Did an overbearing mother turn Tomohiro Kato into a killer?

The media continues to investigate possible reasons why Tomohiro Kato went on a knife rampage in Akihabara, and one tabloid is focusing on his strict mother:

“We had an excess of love from our mother, who believed good education leads to a good future,” his younger brother told the Shukan Gendai weekly.

Speaking about the family and calling Kato “that” or “culprit”, he said their mother was strict, recalling one evening when Kato was around 13.

“The four of us were at the dinner table without saying a word as usual… Mother suddenly grew angry about ‘that’, spread newspaper sheets in the hallway and poured his rice, soup and rest of the meal over them.”

“‘You eat there!,’ she said. ‘That’ was crying while eating from what was piled up on the newspaper,” the brother said, adding the father had just remained silent at the family home in the northern city of Aomori.

The mother used to order her sons to redo homework so that it would impress school teachers, the brother said.

“She always cast her eye on what we wrote in what we called ‘censorship’. She always sought perfection.

“We were ordered to rewrite if she spotted one incorrect or ugly character … It wasn’t a correction by using an eraser but trashing the entire piece of paper and starting writing again.”

Kato started acting violently at around the age of 15, the brother said.

After entering a prestigious high school, his class rank quickly slipped as he rubbed shoulders with the region’s brightest children. He felt he was losing his mother’s affection.

“The culprit quickly realised her affection had shifted to me and misunderstood he was useless,” the brother said.

The brother said he saw Kato shouting to his mother: “You are dumping me!”

I don’t know if this made him crazy, but it was probably more traumatic than all that anime he watched.