SAGAMIHARA —
Shock and bewilderment gripped neighbors of a center for mentally disabled people in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, on Tuesday after a man stabbed and killed 19 residents in their sleep and wounded dozens more in Japan’s worst mass killing in decades.

“This kind of thing doesn’t happen in Japan. It’s unthinkable it happened so close to me,” said Masae Mizoguchi, a 78-year-old retiree who lives up the hill from the Tsukui Yamayuri En (Tsukui Lily Garden) facility.

Residents of the town woke in horror on Tuesday to learn that a man had broken into the disabled facility overnight and stabbed residents as they slept.

“These people were severely disabled, and they were asleep. That’s why he was able to kill so many,” Mizoguchi said.

Japan has largely been spared the mass killings that have become all too common elsewhere in the world, partly due to its strict gun-control laws.

“This is a peaceful, quiet town, so I never thought such an incident would happen here,” said another neighbor, Oshikazu Shimo, one of many Sagamihara residents who gathered nearby as the buzz of cicadas was heard in the humid summer air.

Police have arrested Satoshi Uematsu, 26, a former employee at the facility. A Sagamihara city official said later Uematsu had been involuntarily committed to hospital on Feb 19 for fear he would harm others.

He had come to authorities’ attention after saying he was willing to kill severely disabled people, but was discharged on March 2 after a doctor deemed his condition had improved, the official said.

In February, Uematsu tried to hand deliver a letter he wrote to the speaker of the Diet’s lower house, demanding all disabled people be put to death through “a world that allows for mercy killing,” Kyodo news agency and TBS TV reported. Uematsu boasted in the letter that he had the ability to kill 470 disabled people in what he called was “a revolution,” and outlined an attack on two facilities, after which he said he would turn himself in. He also asked he be judged innocent on grounds of insanity, be given 500 million yen in aid and plastic surgery so he could lead a normal life afterward.

The letter was reprinted by Kyodo after the attack.

“My reasoning is that I may be able to revitalize the world economy and I thought it may be possible to prevent World War III,” the rambling letter says.

The letter, which the Tokyo police got, included Uematsu’s name, address and telephone number, and reports of his threats were relayed to local police where Uematsu lived, Kyodo said.

Japan’s worst previous mass killing was in 2008, when a man drove a truck into a crowd and began stabbing people in Tokyo’s popular electronics and “anime” district of Akihabara, killing seven people. In 2001, a knife-wielding man killed eight students in an elementary school in Ikeda in Osaka Prefecture.

The Sagamihara facility is located in a valley nestled between mountains, at the end of a street of modest houses interspersed with persimmon orchards and vegetable gardens.

In a nearby amusement park, the Ferris wheel and other rides were operating normally.

“That kind of person can’t defend themselves. That’s why so many died,” taxi driver Susumu Fujimura said of the victims.

“It makes you weep to think of somebody just murdering them. He said ‘we should get rid of disabled people’ but he’s the worthless one,” Fujimura said.