Japan’s government is considering new measures to contain social media-driven violence after the arrest of a man found keeping nine bodies in his home — individuals he allegedly killed after expressing a desire to commit suicide on Twitter.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also faced calls to limit potentially violent speech on Twitter during a visit to Japan this week.
Police arrested Takahiro Shiraishi on October 31 after finding the dismembered remains of nine people in his apartment in Zama, Kanagawa. According to the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, Shiraishi told police, “I severed the body in my apartment and put it in a cooler … to conceal evidence that I killed the person.”
Law enforcement officials said he was keeping three coolers and several boxes full of body parts in his apartment, attempting to cover the smell of the decomposing remains with cat litter. The attempt, one neighbor told Asahi, failed, and the halls outside his apartment suffered “an extremely pungent smell that [he] had never experienced.”
The Japan Times reports that Shiraishi, 27, “worked in the sex industry as a tout.”
Police revealed this week that Shiraishi allegedly used Twitter, following the Japanese-language “suicide recruitment” hashtag, to target suicidal people to kill. His final victim, a 23-year-old woman, had taken to Twitter to discuss her desire to die, posting, “I’m looking for someone to die with me.”
Shiraishi reportedly confessed that he reached out to her claiming that he also wanted to die, but instead of killing himself, he killed her and cut her body into pieces.
Shiraishi confessed to police that he did the same to the other eight people, among them 14-year-old and 21-year-old students.
In light of the murders, the Japanese government is facing pressure to prevent the use of social media to schedule mass suicides, a growing problem in the nation. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga announced last week that Cabinet ministers will meet to discuss an assortment of mental health initiatives, law enforcement programs, and other measures to curb the use of social media for deadly purposes.
“I want each relevant minister to exercise leadership so that the government can unite to take measures to prevent similar cases,” Suga said on Friday. “The use of Twitter – a social networking site that is difficult to keep an eye on – to exploit the cries for help by victims who wrote about committing suicide is despicable.”
The ministers are expected to debut their plan at the end of the year; direct government regulation of social media content is on the table.
Dorsey, the Twitter CEO, told Japanese outlet NHK this week that the Shiraishi case is “extremely sad” but “added that it was not realistic to expect the service to auto-delete the kind of tweets said to have been involved,” according to the BBC. Twitter’s terms of service in Japan do reportedly now prohibit the promotion of suicide or self-harm.
The Singapore-based Straits Times notes that crimes facilitated by social media have increased significantly in number in Japan, with over 900 cases of minors who have been victims of criminals on social media.
Japan has as much of a suicide and murder problem as a social media problem. An estimated 20,000 people kill themselves in Japan each year, the highest rate of any Group of Seven industrialized nation, according to AFP. The nation has witnessed a number of attempts at mass suicides in recent memory, including mass suicides organized through “suicide websites.” AFP recalls two major cases: one in which 91 people killed themselves in 2005 after meeting online, and one in which five people failed to kill themselves in 2009 by trying to burn coal in a car.
A study released this year found that nearly one out of four Japanese young people have considered suicide.
While Shiraichi allegedly chose suicidal people as his vulnerable population, other Japanese mass murderers have targeted the disabled and elderly. In 2016, disabled center employee Satoshi Uematsu was arrested for allegedly killing 19 people and 26 others interned at a facility for the disabled. He told police upon his arrest, “I hope that disabled people will disappear.” Uematsu had also lobbied the speaker of Japan’s House of Representatives to legalize euthanasia.
That same year, nursing home employee Hayato Imai was arrested for the murder of an 87-year-old resident at the home. Evidence rapidly accumulated that Imai was involved in the deaths of at least two other individuals at the home who “fell off” a balcony.
The elderly have also increasingly participated in murders, and murder-suicides, particularly older couples who wish to help their spouses end their lives.
In 2013, Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso told the nation’s elderly to “hurry up and die.”
The high number of elderly Japanese and minimal population growth – coupled with above-average instances of suicidal desires documented in young people – have alarmed Japanese authorities. Japan’s population is collapsing, and trends show that young Japanese people are increasingly uninterested in sex. Neary half of Japan’s under-30 population have never had a sexual experience, according to a government report released this year. Many do not express any interest in having them, in a phenomenon the Japanese call “celibacy syndrome.”
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