Issei Sagawa has to be one of the creepiest human beings I’ve ever seen. On the afternoon of June 12, 1981, 32-year old Sagawa leapt to fame for a cannibal murder the Japanese call Pari jinniku jiken (The Paris Human Flesh Incident). He had shot, killed, and ate bits of a female exchange student in his class the previous day, and was spotted by witnesses in the woods in Bois de Boulogne, France, trying to dump the corpse. He was arrested, but was exempted from prosecution as French psychologists found him to be legally insane at the time of the crime. He was sent home to Japan, and after a year in a mental hospital, he was set free.
Here’s an excerpt from his interview when asked about the first time he felt cannibalistic urges:
I was physically weak from the moment I was born. My legs were so skinny they looked like pencils. It was in the first grade of elementary school when I saw the quivering meat on a male classmate’s thighs and I suddenly thought, “Mmm, that looks delicious.” But I’m not homosexual, so from around the time I entered junior high school I became obsessed with the Western actress Grace Kelly—an obsession that lasted right through high school. That was the beginning of my infatuation with Occidental people. Before I knew it, tall, healthy-looking Western women became the trigger for my cannibalistic fantasies. I guess my infatuation with such women stemmed from the fact that I was short, ugly, and had an inferiority complex and therefore sought people who were the exact opposite of myself. Eventually, I began feeling a strong desire to bite into them—not to kill them or eat them per se, but merely to gnaw on their flesh. It was purely a form of sexual desire. It wasn’t like I felt like eating someone every time I was hungry. But you know how you tend to feel a stronger sexual desire when you’ve eaten a full meal? That’s when I would start feeling the urge to eat a girl. It’s absurd, right? In essence, it’s different from the type of hunger that people experience for food. This cannibalistic urge, where I’m going, “I want to eat human meat,” is a sort of sexual appetite, so if I don’t make sure that I ejaculate frequently enough, the desire only gets stronger and stronger.
Head to Vice Magazine for a full account of the urges behind and enactment of his cannabalistic desires.
4 replies on “Issei Sagawa: Interview With A Celebrity Cannibal”
Holy smokes!!
That is rather nasty and scary at the same time!!!
Let us now face the insidious situation of race hate. Issei has been subject to a great and unwarranted deal of race hate. The fact that he ate a dead woman is used to mask the unspoken ethnic superiority of others as they deliver sugar-coated – if hardly disguised – xenophobic diatribes against a peaceful man trying to get on with what is left of his life. He seeks neither fame nor fortune, merely to be accepted and gently appreciated by others.
But latent racism is ever present to thwart him, ever ready to condemn and shamefacedly tireless in its aggressive hypocrisy. Have there not been a number of white race cannibals? No one heard of Albert Hamilton Fish?
By redeeming Issei from the snickering gutter-press we would be redeeming ourselves. By ceasing to parade a singular individual’s past like a dirty handkerchief and rising above the all too easy put-down and snide aside we’d be elevating ourselves as well as Issei.
More people have reached the summit of Everest than have killed and eaten another human being. More people murdered than eaten. But Issei Sagawa is one of the precious few who lives amongst us; one of those who went beyond the bounds of normalcy to touch the furthest reaches of experience and one who could do with our help.
He murdered and ate someone and got away with it due to a powerful daddy and a sad story. Screw it and lock the idiot up for life without daylight.
Losers like this are nothing more than a burden on society – and a dangerous one at that. Your fancy words cut no ice and the only help from us he deserves is someone flipping a rather large electricity switch.
It never fails to amaze me that many of these people who condone this type of behavior speak in a rather intelligent matter. Yes, he got away with something many of us would find well, disgusting, but I believe that a question we are failing to ask ourselves is why is this occurring? Much of the population that we diagnose as “clinically insane” are also people who demonstrate intellectual superiority.
The actions we are observing here are wrong, there’s no questioning that. But what we need to focus on is why the “clinically insane” are so much smarter than some of our best scholars. What is the real issue here? The crime commited or the reason behind the crime commited? If we can come to understand the many “why”s behind this, we can also come to figure out how it can be stopped and also how we can use it to further educate ourselves.