“It Could Have Been Anyone.” On May 11th, a woman in her 80s was stabbed in the back with what appeared to be a knife on the street in Wakaba Ward, Chiba Prefecture, and later died. Based on security camera footage from the area, the Chiba Prefectural Police arrested a 15-year-old male junior high school student living in the city on suspicion of murder on the 12th. The boy admitted to the charges, saying “It Could Have Been Anyone.”
The father responded to a media interview and said, “Since my son started junior high school, there has been very little conversation in the household, perhaps because he didn’t want people to interfere with his life. (On the day of the incident) I came home from work around 8pm, just as my son was finishing dinner, and there didn’t seem to be anything unusual about him.” The grandfather also said, “My grandson was acting the same as always, and I didn’t know that a crime had happened nearby until this morning.”
Crimes where suspects make statements similar to “It Could Have Been Anyone” do occur from time to time. This year, such incidents have also occurred.

On the night of April 14th, a female high school student (15) living in an apartment in Sakura Ward, Saitama City, was stabbed with a knife on the premises. She was taken to the hospital, but died. The man arrested was a construction worker living nearby. During questioning, he stated that he had been walking around the area pretending to be a passerby, looking for a woman to kill. The victim was a woman he had not met, and the incident is similar to the Chiba incident in that he happened to encounter the suspect.

On the evening of May 7th, a man living in Nagano Prefecture brandished a knife on the platform of Toudaimae Station (Bunkyo Ward) on the Tokyo Metro Namboku Line, injuring two men. He stated that “One of the reasons I committed the crime was that I could no longer make ends meet.”

However, he also said that “I was abused by my parents in junior high school. I wanted to show the world that children go astray and commit crimes when things go too far.” The victim of this incident was a university student who was waiting for the train on the platform and had no time to defend himself. It was a planned murder in the sense that the perpetrator brought a knife from home, but the victim did not expect this. In that sense, it is the same as the cases in Chiba and Saitama.

Indiscriminate crimes, there is no connection between the factors that motivated the crime and the victims. This reminds me of the Akihabara massacre in June 2008. After an impersonator appeared on an anonymous Internet bulletin board, the perpetrator committed a major crime as a way to prove that he was the real one. Although it is a hard motive to believe at first glance, the motive for a crime is not necessarily an “understandable” factor. The Akihabara incident was a prime example of this.

However, the receivers of information, who have become a hundred million critics, try to push it into the realm of “understandable”. This is also to feel reassured. The situation is different from that person’s and my situation. Therefore, I will not become a perpetrator. And this sense of relief also serves as a means of concealing the essential factors.

Indiscriminate crimes are not an extension of the perpetrator and the victim, or of us, who are disconnected from each other. It seems to me that the criminal elements lie dormant like magma within those who have socially excluded or isolated themselves for their own peace of mind.

※Translating Japanese articles into English with AI