Culture & Lifestyle

We are left only with archival photographs of Masayoshi Magome. The supreme irony of his homicidal rampage, of course, was that his face was never seen, not by the man and woman he shot and killed, nor by any of the terrified eyewitnesses, many of them small children who screamed and cringed as they looked on.

The scene of the crime was by the indoor pool of the Renaissance sports club in Sasebo City, Nagasaki Prefecture, in the early evening of Friday, December 14. Several gunshots sounded, and perhaps due to the characteristics in an enclosed space, the number heard by witnesses remains uncertain.

But it was, by anyone's account, a scene of abject terror. The assailant, appearing not so much a human being as a vengeful wraith clad in full-face motorcycle helmet, boots and camouflage military fatigues, strode into the club and begun blasting away.

After the smoke had cleared and the screams had died down, an attractive young swimming instructor Mai Kuramoto, age 26, and club member Yuji Fujimoto, 36, lay mortally wounded. The shooter had not fired buckshot but deer slugs, a larger and considerably more lethal type of shotgun ammunition. His intention was unmistakably murder.

The unidentified perpetrator fled. Magome, a 37-year-old college dropout with a class 2 electrician's certificate but a history of irregular employment, was found early the next morning outside a Catholic church near his home, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. A subsequent search of his home and car found him in possession of three shotguns and one air rifle, and about 2,700 shotgun shells. The incident immediately raised questions about Japan's laws controlling ownership of firearms -- which are among the industrialized world's strictest -- and their ability to keep guns out of the hands of homicidal misfits.

The perpetrator's height, perhaps exaggerated by the terrified eyewitnesses, was given as between 170 to 190cm. (Magome's actual stature has yet to be verified, although some posters in the blogosphere claimed to know he was 181.7 cm.) This impression made him "seem" like a foreigner, and initial reports from the scene said the killer might have been a "gaikokujin" (foreigner) or "kokujin" (black).

And Sasebo, after all, is home to Kyushu's largest U.S. naval facility, and Americans of all sizes and colors are ubiquitous near the base. What's more, the crime seemed to closely resemble the type of shootings that have become common in the U.S. One had occurred just 10 days earlier, at a shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska, when a 20-year-old man armed with an AK-47 military rifle gunned down eight shoppers.

It was hardly surprising then, that in the lead-in to its story, Aera (12/31-1/7) wrote, "It was the kind of tragedy that gave people a premonition that Japan is on the verge of becoming an armed society like the United States."

Be as it may, Magome's life was shattered forever only hours after his crime, and it will be left to the police and media to piece together what drove him to murder two people, both of whom he apparently knew.

Immediately after the incident, a friend who'd heard of the shooting, made repeated calls to Magome's cell phone to ascertain he was all right. Getting no response, he called his home. His mother answered.

"There's been a shooting incident at Renaissance. Did Masayoshi go there?" the worried friend asked.

"He told me today he'd be going to a job interview from 4:30 p.m.," Mrs. Magome replied. "I don't think he was planning to go."

"No, he said he was going and would meet us there," the friend retorted. "It's possible he's being held hostage or something ..."

"It might be my son who's the shooter," replied the worried mother. "He owns a gun. It would be better for him to be one of the victims than turn out to be the criminal."

Shukan Asahi (1/4-11)

As far as Magome's motive, was the Sasebo shooting a crime of passion? Most of the media has remained fixated on a "cherchez la femme" angle to Magome's motives, but Shukan Asahi (1/4-11) raises a question of an entirely different sort: was he gay? It seems that a senior police official involved in the investigation had been heard to remark, somewhat cryptically, that the killer's motive was "something that an ordinary person could not possibly imagine." This, a newscaster at a local station suggests, means that "inferences to the effect that Magome had a crush on Ms. Kuramoto were completely off base."

Three days before the incident, moreover, the magazine claims that Magome had been persistently directing questions of a somewhat personal nature to other males in the club's locker room, things like "Where do you live?" and "How old are you?"

"People who were close to him told us 'He had no interest in women' and 'He liked men,'" a police source is quoted as saying.

Aera (12/31-01/07)

If that were in fact the case, then the jealous rage would not have been directed at the male "friend" of Ms. Kuramoto, but rather at Ms. Kuramoto herself, for alienating the affections of a male toward which Magome might have felt attracted.

"He'd never once mentioned Ms. Kuramoto's name to me," a friend named "A" relates to Shukan Asahi. "Actually he almost never talked about women at all. 'It's okay not to get married,' he once said to me."

That friend may have narrowly escaped a similar death by failing to respond to Magome's invitation to come to the Renaissance sports club that evening. (By Masuo Kamiyama, contributing writer)