They Make Our Crazy Mass Murderers Seem Almost Pleasant

I usually try not to delve into macabre subjects on this here blog; others have shown us all what can happen when you admit to finding child mutilation hilarious. Aside from Dan O'Brien taking an immediate interest in you, I mean. So when I say today's post is about a lot of people getting killed in Japan, understand that I am only tackling the subject because it deeply concerns me, and is happening somewhere far away, to people I’ll probably never meet. And yet, I am terrified. Terrified because near as I can tell, the Japanese people are in the throes of a massive Takashi Miike re-enactment. For those who aren’t familiar with Miike, he’s the Director of such gems as Audition, wherein a cute schoolgirl force-feeds a man a bowl of his own vomit and cuts his limbs off with wire. And I think their steady diet of the most intense horror the world has ever known may have finally gotten to them, because they are currently having a rash of killings the likes of which Wes Craven can only masturbate to. Here are some things that have happened in Japan, a country roughly the size of Madison, Wisconsin:

A young man rented a truck, drove it into a crowded intersection, and then started stabbing as many people as he could. He also left forums posts and text messages leading up to the murders, and his self-proclaimed motive was that he “hated the world” and “was bored with life.”

A janitor stabbed eight children to death at the elementary school where he worked.

A 14-year-old boy strangled an 11-year-old boy to death, then decapitated him, then put his head on a fencepost.

A 16-year-old boy in Tokyo attacked five people with knives.

A 17-year-old cut off his mother’s head while she slept, wrapped it, and delivered it to a police box, whatever that is.

My heart goes out to the Japanese, and in order to keep that from becoming a literal reality, I am never going to Japan ever. Of course I’m not saying that these murders are definitely the result of a culture soaked in the blood of a thousand filmed mutilations, but it’s easily the most compelling case for censorship I've run across since that children’s show Fucky and the Tits got canceled. And, in a small way, it makes me proud to be an American, where our burgers are sold by the quarter pound, our cookies are double stuffed, and our murderers just shoot people instead of sawing their heads off and leaving them places. Probably not what the Framers had in mind when they signed the Declaration, but an achievement nonetheless. And it’s more than you can say for the Dutch.

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When not blogging for Cracked, Michael watches 3 Extremes through squinty eyes as head writer and co-founder of Those Aren't Muskets!