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Masaki Kitamura, a 42-year-old director of animation perhaps best known for his work on classic anime series like Yu-Gi-Oh!, Mobile Suit Gundam and Wolf’s Rain, has been arrested for making a massacre threat in the city of Osaka.
According to police officials, Kitamura threatened to run over pedestrians and “stab whoever I can with a knife before committing suicide.”
Why, exactly, Kitamura would make this threat is one thing…why he’d post his threat on the Osaka City government website is something we don’t know.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, not only did Kitamura later deny any knowledge of the post (investigators tracked the posting via IP address to Kitamura’s place of residence), but authorities there say that Kitamura had even announced the location of the attack, as well as where and when: Sunday, August 5th, on Otaku Road.
It gets creepier: Otaku Road is a busy pedestrian area of the city, known for its manga shops and anime-related hangouts, so yeah, this would have qualified as a total massacre — similar to something that went down in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, an area known for its gaming/electronics stores: In 2008, Tomohiro Kato plowed through a crowd, killing 7 people and injuring 10 others.
Osaka cops are also tracing a bomb threat made against a Japan Airlines flight earlier this month and seeing whether that might be related to Kitamura. No explosives were found on board, even though the plane itself was forced to return to Tokyo International after the threat was made.
Again, we don’t have any information as to why the hell anyone would do this, other than them going certifiably insane. Hopefully whatever arrives at his trial and in the upcoming days will hopefully shed some light on the situation, and we’ll keep you posted.
Jeff Nau – who has written 1264 posts on The Jace Hall Show.
Jeff Nau is a main contributor to the Jace Hall Show covering pop culture and music trends in the nerd community. He has contributed to San Diego City Beat, 944, and Ill Literature, amongst others, and spends his spare time working as an artist and photographer.

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