On 19 July the Noda City department of the Chiba Prefectural Police announced the arrest of 49-year-old elementary school teacher Masaki Yabusaki on charges of intimidation.

The suspect had allegedly sent around half a dozens emails to the Noda Board of Education with oddly-worded threatening remarks such as “I will blow up bad guys and their government buildings” if they didn’t rescind a decision to extend the school week to include Saturday classes introduced this year.

Yabusaki reportedly confessed to the charges but no explosives were found in his home during the investigation. The suspect who once served as the school’s curriculum coordinator allegedly sent around six emails to his board of education with various threatening remarks.

Among the messages’ grievances are “There’s no way to recover when you’re working until Saturday” and “All that can be done on Sunday is sleep.” These complaints were followed by threats of violence such as “On behalf of the faculty of Noda, I will blow up bad guys like you and your government buildings. I’m ready.” Even in Japanese the wording seemed pretty immature for a teacher nearing his fifties.

The board of education issued an apology regarding the suspect saying, “We are very sorry he was in a position to teach children.” It was probably the best they could do since regardless of whether this man was an appropriately disgruntled employee, complete nut-job, or calculated terrorist posing as a student that they hired, it certainly doesn’t reflect well on them. Best to play the nut-job card.

Netizens tended to agree with that assessment in their comments:

“A teacher wrote that? ”
“Way to blow up your life.”
“Thank you Saturday classes! It brings criminally insane teachers like that to the forefront.”
“Yeaaaah. I certainly get the sense that he’s exhausted.”

Although it appears that there was no real threat of danger in Chiba Prefecture, it still might be wise to give some consideration to how many hours teachers are required to put in. Anything that triggers a man, sane or not, to refer to you as “bad-guys” worthy of “blowing up” might be worth looking into, at least a little bit.

Source:MSN Sankei News via Itai News (Japanese)
Top Image: Google Maps

▼ In all fairness, the Noda Board of Education does kind of look like a bad-guy hideout.

Image: Google Maps