Even sadder cause KyoAni was one of the few that actually took care of their animators, they were full time salaried employees.
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According to this the arsonist claimed they ripped off his ideas and a novel.
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Whoa, Jake Adelstein. I’ve read about him, he’s pretty well known and held in high regard for his reporting. Particularly for his work on Yakuza related stories
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I’ve read Adelstein too, and enjoyed his work but some of it…sets off my bullshit detector. Not sure why, a bit overdramatic and too perfectly ‘plotted’ maybe.
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I haven’t specifically read his stuff, i think i’ve read an interview of his that may have been posted here on BB. I’m just aware of who he is and that he’s also published some books. Seems like a really interesting dude, i should look him up more seriously at some point.
I was doing some searching and no one has been able to produce said novel. As far as anyone can tell, he’s never actually published anything. However, the police may have a manuscript.
You can’t allow people to work in conditions like this. They were murdered but not for the building they worked in.
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We aren’t supposed to speculate on whether a person is mentally stable, but may I suggest that someone who sets fire to a building with people inside may also think things that aren’t necessarily true.
That said, it is possible he submitted something unsolicited (which you can’t do for legal reason in the US, I dunno about Japan) or self published or published on the internet and thought that something the company did was too close to his work.
Or it could be completely unfounded. I mean, I enjoy anime, but there are a A LOT of common tropes.
Let’s wait for some more evidence before comparing this to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Two of the criminal elements in that fire was having flammable scrap everywhere and locking the doors and exits with chains.
This was an intentionally set fire, which is a big difference. Japan does have modern safety codes, but stuff like this is always when new ones will be drawn up. The one issue I’ve heard was that there was only one main exit, which IMO is odd, but maybe more common in Japan? Is that against codes there?
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According to NHK News Line the attacker doused the building with multiple containers of gasoline and lit it on the doorstep. People were trapped on the upper floor and died of smoke inhalation.
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Sentai Filmworks launched a Go Fund Me for the victims.
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Tokyo Vice is very good and I recommend it, very interesting. But strangely there are a few points where I find myself immediately thinking “well that part is a little embellished”. Without of course, any inside knowledge or evidence on my part…but it’s disconcerting how a few places track like fiction. I started to suspect that he changed some facts to protect people, even to the point of saying certain people had been killed when they really (I suspect) had just gone into hiding.
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The death toll is now 34 as one man has died in hospital.
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I think of the case where someone accused JK Rowling of plagiarism because they had written an essentially similar story. Never mind that an essentially similar story has been written over and over again by thousands upon thousands of writers for as long as children have been imagining they are special. The old perspiration/inspiration saying applies to storytelling, but it’s more like 99% to 1%.
It is not impossible that the arsonist will turn up with a manuscript that has been lifted word for word or scene for scene by the animation company in a way that is undeniably plagiarism. But I tend to think that a person who is so entitled they think they can light an occupied building on fire to settle personal grievances is also a person who has an inflated sense of their importance. They probably once wrote a story derived from the same cultural tropes as some story the animation studio did and imagined that they were the originator of the idea, and that they’d be rich and famous if only it wasn’t for their enemies.
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Thank you for the details, I did not know this
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