Arsonist 'fed up with life' sets fire to Japanese video 'hotel', killing 15

 

The Cats video house in Osaka doubled as an cheap hotel and its 32 cubicles were nearly always full

 

Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent

A 46-year-old Japanese man describing himself as “fed up with life” was under arrest for murder last night after apparently deliberately setting fire to a sleazy “video house” in central Osaka and killing 15 people in the inferno.

Police identified the alleged arsonist as Kazuhiro Ogawa, who appears to have selected the location to inflict maximum loss of life: like so many of the “manga kissa” comic libraries and adult-video viewing parlours dotted around Japanese cities, the down-market Cats video house doubled as an ultra-cheap hotel and its 32 cramped cubicles were nearly always full.

The apparent use of fire to kill so many people has severely shaken Japan in what has already been an unsettling year of indiscriminate murders: seven people died in June when the central Tokyo shopping district of Akihabara was turned into a bloodbath by a lone knifeman.

Mr Ogawa allegedly set fire to a bag of newspapers in his room in the small hours of Wednesday morning. Investigators believe that he would have almost certainly known that most of the other rooms were occupied and that nearly all of the customers were fast asleep.

Osaka victims, all men, were burned or choked to death and at least 10 more were badly injured as the flames and smoke trapped them in a terrifying maze of flimsy wooden partitions and locked cubicle doors. Survivors said that the electricity had failed soon after they were alerted to the burning, plunging the entire place into darkness.

As the blaze tore through the building, those that were able to break out of their cubicles began a hopeless stampede for the exit along pitch-black corridors. One 37-year-old customer was awake and watching videos when he smelled the smoke and charged out of his room. He described clouds of white smoke belching through the corridors and the sounds of screaming and panic from some of the other rooms.

Other survivors said that they could see no attempt by any of the shop's staff to help customers escape the inferno and that the corridors — already too narrow for more than one person to pass along at once — were cluttered to shoulder-height with cardboard boxes and other rubbish.

Another customer, aged 22, said that he had never seen an emergency exit in the place, and that it would have been impossible for those furthest from the main entrance to navigate the corridors in the dark. Of the 15 dead, the majority appears to have died from carbon monoxide poisoning long before they could reach the doors.

Osaka police say that the unemployed Mr Ogawa initially said that the fire had been caused by an accident with a cigarette. This later changed to an apparent confession that he had deliberately started the fire because he was tired of life and “knew that people would die”.

That phrase has fearsome echoes across Japan. They were not only the exact words used by 25-year-old Tomohiro Kato on his blog just before he went berserk with a hunting knife in Akihabara and stabbed seven people to death, but regularly feature in the final text messages of many of those who take their own lives in the country's regular internet suicide pacts.

The deadly inferno has dramatically exposed the murky world of Japan's video houses and so-called manga kissa. The shops, of which there are now dozens in every major city in Japan, have become potent symbols of the hidden poverty lurking just beneath the surface of the world's second biggest economy.

As Japan's once monolithic middle class has polarised into two classes of economic winners and losers, the comic cafes and similar establishments have been seized upon as little more than convenient doss houses. The Cats video house was especially crowded last night because of the heavy rain brought on by a typhoon.

Customers pay around Y1,500 (£7.50) for a night's stay in a 2m x 1m cubicle with a small sofa and either a collection of manga comics or a television and a collection of adult videos. A large number maintain direct links with the sex industry and allow customers to have girls sent to their cubicles by local “delivery health” services.