Why Do Some People Call Satoshi Uematsu a ‘Hero’?
The boundary between a victim’s anger and eugenic thought
Some people still call Satoshi Uematsu—the death-row prisoner who murdered nineteen residents of Tsukui Yamayuri-en—a ‘hero.’ This response cannot be explained only as anonymous provocation. It can also absorb the anger of victims who feel abandoned and resentment toward failures in care and welfare. But where does understandable pain become an ideology that justifies eliminating uninvolved people?
On July 26, 2016, nineteen residents of Tsukui Yamayuri-en, a residential facility for people with intellectual disabilities in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, were murdered. Twenty-seven residents and staff members were injured.
Ten years later, language that measures disabled people’s lives by “social burden” or “productivity” has not disappeared.
Reports published immediately after the attack said that Kanagawa police received enquiries from people who wanted to visit or send gifts to Satoshi Uematsu. Posts on social media called him a “hero.”
Why would anyone glorify a mass murderer who attacked sleeping people with little ability to resist or escape?
Anonymous provocation cannot fully explain it.
Discontent with social systems, the unresolved anger of crime victims, and the temptation to turn a complicated problem into a story in which “removing someone” solves everything can converge in the same response.
Uematsu was not a patient found incapable of responsibility
Articles written immediately after the attack called Uematsu a suspect and discussed whether his history of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization or cannabis use might negate criminal responsibility.
The trial later answered that question.
In March 2020, the Yokohama District Court found that Uematsu possessed full criminal responsibility at the time of the attack and sentenced him to death. The sentence became final after he withdrew his appeal.
A history of psychiatric treatment or drug use does not automatically eliminate criminal responsibility.
The legal question is not settled by a diagnosis alone. Courts assess evidence about whether a person could understand the wrongfulness of the conduct and act according to that understanding at the time of the offence.
The massacre therefore cannot be dismissed as a sudden outburst by a care worker who had become mentally ill.
Uematsu classified disabled people’s lives by their capacity to communicate and their economic productivity. He represented killing them as a benefit to society, prepared for the attack and acted on that ideology.
A crime victim’s anger must not be discarded
The original news article included the testimony of an anonymous woman who said that a man with an intellectual disability had cut her face.
According to the report, the assailant was found to lack criminal responsibility. The woman felt that the legal system had failed to offer adequate justice. She developed fear and hatred toward people with intellectual disabilities and eventually posted that “Uematsu is a hero.”
Because the account was anonymous, its details cannot be independently verified. The problem it illustrates should not be ignored, however.
If a sudden attack left a permanent scar, destroyed a person’s work and relationships, and was followed by the message that the offender could not be punished, intense anger would be understandable.
Article 39 of Japan’s Penal Code provides that an act committed by a person who is legally insane is not punishable, while punishment is reduced when the person has diminished capacity.
But the absence of criminal responsibility does not make the victim’s injury less real.
Whether the state may punish an offender and how society should support the person harmed are separate questions. When punishment cannot be imposed, careful explanations about treatment, prevention, compensation and psychological support become even more important.
Japan also has a medical supervision system under which courts decide whether inpatient or outpatient treatment is necessary after certain serious harmful acts committed in a state of insanity or diminished capacity. It is inaccurate to reduce the system to “no responsibility means immediate release with no response.”
If society answers a victim’s anger only by calling it discriminatory, the victim may feel abandoned again. The task is not to deny anger. It is to receive it before it becomes collective hatred directed at people who had nothing to do with the offence.
How anger at one person becomes hatred of a group
If one person with an intellectual disability commits a crime, responsibility should attach to that person’s conduct.
The nineteen people murdered at Tsukui Yamayuri-en had nothing to do with the offence described by the anonymous woman.
Yet the move from “a person with an intellectual disability hurt me” to “the man who killed intellectually disabled people is a hero” changes the object of responsibility. An individual is replaced by an entire group.
The structure would be the same if violence by one man were used to approve the killing of unrelated men, or if an offence by one foreign national were used to support violence against everyone of the same nationality.
The generalization of fear may be psychologically intelligible. It cannot be accepted as social justice.
People do not always choose their immediate emotions. Publicly endorsing the proposition that members of a category may be killed, however, becomes a political act that threatens other people’s lives.
An emotion we can understand is not necessarily a claim we can justify.
Girard: making disabled people into scapegoats
René Girard described a scapegoat mechanism through which a community concentrates accumulated anxiety and conflict upon an individual or group, then tries to recover order by expelling or destroying the target.
For the mechanism to work, the scapegoat must not be perceived as innocent. The target must appear to be the source of the community’s suffering and therefore deserving of exclusion.
Disability policy does involve real and difficult problems: pressure on family caregivers, low pay and heavy workloads in care facilities, staff shortages, public expenditure, and inadequate responses to violence or severe behavioural distress.
Those problems should be addressed through decisions about institutions, budgets, staffing, medicine, prevention and victim support.
The heroic story told about Uematsu erases this complexity.
If disabled people did not exist, all these problems would disappear.
Once that premise is accepted, institutional failure is transferred onto the existence of disabled people themselves. The responsibilities of government, employers, politicians and communities vanish from view. People least able to resist are recast as the cause of society’s pain.
