⛩️ #26 Calmly Burning Alive: the Shinjuku Bus Arson Case

The Headlines, This Week in Japanese History, and Much More

What would you do if you were sitting on a bus and a madman threw lit gasoline on board?

Probably not sit there calmly burning alive, right?

But that’s what one woman did during 1980’s Shinjuku bus arson case.

More on that below, plus:

• An interview with 2-time Japanese Olympian Cathy Reed

• 5 Russian words used in Japanese

• And your usual links of the week and quiz.

Let’s jump into it:

THE QUIZ

A picture that Japanese people will recognize instantly. Do you?

Question: what’s this?

Answer at the foot of the mail.

THE HISTORY

Calmly Burning Alive: the Shinjuku Bus Arson Case

The Keio Teito bus afire at Shinjuku station. Photo: Yoshiharu Ishii*

In August 1980 a madman threw lit gasoline into a bus idling outside Shinjuku Station in Tokyo. 3 people were immolated instantly. 3 more people died later from their injuries.

But one passenger sat calmly on the bus as she suffered 80% burns.

This is the story of the Shinjuku Bus Arson Case and that passenger, Mitsuko Sugihara.

* * *

When damaged marginals go homicidal in America, they pick up a gun and start drilling workmates, classmates or presidential candidates.

In Japan, this personality type generally turns inwards, isolating themselves at home in an ever-expanding puddle of filth until the day they snap and go outside and leap off a station platform to spatter themselves over a front of a speeding train, ending themselves but not others.

But there have been a handful of Japanese lunatic narcissists who have carried out the most cowardly attack of all: mass arson against innocent people.

• In December 2021, a 61-year old man repaid the staff of an Osaka psychiatric clinic who had been treating him by firebombing the place, killing 26.

• The Kyoto Animation attack captured headlines around the world — in 2019 a moron accusing the company of plagiarizing his ideas lit the company’s HQ afire. 36 lives were lost.

And then there was the first of this kind of mass casualty arson-murder: the 1980 Shinjuku Bus Attack.

* * *

The attacker was a bum and a loser.

He was 38 years old, divorced, with a son. His wife suffered from some unspecified mental illness, so they placed their child in an institution while he drifted around the country, picking up casual construction work.

For a while he kept up the monthly child support, but soon became homeless and the remittances stopped — and then came the descent into alcoholic self-pity.

Soon he was living rough in Shinjuku, living off the vitamins in cheap saké. Reports vary on the precise trigger, but on the night of Tuesday, August 19th 1980 either his few shitty possessions had been wheelbarrowed away because he abandoned them in a coin locker for too long, or some short-tempered commuter had told him to get the f*ck out of their way, you dirty piece of shit. Probably it was both.

Anyway, this moron took out his grudge on the world by stomping down to Shinjuku Station’s west exit to throw a burning newspaper and a bucket containing 4 liters of gasoline into the rear of an idling bus operated by Keio Teito Dentetsu.

It went up like kindling. Three people, including an 8 year old boy, were immolated instantly, died in their seats, reduced to skeletons (in which state they were pictured in the newspapers, which shows the media ethics of the time).

3 more people died of their injuries, including two who held agonizingly on for months before succumbing.

Mitsuko Ishii was one of 14 injured who survived.

* * *

After working for an editorial production company, Ishii had become a freelance editor. She was 36 at the time of the attack and embroiled in an affair with a married co-worker (surname Sugihara), who had not-so-gentlemanly asked her to support him financially.

This pressure had led Ishii to harbor suicidal thoughts in the lead-up to the attack, and for this reason she calmly stayed in her seat when the bus became a burning prison (“maybe it would be easier if I died”).

As detailed in her autobiography — and subsequent movie version — she was finally pulled from the bus with burns covering 80% of her body, leaving her bedridden for months, head shaved, her mother constantly by her side.

After 6 months of cruel agony, she was with difficulty able to walk again, and met the man with whom she had been having the affair, telling him that he had been the reason she didn’t flee even as her skin melted off.

Here’s a testament to the messiness of human lives: while Mitsuko had been bed-bound and tormented by pain, the man’s wife had meanwhile passed away from a long-standing illness, and he and Mitsuko quickly married. He became her rock even as her recovery was dogged with challenges, including the fact she was infected with hepatitis C after receiving unheated blood products used to treat her injuries.

If the hepatitis detail wasn’t macabre enough for you, get this: Mitsuko's brother was a photojournalist who happened to be passing by when the bus was afire and instinctively took a picture, which was published on the front page of the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.

