Still safe

IN A world tormented by violence, Japan is remarkably safe. Muggings are rare and the murder rate low. Last year police recorded just a single gun death in a country of 126m people.

The weapon of choice when someone runs amok is a knife. And so it was on July 26th when a young man broke into a care home for the disabled and carried out Japan’s worst mass murder in decades. The killer methodically stabbed over 40 people lying in their beds, killing 19. Most of the wounds were to his victims’ necks.

Police have named the only suspect as Satoshi Uematsu, a 26-year-old former care worker at the home, who is now under arrest. Mr Uematsu had repeatedly threatened to kill disabled people. In February he wrote a letter explaining his goal of a world in which people unable to live unattended lives would be euthanised. It was hand-delivered to the residence of Japan’s Lower House speaker.

The pathology of mass killers is consistent, whatever their nationality. Almost all are young and male, fuelled by aggression and testosterone. In many cases the tripwire for murderous sprees can be an event that unravels their lives—losing a job, for example. Only Mr Uematsu knows what was going through his mind when he drove to the care home in the dead of night, armed with a bag of knives. He had reportedly been fired—hardly surprising, given his attitude to the disabled—and may have nursed a grudge. A brief enforced spell in hospital earlier this year ended when he was released into the care of his family.

His attack will almost certainly trigger more scrutiny of Japan’s post-bubble generation, the children who have come of age in leaner times. In June 2008 Tomohiro Kato murdered seven people by driving a truck into a crowd of shoppers in Tokyo and jumping out to slash pedestrians with a dagger. Mr Kato traced his failures in life in part to his vertiginous descent, aged 25, into the insecure world of temporary employment. But he added: “The crime I committed is all my responsibility.”

Such horrific events have triggered tighter controls (daggers of 6cm or longer have been banned since Mr Kato’s killing spree), and handwringing that Japan is becoming as dangerous as everywhere else. The statistics say otherwise. Crime last year hit a post-war low. Japan still incarcerates fewer of its citizens than almost any other rich country.

The main danger is overreaction. In 2001 a former school janitor murdered eight primary-school children in Osaka with a kitchen knife. Mamoru Takuma’s rampage is the reason why security guards stand outside some schools in Japan to this day—a sad reminder to millions of children that the world can be a scary place.

Japan’s biggest newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, said this week that care homes for the mentally ill might consider following suit. Security is weak and many facilities lack strong doors or gates. But whatever follows, it is hard to protect everyone from the actions of an unstable citizen who is determined to do harm.