I can sort of see the thought process that leads to this. “There aren’t many Japanese people in Australia and NZ, we need to target non-Asians in our advertising to increase soy sauce consumption!” -> “Japanese people use a lot of soy sauce, we should target them directly by placing an ad in a Japanese magazine” -> “Let’s translate one of our other ads into Japanese!”. Which leads to… *facepalm*

Nice soy sauce though. For my Japanese marketing/advertising and consumer information needs, I usually browse Japan Marketing News and JapanConsuming. On a more lighthearted note, Konbini Life is fun – microreviews of various sweets bought at convenience stores in Japan. Lisa at TokyoMango also has the occasional entry about (generally non-edible) interesting Japanese products.

And I’ll return to more regular blogging… some day. Maybe not right now, but I just had to share this.

To sum it up, 25 year old man Tomohiro Kato rented a 2 ton truck from Shizuoka and drove it 150km to Tokyo and into a crowd of people in Akihabara. He then got out of the car and started stabbing people at random with a survival knife. The police showed up, overpowered him and took him away while ambulances showed up and took the wounded to various hospitals.

He claimed to have been acting alone and there were initially reports of him being a gang member, but those claims appear to be false. The reasons given for his rampage were “I was tired of life” and “I wanted to kill anyone” (in the sense of “I wanted to kill people and had no particular target in mind” rather than “I wanted to kill everyone”).

The Akihabara area is of course plenty busy on Sundays with shoppers buying up on games, computer gear, anime/manga merchandise, porn etc. and the station itself (where the murderer was allegedly heading towards) is a reasonable sized transportation hub linking something like 4 above ground train lines and 2 subway lines. That coupled with the Sunday tradition of closing the main street to form a pedestrian mall meant that there would be plenty of foot traffic to target. Though I suspect that tradition is going to come to an end very shortly. Which is a shame, given that I keep meaning to go and always wind up in Harajuku on Sundays instead. But I digress.

Interestingly there’s also this piece of news on the NHK site – Advance notice of murder found in website – that posts were found on “a bulletin board” warning of the attack. It doesn’t specify what board and the only outlet reporting this is NHK so it’s a bit dodgy (then again, it’s from this morning’s news a few hours ago), but it’s an indication that this may go a bit deeper. The coming days will tell, I suppose, I don’t really want to speculate too much.

There’s a fairly in depth article on The Guardian, if you want to know more/my summary was crappy. I wouldn’t trust CNN on this – they’re using the same AP article as Fox News with an equally sensationalistic headline (”Man on ‘murder mission’ stabs 17 in Tokyo” and “Man Plows Into Crowd, Goes On Stabbing Rampage; 7 Reported Dead” respectively). I wonder when they turned into such a piece of shit. Though their T shirt scheme cracks me up. I alternate between thinking it’s a terrible idea and a brilliant one.

Via BBC, NHK, Kotaku (well, kind of), The Guardian and Yomiuri Online