Seventeen years ago, Japan's "murder of a sixth-grade girl at Sasebo Elementary School" shocked the world.
It forever changed Japanese law and the way underage are managed, but for the virtual world, the 11-year-old murderer has become an idol for countless people around the world.
In June 2004, when 11-year-old Tsuji walked into the sixth-grade classroom after lunchtime, the homeroom teacher saw her covered in blood and asked her what had happened.
Tsuji picked a blood-stained carving knife in one hand and told the teacher very calmly, "This is not my blood." ”
The teacher realized that there was a girl named Mitsuru in the class, and she felt that something must have happened to Mitsuru and hurried to find it. When the door of an empty classroom was opened, screams filled the entire building.
The 12-year-old's neck was cut open, his wrists were cut to reveal his bones, and his hands and feet were severely knife wounded, which showed that the murderer had great hatred for the deceased, and he was ruthless and emotionally guilty.
Although neither the teacher nor the classmates wanted to believe it, Tsuji confessed to killing his classmates with a carving knife.
The police and the school wondered what kind of hatred could make a schoolboy do such a cruel thing. Could it be family reasons?
This is not the case. The killer, Tsuji, lived in the beautiful countryside of Nagasaki, her father was an ordinary member of the insurance company, and her mother was just an ordinary housewife, and the family of five was very harmonious, and it was said that she was a "very obedient child".
The girl who was killed, Misaba, was a lively girl whose father was the president of The Mainichi Shimbun and lived alone in the city with three children after her widowhood. The two children were classmates, not only enemies, but also very close friends.
Tsuji is a very introverted and gloomy person, and he hardly takes the initiative to talk to people. Tsuji pickers and Mitsuru washed on the same website similar to today's blogs, recording daily routines.
In the fifth grade, the two quickly became friends online, commenting on each other's articles, giving each other cute nicknames, and because both of them were very fond of drawing, they also hit it off at school and began to play together.
From the perspective of others, the cheerful Mitsuru seems to be changing the introverted Tsuji Pickers, and she has added Tsuji Pickers to the school's basketball department, allowing Tsuji Pickers to gradually make more friends.
It would be nice if the story only happened here, but Tsuji has a fatal problem, she is not very talkative, but her personality is very grumpy.
If someone doesn't look her in the eye when they talk, she gets angry, and if she doesn't do what she thinks, she beats the other person. The children in the class were often bullied by her, but the irresponsible teacher never cared about it, listing all the bullying as "fights between children".
Towards the end of the fifth grade, there were more and more cases of Tsuji picking and going away.
Withdrawing from the basketball department in preparation for the junior exams, she communicated less and less with her friends and began to indulge in horror and violent movies that were not within the scope of children's viewing. She also wrote many times about her fantasies about killing people in her exchange diary with Mitsuru.
It was also during this period that there were two consecutive minor conflicts between hand washing and tsuji picking. The first time was at the end of the exchange diary, mitsuru wrote the popular phrase "next, xx sauce" at the time, but Tsuji picked angrily told Mitsuru that the word was his own "Don't copy me!" ”
Several other children who played with them did not dare to refute it, but Mitsuru and Tsuji picked argued on the grounds, and the argument led to Tsuji's picking hating Mitsuru even more.
At the end of May of the sixth grade of elementary school, while the two were playing, Mitsuru jokingly spat "You are so heavy", and Tsuji picked vegetables and left in anger. When the two were at odds, Mitsuru wrote in his blog without malice: "Tsuji pickers sometimes seem arrogant when they talk. ”
Who knew that this had become the fuse that led to the outbreak of the killing intent of the tsuji. She first hacked into the account of Mitsuru in some way, and did some damage to the account of Mitsuru.
Mitsuru was very upset about this, and he had been struggling with how to deal with the awkward affair between the two people. She also specifically asked her father and brother how to ease their relationship.
The time was finally back to that afternoon. Tsuji picked and asked Mitsuru to wash her hands from the training room, and she wanted to play games with the two of them. Mitsuru was happy and thought the two could be reconciled. But she didn't know that Tsuji was holding the idea that she would die.
Entering the classroom, Tsuji pulled up all the curtains and sat down. The unknown girl sat down and was covered her eyes. Without any hesitation, Tsuji picked it from behind and washed it with a throat slitting knife.
The wound on the neck is 10 centimeters deep, and even the neck diameter of an adult is only about 15 centimeters. Afraid that the girl would not die, she slashed her friend's wrist so hard that the bones of her wrist were exposed.
In order to ensure that The Medema wash was "dead", she sat in the classroom and watched the blood of the Mate wash shine for 15 minutes. She was still not at ease, and repeatedly pierced the girl's hands and feet to see if the other party still had a reaction.
Such a cruel method is difficult to imagine among adults.
When the police rushed into the classroom, they saw poor Mitsuru lying in the doorway of the classroom, and Tsuji watched the girl struggle to survive until she gasped.
Now the school has annual commemorative activities
According to the police department's investigation, Tsuji even wants to hire a suspicious person to wander around the school at the same time, so that the adults can transfer the criminal suspicion and exonerate themselves.
But after completing the crime, she forgot the plan and subconsciously walked into the class. In any case, this proves that she knows very well what she is doing, and that her actions have nothing to do with the word innocent or pitiful, only the word evil.