However, such was the shock when he found out his sister had been aboard and he had not tried to aid her that he quit journalism and became a landscape photographer instead.

One of the pictures he took of the burning bus appears at the top of this article.

* * *

One would be forgiven for holding a grudge against the attacker.

Instead, after hearing the pathetic details of his life, Mitsuko Sugihara decided to advocate for him.

At the time, victims were legally barred from meeting with perpetrators of their crimes, but when the defendant's life sentence was finalized, a special visit was allowed to the prison where he was held. Sugihara met face to face with the man who had changed her life, and the upshot was this: she offered to sponsor him if he was ever released on parole (one wonders what the families of the dead victims, including the 8 year old, thought about this…).

Ultimately, the man was never paroled, but, thanks to Sugihara’s advocacy, since the 2000s it has become possible for defendants and victims to meet as part of a rehabilitation program.

• On the afternoon of October 7, 1997, the perpetrator of the Shinjuku arson committed suicide by hanging at Chiba Prison. He was 55 years old.

• In 2009, Mitsuko Sugihara was diagnosed with liver cancer, related to the hepatitis C infection. She passed away in December 2014, at age 70. She outlived the perpetrator by 17 years.

More here: Wikipedia (Japanese), Bunshun (Japanese)

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THE INTERVIEW

“I’ve walked into the men’s bathroom before…”

Cathy Reed competed for Japan at the 2010 and 2014 Winter Olympics.

Live now:

Kyoto

Passport?

Japan

Arrived in Japan

Visited since I was a kid, but arrived to live in the summer of 2015.

Favorite place

Itsukushima Shrine (Hiroshima)

Favorite word

ふくらはぎ (fukuharagi). A beautiful word for a part of your leg (calf)!

Natto, yay or nay?

BIG NAY

Most embarrassing moment

I’ve walked into the men’s bathroom before…

Weirdest question from a Japanese person

What’s your blood type?

Ever sang A Cruel Angel’s Thesis?

No.

Japan forever?

Not sure 🤔

Cathy Reed now works as an ice dancing coach in Kyoto, Japan.

THE LANGUAGE

5 Russian words used in Japanese

Japanese uses the katakana syllabary to represent foreign words — which means most English speakers can sound out a word and understand it.

Not so easy, though, with words derived from languages other than English — and today we’re introducing five that come from Russian.

1. ikura — イクラ — “cod roe”

Yum! If you like hoovering up fish eggs when you hit the sushi shop, you have Russia to thank for the name. (Russian original: икра)

2. seiuchi — セイウチ — “walrus”

In Japan, a seiuchi is a walrus. It’s a case of lost in translation, as the Russian sivuc actually refers to an entirely different species: the sea lion. (Russian original: сивуч)

3. norma — ノルマ — “work quota”

Hey, we all love being overworked, right? Exceed your norma like a good Stakhanovite! (Russian original: норма)

4. katyusha — カチューシャ — “hairband”

In English, katyusha will be forever associated with the very-loud-but-very-inaccurate WW2 rocket system used by Soviet forces — but the word is actually a diminutive of Catherine, equivalent to “Katie”.

In Japan, a katyusha is a hairband, named after the protagonist of Tolstoy's Resurrection — and in a neat parallel, the British English equivalent for this particular hair accessory is “Alice band”, named for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. (Russian original: Катю́ша)

5. ajito — アジト — “safehouse”

This one is a dog’s dinner. The Russian original agitpúnkt means “propaganda center”, but, via English, has been shortened to ajito and now means a safehouse — especially in the context of the left-wing Japanese nutbags who played hide-and-seek with the police while kicking off some very nasty political violence in the 1960s. (Russian original: агитпункт)

What are your favorite non-English loan words used in Japanese? Hit reply to this mail and let us know!

THE LINKS

3 things worth your time from this week:

1. The Guardian on the shrine where you pray for good weather (their climate change angle somewhat ruined because most people pray for sunny weather, even in the sweat-depths of Japanese summer)

2. Tim Shaw on Yamaoka Tesshu, sword hero of the early modern era in Japan

3. Patrick O’Hearn’s favorite restaurant in the world (a yakitori in Naka-Meguro, Tokyo).

THE ANSWER

Question: what’s this?

Answer: the lapel badge of a public prosecutor

With a ~98% conviction rate in Japan, these are the people who put you away for good, hopefully not in an outrageous miscarriage of justice :)

Enjoy The Kyote this time? Check this out next: Japan's First Internet-Savvy Hijack-Murder

We’ll see each other again next week,

The Kyote

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The Kyote is published in Kyoto, Japan every Sunday at 19:00 JST