The bizarre case of a hikikomori who went on a berserk killing spree after losing his Internet access, slaughtering his defenceless baby niece and killing his own father, was in fact far stranger than anyone save the family realised – it appears the hikikomori had taken control of the family completely in order to satisfy his obsessive compulsions, finally destroying them when they rebelled against his domination.
The 30-year-old Aichi hikikomori slaughtered his family, viciously hacking to death his 1-year-old niece and 58-year-old father and maiming 3 others, and then burnt down his home in an incident which shocked Japan and further confirmed suspicions that hikikomori can be possessed by psychopathic tendencies which belie their withdrawn exterior.
The details of the case can be read in the previous article.
Hikikomori murders are not unheard of, but in this case the family’s testimony after the massacre indicates matters were far more bizarre than anyone would have suspected.
After he graduated from middle school at 15, the hikikomori-to-be briefly worked at a confectionery factory before falling ill and withdrawing into seclusion at his home; this situation persisted for 15 years, during which time the family was warped into the plaything of the reclusive hikikomori, seemingly existing only to serve his bizarre obsessions.
The family’s 24-year-old second son, who escaped the massacre, explained that far from using his father’s credit card without permission, the hikikomori actually controlled the family’s finances completely, taking his father’s salary and giving his parents an allowance.
Matters began to escalate several years ago when the hikikomori developed an interest in online shopping.
He would use his father’s card to buy photo albums, T-shirts and other items, all of which he would hoard in his room, not even opening them – “every day new packages would arrive, and his room on the second floor was buried in them.”
In fact, the hikikomori had actually taken control of the family finances completely, each month taking his father’s salary and giving him $500 as an allowance, along with a further $400 for his mother.
The rest he kept for himself, evidently squandering it on his collection of boxes. The father, it is said, “just went along with this.”
The family sought advice on how to deal with this “shopping dependence,” and were advised by police and local clinics that they should “stop his card and cancel his Internet access,” which they set about doing to tragic effect.
Upon investigation his father and brother were shocked to discover he had in fact racked up debts of some $25,000 using the card.
They resolved to take action, and had his Internet account ceased, but he merely had it reactivated. After this the father cancelled the contract completely, at which point his son snapped and went on his killing spree.
Although in a case like this it is the hikikomori at whose feet criminal responsibility must ultimately lie, in this and similar cases it appears the parents also bear a grave responsibility – the existence of a hikikomori requires both a parasite and a host, and it is the parents who choose to indulge and harbour their offspring, eventually allowing them to sink into a state of permanent and evidently highly dangerous dependence.
In this respect, far from being lonely aberrations it appears hikikomori are actually the direct creations of their parents.
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The family sought advice on how to deal with this “shopping dependence,” and were advised by police and local clinics that they should “stop his card and cancel his Internet access,”
well now we know who should be sued
The police as always don't know jack.
They should have sent him to a mental clinic once it became clear the bad behavior would not self correct and got the guys in white coats to carry him off if he resisted.
Though this could be another faux pas in Japan in there is a stigma against someone getting psychiatric help like there used to be in the west.
Not entirely sure I agree with the last paragraph. Though it is the parent's fault as well, something about how it's written just doesn't sit right.
The last paragraph seems to be diverting too much blame away from the hikki in question. I think the parents indisputably screwed up, but the hikikomori is the most at fault. While the parents certainly lacked the spine to help their son, I think they accepted his growing eccentricities because they didn't have much recourse, given cultural climate and the "sweep it under the rug" attitude psychoses seems to get.
I blame the hikikomori most for his problems, and acknowledge that his parents enabled and facilitated them, but they seem more like prisoners to this guy's problems than encouraging of.
cue downvoting probably, but I'm just saying...
I quite agree with you. When you become an adult, you become the owner of your person, and you make of yourself whatever you want, growing out of blaming your parents for your own problems. He wanted to make a coward out of himself in this case.
However "Raise crows and they'll poke your eyes out" has never been more true.
Hope he gets the death penalty. Anything else would be a waste of resources on this guy.
