Akihabara killer chronicled massacre plans online

The entries posted to a Japanese online discussion board are chilling.

At 5:21 a.m. on Sunday morning, "I'm going to Akihabara to kill people. If my car is destroyed I'll use a knife. Goodbye everyone." and then seconds later, "I'm tired."

At 6:31 a.m., "It's time, I'm leaving."

At 9:48 a.m., "I've entered Kanagawa [prefecture, en-route to Tokyo], I'm taking a rest."

At 11:45 a.m.: "I've reached Akihabara. Today it's a pedestrian area, I think."

Then, finally, at 12:10 p.m., "It's time."

At around 12:30 p.m. a rental truck was driven through pedestrians as they walked across an intersection along the wide Chuo Dori in Akihabara. The road is closed to traffic on Sundays and becomes a "pedestrian heaven" in Japanese. On Sunday it was closer to hell.

Closed circuit TV images, broadcast on Japanese television, show the white truck coming out of the intersection at speed before coming to stop off-camera.

In the moments prior to those images, the truck had hit several pedestrians.

A man can be seen running from the truck towards the busy intersection it's just passed through. The man runs out of view of the camera but seconds later everyone is fleeing in the opposite direction to escape the killer.

Within minutes a suspect, named by local media as Tomohiro Kato, was on the ground, subdued by a police officer. Still images taken at the scene show the detained suspect and a survival knife, apparently blood-stained, lying nearby.

Images from news helicopters that showed paramedics treating people in the middle of the street flashed across Japan. Pools of blood lay on the road. By the evening TV networks were showing cell phone footage shot just after the tragedy.

The death toll rose through the afternoon to hit seven by the end of the day. They ranged in age from 19 to 74-years-old, six were men and one was a woman. An additional 10 people were injured and hospitalized.

The crime stunned Japan. While the grieving begins, questions are already being asked. Inevitably these include "What happened to the social structure of Japan?"

Japan has one of the lowest crime rates in the developed world. The homicide rate was just 1.1 per 100,000 people in 2005, according to figures from Japan's Ministry of Justice. In comparison, the U.K. had a homicide rate of 3.2, Germany 2.9 and the U.S. 5.6, the ministry said.

But more and more these days there are signs that the social fabric that has held Japan together for so long is slowly coming apart at the seams. Where once people had jobs for life and everyone looked out for their neighbors, now many Japanese take temporary jobs to makes ends meet, live in anonymous one-room apartments in vast cities and rarely speak to those around them.

Estimates say up to 1 million out of Japan's population of 128 million simply shut themselves off from the world in their bedrooms. These people, often children, spend their days online, playing computer games and watching television. If they do venture out, it's usually in the middle of the night to a nearby convenience store.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.