All last week as the tragedy unfolded, Japanese news outlets had been transfixed with the sob stories of Kazuhiro Ogawa who set fire to the parlor after struggling with his divorce, and floundering in unpayable debts for years. He was quoted by the police as saying “I just didn’t want to live any longer, so I set fire to the room.” This week however, all eyes have turned to the story’s twist: the manager of the parlor who could now be responsible for the deaths in the arson’s blaze.

I feel like a Survival Pop Quiz - are you ready? Just select the first thought process that would naturally come to your mind, given the following prompt (bear in mind that your environment has provided no immediate visual cues):

* A fire alarm rings *

You:

A: Sprint for the nearest fire exit, hurdling old women and babies in your haste.
B: Nervously scan the ceiling area for signs of smoke, but remain stationary because no one else is running.
C: Casually rise from your desk and stroll down the hallway in search of the alarm’s origin.
D: Seek out your building’s emergency mains, and switch off the alarm because no one in the middle of a porn DVD would appreciate the interruption of an undoubtedly false alarm.

If you chose ‘A,’ you and I have much in common–specifically, a fear of being burned alive, and a gold medal in inter-office track and field.
However, if you chose ‘D’, you would be more closely aligned with such keen disaster management skills of the 77 year-old manager of the aforementioned Osaka video parlor where 15 customers died in the blaze.

My opinion? In Japan, tragic results in the event of social suicide like this are unpreventable without major societal reconstruction. Having said that, are collateral deaths preventable? Most definitely.

He was the manager of the building, and it was, after all, a fire alarm. Even with an occasional false alarm, fire alarms are in place to provide warning to only the worst possible scenario. I mean, what if we had ‘pie’ alarms, which, upon shrilling (often falsely), would announce that somewhere in the building, a freshly baked pie was cooling and ripe for the taking?

You can bet that every chair in the building would be empty - everyone on all fours, searching for that pie. So why is it then, that a fire alarm - the initial safety measure put in place to save your life in the event of a real fire, goes so casually ignored? Switched off because the reality of an actual fire would be throw a wrench into evening plans?

This manager should be tried and this time, a Japanese apology should not suffice.