Towano Kanae Breaks Down Hokkaido Mosque Arson Case That Ended in a 6.5-Year Sentence

INDEPENDENT — Towano Kanae, who streams as a criminology lecturer, spent a noon broadcast on Sunday walking viewers through the case of a farmer from Chitose, Hokkaido, who was sentenced to six years and six months in prison for three arson attacks in Ebetsu in February. Kanae’s central point, repeated throughout: the mosque in question was built illegally, but that is no reason to set it on fire.

According to Kanae’s account of the court record, the man set fire to a Pakistani-run company office and residence on Feb. 15, tried to burn a second one on Feb. 23 with a gas canister but the blaze died out, and on Feb. 28 broke into a prefab mosque and burned it down. Two buildings were destroyed and the damage was put at more than 20 million yen. Kanae said three members of a Pakistani family were upstairs in the first building and that the outcome could have been fatal. The man had stored a gasoline-based fuel mixture in 40 or so plastic bottles, which Kanae called reckless even for the arsonist himself.

“That doesn’t mean arson is acceptable.” — Towano Kanae, on the Ebetsu fires

The man told investigators he turned against foreigners after a dispute over a visit to his family’s farm, then became convinced a missing chainsaw had been stolen by them, and he had been watching online videos that portrayed Ebetsu as overrun by Pakistani residents. Kanae noted that the chainsaw had simply gone missing, and described the viral videos as heavily edited. When he was arrested in May, the man slashed a police officer with a kitchen knife. Prosecutors sought nine years, later lowered to eight after he donated 3.5 million yen to charities including a community chest; the Sapporo District Court cited the planning and danger and imposed 6 years 6 months. Kanae treated the case as a hate crime, since it was aimed at a community’s place of worship.

Kanae also took up the real problem behind the story: the mosque stood in a zone where building is restricted, and the city had known of it since 2021 and pressed for correction without result. Reports of 76 illegal buildings in such zones across Ebetsu, Kanae said, were widely misread as all belonging to the Pakistani community, when most were Japanese-owned. Kanae argued that unenforced guidance rewards those who build first, and that criticism that should have gone to the authorities landed on the most visible target. After a question-and-answer segment, the stream ended; Kanae noted the chat had split on the topic and urged viewers to check the information they take in.

Chat, with 27 Super Chats, returned often to the donation and to the line between the illegal building and the fires.