Cats was a type of establishment common in Japanese cities: a private video booth rental business where customers paid roughly 1,500 yen -- about fifteen dollars -- for a small room with a screen and a door that locked from the inside. Many customers used the rooms as an inexpensive place to sleep overnight. The rooms lined both sides of a single narrow corridor, and the only way in or out of the business passed through the reception area. There were no windows. No sprinklers. No smoke ventilation system. The building met minimum fire code at the time of its opening, but those codes had never anticipated what would happen when fire erupted in a sealed corridor full of sleeping people with nowhere to go. Some 120 firefighters responded and brought the blaze under control in ninety minutes, but for the sixteen who died, the lethal agent was not flame but invisible carbon monoxide filling those sealed rooms like gas chambers.

Police arrested forty-six-year-old Kazuhiro Ogawa, an Osaka resident who had been living on welfare, within hours of the fire. He told investigators he had set the blaze after deciding to end his own life. He was depressed, unemployed, and told police he believed his life was meaningless. But when smoke began filling his rented room, Ogawa panicked. He fled through the corridor and escaped the building -- the very exit that dozens of other people in those locked, windowless rooms could not reach in time. Ogawa's confession was straightforward, but when his trial began in September 2009, he reversed course, pleading not guilty. He claimed he had only confessed because he assumed his own cigarette had started the fire. The court did not believe him.

On November 21, 2009, an Osaka district court found Ogawa guilty of arson resulting in death. On December 17, the court sentenced him to death. The severity reflected both the scale of the tragedy and the deliberate nature of the crime. Ogawa appealed the sentence through every level of the Japanese judicial system. In 2014, the Supreme Court of Japan rejected his final appeal. Justice Tomoyuki Yokota stated that the fire had caused 'an extremely large number of casualties,' that 'the impact and anxiety on society is great,' and that there was 'no reason to consider the motives and circumstances behind the decision to commit suicide' as mitigating factors. Ogawa remains on death row, where Japanese inmates receive no advance notice of their execution date -- a practice that has drawn criticism from international human rights organizations.

Investigations after the fire revealed a cascade of safety failures that turned a manageable situation into a mass casualty event. The building's fire alarm had been triggered correctly, but the manager silenced it, treating it as a nuisance rather than a warning. The emergency lighting and exit guidance systems were either nonfunctional or inadequate. The rooms had no secondary means of escape. The tragedy prompted a national reassessment of fire safety regulations for small commercial spaces in Japan, particularly businesses that allowed overnight stays in enclosed rooms. Internet cafes, manga cafes, and video booth operations across the country faced new inspections and tighter requirements for emergency exits, sprinkler systems, and alarm protocols. The Cats fire became a cautionary reference point in Japanese fire safety policy -- a reminder that building codes written for one type of use can become death traps when the actual use diverges from what regulators imagined.