A knife-wielding Japanese man who was detained in Tokyo this week wanted to reassure parents all over the world that tough love can ruin their kids, citing his own miserable childhood, according to a report released on Friday ( May 9 ).
The 43-year-old has been charged with attempted murder after allegedly assaulting a 20-year-old gentleman on Wednesday at Tokyo’s Todai-mae Station, which is close to the University of Tokyo, one of the country’s most prominent higher education system.
A police spokeswoman previously told AFP that the think” with the intent to kill” slashed the defendant’s nose and various body parts with a knife-like subject he was carrying. He was injured.
When interrogated, the suspect described his threatening parents, who he claimed were preoccupied with his academic success, according to local media.
Public broadcaster NHK and other sources quoted him as telling researchers that” I stopped going to school and had a hard time” as a girl because of them.
” I wanted to show all these families trying to get their children into Todai that their children can get foolish and turn out to be crooks like me,” he said, using a popular name for the University of Tokyo.
According to the reports, he chose Todai-mae Station as the location of the attack because he thought the best university was a synonym for the idea of “educational misuse” by extremely competitive parents.
However, he and the victim were not close friends, so he decided to attack the victim because he was” comfortable” with him, as NHK reported.
In Japan, which has one of the toughest gun laws in the world and a lower murder rate, violent murder is fairly uncommon.
However, there are occasionally murders and stabbing sprees, including the death of Shinzo Abe in 2022.
Five staff members at a Tokyo key school were only minorly hurt the day after the knife attack when two men broke into the building.
And on Halloween, a 24-year-old person in a costume that resembles the Joker attacked a customer and started a fire on a coach in the cash.
A 34-year-old gentleman was reportedly detained on suspicion of attempted murder after reportedly slashing a person with a weapon in the town of Osaka, causing minor injury.