The Kyote #10: The First Internet-Savvy Hijack-Murder
The News, This Week in Japanese History, & Much More
Dear readers: Happy Children’s Day!
Koi nobori. Image: 663highland, via Wikipedia
Historically Boy’s Day (with March 3rd, the Doll Festival, serving as the equivalent for girls), the fifth day of May is now a holiday to celebrate all kids, and sees families decorating their homes with carp streamers (koi nobori), and munching on rice cakes wrapped in Kashiwa leaves.
So, with congratulations to any readers with children, let’s get on with the mail!
The Quiz
A picture question any Japanese person will answer instantly. Can you?
Question: What does this picture illustrate?
Answer at the foot of the mail.
The Hashtags
What are Japanese netizens discussing? A selection of top trending hashtags on Japanese X/Twitter this week.
Tuesday April 30th: #風呂キャンセル界隈
ENGLISH: “The ‘Give up on the bath’ zone”
In Japan, people generally bathe in the evening rather than the morning. This, together with the relatively rare use of anti-perspirant leads — apparently — to baneful levels of body odor on the packed Tokyo train system come evening rush hour.
Now it turns out a significant portion of Japanese X are no fans of bathing at all and are sharing their hacks to skip the ordeal altogether. It all starts with a post by a user introducing a dry shampoo product, recommending it with the phrase ‘I hate taking baths.’
On a serious note, amongst the squall of replies several users point out the role depression can play in reducing motivation to jump in the tub: “I want people to understand that it's not that I don't like baths or don't want to stay clean...”
Thursday May 2nd: #東京都の難読地名
ENGLISH: “Tokyo’s difficult to read placenames”
A return to more innocent times: an honest to goodness old fashioned quiz is trending, challenging people to guess the pronunciation of several bizarre place names within the greater Tokyo area, based only on their written kanji characters.
The quiz, suitable for readers who read Japanese (or masochists, or both we suppose), is here.
Our favorite is 狸穴町 (literally “raccoon dog hole district”), whose correct reading we won’t spoil here. The whole thing reminded The Kyote of the frequently bizarre pronunciation of ancient British placenames — the Bicesters (“Bister”) or Belvoirs (“Beaver”) of the world.
Friday May 3rd: #チーム友達
ENGLISH: “Team Tomodachi (‘Team of Friends’)”
Japanese rapper KOHH carved out a solid reputation in the 2010s rap/hip-hop scene before retiring abruptly from music in 2021. Now he’s back under his birthname Yuki Chiba, and has released the most viral hit of 2024 so far with Team Tomodachi — having taken fully to heart the modern publicity formula of dumbing down his lyrics to schoolyard levels and being totally incontinent with collaborative remixes. As the flywheel of Internet publicity accelerates we’re now onto the 15th variation of the track — and readers hoping for social media clout should probably get on Tik-Tok and crack off a mime to the song immediately.
The History
This week in Japanese history the following event occurred…
The First Internet-Savvy Hijack-Murder
Footage, broadcast live nationwide, of the presumed “Neo Barley Tea” (right). Image: RealTV
Barley tea (麦茶) is a roasted-grain-based tea made from barley. It is a staple across many East Asian countries such as China, Japan, and Korea. It has a toasty, bitter flavor.
In Japan, it is usually served cold and is a popular summertime refreshment. The tea is widely available in tea bags or bottled.1
2channel (２ちゃんねる) was an anonymous Japanese textboard founded in 1999 by Hiroyuki Nishimura (known as hiroyuki). The site quickly became largest of its kind in the world, with around ten million visitors and 2.5 million posts made per day.2
At 12:18pm on Wednesday, May 3rd 2000, a 2chan user using the handle “Neo Barley Tea” posted the following message, which read in its entirety:
Username: Neo Barley Tea
A 17 year old in Saga City, Saga Prefecture
Hehehehehe
Four hours later, as breaking news shows were throwing live to the scene of the ongoing hijack of a bus by a knife-wielding youth in Saga City, Saga Prefecture, the first reply to the above appeared:
Username: Anonymous
This TV show is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.
Followed quickly by:
Username: Anonymous
I wonder…
Username: ThrowawayAccount
Do you think this has anything to do with the bus hijack…?
* * *
One of the most bizarre aspects of the American justice system — which in general is a list of symptoms of insanity— is the way in which children can be, seemingly at a prosecutor’s whim, tried as legal adults, with all the implications that entails for the range of possible punishments.