Dude...
dont tase me bro
Retarded, people need to stop blaming bad parenting and start blaming children that can not take responsibility for their own actions, especially ones that are older than 15.
In addition, Hikki should be a jailable offense, the identities of these jailed Hikkis should be protected both for their future integration back into society and the identities of their family members so they will not be deeply shamed.
Pressures of society norms are causing parents to make these decisions, whereas there is no excuse for the Hikki for his behavior.
I'm going to speak what I believe is the truth even if it may offend some people here.
There is a third factor at work here as well and most of the people of Japan do not want to admit it.
The elephant in the living room issue behind Hikikomori is the Japanese culture surrounding education and employment.
As long as people's fates are decided in middle school and the chance to better one's self later in life denied we will see more of this kind of news from Japan.
he lost self control... i seriously pity this family while its true its the parents fault for not controlling thier son but its also the sons fault for not controlling himself on his spending... this kind of guys just sucked
A wake up call for everyone.
They should have just walled up his room. There are some people that the world can truly do without, and this guy is a perfect example.
Cask of Amantillado, anyone? ^_-
"For the love of God, Montresor!"
"Yes, for the love of God."
This spanish saying is appropriate:
cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos.
Breed crows, and they'll take out your eyes.
that means: raise your children badly and you'll suffer for it.
I think they would have done better to take precautions against his rage before staging a rebellion.
This is what chris-chan will be.
How is it the parents' fault at all? The second son got married, had a kid and seems to be doing fine.
The hikki chose to live 15 years as a useless parasite. He chose to kill people when he doesn't get what he wants. Nobody put a gun to his head and made him do all that.
Of course the 30 year old basement dwellers in SanCom would blame the parents. It's always easier to pass off responsibility elsewhere. Blame the parents, the teachers, the society. Anything but take personal responsibility on how screwed up you become.
Well said on the parasite/host analogy, Arte. For a parasite to exist, there first needs to be a host. If the host decided to do something early on, the parasite might not have become so fatal.
These hikko parents seriously need to wake up if they value their lives. If their kids decide to lock themselves up, had it never occurred to them that they could simply just knock the door down and walk in? They need to stop using the "but leaving our kid to grow out of it is a Japanese/Asian cultural thing" as an excuse.
I said it in the first article - I'll even pay for my own plane ticket to Japan. Fuck the trial i've read enough this bastard needs to not die but to suffer a long horrendous existence.
I'll use the same bloody knife to gouge out his eyeballs (but slowly carve them out - unlike how he quickly killed his niece and father) and throw him into jail with whatever the equivalent japanese "BUBBA" or maybe he'd be named "SUMO"
Without his eyes this bag of shit can't even see his beloved 2d waifus.
Reading this makes me glad I'm only a half-hikki. I spend long hours at home, but the rest of the time I have to go to school in hopes that my future job will give me more money than just $250 every 2 weeks.
This particular hikki is absolute trash and deserves all the pity he can deny all he wants; he's merely serving himself as a walking exhibit of human failure.
The parents share some responsibility for his hikikomori behavior. Just like there are some who are welfare addicts as far as the government is concerned, the fault lies on both sides.
That said, the only person that should take any responsibility for what he did to his father and niece is himself. While his parents helped make him a hikikomori with their coddling actions, he's the one who took their far-too-late-in-coming discipline as an excuse to become a murderer.
this peeps needs a mental asylum
and medical cures
we have this in europe why they dont call police or
medics?
poor hikko bastards...
Japan should have an army, then this hikikomoris will be forced to go through military services, that would probably solve the problem.
OMFG, There is NO excuse for committing murder! No reason or cause is good enough for someone to kill someone. Don't go hating amazingly kind and gentle, won't hurt a fly people just because they aren't assertive. Some people find it hard to take control of situations, they were born like that.
No internet = no exp gain. All he wanted to do was level up. xD
Both are to blame. There are no winners. Just losers trying to justify their own failures.
curb stomp
triangle
tapped out
what's he going to do now without interwebs in prison? cry? try to stab his burly, ready to rape him fellow inmates? ha, ha. good luck with that.
