Seito Sakakibara
Seito Sakakibara (in German: "Student Sakakibara"; * around 1983 ) was the self-given alias of a 14-year-old student who killed two other children and injured three others in 1997 in the Japanese city of Kobe . The real name of juvenile offenders can not be published under Japanese law . In the files he is therefore called Young A performed in English-language media as Boy A . The news of the juvenile child murderer attracted attention far beyond Japan. In German-speaking countries, the case became known as that of the Kobe school killer .
Deeds
On February 10, 1997 at around 4 pm, two schoolgirls were attacked with a hammer, one of them seriously injured.
His first victim was Ayaka Yamashita, a ten-year-old elementary school student from Suma-ku District , who was beaten with an iron bar on March 15, 1997. She died on March 27, 1997 as a result of the attack caused by a brain contusion. On the same day that Yamashita was attacked, another girl was seriously injured by knife wounds in the street.
The next victim was found on May 27th. It was about the eleven-year-old special school student Jun Hase , who disappeared on May 24, 1997 on the way from his parents' house to his grandfather and has been missing since then. His severed head was found at the gate of a primary school, in his mouth a note with Japanese inscription in red was found (excerpt):
“This is the beginning of the game (...) You guys from the police, stop me if you can (...) I have an urgent need to see people die, it's a thrill for me to commit murders. A bloody dish is necessary for my years of great bitterness. "
The following was also to be read in faulty English:
"Shooll kill"
The torso was found in a nearby forest. Strangulation was found to be the cause of death in this case .
Contact with the media
On June 6, 1997, the local daily Kobe Shimbun received an anonymous letter. The document was also written in red ink, had three pages and consisted of 1,440 words, including a name consisting of six Kanji characters ( 酒鬼 薔薇 聖 斗 ) , which can be understood as Seito Sakakibara . The same six characters, which stand individually for alcohol, devil, rose, saint and fight, were already on the piece of paper from the mouth of the killed boy. The comparative written evaluation showed agreement. The text read as follows:
“Well, this is the beginning of the game. (...) For the purpose of this game I am putting my life on the line (...) If I get caught, I might be hanged (...) The police should be more angry and more committed in my pursuit (...) Only if I kill am I free from the constant hatred I suffer from and able to find peace again. Only when I inflict pain on people can I relieve my own pain. "
The author also confessed to killing Jun Hase . He also charged the Japanese education system with making him an "invisible person".
When the media initially reproduced the name as Onibara (in German: Rose of the Devil), he furiously threatened in a second letter:
"From now on, if you get my name wrong or if my mood spoils me, I will kill three pieces of vegetables every week (...) If you think I can only kill children, you are very wrong."
Arrest, conviction and release
However, further murders were prevented by the timely arrest of the 14-year-old high school student on June 28, 1997, which was made possible by anonymous information. At first he was only suspected of murdering Jun Hase . In the room of the arrested person, in addition to thousands of manga volumes, anime and porn videos, there was in particular an incomplete protocol of the acts. A few days later, the perpetrator confessed to both murders and the three other attacks. He said he drank the blood of his male victim and played with his mutilated corpse. Further investigations also revealed that he was a gun fanatic and an avid reader of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf .
Despite his young age, the student Sakakibara was sentenced to unlimited imprisonment on October 17, 1997 for two murders and attempted murder in three other cases, and was sent to a juvenile detention center. On March 11, 2004, after completing rehabilitation and education programs, he was released on parole at the age of 21. The probation ended on December 31 of the same year. The man was deemed to have been rehabilitated to a healthy degree and was released from state supervision. Since he was a minor at the time of the crime, his true identity is still not published, as is the newly assigned place of residence.
A group of people, including a lawyer specializing in miscarriages of justice and the principal of the school the convict attended, insist that Sakakibara was wrongly convicted and pointed to inconsistencies in the investigation.
Others, on the other hand, sharply criticize the release and, based on the unusual public announcement, suspect that Sakakibara was in fact not ready to be released, even according to the authorities, and that he should have continued to be detained. This criticism was expressed particularly bitterly three months later when an eleven-year-old girl killed a classmate.
consequences
In view of the large amounts of adult material in Sakakibara's possession, the politician Shizuka Kamei called for access to such media to be made more difficult. Sakakibara’s acts are also cited as a trigger for a change in the age limit for the applicability of juvenile criminal law in Japan. The revision of the law finally came into force in 2001 and lowered the criminal age of juveniles from 16 to 14 years.
backgrounds
Even when he was at primary school, Sakakibara carried knives with him and wrote in his diary:
"I can dampen my annoyance by holding a survival knife or twirling scissors like a pistol."