(Don’t worry, we know where we’re going with this)
It seems that the more outrageous the crime, the more likely the bald facts of a perpetrator’s age will be ignored and zero examination made of whether malice aforethought (the legal threshold for murder) was actually present.
Japan has long had a different attitude to underage murderers.
The rare outbursts of grotesque violence attributable to legal minors have traditionally been seen as part of wider social phenomenon requiring a holistic rather than a vengeful approach.
And that’s why we’ll never know the identity of the 17 year old perpetrator of the May 3rd 2000 Nishitetsu bus hijack-murder — a media ban on naming him in the immediate aftermath of the crime was followed, after his release, by the creation of a fictitious identity under which he presumably still lives today.
We say “release”, because he returned to society with shocking haste — and the institution he was held in was not a prison.
* * *
The kid was a loser.
We’ll never know his name, but that we know for sure.
He was so alone, so invisible, so desperate to at least be worthy of becoming a topic of conversation.
Other kids have radar installed for this. Most kids roll their eyes and avoid the loser.
Some kids take advantage, of the process whereby the loser is in a constant race to reduce the standard of behavior they are willing to be subjected to in return for attention.
A bunch of kids told the loser it would be the funny if he jumped off a landing at middle school. They held out the prospect of parochial clout in return for a simple several-story leap.
Maybe at the last they resorted to telling him he was too much of a pussy to try. However long it took, whichever levers of manipulation they pulled, ultimately he vaulted the bannister, free-fell onto his ass and wiped out his lumbar spine.
Still, he took the high school entrance exam from his hospital bed, and passed.
9 days after entering Chienkan Prefectural High School he gave up and stopped going — the school culture did not, apparently, suit him (校風が合わない) — which may well be a euphemism for classmates remorselessly calling him the Fuckwitted Birdman of Southern Japan.
And mild-mannered losers at school frequently turn into uncontrollable rageoholics at home. The loser, now a full-time shut-in, proceeded to systematically beat the shit out of his parents, his sister and his dog.
The parents pleaded for help, to police and psychiatric services. Bureaucracy cast its lazy eye then replied there was nothing they could do unless and until a crime had been committed. His black-eyed parents staggered out of each institutional office unwilling to officially name themselves as victims, ensuring some other poor bastards were going to get hurt too.
At some level he intuited he needed help. In the same way the South Side of Chicago throws up pubescent killers who, when arrested, ask the cops how they can join the Police Department, the loser had dreams of becoming a public prosecutor. But after the neighbors complained a few too many times about the howls of the little sister and the canine it was fuck it — if actual life isn’t possible we’ll escape to a world where it doesn’t matter what breed of shithead you are in reality.
So he demanded a computer from his parents and dove deep, armored by his anonymity, vertebrae no longer at risk in the battle for attention.
2chan is born. 2chan catches on. Every teenager with a modem in Japan is vomiting their id out before an audience of millions. It wasn’t called social media. It was social media. No longer the loser, the kid is just a kid again now, with the renewed ability to be whoever he wanted to be.
But with this chance to assume any possible persona, scale any height of imaginative dudgeon, the loser quickly proves out again a loser.
2chan is resolutely anonymous, denigrating anyone who registers a permanent username. One of the largest memes born there was Giko Cat (ギコ猫) a cute, ASCII-rendered mascot.
The loser, still desperate for attention, not caring if it is malign or not (but actually caring deeply) stomps into the community in snowshoes by not only registering a username but also aiming it at the beloved Giko: CatKiller (キャットキラー).
(To be fair, the anti-feline nickname may have allowed his battered dog a momentary sigh of relief).
Sticking two rigid middle fingers up at God is one thing. Sticking them up at a hive mind of Internet nerds is another thing altogether.
Sweaty-palmed, lashing at his keyboard, Cat Killer pinballs around 2chan trying to meme, accumulating abuse like a magnet attracts iron filings. He starts a thread promising the thousandth reply would win a prize; it gets to post #999 but he takes too long composing the winning entry in his own competition and gets gazumped.
