[Preacherman]

From the Telegraph, London (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$G3HK4RDQ00FEJQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2003/09/17/wjapan17.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/09/17/ixworld.html):

Three die as worker blows up office

By Colin Joyce in Tokyo
(Filed: 17/09/2003)

A Japanese delivery driver demanding back pay from his employers blew up their office yesterday, killing himself and two other people.

Noboru Beppu, 52, marched into the Keikyubin delivery firm in Nagoya, central Japan, armed with a knife, a crossbow and two cans of petrol.

Demanding three months' back pay, he doused the office with the fuel and barricaded the door, taking about 30 people hostage.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2003/09/17/wjapan17.jpeg

A man hangs from the window of the Keikyubin office building in Nagoya after the explosion yesterday


Most were freed during a three-hour siege which ended with Beppu reportedly setting the petrol alight.

Beppu, a policeman and the 42-year-old branch manager were killed as an explosion ripped through the building, showering glass over a wide area.

About 40 policemen and firemen were injured, four of them seriously. Beppu was demanding £1,300 in wages for the months of July to September. The money was said to have been paid about an hour before the blast.

Police are investigating whether he intended to commit suicide from the start.

[Fly320s]

Stupidity is a world-wide phenomenon.

[Monkeyleg]

Over here the media talks about someone "going postal."

I guess over there they literally go ballistic.

[AJ Dual]

From what I hear, crime figures in Japan are grossly misreported.

The "crime shuffling" style of reporting that several posters in this forum accuse the U.K. of, and Agricola defends as no longer true, has been raised to a high art form in Japan.

If you think it's outrageous that a nation may once have deflated it's murder stats by dropping all the manslaughter plea-bargains and the like, try a nation that catagorizes a man who commits murder-suicide on his family of five, as "six suicides". :(

[Teufelhunden]

The "crime shuffling" style of reporting that several posters in this forum accuse the U.K. of, and Agricola defends as no longer true, has been raised to a high art form in Japan.

Andrew,

Do you have any links claiming or proving this behavior? If you do, it might prove of use to me in another ofrum I frequent...

-Teuf

[TheOtherOne]

If you think it's outrageous that a nation may once have deflated it's murder stats by dropping all the manslaughter plea-bargains and the like, try a nation that catagorizes a man who commits murder-suicide on his family of five, as "six suicides".Hmmm... Maybe that's why Japan's suicide rate is much higher than the United States.

Someone was arguing with me once on another message board about how Japan, because it was virtually gun-free, was so great. I was looking around for some statistics and found some propaganda crap somewhere about how guns needed to be banned because so many people killed themselves with them in the United States. Then I found the stats on the much higher suicide rates in Japan. I gave both the suicide/anti-gun article and the stats to the guy I was talking with and he didn't have anything to say after that.