“Rampage killings” such as the Sagamihara attack, where one assailant kills a large number of strangers, have been rare in post-war Japan.
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Police said Uematsu entered the facility at about 2:10 a.m., Tuesday, local time, by breaking a ground floor window with a hammer, then apparently went room to room stabbing anyone he saw.
Satoshi Uematsu, his face concealed by a blue jacket while being transported from a Sagamihara police station about 30 miles southwest of Tokyo on Wednesday, flashed a toothy grin at television cameras from the unmarked van. Some 40 minutes later nine men and ten women, between the ages of 19 and 70 were dead, most with their throats cut.
Uematsu was involuntarily committed to hospital on 19 February after he tried to present a letter to the speaker of the lower house of Japan’s parliament.
The news agency noted that it was unclear what sort of work the 26-year-old Uematsu did in the facility and whether he resigned or was sacked from his job.
The 26-year-old today appeared before public prosecutors as half a dozen plainclothes officers raided his home.
“We do have to learn the lesson from what happened”, he said.
He is believed to have broken into the Tsukui Yamayuri-en facility early on Tuesday morning.
The facility employs more than 200 people, including part-timers, with nine of them working the night of the attack, Hirosue said.
Uematsu, had said in letters he wrote in February that he could “obliterate 470 disabled people” and gave detailed plans of how he would do so, the Kyodo news agency reported.
Another 25 people were injured in the horrific attack which was Japan’s worst mass killing in decades.
Earlier this year, he attempted to hand deliver a letter to Japan’s parliament calling for disabled people to be euthanised.
Kanagawa prefecture governor Yuji Kuroiwa said there had been “warning signs” but that it was hard to say if the attack could have been prevented.
The picture being painted of Uematsu is of a deeply troubled man who didn’t hide his belief that disabled people should be killed and euthanized.
“I was told by a policeman to stay inside my house, as the situation could be unsafe”, she said.
When Japanese experience depression, doctors say, they prefer to imagine something is wrong with their character rather than their heads, and a cultural impulse known as “gaman, ” or the will to endure, takes precedence over medical care. Because of the country’s extremely strict gun control laws, any attacker usually resorts to stabbings.
The man who stabbed to death 19 disabled people in a Japanese care home asked a friend to join him in his attack, insisting that the handicapped were “unnecessary” and “a waste of taxes”.
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Mamoru Takuma, who stabbed eight children to death and wounded 15 others at an elementary school in Osaka in 2001, was also living with untreated mental illness, and was also socially isolated and estranged from his family.