He posts, as “a friend” of himself, saying Cat Killer has been in mental distress. A pile-on ensues. He is told to fuck off and die, thank you very much. He promises he will abandon his permanent nickname, leave the CatKiller persona behind. People applaud. He comes back with a different registered handle, Neo Barley Tea, one-upping the user Barley Tea, gainer of much social proof by their hacking of 2chan’s creaky security. People boo. The loser can’t catch a break. He’s a donkey, he can’t do anything right, he hates himself so much he’s outsourced his self esteem to a messageboard of at best amoral and at worst actively evil anonymites.
Finally, nauseated by his failure in the second chance salon of the online world, he seeks recourse back out in the location of his original humiliation: the real world. Buying a knife from a hardware store, he posts the cryptic message on 2chan and proceeds to the nearest bus stop to show both existences he’s mad as hell and won’t be taking it anymore.
* * *
Back to the thread:
The first four posts of the legendary Neo Barley Tea thread, as translated earlier in this story. Source: Wayback Machine
As 2chan woke up to what was happening — and this is typical of the board’s ethos — the next two replies were an irrelevant cut-and-pasted piece of ASCII art, then a message reading click here for more about the bus hijacking accompanied by a wall of porn links.
Then the thing goes viral, and in comes the avalanche. The thread, still available today on the Wayback Machine, is a fascinating document, an unspooling real-time moral Rorschach test for those participating, and, in hindsight, a microcosm of humanity developing before us like an image in a photographic tray.
We have:
people live-reacting to what they are watching unfold on the news
people saying someone should alert the authorities about the thread
people saying someone should alert the authorities about the thread, and here’s the phone number of the Saga Prefectural Police but I’m not going to call
people commenting on how the news is spreading through 2chan
people posting that they are posting something for posterity
people wondering if the hijacker is reading the thread live on a cellphone
people addressing the hijacker directly, telling him to surrender
people addressing the hijacker directly, applauding him
people happy that a boring Golden Week holiday has been livened up
Internet sleuths trying to pinpoint Neo Barley Tea’s IP address
An ASCII Giko cat pretending to be then-Prime Minister Yoshirō Mori, saying things like “This idiot’s going to mental hospital!”
scam links, trying to cash in on attention with enticing horseshit like “confirmed identity of the hijacker here!”
people pointing out (presciently as it turns out) that 2chan administrator-owner hiroyuki is going to get famous off this
And on and on and on for miles and miles and miles.
(The Kyote considered annotating the entire thing until noticing how long it went).
The concluding posts, from 2:45am, March 29th 2001, 10 months after the hijacking, are by a lone insomniac, trying to get the thread up to a round 16,000 replies.
They give up at #15791, and the thread concludes.
* * *
Route of the hijacked Nishitetsu bus; the trip took 17 hours. Image: Google Maps
The hijack, in summary:
Half an hour after the 2chan post, a Nishitetsu company bus scheduled from Saga Joint Government Office on a 1h10m trip to Tenjin Bus Center is hijacked by a 17 year old armed with a meat knife (牛刀).
Lacking any panic button or the like, the bus driver is unable to alert authorities as the hijacker instructs him to head towards Yamaguchi Prefecture on the main island of Honshu.
As the driver flashed his headlights trying to alert passing motorists, the hijacker instructed the passengers to close the curtains.
Nishitetsu realize the bus has not arrived on schedule.
One passenger manages to jump from the moving bus, is picked up on the expressway and alerts authorities.
Now in Yamaguchi, the police are following the bus and the hijacker stabs a male passenger, who jumps from the bus onto the roof of a pursuing police car — and this is broadcast live across the nation by the pursuing press pack.
Showing what a little prick he was, the hijacker screams “this is collective responsibility!” and stabs another passenger as punishment for the injured man escaping.
With the jurisdictional pettiness typical of Japanese law enforcement, the Yamaguchi Prefectural Police allegedly lift a blockade of the expressway in order to pass the buck to their neighbors in Hiroshima Prefecture.
The hijacker releases all male passengers at the Takedayama Tunnel in Hiroshima, probably to ensure no one remains on the bus capable of physically overpowering him.
Three injured passengers are released as an expressway service station. One has already died from blood loss. This is the only death during the incident.
After halting overnight at the Kodani service area, at 5am on May 4th police storm the bus with flashbang grenades (their first use in Japan), and arrest the hijacker.
* * *
Note: 2chan administrator hiroyuki, who — just as users had speculated he would — got famous off the incident, now says the police never actually requested the IP address of Neo Barley Tea in the aftermath of the hijack, and thus it was never conclusively proven that the thread originator and the bus hijacker were one and the same person.
