A Japanese high school student has been arrested in Tokyo for threatening to blow up Konami HQ over a video game.
Maybe you can get away with a little hyperbolic mass murder online in the West, but definitely not in Japan. They take these sorts of threats very seriously no matter where they pop up.
So when a 16-year-old suspect posted bomb threats on an online app store saying he'd blow up Konami headquarters over a busted video game, police tracked him down and arrested him.
According to Kotaku (which cites several local Japanese news sources), the threats were made earlier in June. At issue was a mobile soccer game called PES which apparently had some buggy net code and caused the 16-year-old suspect to lose his connection during a match.
Rather than complain on some online forum somewhere like a normal person, he decided to leave a review on the app store where he threatened to blow up Konami HQ. Those threats included statements such as “I’m going to blow up Konami’s headquarters,” and “I’m going to kill the people who work at Konami.”
Which all sounds pretty clear to us, and likely did to the Tokyo PD, so they picked him up earlier this week. No news on possible charges, but given he’s only 16, he’ll likely get a stern talk at the very least.
Japan doesn’t screw around when it comes to bombing threats--at least, not after the Kyoto Animation Studio arson last year. The fire was the worst case of mass casualties in Japan since World War 2, with 36 people dead and 34 taken to hospital with burns and lung injuries from the smoke.
Square Enix received an arson threat not a few weeks later from a disgruntled gamer who wanted his money back. He specifically threatened to cause a similar fire to the Kyoto Animation Studio attack, which was still very much fresh in the mind of the populace. A 40-year-old suspect was arrested.
Source: Kotaku