Kazuaki was a second-year junior high school student when he sat across an acrylic partition from Satoshi Uematsu, the man accused of killing 19 people with intellectual disabilities at a care home outside Tokyo.
What struck him was how Uematsu seemed.
Uematsu, a former employee of the Tsukui Yamayuri En facility in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, was small, softly spoken and polite, bowing deeply as he thanked Kazuaki for making the journey to see him at a detention facility in Yokohama.
"I wanted to see for myself what kind of person he was," said Kazuaki, now a 21-year-old university student in Tokyo whose name has been changed for this story.
Over about 18 months, he visited Uematsu four times before a trial that would end with his death sentence.
Ten years after the July 2016 attack, Japan's deadliest mass killing in decades, Kazuaki says he wants people of his generation to think about what happened and why. Uematsu stabbed residents as they slept, killing 19 and injuring 26 others.
Uematsu, now 36, has repeatedly sought a retrial.
Kazuaki first learned of the killings through television news and was particularly disturbed by footage of Uematsu, with dyed-blonde hair, smiling at cameras as he was taken to prosecutors.
"I couldn't understand how someone could commit something like that and still smile," he said.
His curiosity deepened after he came across a magazine article about an editor who had met Uematsu in detention. Surprised that an ordinary member of the public could visit someone at the center of such a major crime, Kazuaki looked up the procedures online and sent Uematsu a letter saying he wanted to know more about the case.
Uematsu replied quickly.
Each visit lasted no more than 30 minutes, and Kazuaki prepared questions in a notebook beforehand.
Uematsu often answered questions about the killings in a flat, almost mechanical way, Kazuaki recalled.
Uematsu told him that people with disabilities who were unable to communicate were a burden on others and unnecessary, and that they should be euthanized with the consent of their families.
Kazuaki found the reasoning absurd and riddled with leaps in logic.
He was also struck by Uematsu's intense concern with his appearance.
Asked why he had smiled for the cameras as he was being taken to prosecutors, Uematsu said he had just woken up and thought he looked terrible. He had tried to cover his face but laughed when he saw the mass of cameras pointed at him.
Uematsu also told Kazuaki he had undergone cosmetic surgery on his eyes and nose because, as he put it, "If I looked ugly when I was arrested, no one would take what I said seriously."
He said he had dyed his hair blonde after being inspired by U.S. President Donald Trump and spoke proudly of building up his body through training.
"He was good at drawing, but he would say, 'For someone as ugly as me, this is the only thing I have going for me,'" Kazuaki said.
"When I told him I didn't think he was ugly, he leaned forward with his hands on the desk and insisted that I was wrong."
Kazuaki came away with the impression that Uematsu had low self-esteem and placed excessive value on appearance and ability.
During their meetings, Uematsu also told him: "I thought that even someone like me could help society if I acted on what I believed was right. There are plenty of people online who agree with my ideas."
He added: "If I had talent and had been given a chance to succeed, I wouldn't have committed the crime."
Kazuaki believes Uematsu's sense of inferiority and desire for recognition may have helped push him in a destructive direction.
At their final meeting, about a month before his trial began, Uematsu expressed what Kazuaki saw as his first sign of doubt, saying: "Maybe what I did wasn't right."
But at his trial, he continued to voice discriminatory views about people with disabilities.
Since high school, Kazuaki has visited Tsukui Yamayuri En each year on the anniversary of the attack to lay flowers. Those visits have also brought him into contact with people with disabilities and those who support them.
As memories of the killings fade, he worries that the broader questions raised by the case are being forgotten too.
"There are many issues in society that can't simply be reduced to whether one side is good or bad," he said, pointing to discrimination against minorities, including foreign nationals and sexual minorities, particularly online.
Kazuaki still keeps the notebook in which he carefully recorded Uematsu's words and behavior.
"Even if they never kill anyone, another Uematsu could be anywhere," he said.
Around the same period, Takashi Sasaki, an assistant to the president of Tokyo University of Social Welfare and the father of a son with a developmental disability, also corresponded with and visited Uematsu.
Sasaki said Uematsu once replied, when asked directly why he had carried out the attack, that "I wanted attention."
Sasaki also believes a desire for recognition and a deep sense of isolation played an important role in Uematsu's thinking, although Uematsu himself repeatedly expressed eugenic and discriminatory ideas about people with disabilities.
"What stayed with me most was his profound loneliness," Sasaki said.
He recalled Uematsu saying that when he worked at Tsukui Yamayuri En, no one thanked him even when he helped residents.
Sasaki said the case left him asking what society could do to prevent resentment and isolation from turning into violence against vulnerable people.
Kazuaki, too, hopes the case will continue to prompt reflection among younger generations.
"I want people of my generation to take an interest in this too," he said.
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