What’s in a name? The saying goes. Sometimes, a whole lot of karma. Thankfully, “Beat” Takeshi wasn’t injured but his car took some serious abuse from a pickax.
Beat Takeshi, with a pickax
All he wanted to do was go home. On Saturday, September 4, at 11:40 p.m. local time in Japan, Takeshi Kitano had just finished his broadcast on news show “Newscaster: Joho 7 Days.”
The 74-year-old actor and filmmaker also reads the headlines for Tokyo Broadcasting System Television. The driver pulled his car around and Takeshi just got settled in when a maniac appeared with a pickax.
Swinging around the deadly implement of destruction, the attacker demanded Takeshi get out of the car so he could beat him properly. With his pickax. The actor sat tight while the “car’s windshield and the driver’s side window were both shattered.”
Tokyo police have lots of funding so they were on the scene in a jiffy. They arrived and took the lunatic into custody before he could injure Takeshi or his driver.
The wild-man wielding a pickax has not been identified by name but is described as “a man in his 40s from Chiba Prefecture.” He only wanted some attention.
As reported by police, the attacker “felt ‘ignored’ this past June when he waited for Kitano, telling investigators, ‘I got down on my knees near the car and begged him to help me enter the world of show business, but he ignored me.'” Dirty bleepard.
Admitted the attack
After being arrested with his pickax in hand, still swinging it relentlessly at the actor’s vehicle, the assailant didn’t see much use in denying the attack so he admitted it.
Metropolitan Police relate that he may admit he was at the scene but he wasn’t really there. Sometimes, they report, “his comments did not make sense.”
Along with the pickax, police took into evidence a “knife with a 10-centimeter blade in the man’s possession, who also admitted to carrying the weapon.”
He wasn’t arrested for the assault but he was charged right away with “illegal weapon possession.” The specifics of the knife have not been released but reports note that “it’s against the law in Japan to carry certain kinds, including locking blades that measure longer than 5.5 centimeters.”
Long before he was attacked with a pickax, Kitano started his illustrious career “in the 1970s as part of a comedy duo called the Two Beats.” By the “1980s, Kitano became one of the biggest TV celebrities in Japan.” He also has the dubious distinction of his own video game.
While filming “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” he also “worked on the 1986 Famicom game Takeshi’s Challenge, considered one of the worst games ever made.” He had better luck as a director. “Since then, he’s become one of Japan’s most internationally acclaimed filmmakers. At home in Japan, he continues to appear in a variety of shows, from comedy to news.”
