The malaise of Japan’s nihilist youth

Last Sunday, before Tomohiro Kato drove his truck into a crowd of people in the Akihabara district in Tokyo, killing seven, he updated his blog 16 times.

The Japanese media have already painted Kato (right) as an aberration, a bloody minded lunatic, but the tone of his postings suggest somebody in full use of their mental faculties. "What dreadful rain… Will I get there on time?" he frets at one point.

If Kato seemed ordinary it was because in many ways he was. Japan is suffering from an epidemical malaise affecting its young people. Youth suicides, including group pacts, have become such a common phenomenon that newspapers rarely bother reporting them. The number of random street attacks, like the kind perpetrated by Kato, has doubled in the last year. One 16-year-old who went on a knife rampage in

January summed up the nihilist mindset which defines this growing trend: "I wanted to kill everybody, I didn't care who."

An undeniably large section of Japanese youth is mentally damaged. The term hikikomori was invented in 1986 to describe the subculture of young, mostly male, Japanese, who give up on the outside world to adopt a hermetic lifestyle playing computer games and surfing the internet. Now, the pent-up rage and depression felt by more than a million young people who shut themselves away for months at a time is seeping into mainstream society.

Medical experts agreed the state has failed its children. Free, anonymous services such as the Samaritans in the UK do not exist. Some companies offer counselling, but only to employees on prestigious life-long contracts.

Meanwhile, instead of pushing the government to help those people who feel most alienated by society, Japan's media have chosen to demonise them, spreading scare stories about reclusive sociopaths, liable to go on killing sprees at any time.