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NEWS: Man Arrested for Threatening Evangelion Studio Khara on Twitter


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ErikaD.D



Joined: 09 Jun 2019
Posts: 658
PostPosted: Wed Oct 16, 2019 10:14 am Reply with quote
It makes me wonder is Japan still a safe country especially with this year's KyoAni fire, stabbing attack and now this. Sad
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Jeff Bauersfeld



Joined: 07 Dec 2015
Posts: 109
PostPosted: Wed Oct 16, 2019 10:53 am Reply with quote
ErikaD.D wrote:
It makes me wonder is Japan still a safe country especially with this year's KyoAni fire, stabbing attack and now this. Sad


With only mild hyperbole, that is basically a Tuesday in the US and I want to say we are still considered one of the safer developed countries. I'm sure the statistics still show that Japan is still one of the safest countries in thre world despite recent events.
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whiskeyii



Joined: 29 May 2013
Posts: 2242
PostPosted: Wed Oct 16, 2019 12:50 pm Reply with quote
I feel like a lot of these incidents show that Japan really needs better mental health services. :/ While I know that mentally ill people are way, waaaaaay more likely to be harmed than to harm others, it does feel like a lot of the reported motivations seem to mired in delusions on the part of the suspects. Maybe if they had access to help, they wouldn’t end up lashing out like this.
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Everlasting Coconut



Joined: 22 Jul 2019
Posts: 290
PostPosted: Wed Oct 16, 2019 12:51 pm Reply with quote
ErikaD.D wrote:
It makes me wonder is Japan still a safe country especially with this year's KyoAni fire, stabbing attack and now this. Sad


If we measure a country's safety based on threatening things people say on Twitter, then no country is safe.
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Key
Moderator


Joined: 03 Nov 2003
Posts: 18137
Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley)
PostPosted: Wed Oct 16, 2019 1:17 pm Reply with quote
Not the last of this kind of incident that we're going to see, unfortunately.
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AkumaChef



Joined: 10 Jan 2019
Posts: 821
PostPosted: Wed Oct 16, 2019 1:27 pm Reply with quote
Everlasting Coconut wrote:

If we measure a country's safety based on threatening things people say on Twitter, then no country is safe.


You are 100% correct. I don't mean to diminish the seriousness of these threats but the fact is that violent threats are made online, over the phone, and in person thousands of times a day in every country on the planet. This particular one just so happens to be newsworthy to we anime fans given current events. And, as Key said, it will surely happen again. In fact, I'm sure it's happened many other times already without us knowing about it.
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Chrno2



Joined: 28 May 2004
Posts: 6171
Location: USA
PostPosted: Wed Oct 16, 2019 2:17 pm Reply with quote
What the hell is going on Japan, that is causing these oddballs to come out of the wood works?

Hell, even without social media stuff like this would still happen. It's just that social media does make things a little easier to go after people. If this was China (as much as I hate what's going in China) people would be grabbed up before they even touched the keyboard.

And while I don't like extreme policing of social media people need to be dealt with when they are threatening personalities.
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meruru



Joined: 16 Jun 2009
Posts: 470
PostPosted: Wed Oct 16, 2019 2:53 pm Reply with quote
It's a terrible inevitability that when there's any terrorist act heavily featured in the news, there are people that try to copy it. I wouldn't take these events as any sort of indictment on the safety of Japan as a whole, since as far as I'm aware, by most metrics Japan is still quite a safe country.

It's disgusting that the anime community is so toxic in Japan, that there's so many willing to threaten stuff like this. But I don't see it as much different from the gaming community in the west, which is guilty of harassment, stalking, threats, and even a wrongful death by a false report to police.
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AkumaChef



Joined: 10 Jan 2019
Posts: 821
PostPosted: Wed Oct 16, 2019 3:37 pm Reply with quote
Chrno2 wrote:
What the hell is going on Japan, that is causing these oddballs to come out of the wood works?

Nothing.
There hasn't been any sort of change. People like that have always existed, social media has been full of various threats as long as it has existed. Millions of people threaten violence on social media every single day. It's just that we don't hear about most of it. We happened to hear about this one because ANN reported on it.

Quote:

Hell, even without social media stuff like this would still happen. It's just that social media does make things a little easier to go after people.

Exactly. And it's not just the fact that the internet makes it easy for people to go after others without consequences, there's also the fact that modern media spreads/shares news at lightning speed. 20 years ago this guy would have shouted his threat out loud to his drinking buddies and nobody other than them would have heard about it. Today he posts it on the internet, and the magic of the media puts the clickbait in front of us so we all know about it.
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DavetheUsher



Joined: 19 May 2014
Posts: 505
PostPosted: Wed Oct 16, 2019 4:42 pm Reply with quote
meruru wrote:
It's a terrible inevitability that when there's any terrorist act heavily featured in the news, there are people that try to copy it. I wouldn't take these events as any sort of indictment on the safety of Japan as a whole, since as far as I'm aware, by most metrics Japan is still quite a safe country.


And any kind of threat or statement made to an animation studio after the KyoAni thing is gonna be heavily scrutinized and taken more seriously now than it would have been before KyoAni. Even if it's just people venting or joking.

Quote:
It's disgusting that the anime community is so toxic in Japan, that there's so many willing to threaten stuff like this. But I don't see it as much different from the gaming community in the west, which is guilty of harassment, stalking, threats, and even a wrongful death by a false report to police.


