Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
Nine months ago, idol Tomita Mayu was stabbed around two dozen times by a fan turned stalker. Tomita suffered wounds to her neck, chest, back, and arms, which put her in critical condition, but somehow none of her vital organs were hit and she survived her assault.
At the trial for the attempted murder of Tomita, the stalker pled guilty to the charge, and he didn’t seem all that remorseful.
Iwazaki was seen smiling as Tomita’s statement was read out. “He kept shouting ‘die, die’ over and over,” Tomita said.
Tomita told the court in her statement that Iwazaki “persistently tried to talk to [her], so [she] threatened to call the police when [she] felt a blow in the right side of [her] stomach and saw [she] was being stabbed by a knife.”
“I hope [Iwazaki] rots in jail for the rest of his life,” Tomita said. “I can’t help but be afraid for my life. Who knows if he’ll hold a grudge at me and kill me for real next time.”
The reason for all this was that Iwazaki was, of course, obsessed with Tomita.
His Twitter account displayed constant rants concerning Tomita for four months before attacking her, making statements like, “I liked Tomita. I wanted to marry her.”
After Tomita rejected his gifts, he confronted her in person and got “vague answers”, so he decided to kill her.
In a statement to police, Tomohiro Iwazaki, the man who confessed to stabbing 20 year old Mayu Tomita said, “I sent her presents, but I felt indignant when they were returned. I asked her on the spot what the problem was, but when she gave me vague answers I lost control and stabbed her countless times.” According to police, the culprit Iwazaki also said he “intended to kill her” and that he “had prepared the knife beforehand” in his plan to kill her.
The fact that Iwazaki was so outwardly obsessed with Tomita has also left the police in hot water, as before the attack she had gone to the authorities to seek help.
The Metropolitan Police Department said the idol had consulted police earlier this month, saying a man named Iwazaki had persistently written to her via her blog and Twitter account.
Unfortunately for her, she got no help.
“When police were questioning me about the details, the first thing they ask was ‘Do you really think he might have murdered you?’” Tomita said in her letter. “I specifically told them the words ‘I might be murdered.’ I’m done being angry about it, and now it’s just upsetting.” Police apologized to the idol and released the results of the investigation into the handling of her case, admitting the officers “should have realized they needed to take better security measures for her safety as soon as possible.”
Yeah, so this is why obsessive fandom is not only extremely worthy of derision, but also downright scary. But we (hopefully) all already knew that, and hopefully the guy who did this goes away for a long time.
Perhaps more relevantly, are the police seriously just going to issue an apology? I’m not one for superficial, meaningless change, but maybe learn something? Maybe announce some kind of training so they know how to deal with this shit next time? Anything? Just seems abundantly clear to me they weren’t prepared at all to deal with a stalker situation and legitimate threats online, and an apology doesn’t do much to build confidence in them preventing this the next time it comes to them.
