First off, the information I’m about to relate to the reader will be really confusing without knowing some terminology, so I’ll assume ignorance for the time being. First off, for anybody that doesn’t know, anime is a form of animation that comes from Japan. The style itself is very distinctive, and often recognizable by its archetypical portrayal of anatomy, although the traditions are sometimes broken by other series; the characters’ chins are very pointed, the noses are thick lines when seen from the front and pointy curves from the side, and the eyes are typically gigantic and almost circular, or noticably narrow. Some series also use a combination of these two eye shapes; the women will have the huge eyes while the men have the narrow ones. People who are so into anime that it begins to affect their daily lives are referred to as otaku, a Japanese word for geek. Otaku are generally very reclusive, sometimes overweight, and a good deal of otaku also delve into more sexually explicit anime. A form of this that they enjoy is pictures of younger anime girls or anime girls portrayed in a pre-adolescent way, called lolicon or “loli” for short.
Another thing you should know is that the otaku subculture is infamous for, like many other sub-cultures, producing a few horrific murders. Otaku murderers stand out, though, in the way that they are influenced by their long-term love of lolicon to sexually assault and murder younger girls instead of women. Now, the reason I bring this up is because one such murder happened a few months ago. Ryou Katsuki, a 21-year old futon maker, was recently found guilty of kidnapping and strangling 5-year old Yukimaro Narita to death, and when police investigated his home, they found that he owned a huge stash of anime memorbilia. If you want all the details, you can get them here:
http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2008/12/07/mahou-shoujo-obsessed-otaku-murders-5-year-old-girl/
The media coverage is, in typical fashion of an otaku murder, concentrating much less on the details of the murder and the man’s personal life, including any mental disorders he may have been diagnosed with, and more on the fact that he was an otaku. In doing this, the intent is to create a scapegoat for the crime and make it go away faster as a result. In truth, as with other media-related murders, the problem is not the media itself, but a long, unchecked history of mental disorders ignored by the murderer’s family, ignored by the murderer’s friends, ignored by the school officials that worked with the murderer on a daily basis, and ignored by everybody else around the murderer in general.
For a great example of this, look at Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter. (I bring him up because, other than the reason I mention, he was used as another scapegoat by Jack Thompson and others to blame all of society’s ills on video games, as Cho spent a lot of time playing Counter-Strike.) From an early age, he displayed strong mental illness, which simply got worse as he got older. And people just dealt with it. He threw tantrums over having to go to school. He had trouble talking with other students and was often bullied as a result. He wrote a hit list. He obsessed over the Columbine murders and wrote a message on his binder telling his classmates to fuck off and burn in hell. He stalked other women and harassed them over instant messengers. He wrote twisted screenplays with murder incorporated in some form. And how he was never actually treated for anything despite all this is probably one of the most pathetic examples of mass ignorance I have seen in the modern day, up there with Neo-Conservatism. Fuck’s sake, he even mailed videos to MSNBC threatening to murder everybody he didn’t like… that’s even worse than what the Columbine shooters did.
The bottom line of this rant is that media in general, no matter how explicit, does not cause murder; most of the time, all it does is influence a mentally ill person to model their actions after it. In other cases, though, the person will become unhealthily obsessed with the media, but this would count as a mental disorder, which I will discuss in a second. The reason that so many people out there blame everything on anime/video games/explicit music/violent movies is because people don’t like to take responsibility for anything. When a mentally ill person appears, people make a diagnosis at the most, then just go on with their lives as if nothing had ever happened. Threatening letters? Just begging for attention. Hostile actions? Just a phase. Video of themselves shooting off a whole bunch of guns as if gunning other people down? Just being silly. This mindset of “ignore, then blame” is going to create more murders and create more murderers, that’s all there is to it. If people really have any interest in bringing the numbers of murders down, then they should stop pissing and moaning about how bad <form of media> is and work to better the process by which mental disorders are diagnosed and treated by advising more people to report suspicious activity or contributing money to psychological research. Course, a lot of the people speaking out against “bad” media are social purists who are only interested in using real life happenings to push their personal interests forward, so that obviously won’t happen any time soon.
To finish the rant up, I’ll tack on this aside: yes, I am also defending lolicon, hentai, pornography, satanic metal, rap, and most fetish indulgences. While this probably makes me a gigantic asshole, condemning the above as bad influences after the rant I just typed would make me a bigger asshole, and a hypocrite on top of that.