Serves him right for killing a baby.
Fuck, this guy was a complete monster! I'm sick of seeing people make excuses for hikkikomori not having any elements of basic decency or humanity- yes the parents should have done something about this sick fuck long ago, but that doesn't make him in ANY way blameless for his utterly evil actions. I'm praying he gets the death sentance, and quickly.
Thanks for the blatant and outright moral pronouncement on the situation Sankakucomplex. We really needed you to help us think through this, being the mindless creations of this website that we are.
You're welcome peon. :) Come back if you have any further questions about morals or 2D vs 3D we are always here to help and are never wrong.
1. Family should've taken a hint (Bless the second son for realizing it even if to late)
2. Can we just have batshit crazy hikkomori killed already?!
Any sane person can become crazy so that's not really the best solution.We can't just kill our problems away like this Hikikimori did or we'd just be as crazy as him.
....fail. No other words but fail.
It may have started out with the parents giving him the responsibility of household finances. Maybe to give him some manner of a sense of accomplishment and some responsibility. Pure speculation, but it's possible. Regardless, the packages coming every day that weren't opened should have raised some manner of red flag. Parenting isn't easy by any means. But damn....stupid is still stupid. I don't really think they deserved death for such stupidity. They just acted way too late to make any change in the hikki that didn't involve him snapping.
why they dont kill him when they have the chance?
This unfortunately hits a bit close to home to me. Shut-ins have A LOT of control over their family - but its through despicable means.
First, is GUILT - they constantly remind their parents about how their failed parenting skills made them what they are... and pretty much swindle all they can through that.
Second is NO SHAME - they will throw tantrums in the middle of the supermarket, on the street, whenever they don't get their way and the embarrassed family just has to put up with it until their 30 year old baby calms down.
Thirdly is COMPLETE AND UTTER SELFISHNESS - absolutely 100% of their actions are done only for their sake, and those actions are almost always short term. They feel that since no one else in the entire world is worse off than them (as they sit around and play on the computer), then they really only can afford to look out for themselves from now on.
For example, back in the day, my brother... even after racking $6000 debt playing pay-by-the minute dial-up MMO, and dropping out of ivy league school because of said MMO, would still play the MMO at home, even though it tied up the phone lines and then when clients tried to call my dad with medical emergencies all they got was a busy signal. After two weeks of really telling him that he was interfering with family business, my dad just broke down and bought a second telephone line.
Dail-up MMO I never knew such things existed or one could run up a $6000 tab on one.
If I did that my dad would have made me sell my car.
Wow.
My parents would just yell at me, tell that I'm useless crap and cut the line.
It somewhat worked, I attend university, but I have some mental problems.
Well, could've been worse.
Why the hell would anyone want to do this thing???
that guy is a psycopath.
the confectionery factory he worked must've sucked massive balls.
Or he sucked in making chocolate balls.
You mean chocolate salty balls.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ew06J05pkk
Some people just shouldn't have kids.
Or rather, some kids just shouldn't be.
Except for the fact their other kids seem to have turned out fine. So, one bad apple. You never know how you're little bundle of horror and debt will turn out.
How the hell did they go 15 years without at least saying, "Son, you don't need a shirt you're never going to wear"?
Or "Son, I am disappoint."
His brother and father should've kicked his ass out the door.
You know those idiot parents who goes by the belief of saying "My daughter/son is important! He/she just needs more time for his/her life to think about."?
Yeah.... uhhh, I assume that they can't.
A dominant Hikikomori, now thats something new.
Not really. If you look good into other cases, you can see the hikikomori is the dominant one. Otherwise, he or she would have been thrown out of the house at least for a day to teach it to correct itself.
I say retard but that's my read of him. 30k in debt for video games? seriously... retarted... buy a house or car or get laid with that cash
holy shit
stupid parents i hate them
yea, a baby was killed! Sick
wtf man, the parents tried to do something to stop him and instead got killed. If every parent in the world was good then the majority would be dead.
