Since late March there has been a rash of vandalism directed against flowers. Tulips, in particular, have been cut, uprooted or trampled in public places. The news trail seems to originate during the most recent cherry blossom season, when eight young trees were found destroyed in West Tokyo's Koganei district, and shortly thereafter in Fukuoka branches on 10 trees were cut off. On April 1, in the same city, somebody in a car ran over 2,000 tulips.

The story reached its apex with that infamous surveillance camera video of a salaryman whacking tulips as he walked down the main street of Maebashi, in Gunma Prefecture, on the night of April 18. The video received attention because it put a face to the destruction. No TV show or newspaper masked the man's features; in fact, the visual evidence was accompanied by the phone number of the Maebashi police so that anyone who recognized the perpetrator could inform on him.

The media is using the video to help apprehend a man who did a bad thing, but to what extent does the video also provoke others into doing the bad thing themselves? Seeing the man dressed in a nice suit, walking down the street and laying into the tulips with his umbrella, I wondered what his day had been like. He may have been a habitual tulip-whacker, or he may have simply given in to a violent impulse this one time, projecting his supervisor's face onto innocent flowers perhaps. At any rate, tulip massacres continued in Maebashi after the video was posted, and 53 were destroyed at an elementary school in Fukushima last Monday, the same day a group of junior-high-school students confessed to flower vandalism in Niigata.