People who think they're doing the right thing and try to justify it by saying they're "on the right side of history" don't think they're doing anything wrong.
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kotomikun



Joined: 06 May 2013
Posts: 1205
PostPosted: Wed Oct 16, 2019 5:19 pm Reply with quote
whiskeyii wrote:
I feel like a lot of these incidents show that Japan really needs better mental health services. :/ While I know that mentally ill people are way, waaaaaay more likely to be harmed than to harm others


...and that's probably where you should have left it, because up to that point, you were right. There's no correlation between mental illness and terrorist attacks; "homicidal maniac" isn't in the DSM. We just keep going to that because it's an easier solution than trying to deal with dangerous political movements and our general love of violence (and in the US, the gun debate).

I don't think there's much cause for (additional) panic; after something like this happens, there are always a bunch of copycat threats, and the police are going after those much more aggressively now for obvious reasons. Very unlikely that these people would have actually carried out the same sort of attack.
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Jeff Bauersfeld



Joined: 07 Dec 2015
Posts: 109
PostPosted: Wed Oct 16, 2019 7:24 pm Reply with quote
kotomikun wrote:
whiskeyii wrote:
I feel like a lot of these incidents show that Japan really needs better mental health services. :/ While I know that mentally ill people are way, waaaaaay more likely to be harmed than to harm others


...and that's probably where you should have left it, because up to that point, you were right. There's no correlation between mental illness and terrorist attacks; "homicidal maniac" isn't in the DSM. We just keep going to that because it's an easier solution than trying to deal with dangerous political movements and our general love of violence (and in the US, the gun debate).


I believe I heard about a study from an NPR piece where some academic or high-up in the criminal justice community ran the statistics on mass shootings/voluntary mass casualty events in America in the last decade or two, and a majority did not have a mental health cause. Basically, it's just easier for the general public to believe that a mass killer is "crazy" than they intentionally committed an atrocity. Makes for easy, sound-bite solutions that are nowhere near as nuanced as they need to be.
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Rentwo



Joined: 05 Oct 2019
Posts: 184
PostPosted: Thu Oct 17, 2019 3:10 am Reply with quote
Jeff Bauersfeld wrote:
I believe I heard about a study from an NPR piece where some academic or high-up in the criminal justice community ran the statistics on mass shootings/voluntary mass casualty events in America in the last decade or two, and a majority did not have a mental health cause. Basically, it's just easier for the general public to believe that a mass killer is "crazy" than they intentionally committed an atrocity. Makes for easy, sound-bite solutions that are nowhere near as nuanced as they need to be.


That might be true, but remember that 'mass shooting' is a very broad term. A lot of people, including media outlets and politicians, only think of mass shootings as specifically a lone gunman going into a school, church, or shopping center and trying to kill as many people as they can before they get taken out by the police. But in actuality that makes up only a very, very small percentage of mass shootings in America. A mass shooting is any time a gun is fire and there's 3 or more victims. Burglarly gone wrong, gang violence, murder suicides, routine police shoot outs. Those types of situations are what the vast majority of 'mass shootings' actually are. So in that way I would believe most mass shooters are normal people, since most mass shooters are just regular criminals doing criminal things. I don't know if the KyoAni guy was ever found to be officially mentally ill or not, but from what I've read most arsonists are.
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AkumaChef



Joined: 10 Jan 2019
Posts: 821
PostPosted: Thu Oct 17, 2019 8:40 am Reply with quote
kotomikun wrote:
...and that's probably where you should have left it, because up to that point, you were right. There's no correlation between mental illness and terrorist attacks; "homicidal maniac" isn't in the DSM. We just keep going to that because it's an easier solution than trying to deal with dangerous political movements and our general love of violence (and in the US, the gun debate).


I think that distinction comes down to the difference between a layman's definition of the term "mentally ill" and a professional clinician's definition. I think most people would consider a mass murderer to be "crazy". Perhaps not with a literal, specific, diagnosis--but simply because normal people tend not to kill others. Something had to go wrong in a killer's mind in order for that person to willingly take other people's lives. Perhaps there was no mental defect which created the motivation to kill, but some kind of defect must have switched off a killer's compassion for others. Perhaps it's wrong to call that "crazy", but to the average person it sure seems like there's something wrong with a killer's mind or mental state. "Homicidal Maniac" might not be in the DSM specifically, but the DSM does contain a variety of diagnoses that could be the underlying problem, and to the layman who does not use medical terms pedantically those two are functionally identical. Of course that does not mean that all killers have a mental defect, but it's certainly easy to see why the general public might think this.

Quote:
I don't think there's much cause for (additional) panic; after something like this happens, there are always a bunch of copycat threats, and the police are going after those much more aggressively now for obvious reasons. Very unlikely that these people would have actually carried out the same sort of attack.


Agreed 100%.
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v1cious



Joined: 31 Dec 2002
Posts: 6199
Location: Houston, TX
PostPosted: Fri Oct 18, 2019 2:38 pm Reply with quote
Chrno2 wrote:
What the hell is going on Japan, that is causing these oddballs to come out of the wood works?

Hell, even without social media stuff like this would still happen. It's just that social media does make things a little easier to go after people. If this was China (as much as I hate what's going in China) people would be grabbed up before they even touched the keyboard.

And while I don't like extreme policing of social media people need to be dealt with when they are threatening personalities.


Sounds like a typical post on Twitter. The only difference is Japan does something about it.
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