Target Villagers | Name Tsuyama massacre | |
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Date 21 May 19381:30 a.m. – 3:00 a.m. Deaths 31 (including the perpetrator) | ||
The Tsuyama massacre (津山事件, Tsuyama jiken) was a spree killing that occurred on 21 May 1938 in the rural village of Kamo close to Tsuyama city in Okayama, Japan.
Contents
Mutsuo Toi (都井 睦雄, Toi Mutsuo), a 21-year-old man, killed 30 people, including his grandmother, with a Browning shotgun, Katana, and axe, and seriously injured three others before killing himself with the shotgun. Until the 1982 killing by Woo Bum-kon, this incident was regarded as the second-worst massacre by an individual in modern history, behind the 1927 killing of 44 people by Andrew Kehoe.
Massacre
Mutsuo Toi cut the electricity line to the village of Kamo on the evening of 20 May, which left the community in darkness. At around 1:30 a.m. on 21 May, he killed his 76-year-old grandmother by decapitating her with an axe. Then he strapped two torches to his head and prowled through the village entering the homes of his neighbours. He killed 29 neighbours (27 of whom died at the scene of the incident, while two others were fatally wounded, dying of their injuries later) and seriously injured three others in about an hour and half using a Browning shotgun, a Japanese sword and an axe. This was almost half of the residents of the small community. At dawn he committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest.
Mutsuo Toi
Mutsuo Toi (都井 睦雄, Toi Mutsuo, March 5, 1917 – May 21, 1938) was born in Okayama Prefecture to well-off parents. His parents died of tuberculosis when he was a baby, so he and his sister were brought up by their grandmother. He was originally outgoing, but at the age of 17 he became socially withdrawn after his sister married in 1934.
He was interested in the story of Sada Abe, the prostitute who, in May 1936, strangled her lover then severed his penis. He had started writing a novel, Yūtokaiōmaru (雄図海王丸).
He took part in "Yobai" (夜這い) or "night-crawling", a rural custom which involved creeping into young women's bedrooms during the night to seek sexual intercourse.
From his suicide notes it appears that after May 1937 when he was diagnosed as suffering from tuberculosis, the young women in the village rejected his sexual advances.
Legacy
A 1983 Japanese movie, Village of Doom, was based on the massacre.
The attack is one of the worst rampage killings by a single perpetrator in modern history.