Tragedy in Akihabara

While writing my paper on digital youth for a conference in Tokyo next week, I learned about the terrible tragedy in Akihabara, the electronics capital of Japan. According to the media accounts I've read, a twenty-five year old factory worker, Tomohiro Kato, posted several blog entries warning that he was going to kill people. He then drove his truck into a crowded pedestrian area of Akihabara, jumped out of the trunk, and began to slash people with a knife, killing seven and wounding many more. If this had happened in 1930 or 1960, social commentators would have looked at the deadening factory work as the cause of this mental breakdown and rampage. In our era, all of the accounts I've read lay heavy stress on Kato's obsession with video games and anime and the fact that he posted several warnings using a cell phone.

It's impossible not to think about this incident as I work through some ideas about why some technologies, but not others, become the locus of cultural anxiety, why some technologies and their attendant cultural forms become stand-ins for other narratives about discontinuity, disruption, and the lack of futurity. The Japanese crime rate is falling. It's always been incredibly low and is currently even lower than in the last decade. Same with the U.S. The obsession with crime and with youth being bad and wrong and evil and technology-obsessed(sometimes those things are treated as equal, almost) is countered by the stats: as Larry Grossberg points out in his incredible book CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE: KIDS, POLITICS, AND AMERICA'S FUTURE, all of the normal indicators suggest this is the healthiest generation (lower suicide, violence, mental health, self-reported happiness level, fond attachment to parents, etc.) So why is our popular narrative otherwise? Why do we insist these kids need surveillance (our schools are armed camps these days), protection, and constant chastising . . . and why are we blaming mobile technologies for their supposed "decline."

These are the questions I am trying to answer, and they are given a terrible burden of tragedy by Kato's rampage.

Of course, in the US we have become all too familiar with the mass murder in an educational establishment, from Columbine to the present. Should we blame video games? Or do we look at the deeper causes that might lead a youth to break down and resort to the ultimate violence? Do we ask what about our society and the future it offers prompts kids to turn, obsessively, to fantasy? And, of course, when the fantasy is no longer a palliative against despair, why do kids turn to violence that, they know, will make them famous in a way that their dead-end lives never will. That is chilling to contemplate.

Was it computer games that contributed to Kato's mental break with morality and reality? Or did his various blogs and games and anime characters give him some release for a long time (he was reported to have been obsessed with them since childhood) even though they finally failed to soothe his loneliness (again as reported in the media) and alienation.

The problem with drawing cause-and-effect social morality from one tragedy is that there are many, many ways to make the connections. And making one narrative, of course, blinds one to other ways of analyzing the individual incident and the larger socialproblem. Factory work? A terrible economy? A dead-end life in a culture that promised that the corporation was the "family" and would employ one and take care of one forever? That is a narrative too, and a plausible one.

These are the questions we will be exploring at the Digital Youth conference in Tokyo. How heartbreaking that we will be discussing this together, with scholars from all over Asia, in the aftermath of such a terrible incident. At the same time, perhaps we will be able to provide some insights that counter the cliches and help us all to understand what, in the end, is incomprehensible, overwhelming, and deeply disturbing.

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Photo of Akihabara out of focus, courtesy of Ayoumali's photostream on Flickr. Please click on the image for full documentation.