Five summers ago, one of Japan’s most respected anime studios became a death trap for dozens of cartoonists. An individual broke in in the morning with two cans of gasoline, shouting like a man possessed: “Go to hell! I’m going to kill you!” Thirty-six employees, most of them in their twenties and thirties, were burned to death by the flames or suffocated on the third floor staircase, whose access to the roof was closed. Thirty-two others were injured, including the arsonist himself, Shinji Aoba. This Friday, a Kyoto court sentenced him to the death penalty.
More than four hundred people, including relatives of the victims, have participated in the draw to be able to attend the reading of the sentence in Kyoto. The magistrates have rejected the mitigating circumstance of temporary insanity raised by the defense, according to which their client suffers from mental imbalances and was not in a position to “distinguish between good and evil.” Admitting the obfuscation of Aoba – who is now 45 years old – the ruling maintains that he knew very well what he was doing, because he had also explained it.
The murderer intended to punish Kyoto Animation (also known as KyoAni), obsessed with the fact that an idea had been stolen from him, after having participated in its annual contest for light novels, mangas and scripts. A fixation considered ridiculous by the prosecution and by the company, which remembers receiving anonymous threatening emails for two years, before the tragedy. Aoba, in fact, has no known work.
Kyoto Animation, on the other hand, is among the four or five most prestigious Japanese studios, with light novels that sell millions of copies, before being converted into mangas (comics), animes (animation) and even video games. The morning of the tragedy, July 18, 2019, its artists were putting the finishing touches on the Violet Garden film, which had previously been a series and illustrated novel for teenagers. His other hits include Clannad, Lucky Star, Kanon and Haruhi Suzumiya. The Kyoto company has the added prestige of working with employees – rather than “freelancers” – whom it trains under the same roof. Something that, unfortunately, on the day of the events became a death trap, due to the crazed irruption of a subject who had purchased forty liters of gasoline at a gas station located five hundred meters away.
During the trial, at the end of last year, the prisoner said that he did not think he was going to cause so many deaths and, in December, he asked for forgiveness for the first time from victims and relatives, still maintaining his mania that he had been kidnapped. Aoba, who spent ten months in a hospital for burns, listened to the sentence without showing any emotion, from a wheelchair. He himself had requested the death penalty during his trial.
End of a marginal drift, which began when in his youth he was locked up for the first time for stealing from a supermarket. He then passed through several reform schools for convicts.
Aoba broke into the studio on July 18, 2019, shouting, “I’m going to kill them,” poured a flammable liquid and set it on fire. Most of the 36 deceased, aged between 20 and 30, were trapped in a staircase of the building when they tried to escape to the roof, whose door was closed.
Aoba now becomes the 108th inmate on death row in Japan. He is awaiting hanging, an execution procedure used by the Japanese for a century and a half. The United States and Japan are the only G-7 countries that continue to apply capital punishment. Last year, however, there were no executions in the Land of the Rising Sun. When there are, the prison authorities place several buttons in the adjacent room – although only one of them activates the trapdoor – so that none of the officials know, with certainty, who the executioner was. .
