“Handicapped Should Die”

The man targeted heavily handicapped people sleeping in the facility. Breaking into a residential mental healthcare facility in Sagamihara, Kanagawa, before dawn of Tuesday, Satoshi Uematsu, 26, killed 19 people on the bed stabbing with knives and injured other 26. He was arrested by police after appearing to police office. The man believed that he did that for human being.

Having worked in the facility named Yamayuri-en for years, Uematsu knew well about how those handicapped residents were cared. He sneaked into it 2:45 a.m., tied the wrists of the workers in their night shift not let them call outside for help, and then stabbed disabled people on their neck one after another. Uematsu told police that he targeted ones who were not able to have communication.

According to reports, Uematsu began to talk to his co-workers that heavily handicapped people’s lives were meaningless in February. After consultation with police, the facility reported Sagamihara city office about strangeness of him. The office decided to let him hospitalized with mental disease caused by hemp. The hospital released him few weeks later, diagnosing him harmless.

One thing making this case the strangest is that Uematsu wrote a letter to the Speaker of House of Representatives to declare the crime. “I can kill 470 handicapped people. Knowing it as insane, however, I can’t help stand for Japan and the world, when I recall tired face of the parents or sober eyes of the workers,” wrote him. He explained that his aim was bringing a situation in which a heavily handicapped person could be choose euthanasia with consent of guardian, when he or she was difficult in living social life.

Uematsu believed his idea would save the world. “While war will produce many hates with killing hopeful people, killing disabled people can reduce unhappiness to the smallest level,” wrote him. There was a clear discrimination on the disabled in his mind. Also in the letter, he revealed his plan of midnight assault in Yamayuri-en, tying the workers down using plastic wristbands and turning in police.

There is a tendency in Japanese society that a person distinguishes from others. Sharp division between rich and poor, big corporation and small business, powerful and powerless, able and disable or urban and local could cause Uematsu’s idea to eliminate disabled people. He had no idea about real world, where any disabled people were loved ones or diversity would make it stronger. Politics has been incompetent on the problem. “I send condolence from my heart” was the message of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on this terrorism against current Japanese society.