1.
Naoto Moriyama had lived a more traumatic life than any other person during the previous 40 years of his life. Moriyama's father was the very picture of a toxic parent, who never had a regular job and lived a life totally addicted to gambling, such as horse racing and pachinko, and alcohol. When alcohol was added to his anger at having lost at gambling, nothing was more terrible for Moriyama. On such occasions, his father would sit astride him and continued to beat him until he lost consciousness. The only consolation was that he was never hit with a bottle of sake which was his father’s favorite drink, but anyway, he had lost three of his front teeth by the time he entered junior high school, and on some occasions, his eardrum was ruptured too.
His mother had already passed away, and the people who could be called as his relatives were only his grandparents on his father’s side. When Moriyama was in his first year of junior high school, his grandparents took him in after his teacher took him to the Child Guidance Center and he was put under the protection. Therefore, he was finally able to escape from his father's clutches, but this time, he started to be bullied at school. Since elementary school, Moriyama had had no energy to spare for study because of his appalling family background, so he couldn’t read or write even simple sentences, or perform simple arithmetic, and furthermore, wasn’t good at sports. Consequently, he stood out in a bad way. By the time he reached the second year of junior high school, he became the target of a delinquent group, and often came home with bruises.
He was to continue to live a miserable life even after that, but I won’t go into the details of his later life. This is because I believe that you can already imagine precisely enough what kind of person he became. However, I would like to state another thing about Moriyama. Perhaps because of his tragic upbringing, he began to suffer from mental disorders at some point in his life. The process had already begun by the time he entered junior high school. One day, while being beaten by his father, he suddenly heard a voice telling him, "Go to hell," and soon the voice began to always accompany him wherever he went. The messages this voice conveyed to him were mostly negative ones, and hearing them was an unpleasant experience for Moriyama which made his hair stand on end.
Also, around that time, he started to be struck by a strange sensation that he was in a dream all the time. I think most of you have experienced the situation where you woke up in the morning and wasn’t able to distinguish between dream and reality. In your dreams, I suppose, you often experience unrealistic phenomena like you are floating in the air or are being attacked by monsters, but usually, however immersed you were in such a dream while sleeping, you start to regain a sense of reality as soon as you wake up. In Moriyama's case, however, he felt as if he were always in a dream. It was often that he lost self-recognition, and he lost almost all his control over his own behaviors. And when he was around 20, he repeatedly exhibited problematic behaviors, which prompt people around him to make him see a psychiatrist. Then, he was diagnosed with both schizophrenia and dissociative disorder.
He had lived in such a defective consciousness, in between illusion and reality, for decades. However, there was a moment when he was strongly aware that he was alive. It was when he was shaking with rage and hatred toward his father, bullies at his junior high school, and furthermore, an entire society which put him in such an awful position. On such occasions, his heartbeat became as intense as if he was suffering from palpitations, and he felt cold sweat seep out of his pores throughout his body. Like this, it was only the physical sensations he had when he abandoned himself to rage that made him feel that he was alive.
2.
One day in October in 2015. Moriyama, who was 40 years old then, was walking in a residential area a little far from downtown carrying a large backpack for mountain climbing on his back. Without looking aside, he was silently walking straight on a less crowded street around 11:00 a.m. with his head bent forward (probably because of the weight of his backpack). The trained eye might have detected something unusual in his sharp eyesight steadily fixed on the front. However, it was in a quiet residential area on a weekday morning. Even if a sharp-eyed middle-aged man was walking carrying a large backpack whose contents were suspicious, nobody questioned him.
Moriyama stopped at a crosswalk located at one point on the street. He turned to the crossroad, and then in front of him, there was a clean new-looking building over the street. On the first floor of the building, an automatic door made of glass could be seen, and above it, there was a sign saying “Nishida Dermatology Clinic.” It was the clinic he had been going to for years, in order to receive treatment for his chronic atopic dermatitis.
He stared at the sign over the street. It might have been said that he glared at it rather than stared at it, to be precise. And then, he let out a deep sigh as if he had made some decision, crossing the crossroad steadily and slowly as if to pick his route carefully.
