After serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki was hanged on June 17, some death-penalty opponents wondered out loud if Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama had signed the execution order as a response to the indiscriminate murders of seven people on the streets of Akihabara nine days earlier. Of course, Hatoyama didn't mention any connection, but that didn't stop the media from making their own. At least two weekly magazines, Asahi and Aera, ran analytical articles tracing a vector of violence that extended from Miyazaki to Akihabara and which included other high-profile murders in between.

Miyazaki and Tomohiro Kato, the 25-year-old man arrested onsite for the Akihabara killings, don't have much in common. The former killed four little girls in 1988 and 1989 after abducting and imprisoning them, while the latter allegedly killed strangers by first driving a rented 2-ton truck into a crowd and then stabbing as many people as he could. Miyazaki apparently had, at best, a tenuous grasp of reality, while suspect Kato's self-pity and bitterness sprang from real-world disappointments related to family and work.

Image-wise, Miyazaki and Kato represent two variations on the otaku model. Miyazaki, in fact, popularized the neologism. At the time, otaku — young men who obsess over pop culture and new technology — were seen as antisocial and immature. With his thousands of anime videotapes and manga, Miyazaki made otaku into pathetic pariahs, but only for a little while. Now, otaku comprise a viable and powerful market, and, with the subsequent emergence of the Internet and mobile communications, the term's edges have blurred. In a sense, we're all otaku now, which is why Kato's case has been particularly unsettling. A lot of people not only sympathize with him, but have openly stated that they could see themselves falling apart in a similar manner.