Killer in Japan Made His Intentions Public

Some Wonder if He Could Have Been Stopped

TOKYO, June 13 -- Tomohiro Kato, who police say has confessed to a stabbing rampage on Sunday that killed seven people, planned and executed the attack while enmeshed in Japan's near-ubiquitous matrix of surveillance cameras and high-speed wireless networks.

Kato, 25, a worker in a factory that assembles Toyotas, was sometimes unaware that he was being watched. Private surveillance cameras recorded his purchase of knives in a military surplus store two days before the killing spree, when he laughed with a salesman and made stabbing motions. Street surveillance cameras also caught his image Sunday, when he plowed a truck into a crowd of pedestrians in central Tokyo and commenced stabbing.

But in the days and hours leading up to the attack, Kato took considerable time to inform the wireless matrix -- or at least one Web site on it -- where he was, what he was thinking and what mayhem he had planned. A few minutes before the attack, he took a moment to complain about "awful" traffic.

Using his mobile phone, he blogged again and again en route to mass murder.

The stage Kato chose for Sunday's violence was suitably high-tech: the main street of Tokyo's Akihabara district, an internationally known magnet for consumer electronics and edgy comic books, a place where geeks with gadgets congregate by the tens of thousands.

"What I want to do: commit murder," Kato wrote in a mobile-phone Web posting two days before the attack, according to local media reports. "My dream: to monopolize the tabloid TV shows."

By that measure, he clearly succeeded.

In a white two-ton rental truck, he barreled into a street full of pedestrians at lunchtime, killing three people on impact. Then he emerged from the truck and began stabbing and slashing at passersby. He killed four with a five-inch, double-edged dagger and injured 10 others.

When he was tackled by police and arrested, he was splattered with blood.

Why he did it is less clear, although Kato has since told police about anger at his parents and irritation with work.

Kato attended an academically elite high school in Aomori, a town on the north end of Japan's main island of Honshu. But he struggled with his coursework there. "My life went well until I entered high school," he told police, according to the Asahi newspaper. In Web postings and in conversations with police, he has reportedly said that his parents were "strict" and "forced" him to study.

His parents, confronted by news media Tuesday night outside their home in Aomori, bowed repeatedly and apologized for their son's actions.