Even after crossing the crossroad, he kept on going and entered the clinic through the automatic door mentioned above. Before someone noticed, he was holding his backpack which he had been carrying on his back in front of himself. And though it was not certain whether it was before a female receptionist saw him entering or not, he took a small-sized drum out of his backpack held in front of himself.
Of course, the receptionist must have never come across such a situation in her life. Needless to say, a drum isn’t a necessary item for receiving treatment at a dermatology clinic. Also, since the drum was capped at the moment, it was impossible for her to detect the smell of the contents. However, she immediately understood both what was in it and why Moriyama carried it into the clinic, and shrieked, stepping back,
“Eeeeeeek!”
By the moment, Moriyama had already uncapped the drum and spread the liquid which had been in it across the floor of the waiting room next to the automatic door. The sulfur smell specific to kerosene engulfed the room. And then, before other staff who had heard the shriek rushed there, he quickly took a lighter out of a pocket of his backpack and raising a weird cry, threw it at the puddle of kerosene soiling the wooden floor of the room.
“Bang!”
The next moment, a pillar of fire shot up all over the floor with a tremendous explosive sound. Moriyama himself, who set fire to the puddle of kerosene, also ended up being blown by the pillar of fire which shot up vigorously. After that, the flames rapidly engulfed not only the first floor but also the second and third floor, leading to a terrible disaster that took 15 lives, most of whom were staff of the clinic. Fortunately or unfortunately, soon after the pillar of fire shot up, the automatic door opened, and Moriyama, the very man who caused the disaster, was blown out of the building and though he suffered severe burns on his whole body, he escaped death.
This is the whole story of “Nishida Clinic arson attack,” which provoked a nation-wide controversy over the mental competency of the mentally disabled who committed crimes.
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3.
Naturally, the treatment of Moriyama, who had triggered the incident where 15 people both males and females had lost their lives and many others also suffered serious injuries, attracted nation-wide attention. As mentioned before, because Moriyama survived though he was seriously injured, it was decided that they would give him treatment for his burns and wait for justice.
As might be expected, the general attitude of the public toward the decision was something like: “why should this man, who committed such a grave crime, be let survive using the taxpayer’s money?” And their nerves were rattled furthermore by the fact that Moriyama had some mental illnesses, so that he might not be punished in case the trial concluded that he hadn’t been mentally competent enough at the time of the incident. According to one report, he made an unrealistic statement that it was out of revenge against the director of the clinic, who had prescribed an ointment with poison, that he had committed the crime.
Roughly speaking, as one of the basic principles of the penal code, there is a concept that as long as a person accused of a crime (what we call as “crime” here is a violation of the law) had both “option to commit the crime” and “option not to commit the crime” at the moment he committed the crime, and if he chose the former of his own will, the person should be punished. Thanks to this concept, people are protected from being punished for inevitable accidents such one as a person accidentally hit someone, and the person who was hit was injured.
This concept is also applied when a person in a state of insanity committed a crime. That is, in such situation as a schizophrenia patient haunted by paranoia committed a crime, even though the patient committed the crime, he or she may be judged innocent because he or she may be regarded as having been incapable of judgement of good or evil (mentally incompetent) at the moment of the incident, and the crime committed by him or her may also be regarded as something like an inevitable accident.
However, it is also true that the victims and their families can never be satisfied with such judgement even if it is justifiable according to the penal code. Therefore, each time those with histories of mental diseases committed crimes, this kind of issue was tabled for discussion again and again. And as for “Nishida Clinic arson attack,” the discussion was made even hotter than other cases by not only the gravity and brutality of the crime but also the complexity of the situation where they would treat Moriyama, the very man who had committed the crime, using tax payer’s money.
This incident was featured in TV shows day after day, and experts engaged in a discussion of whether Moriyama had been mentally competent or not. On the Internet too, many people protested that the treatment for Moriyama’s burn should be promptly stopped taking into account the feelings of the victims. Like this, when people throughout the nation was tumultuous because of the shocking incident, one blog post written by a psychiatrist attracted public attention. Despite his position as a psychiatrist, the writer of the blog assured that there was no doubt that Moriyama had been mentally competent at the time of the incident, based on the facts that he had purchased kerosene and the lighter in a premeditated way, and that he had received a diagnosis of his schizophrenia having gone into remission two years before. Moreover, the writer claimed that through Moriyama’s personal history, he could catch a glimpse of Moriyama’s weakness, and he even insisted that it was this weakness of his that really brought about such a terrible crime.
