A knife-wielding man attacked a facility for the disabled and then turned himself in, police said.
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Further details weren’t immediately available.
Local media reported Uematsu had sent a letter to the speaker of the lower house of Japan’s parliament in February threatening to kill 470 disabled people. The man used to work at the facility, the police said.
A 20-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of murder.
At least 15 people have been killed in a knife attack at a centre for disabled people outside Tokyo.
Police had recovered a bag with several knives, at least one stained with blood, the Kanagawa prefecture official said.
A fire department spokesman said that another 25 were wounded, 20 of them seriously, in the attack which ranks as one of the worst mass killings in Japan’s postwar history.
A woman who lives across from the facility told Japanese broadcaster NHK that she saw police cars enter the facility around 3:30 a.m.
“I was surprised to hear that the culprit was a person from this neighborhood”, she said.
Shimbun had also been hospitalised early this year after expressing a willingness to kill disabled people if the government approved, a city official said.
It is the worst mass killing in Japan since the end of World War Two.
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Sagamihara in Kanagawa Prefecture is about 40 kilometers (25 miles) southwest of Tokyo. While local media are reporting that Uematsu had been fired from his job at the facility, police are continuing to investigate the motive behind the attacks. In 2008 in Tokyo a man ploughed a rental truck into a crowd of shoppers in Tokyo’s bustling Akihabara district before he stabbed passers-by, killing seven people and injuring 10 others.