Already at the age of twelve he was noticed by extreme animal cruelty , for example he lined up frogs on the street in order to run over them with his bicycle. He also beheaded pigeons, he had already started mutilating cats and a little later - on the way to school - with physical attacks on girls.
He had his first erection, as he later told his doctors, when he was a fifth grader dissecting a frog. He also said he masturbated over the idea of eating his guts in his first year of high school.
After the attacks on March 16, he wrote in his diary:
“I conducted sacred experiments today to confirm how fragile human beings are (...) I slammed the hammer when the girl turned to me. I think I hit her a couple of times, but I was too excited to remember. "
The following week, March 23, he added:
“This morning my mother said to me, 'Poor girl. It must have died. ' There's no sign of getting caught. (…) I thank you, Buddha , for this. (...) Please keep protecting me. "
The perpetrator's mother apparently encouraged development by encouraging her son to excel at school, even though social workers had already warned her that he was mentally unstable.
The behaviors and fantasies described are, as a preliminary stage to - real - actions on people, a typical feature of the biography of later serial killers. There is little doubt that Sakakibara would have committed other murders.
Comparable cases
The police initially saw similarities in this case with that of the Zodiac killer . The common ground, however, is limited to the perpetrator's contact with the media. The parallel with the case of the Japanese serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki is much clearer . As with this one, Sakakibara's criminal career began very early.
Literary debates
Since the 1990s, current social phenomena have been increasingly dealt with in Japanese literature, including topics such as a lack of attention, neglect and violence in families or in the Japanese school system. There are fictional portraits of tragic childhoods, some of which were derived from real events such as the one around Sakakibara Seitō and can be understood as internal Japanese and global system-critical texts. Kuroda Akira 's Made in Japan (メ イ ド イ ン ジ ャ パ ン, Meido in Japan 2001), for example, paints a picture of the “neglect of affluence” of four male adolescents in connection with drug use and violent media content. The story of Kirino Natsuo ’s Real World (リ ア ル ワ ー ル ド, riaru wārudo 2003), on the other hand, is located directly in the school environment and describes the murder of a high school student and the subsequent media coverage. A “game” with these same media, as in the Sakakibara case, is suggested. Further examples of authors and books dealing with this topic are Ryū Murakami ( Piercing (ピ ア ッ シ ン グ, piasshingu) 1994; In the Miso Soup (イ ン ザ ・ ミ ソ ス ー プ, In za miso sūpu) 1997), Kirino Natsuo ( I'm sorry, Mama 2004), Yū Miri ( Gold Rush (ゴ ー ル ド ラ ッ シ ュ, Gōrudo rasshu) 1998) or Takami Kōshun ( Battle Royale (バ ト ル ・ ロ ワ イ ア ル, Batoru Rowaiaru) 1999).
literature
- Lisette Gebhardt (2015): "Psychograms of a Lost Generation: Childhood and Adolescence in Contemporary Japanese Literature". In: Michael Kinski, Harald Salomon and Eike Großmann (eds.): Childhood in Japanese history - ideas and experiences. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, pp. 453-488. ISBN 978-3-447-10502-6
- Kobe killer set free. The Japan Times, March 11, 2004, accessed November 29, 2014 .
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Japan: Invisible Existence , in: Der Spiegel, June 16, 1997.
- ^ A b Hidenori Fujita : The Reform of the Japanese Education System as an Answer to Delinquency . In: Gesine Foljanty-Jost (Ed.): Juvenile Delinquency in Japan. Reconsidering the "Crisis" . Brill, Leiden / Boston 2003, p. 143-172 .
- ^ 14-Year-Old Arrested in Japan for the Brutal Slaying of a Child , in: The New York Times Online, June 29, 1997.
- ↑ Kobe killer set free. Reformatory parole 'has grown up'. , in: The Japan Times, March 11, 2004.
- ↑ Trevor Ryan: Creating 'Problem Kids': Juvenile Crime in Japan and Revisions to the Juvenile Act . In: ZJapanR / J.Japan.L. 19 . 2005, p. 153-188 .
- ^ A b c Lisette Gebhardt : Psychograms of a Lost Generation: Childhood and Adolescence in Contemporary Japanese Literature . In: Michael Kinski, Harald Salomon and Eike Großmann (eds.): Childhood in Japanese history - ideas and experiences. Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2015, p. 453-488 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Seito Sakakibara |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Japanese man who killed several children as a minor student |
| DATE OF BIRTH | around 1983 |