However, hiroyuki is one of the great splitters of hair, disclaiming all responsibility for any of the repulsive posted on 2chan or its successor 4chan, despite being found liable in a huge array of lawsuits over the years, and the lining up of details seem to far surpass coincidence.
* * *
In last week’s edition, The Kyote explained why Japan is a good place to commit a murder.
It certainly was in this case.
The hijacker — whether truly the 2chan user known as Neo Barley Tea or not — was sentenced not to prison but a spell in a medical reformatory, and was released only 6 years later, given a new identity, and disappeared (although from time to time poor innocents are “outed” as the killer online, doxxed and subject to abuse).
* * *
Any crime that gets decent nationwide attention in Japan tends to attract a scalding number of copycats — see the Vending Machine Poisoning Spree and “Yukko Syndrome” suicides examined in recent editions of this publication — and the Nishitetsu bus hijacking was no exception.
The problem with pining down these copycats is that broadsheet newspapers tended to get very bashful in their contemporaneous reporting, lest they be accused of encouraging more incidents, so you need to employ some archival aikido to even find references to them — as opposed to the readily-findable cloggage of meaningless pious moral examinations of the why shy nutbags try to leave their mark on the world with violence.
Still, we can be sure the following occurred in the aftermath:
2001 - A person calling himself Neo Mugisake (“Neo Barley Alcohol”) posted a threat on 2chan against a dance festival, and was arrested on suspicion of blackmail.
Nov 2002 - A person calling himself “Neo Oolong Tea” posted a bomb threat against Odakyu Railway on 2chan, and was arrested.
There were also two hijackings (Jan 2001, in Kyoto and 2008 in Toyama City), where the perpetrators got off on the whole bus aspect rather than the 2chan/beverage name combination. Both were arrested before they could cause any injuries.
* * *
To forgive.
One of the injured from the Nishitetsu hijack, Yumiko Yamaguchi, reflecting on the incident while recovering from her stab wounds, decided to became an advocate for bullied children who refuse to attend school, hoping to develop a system capable of intervening before such kids resort to the type of violence she was victimized by.
In this way, Yamaguchi resembles Mitsuko Sugihara, who was disfigured in a notorious August 1980 bus arson attack outside Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, and proceeded to advocate for the mentally ill perpetrator while he faced trial.
Again, here, we have the Japanese idea of viewing murderers as products of wider societal phenomenon deserving of understanding and sympathy rather than vengeance.
It seems obvious to applaud this high-mindedness of Yamaguchi and Sugihara, with their knowledge born of trauma and disfiguring injuries — their ability to transcend anger and achieve not only forgiveness but advocacy.
But we should not forget the grieving families of those who died either — and who, due to another tradition, silent endurance of hardship, usually shy away from public venting of their feelings. What do the relatives of the Nishitetsu bus victim who bled to death at the hijacker’s whim think about his 6 years in an education facility followed by anonymized release? The Kyote doesn’t know. Neither does the world.
* * *
After the bus hijacking and a series of other, yet more gruesome murder cases, the age of legal responsibility in Japan was reduced from 16 to 14 years old — superseding the previous Juvenile Law (which had been nicknamed “The Law of Love”).3
On Children’s Day we hope those youngsters who need help are able to get it.
More at Wikipedia here.
More on Juvenile Criminal Responsibility and Punishment in Japan
The Answer
Question: What does this picture illustrate?
Answer: the rehabilitation of a young criminal
The youth on the left has the trappings of a typical delinquent: the whacked-out hairstyle, the sweatsuit with its punning kanji distorting the everyday polite interjection “thank you in advance” (よろしく) into the phrase “certain death on a dewy night” [trust us, it makes sense in Japanese].
On the right, the platonic ideal of a productive member of society: side-parted, compliant, conformist to the core.
Has perhaps Neo Barley Tea become the typical salaryman, slumbering on the train beside you after his 12 hour shift, indistinguishable from the convoys of other identikit corporate employees?
On that note:
Until next week,
The Kyote
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The Kyote is published in Kyoto, Japan every Sunday at 19:00 JST
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barley_tea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2channel
https://japanesestudies.org.uk/ejcjs/vol18/iss3/watson.html
Very enjoyable read, thank you!