June 15, 2008	Sunday	Jamadi-us-Sani 10, 1429

TOKYO: “I’m going to kill people in Akihabara. I’m going to crash into a crowd of people and when the car is down I’ll use a knife. Goodbye everyone” Text message believed to have been posted on the web by Tomohiro Kato at 5:21am the day seven people were slain in Tokyo’s Akihabara district.

In the days leading up to Sunday’s deadly violence, Tomohiro Kato is believed to have written hundreds of anonymous text messages posted from his cell phone to an Internet bulletin board, exposing intimate details of his unhappy life.

The writer complained that his parents ditched him when he reached high school, blaming his plummeting grades on their refusal to help him study. He lamented that he was ugly and had no girlfriend.

“That’s the source of my problems,” police believe the 25-year-old temporary auto parts worker wrote. “I’m in a mood to kill people regardless of who they are.”

The warning was not enough to avert a rampage that left seven dead and 10 injured in the popular Akihabara district.

The internet can link people from around the block and around the world, but it can also, as Kato’s experience seems to show, be a lonely place, a black hole for data. Kato is now reportedly telling police that his repeated internet threats to kill people were a cry for help. If so, they had about the same effect as a man standing in a closet and screaming with a bucket over his head.

“Despite his appeal, nobody responded to him,” said Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara in an interview. The head of Japan’s massive metropolis has been a prominent critic of what he sees as the loss of old social ties and the atomisation of younger generations of Japanese. No amount of online living could compensate for Kato’s loneliness, he argued.

“He was in a virtual world,” Ishihara said. “He was not connected to anyone.”

Police believe Kato blogged about his progress as he traveled from his home 60 miles south of Tokyo to Akihabara, the capital’s sacred turf for digital youth culture.The chosen location is laden with significance.

Akihabara is Tokyo’s subversive neon playground for young Japanese males, the place they come for the pleasures of the maid cafes where young women dressed in tunics and lace cater to their non-sexual fetishes, or to browse for animated films and manga comics that drip with themes of sex and sexual violence.

Akihabara is also the cradle of Kato’s own kind: awkward loners devoted to cartoon worlds populated by animated characters and robots.

In the posts, Kato allegedly professed to be interested only in “two-dimensional girlfriends”.

The five-minute spasm of violence on Sunday, during which Kato allegedly struck at least three people while driving a truck before leaping out and slashing his way through the crowd with a survival knife, has injected a dose of dark reality into Akihabara’s fantasies. The sidewalk shrines of flowers and green tea that swelled in the aftermath were for real victims: a retired dentist shopping with his son for a computer, a music student, a cook.

“Japan is the Petri dish for how far you can go replacing your real life with a virtual one,” said Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica, a study of the global appeal of Japanese pop culture. “But there’s also a dark side to that. Is a virtual life really satisfying? Is it an adequate substitute for a wife and kids, or friends? And if you look at Kato’s postings, you see the outer limits of virtual life.”

If Kato is confirmed as the blogger who dropped a trail of digital breadcrumbs leading to his crime, he would be just one of millions of young Japanese who have come to diarize the details of their lives. Tokyo is awash in young people offering a real time description of where they are now, what they’re doing now, how they feel at this moment.

Kato reportedly told investigators he picked Akihabara because he knew it would be packed with shoppers and gawkers on a Sunday afternoon, when its main thoroughfare is limited to pedestrian traffic.

There was no refuge for the dead and injured. —Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times