Empire of Death

Talie Chen

ASA 002 A03

October 18, 2015

Blog 5

It seems as if there’s been school shootings and mass murders on the news on a daily basis. Just in the past two weeks, there has been two school shootings, one at a University in Texas, and another at a Community College in Oregon. With these horrific events still so fresh in our minds, Hamamoto in Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence, presents his hypothesis to a very relevant issue regarding the motive and causes of serial killings and mass murders. From the very start, I found it extremely disturbing to read his detailed descriptions about the mindset of serial killers and to see the victims of these murders referred to as “prey,” but found it to be even more disturbing later on to see him talk about serial killers who have “sought out yellow people as objects” or their murderous psychosexual urges.  Hamamoto states that there is a strong correlation between an “increasingly militarized society and the attendant rise of serial and mass murder over the past few decades” and that the victimization of yellow female civilians is because of the “undeclared war against them by the US.” Prior to reading this article, I knew that after World War II and the ‘Comfort Women’ camps, asian women have often been considered “exotic” and fetishized. However, I didn’t know it was so extreme to the point that they have become targets for murders. Are there any other reasons for this besides militarization?