August 2017
Makoto Oya was arrested in in Saitama Prefecture after recording and uploading videos of himself torturing stray cats. The case details include:
Makoto already kept a pocket camera for translation work and documentation. One night in April, when the downpour hit and the city huddled under umbrellas, he filmed Sen perched at the windowsill, whiskers trembling as the neon reflections blurred on the glass. The clip was simple: a still frame of the cat’s profile, a doorbell’s distant echo, the city breathing. Makoto cut the footage, slowed the frame, and overlaid a soft piano loop. He uploaded it with a tentative title: “Sen Watches the Rain — 2021.” Nobody expected much.
Most people knew Makoto Oya for his music—beautiful, haunting piano compositions that felt like walking through a Kyoto garden in autumn. But Elias was part of a niche community, a digital brotherhood obsessed with the "Lost Year." In 2021, the story went, Oya had taken a sabbatical from music. He had moved to a small coastal town, adopted a stray tabby named "Pudding," and documented their life together in a series of raw, unedited vlogs that were deleted almost as soon as they were posted.
. Between March 2016 and April 2017, Oya captured at least 13 stray cats using steel traps and subjected them to extreme torture, including drenching them in boiling water and using a gas torch. The Videos
December 12, 2017
The trial concluded at the Tokyo District Court on .
This essay examines the legal and ethical ramifications of the Makoto Oya case and the proliferation of harmful online content.