Yeah, are they stupid or something?
The whole thing sounds like a plot of a H-manga. Not only did the parents allowed their son (who, we suppose, had no social skills) to use the family money freely, they couldn't even stop a 30-year old man (who probably spent most of the last 15 years in front of a computer). Even through they had numerical advantage (4 to 1).
Well it's their son afterall, parents always have soft spots.
SOFT SPOTS?
More like these parents had a submission fetish or something.
Weird Japanese are WEIRD.
For my part, I still hate the hikikomori, but I do look upon his parents with contempt and some curiosity, what could possibly be going on in their heads to allow such cowardly behavior?.
@anon 18:14
I think it is applicable. I don't agree with the parents' attitude either (as stated above), but saying things like "the parents are stupid", "they should have thrown him out ages ago", "they died because they chose to keep a leech of a son at home" is just plain unreasonable.
Throwing him out may have made him snap earlier and we might have gotten the same result, and most hikikomori are creepy but not murderous. A person that would commit this kind of crime wouldn't be stopped by this or that behavior, and trying to find a justification for this killing spree is pointless.
Short version... yes, hikikomori can't be without the parents' support, but not killer ones.
PS: saying that this is a situation where most observers here could in fact contain the situation had it happened to them is a massive restraint bias.
"The Just-World Phenomenon is when witnesses of an injustice, in order to rationalize it, will search for things that the victim did to deserve it. This eases their anxiety and allows them to feel safe; if they avoid that behavior, injustice will not happen to them. This peace of mind comes at the expense of blaming the innocent victim."
Add this to the herd mentality phenomenon and the Restraint Bias ("if it were me, things would have been so different") and lo, this page and its comments are explained.
Come on, guys. I wouldn't say the parents were doing the right thing, but this change of heart is ridiculous. You can spoil a child all you like, but you can't instill in someone the willingness to repeatedly and lethally stab sleeping members of your family, one of them being a toddler. Dangerous sick fucks are everywhere, they're closer than you imagine and in most cases you don't see what's coming until it's too late.
@smorki:
No one here is detracting any guilt from the psycho.
At the same time it cannot be denied that the parents and society at large aren't innocent. The just-world phenomenon is therefore not applicable, since it deals only with situations where the public imparts guilt on an innocent person. Likewise, restraint bias only deals with situations where the observers would in fact not have contained the situation would it have happened to them, and therefore is inapplicable in this case.
This situation probably started small. When he lost his job, the natural parental love combined with the knowledge that if they wouldn't accept him he'd die on the street, made them keep him at home. At first the bastard probably wasn't even consciously testing how much he could let the family dance to his tune, but he was and then realised that he could control them. I think the guy is a psychopath, in the sense that he didn't do it to be mean, but that he utterly didn't care about his family, as long as the situation served his purpose.
(Reposting this since I got a network failure halfway submit and it hasn't appeared yet. I hope it doesn't show up twice.)
This situation probably started small. When he lost his job, the natural parental love combined with the knowledge that if they wouldn't accept him he'd die on the street, made them keep him at home. At first the bastard probably wasn't even consciously testing how much he could let the family dance to his tune, but he was and then realised that he could control them. I think the guy is a psychopath, in the sense that he didn't do it to be mean, but that he utterly didn't care about his family, as long as the situation served his purpose.
Well it is indeed true that parents have soft spots for their offspring, in this case the soft spots must be in their brain.
How many of you sankaku readers are spoiled little pricks whos parents still pretty much support them...
For a momemnt ago everyone hated the hikikimori. Now, everyone hate his parents. Lovely turn.
^ no shit I'd say most
Here!
stupid family D:
Suddenly, I dont feel any pity for them anymore. Not that I had alot of it before. The only one I pity is baby girl, she was innocent.
Master of Parents is pulling your strings!
spending your cash and buying lame things!
Worried 'bout him, you ask the police.
you cut off his net and now you're deceased!
Master!!
Master!!
