Japan: 4 Dead, Suspect Arrested in Gun & Knife Attack

Facts

• On Friday, the Japanese police arrested 31-year-old Masanori Aoki for allegedly killing four people, including two police officers, in a rare gun and knife attack in the central prefecture of Nagano on Thursday.¹
• Per the police, Aoki, who reportedly barricaded himself in his home after the attacks, has confessed to killing one of the officers, saying, "It's true that I shot him. I killed him."²
• He was formally arrested on suspicion of murdering one of the officers and is likely to be arrested later for the other deaths, Nagano regional police chief Iwao Koyama said, adding the accused is not contesting the charge.³
• Aoki, son of the speaker of Nakano's city assembly, is accused of stabbing a woman, shooting two police officers dead, and murdering an older woman who was found injured at the scene and later pronounced dead.⁴
• While Koyama stated that more than 100 officers are working on investigating the "how and why" of this "extremely heinous act," a 72-year-old eyewitness claims "a man wearing camouflage and carrying a large knife" announced after killing the woman: "I killed her because I wanted to."³
• Gun crime is rare in Japan, with nine shooting incidents and four deaths reported last year. Moreover, this is the first time since 1990 that multiple officers have been killed in the line of duty in Japan.⁵

Sources: ¹BBC News, ²NHK, ³France 24, ⁴Al Jazeera, and ⁵Washington Post.

Narratives

• Narrative A, as provided by East Asia Forum. Despite a handful of high-profile incidents, such as the assassination of former PM Shinzo Abe, Japan remains one of the safest nations in the world. Crime has risen, but only to pre-COVID levels, and is overall trending downwards. The rare instances of violent crime do not reflect a significant increase in crime.
• Narrative B, as provided by FT. Japan's reputation as a safe nation is well deserved, but its methodology for collecting crime statistics needs to be revised as many important metrics are manipulated while certain crimes go unreported. We are seeing an uncovering of the hidden world of crime in the country as the public grows more fearful of crime and more skeptical of the police.