25 years old at the time, Tomohiro Kato drove a two-tonne truck into passers-by in broad daylight before getting out of the vehicle and stabbing random people in the crowd with a double-edged blade, killing seven people. and ten wounded.
He told police he was “tired of living” and had come “to kill anyone”.
Mr Kato’s act was the result of “meticulous preparations” and the convict showed “a deliberate intent to kill”, Justice Minister Yoshihisa Furukawa told a press conference in Tokyo on Tuesday. .
“The death sentence was confirmed by sufficient deliberations during the trials. On this basis, I approved the execution after careful consideration,” he added.
“It is a very painful affair which had led to extremely serious consequences and shocked society,” said Mr. Furukawa.
– Many messages on the internet –
The death sentence was upheld by the Court of Appeal in September 2012 after a first instance verdict in March 2011, and Japan’s Supreme Court rejected Mr Kato’s appeal in 2015, making the sentence final.
The son of a banker, Mr. Kato grew up in Aomori, studying in the best high school in this department in northeastern Japan, then opting for a professional course in order to work in the automobile industry.
At the time of the incident, he was a temporary worker in an auto parts factory in a small town in central Japan, and had learned shortly before the massacre that his contract would end at the end of June 2008.
Housed by his employer, he was also going to lose his apartment and had confided on the internet that he feared becoming homeless.
Before taking action, he had sent dozens of messages on an internet forum, via his mobile phone, describing his intentions in detail.
“I will kill people in Akihabara. I will rush my vehicle into the crowd and if it becomes useless I will use a knife. Goodbye everyone,” he wrote hours before the attack.
– Weapons regulations –
During a hearing, Tomohiro Kato had also explained that he had committed this crime because of criticism of which he had been the object on the internet.
Prosecutors say Mr Kato’s self-esteem also suffered when a woman he was communicating with online stopped writing to him, after he sent her a photograph of himself.
After his arrest at the scene of the attack, Mr Kato wrote to a 56-year-old taxi driver injured in the attack to express his regret, and also issued an apology during his trial.
Following this crime, which occurred seven years to the day after the massacre committed by a man armed with a butcher’s knife in an elementary school in Osaka (west), the Japanese authorities had banned the possession of double-edged daggers whose the blade exceeds 5.5 centimeters.
Mr. Kato’s execution is the first application of the death penalty in Japan since last December, when three people sentenced to death for murder were executed by hanging on the same day.
Japan is, along with the United States, one of the last industrialized and democratic countries to still resort to the death penalty, a sentence widely supported by Japanese public opinion.
The Japanese government thinks it is “not appropriate” to abolish the death penalty, considering that “heinous crimes such as mass shootings and murders during armed robbery still occur frequently” , said the Japanese Minister of Justice on Tuesday.