Regarding the June 9 article "Akihabara marks year since attack": I wonder, how much did the temporary employment status of Tomohiro Kato (the man charged with running down pedestrians and fatally stabbing passersby on June 8, 2008) contribute to his feelings of hopelessness and his desire to gain recognition in life somehow?
The fact that temporary workers have fewer rights in the workplace may explain Kato's paranoia about losing his job. I've read two reports that conflict over whether Kato was about to lose his job late in June 2008 or whether he only believed he would lose it due to an incident in which he had walked out in the belief that he was being disrespected.
Temporary workers can't express their opinions at work as "permanent" employees can, without fear of dismissal. Temporary contracts and dispatch contracts more often serve as a way for companies to evade employment laws rather than as a means of meeting seasonal production demands. Long-term temporary employment is immoral. More than three months as a temporary is long enough in my opinion.
Kato may have easily found himself in a position where he had no one to candidly talk to about his work situation and no way to use his own initiative to change it. He believed he had already lost, and the money was gone. Could he re-educate himself affordably? Probably not.
Of course, taking other lives so that people would know his pain was selfish, and we will kill him for it. But could it be that one of our robots malfunctioned, overheated and went AWOL? Maybe the labor and education ministries need to look at how human beings are having their initiative stripped away along with their human rights in the workplace.
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