It looks like a possible tragedy was recently averted in Japan, with the famous anime director, Kunihiko Ikuhara, now calm after a deranged anti-fan received his sentence in court. As it turns out, the Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena director was constantly targeted by the suspect. Their harassment was like the one Kyoto Animation faced prior to its lethal arson.
A new report by Mainichi confirms that the situation was addressed once Kunihiko Ikuhara decided to open up about the problem. The director shared that he became the target of a dogged harassment campaign last year, with the suspect believing that Ikuhara had plagiarized their work. Sounds scary, right?
According to various reports, Ikuhara, his employees, his co-workers, and all the people closest to him received threatening messages from the unnamed suspect. Once these threats got more frequent and worse, Ikuhara decided to alert the police, due to which regular patrols started going around his house. Eventually, the entire situation made the director file legal action against the suspect, with the court giving a verdict last December.
The police were alerted because the woman’s harassment seemed quite similar to what Kyoto Animation went through before a crazed fan set fire to one of its studios in 2018. More than 30 employees were killed, and plenty more of them were injured after a suspect burned a building that belonged to Kyoto Animation.
The suspect, currently on trial for arson, claimed that they only attacked due to an act of plagiarism. They believed that Kyoto Animation had stolen one of their ideas for a story without giving them any credit. So, one can see how similar the two cases are and why Ikuhara felt the need to bring in the police instead of waiting for the whole situation to die down by itself!
