On the morning of July 18, 2019, 41-year-old Japanese citizen Shinji Aoba broke into Kyoto Animation Studio No. 1, dumped nearly 40 liters of gasoline on the first floor, and lit a fire while cursing.
The fire ultimately claimed the lives of 36 people, and 33 people, including the culprit Shinji Aoba, were injured to varying degrees. KyoAni Animation suffered a heavy and unmitigated disaster, with a large number of important drawings destroyed and many talented animators leaving this world forever.
The world hated such an evil act to the point of gnashing their teeth, but because of the severity of Shinji Aoba’s injuries, the trial surrounding the culprits was delayed again and again, and did not officially begin until September 5th of this year.
For four years, the medical staff tried their best to save Shinji Aoba’s life so that he could receive a fair trial and face his crimes head on. But to everyone’s dismay, all their efforts failed to produce a confession or apology from the murderer, and instead, they saw Shinji Aoba for what he really was – a demon in a state of delusion.
Shinji Aoba in the courtroom scene was numb, and when the prosecutor accused him of the crime, he did not deny it, but his attitude was glib and he tried to get off with incomprehensible delusional words.
Seeing such a record of the trial, those who still had a glimmer of hope for Shinji Aoba, their disappointment may be hard to express.
1
It took the Japanese government four years to save Shinji Aoba’s life in order for him to receive a fair trial. And this criminal’s severe burns became the most ironic aspect of this disaster.
Shinji Aoba’s attending doctor’s name was Keihiro Ueda, a specialist in emergency medicine. Soon after word of the Kyoani arson spread, Keihiro Ueda called various medical institutions to say that he and the hospital had experience in dealing with burns and could help admit the injured.
But instead of waiting for victims, he waited for the dying murderer.
Although Shinji Aoba would still scream at the top of his lungs when he first emerged from the scene, his life was soon hanging by a thread as more than 90 percent of his body was burned. The hospital judged his mortality rate to be 97.54%, making it almost a certain death. Seeing this unprecedented injury, many doctors said there was nothing they could do, but Keihiro Ueda did not give up.
After several surgeries, Ueda and his team first removed Aoba’s necrotic skin tissue and temporarily replaced it with artificial dermis, and then harvested normal skin from Aoba’s body, which was used to grow more transplantable epidermis.
Culturing the epidermis took three to four weeks, but dangers such as infection and unstable blood pressure put Shinji Aoba’s life in jeopardy, and it was questionable whether he would make it to that point.
In Keihiro Ueda’s diary, he was so preoccupied with the operation that at one point he was hallucinating: sometimes it was as if he could see the news of Aoba’s death on television or on the Internet. For this reason, Ueda frequently ran to and from Aoba’s hospital room, fearing that he would suddenly die.
In addition to the desperation of the medical staff, the diary records the only moment when Aoba reveals his humanity. After realizing that his voice could come out again, Aoba cried all day. When Ueda asks him why he cried, Aoba says it was for saving his life, and that the doctors and nurses in front of him had nothing to do with him, yet they still reached out with all their might.
The doctors’ efforts were not in vain. Aoba, who received an autodermal transplant, recovered quickly and was discharged from the hospital and sent back to the detention center. Keihiro Ueda saw Shinji Aoba for the last time in January of this year, when Aoba was nearly cured and basically able to take care of himself, which meant that the process of the trial could finally be put on track.
What people didn’t expect was that in order to save one villain, the doctors found a way to save many more. The use of cultured epidermis to heal such a large area of burns was unprecedented in the world, and this unexpected “clinical trial” was another step forward in the medical treatment of burns.
Keihiro Ueda has since cured other patients using this method.
However, from a more realistic point of view, this rescue came at a high price.
According to another dermatologist, it costs about 300,000 yen (about 15,000 yuan) to prepare just one piece of skin the size of a postcard. The number of pieces used to treat Shinji Aoba is likely to be 250 at most, so the cost is estimated to be close to 75 million yen. Together with the artificial dermis used in the previous emergency and the ICU hospitalization fee, the total cost was about 200 million yen (about 9.8 million yuan).