Uematsu did not solve the problems.
He killed people who had been defined as the problem.
When those two acts are confused, murder becomes a false tale of heroism: someone supposedly dared to do what society needed but others were afraid to do.
Nussbaum: the false calculation that taxpayers matter more
Some posts supporting Uematsu described disabled people as lives that only consume tax revenue.
But if a right to live depends on taxes paid or economic output produced, the principle will not stop with disabled people.
Infants, older people, people who are ill or unemployed, disaster survivors and students all receive support from others at some point. Accident, illness or age can turn someone who supports others today into someone who needs support tomorrow.
In a society that prices life by productivity, nobody’s life is protected unconditionally.
Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach asks whether each person has genuine opportunities to live a life worthy of human dignity, rather than how much profit that person returns to society.
Her account includes people with profound disabilities within the scope of justice and gives governments responsibility for securing the conditions of a dignified life.
Support does cost money. That fact does not yield the conclusion that people who need support should be eliminated.
It creates a political question: who should carry the work of care, how should the burden be distributed fairly, and what institutions can preserve the dignity of both the person receiving care and the person providing it?
Arendt: turning human beings into “superfluous” people
Hannah Arendt located a radical evil of totalitarianism in making human beings superfluous.
When people cease to appear as individuals with distinct lives and become an interchangeable category whose removal would supposedly cost society nothing, a barrier against violence collapses.
In public memory of the Tsukui Yamayuri-en massacre, the perpetrator’s name, ideology, history and photograph have repeatedly circulated.
The victims, by contrast, have often appeared as a single phrase: “nineteen severely disabled people.”
There are important reasons for anonymity, including the wishes of families and protection from discrimination. Even so, we should notice a structure in which only the killer is given an ideology and a story while the people he killed become numbers and attributes.
Repeating Uematsu’s claims in order to condemn them can inadvertently amplify his words and push the victims into the background again.
The nineteen people had favourite foods, characteristic expressions, daily habits, and relationships with family members and support workers.
An inability to express a wish through conventional speech is not an absence of experience or emotion.
To call them people who “gave nothing back” is to have outsiders who did not know their lives declare those lives empty.
Crime by a disabled person and discrimination against disabled people can be discussed together
We do not have to erase either of two realities.
Some people suffer violence committed by a person with an intellectual or psychosocial disability and then receive inadequate protection or redress.
At the same time, disabled people are themselves especially vulnerable to abuse, sexual violence and exploitation. Material submitted to Japan’s Cabinet Office has noted both the possibility that the risk of victimization rises with the severity of intellectual disability and the danger that offences against disabled people remain invisible to police.
Acknowledging one form of victimization does not deny the other.
Society should individually assess the risk presented by an offender with a disability and provide appropriate treatment, supervision and prevention. It should also provide victims with adequate compensation and long-term support regardless of the offender’s criminal responsibility.
At the same time, it must not classify unrelated disabled people as potential criminals or turn one person’s conduct into fear and punishment of a group.
Standing with victims and protecting disabled people’s lives are not opposing commitments.
The failure of an institution that cannot do both is what should be criticized.
The “hero” did not confront the powerful
A hero ordinarily confronts power or danger in order to protect other people.
Uematsu did not attack politicians, the officials who designed the system, or people who profited from running institutions.
He attacked sleeping people for whom resistance and escape were extraordinarily difficult.
Calling that heroic reverses the meaning of courage.
The glorification of Uematsu may contain the anger of crime victims who were never helped or resentment toward failures in the care system. That suffering must be taken seriously.
But suffering cannot be assigned to uninvolved and vulnerable people, and their elimination cannot be called justice.
In 2026, ten years after the massacre, Japanese disability organizations again declared that lives cannot be ranked and called for a society that rejects eugenic thought.
The question posed by the attack is not whether disabled people should be protected because they are good or harmless.
It is whether society can preserve a principle: regardless of usefulness, conventional communication or perceived risk, no person’s life may become an item in a collective cost-benefit calculation.
- Hear the anger of victims.
- Admit institutional failure.
- Respond individually to dangerous conduct.
- And still refuse to sacrifice uninvolved people.
Holding those four obligations together is how we resist the heroic fantasy that removing someone will solve everything.
When a society begins calling a person who killed vulnerable people a hero, it is not the value of disabled people that is on trial. It is whether that society will begin putting a price on human worth.
References
- City of Sagamihara, “About the Tsukui Yamayuri-en Incident”
- Statement following the judgment (Japanese)
- Japanese Law Translation, Penal Code
- Ministry of Justice, Medical Treatment and Supervision Act materials (Japanese)
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “René Girard”
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Capability Approach”
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Hannah Arendt”
- Cabinet Office material on crime victims with disabilities (Japanese)
- DPI-Japan, appeal marking ten years since the Tsukui Yamayuri-en massacre (Japanese)
Facts were checked as of August 6, 2026. The anonymous woman’s account in the original report could not be independently verified and is used here only as an example of a reported emotional response. The philosophers cited did not discuss this case; their ideas are applied to the question raised here.