36 Victims: Police and Media at Odds over Reporting on Bereaved Families… KyoAni Arson Case Confronts the Media

When I turned on the TV and tuned into a news program, I saw images of black smoke billowing from a wheat-colored building.

It was just after 10:30 a.m. on July 18, 2019. Located in a residential area of Fushimi Ward, Kyoto City, Kyoto Prefecture, is the first studio of Kyoto Animation, which has produced numerous popular animation works, including “Violet Evergarden” and “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.”

After showing images from the ground, the live broadcast soon switched to aerial photography. People were being carried out on stretchers through the gaps in the blue sheets. Firefighters are desperately trying to extinguish the fire, but the flames and smoke continue unabated, as if to ridicule them.

Five years after the Kyoto Animation Arson Case in which 36 people were killed, Shinji Aoba was sentenced to death by the Kyoto District Court, but he is appealing his sentence.

No matter how shocking a case may be, the public’s interest wanes as time goes by, and the media gradually covers the case to a lesser extent. Is there any way to scoop up the “silent voices” of those involved in the case? Nonfiction writer Mizuho Takagi and her YouTube channel “Hikage no Koe, ” which has more than 80,000 subscribers, have been pursuing the truth that the media does not tell.

In June of this year, she published ” Tears of the Case: Gathering the Voiceless Voices of Crime Perpetrators and Victims’ Bereaved Families ” (Tetsujinsha). The book delves deeply into nine major cases, including the murder of three Chiba elementary school girls, the bullying suicide of two Hachioji junior high school girls, the abusive death of a 5-year-old Meguro girl, and the murder of two Osaka sisters. Takagi says that one of the most difficult cases to cover was the Kyoani arson case. We asked him what went on behind the scenes of the case.

The Kyoto Animation arson case was probably the first case in which the police placed restrictions on coverage of the bereaved families at the time of the incident. There was some public opinion regarding whether or not to report the actual names of the victims, and the police were late in making an announcement.

Based on this premise, the police usually only handed out a paper requesting that the bereaved families refrain from commenting on the incident, but in the case of the KyoAni incident, the police even threatened individual companies about how they should cover the bereaved families at a meeting with the head of a section of the prefectural police department. If they did not follow the police’s instructions, they would be banned. This naturally slowed down the coverage. The same was true of the coverage of suspects. There were some major media outlets that did coverage like that of “Hikage no Koe,” but I often heard people from the Tokyo-based news media say that even if they did, they were told by the local news departments (Kyoto Bureau, Osaka Head Office, etc.) not to report the story and were therefore not allowed to report it. I am sure that each company was doing a good job, but I think that the major media were not able to release as much of their coverage as they would have liked.

While major media outlets were restricted, Mr. Takagi and the “Hikage no Koe” reporting team began working independently immediately after the incident. Kenichiro Wagatsuma, a filmmaker, was in charge of the interviews around the family home.

This is a personal story, but Wagatsuma and I are of the same generation as Aoba, and as for Wagatsuma, we both grew up in a bedroom community in the suburbs. As was the case in the former Urawa City, there are a great many houses that are about the same age.

In other words, when Aoba was a child, the city developed rapidly. Wagatsuma was in the same environment and felt the city’s momentum very much during his childhood. There were many children and the whole town seemed to be sparkling.

However, the apartment where Aoba lived was a building with a dark image that was left behind in the midst of such a bright image. Wagatsuma said the contrast left a lasting impression on him.”

The “whole picture is far from being painted if you only cover the immediate aftermath of the incident. Takagi and his team felt this way, and continued their coverage afterwards. In the process, they also felt the difficulty of grasping the truth.

In recent years, the frequency of aerial coverage (online coverage via SNS, etc.) has become more frequent than ground coverage (so-called “on the ground” coverage),” he said. However, in this case, we were almost 100% on the ground, which is rare in recent years for covering a suspect, because ‘the impression was too weak,’ ‘there were no classmates or other people who remembered the case,’ and ‘there were no posts on SNS.

If there is no one who wants to send out information about Aoba himself, we have no choice but to keep going around steadily. And we took testimonies that we had heard from Aoba, some of which turned out to be incorrect during the trial. It was a moment when we realized once again how difficult it is to cover a case before the trial.

However, that does not mean that we should just hear the trial and write about it as it is, or that this is the right thing to do. I believe that there are things that can only be seen through multifaceted coverage and that there are voices that can only be picked up in the field, and that is what I believe based on my past experiences.

Continued from Part 2 “The Media Mistook the Photo of the Murdered Sisters… The ‘Shocking Fact’ I Discovered While Covering the ‘Aftermath’ of the Incident…” [Part 2