Naturally, Shinji Aoba was not able to pay it off; after all, he had already squandered his money – all of it on gasoline and tools for the arson in Kyoani. Three-quarters of this astronomical treatment cost is expected to be paid by the Japanese National Fund, while the remaining quarter falls to the Saitama Prefectural Government, where Aoba previously lived.
Such an arrangement is not destined to be understood by all. In the eyes of some Japanese netizens, the significance of doing one’s best for a demon destined for the death penalty is unclear. Even in the medical team in charge of Shinji Aoba, there were likewise a few doctors who were caught in hesitation. When they heard Shinji Aoba’s thanks, their hearts were instead mixed, as they did not know if this was in line with people’s expectations.
When people asked Ueda Keihiro what he thought, he both held fast to his principles as a medical doctor and looked forward to Aoba’s repentance.
“For the sake of those victims and their families, I cannot allow the murderer to escape the departed dead. This conviction is strong, so I must not let the culprit die like this.”
Shinji Aoba and Keihiro Ueda
But judging from the trial, the confession Keihiro Ueda wanted to see may not have been there.
2
Prior to the arson, Shinji Aoba had stomped around the Keiani studio several times. On the day of the incident, he purchased nearly 40 liters of gasoline from a gas station and had a special can with a wheelbarrow. He had no concept of what would happen if he poured that much gasoline on the ground and set it on fire. In his statement at the trial, he was slightly surprised by the number of deaths, but only felt that it was a bit “too much”.
“I didn’t think so many people would die, and now I feel I went a little too far.”
In a courtroom sketch, a wheelchair-bound Shinji Aoba wears a mask, but it’s hard to hide the grimace of his burned face.
At the time of the fire, eyewitnesses reported hearing a loud explosion in the studio, and some experts speculated that a “deflagration” had occurred at the scene. In a studio full of wooden utensils and paper, combustion produces large quantities of toxic gases and carbonized particles. But before people could escape, the heat ignited the toxic gases and oxygen, causing a huge explosion and shockwave.
Shinji Aoba was also not spared; he was burned beyond recognition and collapsed on the ground shortly after escaping the scene. He collapsed on the ground shortly after escaping the scene. Kind-hearted people around him thought he was a KyoAni employee and poured water on him to cool him down, and police officers arrived to ask about his injuries, but he kept shouting things like “KyoAni copied me”.
Shinji Aoba’s hatred for Kyoani was based on his belief that his work had been plagiarized by Kyoani. In court, he blandly confessed to the crime, but his subsequent confessions became increasingly baffling.
Since the age of 30, Shinji Aoba has had an unstable job and has lived a poor and muddled life. Then he was introduced to The Melancholy of Ryouga Haruhi, and Kyoani’s animation opened his eyes to another possibility.
From then on he started the path of writing. On a Japanese 2ch forum, he also thought he had connected with a female supervisor at Kyoani, and even developed a crush. Shinji Aoba has since submitted novels to Kyoani on two occasions, and when asked by his defense attorney why he chose Kyoani, Aoba’s response was conversely innocent.
“I believe that here I can create the best animation and write the best stories.”
But it was not to be, and after two unsuccessful submissions, Aoba’s world seemed to turn upside down. He began to believe that a dark force was playing with him, more specifically, a mastermind he called “Number Two”.
Shinji Aoba is not a first-time offender, having been imprisoned for robbing convenience stores and stealing women’s underwear before he turned 30. Shinji Aoba describes how he met “Number Two” while in prison, but this “Number Two”, whose face and information he cannot describe, became a nightmare that played with his life.
“Number Two had a wide range of connections, not only to the bigwigs in the ACG industry, but also to government officials. Aoba blames “Number Two” and “Female Supervisor” for his failure. He believed that “Number Two” had probably invested money in KyoAni, and had therefore taken control of KyoAni so that his work would not be selected, and that the other party was only interested in enjoying themselves by trashing their own hard-earned work.
