confirmed that they had been searching for Mr Kanagawa since a 72-year-old male resident of Tsuchiura was stabbed to death on Wednesday.

Eight police officers had been on duty at the station at the time of the mall attack, and police issued an apology for failing to prevent it.

An Asahi article gives more details on the police response:

Under the assumption that Kanagawa was hiding in the Tsuchiura area, police posted about 170 police officers at train stations on the Joban Line and the Tsukuba Express Line starting from the first train runs of the day Sunday.

Eight plainclothes officers wearing bulletproof vests were sent to Arakawaoki Station on the Joban Line: one inside the ticket gate; one outside the gate; two on the station’s platforms; and four outside the station.

Yuji Isshiki, the officer waiting outside the ticket gate, was checking on exiting passengers when he was stabbed around 11 a.m. by Kanagawa, who had arrived on an earlier train and exited the gate, police said.

Kanagawa stabbed four others at the gate and fled while attacking others at the station, they said.

Isshiki asked another officer to chase the suspect. However, that officer lost sight of Kanagawa.

“When he stabbed people in and around the station, he ran several hundred meters at full speed. So we failed to catch him,” a police officer said in the news conference.

Kanagawa, in fact, made it to an unmanned police box near the station, where he called police again using the interphone to inform them of the stabbings. He was subdued and arrested by other officers sent to the scene.

Police defended their decision to place only eight officers in and around Arakawaoki Station.

They quoted Kanagawa as saying that he had shaved his head in Tokyo’s Akihabara district to disguise his appearance.

Police had also sent officers to Akihabara, an area known for its electronics stores, because they heard Kanagawa had gone there to buy videogames.