The writer (we will call him Dai Honda though it isn’t his real name) became in great demand in TV shows because for the public, he was someone like a spokesman who told “the truth which nobody could tell though everyone wanted to.” He was also to become insane while being flattered by other people, but anyway, let’s focus on what had led him to write such an extreme blog post in what follows.
4.
Honda’s father was a salaryman called a corporate nomad to be precise, so his family moved several times while Honda was a primary school student. Needless to say, changing schools is a serious incident for children because people in a different area use a different dialect and they have to rebuild their new human relationships. When Honda moved from the Kansai region (Osaka and surrounds) to the Kanto region (Tokyo and surrounds) in his fourth year of primary school, he especially experienced tremendous stress.
It seems that in recent years, the Japanese language has been being standardized throughout the nation and the gaps in dialects in different regions have been narrowing, but such gaps were richly retained in 1990s, when Honda was a boy, so that the Kansai dialect and the Kanto dialect, in particular, were as different as if they were two different languages though they are both the same Japanese language.
To begin with, people in the Kanto region speak with different intonation than those in the Kansai region do, and whereas the former ends their speech, saying “~dayo,” the latter does, saying “~yade.” Furthermore, there are some examples where they use different expressions to describe the same object, like while the former calls someone stupid as “Baka,” the latter calls them as “Aho.”
Honda got a huge culture shock when he started to live in the Kanto region in his fourth year of primary school, and he was also teased about his Kansai accent by his classmates for a while though it was not so severe as to be called bullying. He had changed schools several times by then, but it had never taken longer for him to adjust to the new environment than that time. Besides, it was also unfortunate for him that he wasn’t so good at sports. Generally, even if you have some difficulty in your personality, you can earn due respect in the life of primary school as long as you are a good athlete. Also, since the difference between dialects can hardly be problematic while playing sports, he could have facilitated communication with his classmates if he had had participated in sports with them, but because he was a pale small boy and relatively clumsy, he didn’t have such a loophole either.
Until he moved to the Kanto region, he was an outgoing boy who sometimes bothered his teacher by talking to other students during classes, but after the move, he became quiet so much so that those who knew what he had been would have been surprised: if he spoke to his classmates without caution, he was teased because of his accent, and he had no friend at all to protect him. Consequently, he began to frequently go to the school library to engage in reading so that he could forget hard time at school.
It can be said that this experience of struggling with human relationship as a boy became his formative experience which prompted him to have interest in human mind and how society worked: he thought that it might be possible to explain difficulties in life he had been facing by regarding it as something caused by habits of humans who are social creatures. In this sense, he was a precocious child and it can also be said that his mind was science-oriented by nature. Those who have science-oriented mind try to resolve everything in the world into their component elements and uncover some system among them when they consider something. Such a person as Leonardo da Vinci, who dissected corpses to make observations, was an extreme example of this, and we can say that Honda’s thought process was similar to da Vinci’s in many ways.
Such intellectual pursuit of his began with reading books of Sherlock Homes stories the school library had. He really admired Homes, who, in the stories, acutely saw through criminals’ actions or mentalities out of traces they had left. Of course, Sherlock Homes stories are fictions, so that a lot of contradictions can be found in them if you read them carefully, but Honda was totally enamored by the way Homes led his cases to the solutions by resolving various phenomena into their component elements and finding clues ordinary people could never detect according to his own method called as “Science of deduction” by himself.
Furthermore, since Honda was not good at sports, he came to possess all the stronger admiration for Homes’ keen mind, thinking “If I have something superior to others, it must be my brain.”
He remained in the Kanto region after the graduation of primary school too and entered a public junior high school in the area, studying hard, so that he was always one of the top achievers in his year. In his third year, he was a bit shocked when he was told “I’ve heard my seniors in my badminton team call you a study buff” by his sister, who had entered the same junior high school as a new student. However, this incident made him all the more motivated because he thought “I will go all the way up through studying hard and get those who despise me back in the future,” and he eventually entered one of the most prestigious senior high schools in Tokyo.