I also blame the Japanese educational system for this as I seen the only thing he graduated from was middle school and then was made to work in a factory.
In the US one's fate is far from decided in middle school.
In fact a person's fate is never truly decided in the US unless you kill someone and get jailed for life.
You can still go to night school or get a GED and still go to college.
Yep. The family sure had it coming...
dont forget religion
Fuck the baby! The baby was the worst enabler of them all! Think about it, but not too much really at all!
I blame Society and civilization! FUCK SOCIETY!
three adults in the family, and nobody did anything about it!?
4.3 people and he won? They deserved it. -not
Anonymous 00:53
You WOULD blame the infected person if they actually fostered the virus and made it even worse.
You realise your advice of "kick their lazy ass outta the house!" requires that the parents... actually do that instead of coddling the hikkikomori in the house and saying "here, have at my credit card!"
Right?
Placing the blame entirely at the feet of the hikkikmori is a fallacious as placing the blame entirely at the feet of the parents. To cure a social withdrawal syndrome, you need cooperation from immediate family members as well.
Meh tone down the hate, at the end of the day, the family suffered the ultimate price, they aren't to blame really. Even if you call what they did, overindulgence they were only parents and family who love their son/brother. The real blame falls down to the psychopathic bastard, I don't think he was indulged to become a psycho, he chose himself to go through and murder them. Also the fact that he did it after his internet was terminated shows he had a clear intent, it's not just a case of him literally being insane and slaughtering them because he had a clear reason and he was angry at what they did, but to go so far is the insanity, and only he is to blame, not their parents of family, just him.
You guys don't understand a FUCK !
His father just did that because of LOVE and PITY of his son.
Of course, it went too far and the end couldn't be other.
I have three younger brothers and they would be bloodied and maimed before they decide to turn into a hikkikomori.
Stupid people. Everywhere. Fuck them with a chainsaw.
I will bet my sweet ass this comment will be downvoted. Go ahead and do it. Just give me a REASON why you do it. Otherwise I'll know that you people are the reason hikikomoris exist. Because you ENCOURAGE them to.
They should have hired burly men to go into the house in silence, break into the sick fuck's room and thrown him out of the house with a few of the clothes he bought and auctioned the rest of the things online.
Whether the parents let him do it is secondary- If someone wants to do something, it's their own choice. The parents didn't exactly make him become a hikkikomori, it was he himself who did it. Don't blame the parents for one sick fuck's actions.
Sure, blame the parents. I for one don't believe it. 15 years old, and wanting to stay at home all the time? When will people learn that hikikomoris are MALICIOUS? the host is always blamed, but if you are down with a cold, do you blame yourself for being a host for VIRUS?
Stop hikikomoris. Create jobs. Kick their lazy ass outta the house!
Yeah. They shouldn'ta rebelled. Jerks.
Stupid parents, I'm not defending the guy, but the parents got what they deserved. It's sad that other people suffered as a result.
Such cruel ignorance.
Thank you.By his understanding,his dad deserved to die for loving his fucking kid.That's some commendable moral standards you got going there.Shithead.
And that hikikomori is still fucked up regardless. We choose our own paths and he fucked up big time. I'm not going to give any sympathy to some damn murderer who killed the parents who sheltered him of his own will.
If he'd love him, he'd have kicked him out.
If they just forced him to work, this whole situation wouldn't have arisen in the first place.
"Son, you dropped out school, not good. Now you'll at least write applications and try to get a job or you won't see a penny from us."
I don't say they deserved to die, but they were bad parents. Period.
I guess hes too spoilt!
stupid police
"stop his card and cancel his internet access"
thats like taking food away from a beast, wtf do you think would happen?
if it were me, beat the hikkikomori, then cancel internet access, and then some
It is important for the parents to dominate their son gradually instead of suddenly, with constant reminder that it is on their mercy that he is allowed to live.
Then cut off internet access after that. Seriously, there's a limit with how lenient you can be with your own son.
Sadly the more they would have pushed, the more he would have begun to fray. It might not have been an instant snap, but he would still snap.