The “female supervisor” who made Shinji Aoba fall in love with him has turned into a plagiarist. From “Kotone Girl” and “Blow Up! Euphonium” and “Free!”, Aoba thought that all of these works were plagiarized from his own novels.
In fact, the plagiarism claim doesn’t hold water in terms of time or content, but Aoba is still adamant about it.
“Plagiarizers are praised by the world, while those who work hard to create are left out in the cold. That ‘female supervisor’ is climbing higher and higher, while I’m slipping.”
In Shinji Aoba’s mind, he needs to do something “big” to get rid of the plagiarism that KyoAni Animation is doing to him.
In 2008, there was a terrible random murder in Akihabara, Japan. The culprit drove his car into a crowd of people and then attacked a fallen passerby with a dagger. ……
Influenced by this case and feeling that he was in a similar situation as the murderer, Aoba had wanted to repeat the tragedy of that year. He went to Omiya Station in Saitama Prefecture with six daggers, but stopped because he felt that the number of people in the neighborhood was too small to make it a “big deal” even if he did. In the end, his target became Kyoani, and even if he had to destroy an entire studio, he would send a warning to Kyoani.
“I think that’s all I can do.”
These delusional statements and jumps in logic became a breakthrough for the defense. Aoba’s defense attorneys argued for innocence or a reduced sentence by claiming that Aoba was in an unstable state of mind and had lost the ability to distinguish between right and wrong.
According to the process, the analysis of Aoba’s mental state will become the focus of the debate later, but from the perspective of a layman, no one will believe in this kind of defense, and the crazy story from Aoba’s mouth.
In order to commit arson, Aoba meticulously prepared the tools to commit the murder; when purchasing gasoline, he used lies to escape suspicion; he chose to commit the murder at 10:30 a.m. because he judged that people were at work at that time and no one would come to stop him ……
He thought carefully at every moment of the murder, in other words, he knew exactly what he was doing.
3
Shinji Aoba’s trial drew attention from all walks of life, not only from the media who waited early, but also from the general public.
At the trial on September 5, the court provided 35 additional seats for spectators, which required people to qualify by drawing lots. The process of drawing lots was tedious, and one had to rush to the site in the heat to participate, but the site was still crowded with people early. Some of them wanted to understand the motives of the criminals, while others wanted to know why Shinji Aoba was here.
In order to recognize his character, the prosecutor listed the trajectory of Shinji Aoba’s life, in which many dark labels can be seen – the scars of his family of origin, the hardships of life, the loneliness of not being understood.
After his parents divorced at the age of nine, Aoba suffered from his father’s abuse until he passed away by suicide at the age of 20. After that, Aoba moved to her mother’s residence. But it didn’t last long, as his mother and stepfather miscommunicated with him and eventually kicked him out of the house. Since then, he has lived a life of poverty and emptiness.
Shinji Aoba at school
In the eyes of some old acquaintances, Shinji Aoba was more outgoing and conscientious when he was in school, but it’s a bit hard to believe that he’s become this way after dropping out of school. But in Shinji Aoba’s account, since he was kicked out by his mother and lived alone, his life has long been black and white, living in poverty and emptiness, and writing novels has become the only persistence. But who would have thought that this seemingly harmless hobby would become the beginning of a tragedy?
In the face of life’s misfortunes, Aoba chooses to blame it all on others, and even when he falls to the ground with serious injuries, he doesn’t forget to shout that everything is someone else’s fault.
“They plagiarized my work, call the president of KyoAni, I want to speak to the president!”
Shinji Aoba’s past is indeed laced with the bitterness of life, but that doesn’t excuse him from hurting others. For the wider public, what mattered most at the moment was nothing more than the outcome of the trial; after all, when he chose to take everything out on others, the pity people felt for him completely dissipated.
After four years of silence, people still had to wait another four months. There would be a total of 33 trials surrounding Shinji Aoba’s mental state and sentencing until January of the following year.
Only then would the case be legally closed – but the indelible pain of the victims would remain, and the disaster would never truly come to an end.