The Ivy league tech graduate charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson in Manhattan made multiple visits to Japan earlier this year, according to those who spoke with the alleged gunman.
During one of his visits on Feb. 25, the suspect, Luigi Mangione, now 26, entered a restaurant in Tokyo where he sat at the counter, according to Obara Jun, a Japanese poker player who saw Mangione struggle with ordering in the restaurant.
“He was very friendly and it didn’t take long for us to get to know each other,” Jun told NBC News via text message Wednesday.
The poker player posted a picture with Mangione to X the night they met, but only identified the man he spoke with as Mangione after his face was plastered all over social media this week as the suspect in Thompson’s murder.
Jun said he was drinking with a friend at the bar and then invited the seemingly friendly American to his table. “He was very happy to sit at our table,” Jun recalled, and said he told Mangione he would treat him to some food and drinks.
Jun recalled Mangione as being on vacation from Hawaii and that “he was very smart, and that he graduated from a prestigious university.”
Mangione “told me that he loves Japan and Japanese culture,” he said.
“He was very friendly, and we followed each other on Twitter, enjoyed a meal together for a while, and then we parted ways,” Jun added.
Tokyo in February.Courtesy of Obara Jun
But a month later, Mangione was describing Japan as lacking free will and proposed solutions for solving Japan’s demographic crisis.
He said the solution to the country’s falling birth rates wasn’t immigration but “cultural.”
His suggestions included banning sex toys and replacing conveyer belts in sushi restaurants with waiters to promote human interaction, according to an April post on X.
“Modern Japanese urban environment is an evolutionary mismatch for the human animal,” he wrote.
He also proposed replacing video game cafes with athletics in school.
Meanwhile, Mangione was also messaging Gurwinder Bhogal, who runs a Substack newsletter about the social impact of technology, which Mangione subscribed to and was a “longtime fan” of.
Mangione was a “founding member of my Substack, and someone I’ve been friendly with for a while,” Bhogal said in a Substack post this week, adding, “I hope there’s been some kind of a mix-up, because this doesn’t seem like him at all.”
Despite his gripes with Japan, Mangione emailed Bhogal about his visits there and said he was planning another visit to the country in early May, Bhogal said.
It was not clear how many total visits Mangione made to Japan or the total time he spent in the country.
“Japan is peak NPC-ville,” Mangione said on April 16 in an email to Bhogal shared on X, using a term that refers to preprogrammed non-player video game characters and which is at times used as a derogatory slang.
“Scary lack of free will in this country,” Mangione wrote in the email, as he described an incident where police in Japan did not jaywalk to help a person “seizing on the ground.”
Mangione had an “eclectic range of concerns,” Bhogal said on X.
“The main impression I got of Luigi when I spoke with him was that he was a deeply curious individual,” Bhogal said.
