Norio Nagayama - Landscape of a Serial Shooter - 1968

Norio Nagayama - Landscape of a Serial Shooter - 1968

The Norio Nagayama serial shooting case (1968) is known as a case that sharply illuminated the distortions of the postwar Japanese social structure. Nagayama was born into an extremely poor family in Aomori Prefecture, and lived on the margins of society from his childhood, moving from foster home to foster home and juvenile reformatory. The handguns used were leaked from a U.S. military camp, symbolizing the influence of the postwar occupation system and the U.S. military on individual tragedies.

After the incident, the media reported Nagayama as a "serial shooter," but literary scholars and thinkers saw his actions as the product of "structural violence. The publication of his memoir, "Tears of Ignorance," brought to light the inner life of a young man who had been excluded from society, and went beyond a mere record of his crimes to appeal to the "unspeakable reality of Japan. The Nagayama Incident was a contradiction of that era. The Nagayama Incident was perceived as the exclamation of young people who were burdened with the contradictions of that era.

The announcement of the independent screening of the film "Serial Shooter" in the February 1975 issue of "Omoshiro Hanbun" (Funny Half) went beyond a mere introduction of the case, stating: "Four murders with the same gun in four different cities," "A 19-year-old boy was arrested," and "We tried to follow in Norio Nagayama's footsteps and visualize another Japanese archipelago. He goes on to narrate. There was an ideological orientation that went beyond individual guilt and attempted to depict the pathology of society itself as if it were a map.

This perspective resonates with the underground film movement shared by Shuji Terayama, Koji Wakamatsu, Masao Adachi, and others. The attempt to create a vision of "another Japanese archipelago" by standing in the gap between the state and the individual, the city and the frontier, violence and silence, is at the heart of the cultural record of the Nagayama Incident. The Nagayama Incident exposed the limits of postwar democracy and at the same time made visible the "cries of the voiceless" that lurked within it. The name of Norio Nagayama still lives on as a symbol of reexamining the center from the periphery of society.