To further analyze how an 11-year-old girl was able to commit such a disastrous murder, the police conducted a further investigation into her daily life.
In the early days of the Internet, Japan's grading system for children was not clear enough. Obsessed with crime, after watching "Battle Royale", she created a fan fiction, replacing all 38 people in the story with classmates in the story, and letting them kill each other in the story.
In the story, she arranged a character for her "friend" Mitsuru, and in her own text, she killed her. After Mitsuru was angry with Tsujiki picked because of a sentence, she saw the method of killing people with a knife in the TV series, so she immediately followed suit, and in reality, she really killed Mitsuru.
Some scholars believe that Tsujichocho does not have any mental illness, but there may be "Asperger's syndrome" (a type of autism, emotional and cognitive delays) that causes her to be unable to distinguish the difference between reality and virtuality, and even less clear about the simple thing that "if you kill someone, you will die, and if you die, you won't come back to life."
Before the killing of Tsuji, people under the age of 14 in Japan are not criminally liable, and there is a possibility of stunting and too young age, which means that Tsuji pickers can not bear any responsibility after killing innocent Mitsuru wash.
Because of her brutal behavior, even many students suffered from PTSD, and Japanese society could not accept this result, and strongly demanded that she be severely punished.
This led to Japan lowering the juvenile criminal court trial age to 12 years old in 2007 and stipulating that 11 years old could be transferred for trial if necessary, and the claim that she was ill was not accepted by the court.
Japan has tightened restrictions on children's access to publications and the Internet, schools have placed counsellors, and for the first time, school violence has received national attention.
However, Tsuji did not go to jail and was restricted to freedom for 4 years in institutions similar to juvenile detention centers. Is this price really enough for mitsuru's family?
At a time when the damage caused by the case to the families of the deceased has not dissipated, something even more infuriating happens - the Tsuji pickers who killed people at the age of 11, the Tsuji pickers who did not go to jail, became the idols of teenagers in Japan and even overseas...
In Order to protect underage suspects in Japan, they usually use the pseudonym "boy/girl A" to refer to them, and the real name and photo of Tsuji pickers have not been revealed at first, but a picture of Tsuji TV when it was reported on the case accidentally revealed the name of Tsuji Pickers.
Originally, this case was very sensational, and after the real name was leaked, it attracted countless people to search for things about the murderer. On forums led by 2chan and 4chan, tsuji picking has become a hot topic.
Some people think she is good-looking, calling her "the cutest murderer in the world", and some posts find the contrast between her brutal and cute image "touching".
Moreover, because Tsuji Pickers and many people on the forum have the same niche hobbies, they quickly began to spread photos of Tsuji Pickers, and even created various comic images for Tsuji Pickers.
The paintings gradually spread out of the forum and flowed into the mainstream Internet. Over time, many people have forgotten the crime of picking vegetables in reality, and foreign netizens have no idea who her prototype is.
They indulge in the "violent Lolita" setting they have placed for tsuji picking, which makes tsuji picking more and more popular.
After the crime of picking vegetables, he was once photographed by a classmate covered in blood, holding a carving knife, and wearing a sweatshirt with the word "Nevada" printed on it. They drew a caricature of Tsuji according to this picture, drawing the murderer into all kinds of cute images.
Murder weapons, murderers have all become cute, rationalized beings:
Even her abnormal killing behavior has been pursued by some netizens as a "sick goddess", and she thinks that her crazy appearance is very middle two and very handsome.
Tsuji became a new icon of the teenage subculture, and the Internet was full of restrictive paintings and detailed depictions of murder scenes that were extremely disrespectful to the victims.
There are even people who stand on the CP of the murderer and the deceased, and make up stories of love between the mutilated deceased and the murderer. Soon, such confusing behavior extends to real life.
Tsuji is known as "Nevada tan" (tan is the Japanese name for a child) because he kills people in a University of Nevada sweatshirt, and the university's uniform is snapped up when it is picked up at the juvenile detention center.
They have also become popular cos roles in comic shows such as the United States and Europe, and they will not empathize with this tragedy when they are far away from Japan.
The growing number of crazy imitations of the killers led the University of Nevada to have to discontinue the same clothing in case it caused social problems.
But in fact, people have forgotten that Mitsuru was a real girl who died, and how the murderer watched her friend die in cold blood.
The passion for killing people began with premature exposure to violent and bloody literary and artistic works, but now the literary and artistic circles have created another batch of works based on Tsuji picking. The German band is named after Nevada tan.
Someone wrote a hymn to Tsuji, "Cutie NeVaDa," and a band released an album called "Girl A" dedicated the album to all underage murderers in Japan.
And the Japanese director actually adapted a movie about "the world's cutest murderer" based on the pick of Tsuji.
Tsuji's inability to recognize the boundary between the real and the virtual world has mutilated a young life, and in reality her followers, crossing the moral line, continue to blur this boundary.
In 2021, the Japanese media spread rumors that Tsuji pickers have been married, and we can't verify what kind of life Tsuji picks have, but it is certain that Mitsuru was left in 2004 forever.
Japanese netizens pulled out a recent photo of the suspected murderer
Mitsuru's family has not yet received an apology from the murderer, but the murderer has become a legend of Internet culture...