Japan’s knife crime wave lays bare tragic cost of youth mental burnout

Japanese police investigators work near the scene of a stabbing of a woman in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo on March 11.

Photo: Kyodo/AP The day that Taiki Hirokawa stabbed his former girlfriend to death in a Pokemon store in Tokyo had started like any other, his mother told police.

She and her son had breakfast together and nothing appeared out of the ordinary.

Hours later, security camera footage caught 26-year-old Hirokawa walking straight into the store, pulling out a knife, going behind the counter where Moe Harukawa, 21, was serving customers, and repeatedly slashing her in the neck and chest before turning the knife on himself.

Horrified onlookers – including children – told investigators that Hirokawa never hesitated, ignored his victim’s screams, and that the entire incident “was over in a minute”.

The brutal killing of Harukawa on March 26 has renewed debate in Japan, fuelled by extensive media coverage, over the dual problems of knife crime and stalking.

Police and emergency responders stand by at the scene of a deadly stabbing in downtown Tokyo on March 26.

Photo: Kyodo/AP For mental health experts, the gruesome incident points to a clear decline in the mental well-being of young Japanese struggling with soaring stress levels, stunted emotional development and an inability to communicate their problems. “There are always a variety of reasons for incidents of domestic violence, but in a case like this, when one partner kills the other, the reason is often that the attacker does not want to be separated,” said Vickie Skorji, a mental health specialist and senior adviser to the Tokyo-based TELL Lifeline.

Skorji traces the decline in well-being to the coronavirus pandemic. “It is obviously hard to generalise, and we do not know if there were any underlying mental health issues or personality disorders in this case, but we do know that lots of young people have been very stressed since Covid and are tending to escalate situations.” The pressures are numerous and wide-ranging: stresses tied to studies and exams, workplace demands and family concerns, as well as an inescapable backdrop of conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East, political turmoil in the United States, and fears ranging from climate change and human rights to simply putting food on the table.

Those stresses are not unique to Japan, with Skorji citing studies showing rising mental health problems among young people worldwide over the past 10 to 15 years, a trend many experts l

原文链接: 南华早报