KYODO NEWS - Jul 24, 2019 - 20:15 | All, Japan

A survivor has recounted his experience of jumping out of a Kyoto Animation Co. studio after a man set fire to the building last week, leaving 34 people dead.

The 52-year-old employee was drawing landscapes on the second floor of the three-story building on the morning of July 18. There were about 20 to 30 people on that floor, he said.

At around 10:30 a.m., the employee heard a woman screaming, followed by a colleague rushing up from the first floor yelling "Fire!" and the studio alarm blaring. Thick black smoke spewed out from the spiral staircase about a dozen seconds later.

"I need to escape," he told himself. He crouched down and felt his way in the dark to the balcony a few meters away. There were already around a dozen other employees there, leaning over the railing and screaming for help.

(The man escaped with only minor injuries)

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Looking down, the man saw a person engulfed in flames and another lying on the ground 5 meters below the balcony who had jumped.

He thought he would "either die in the smoke or jump and get seriously injured." As the man struggled to decide, he heard others encouraging him, with one person shouting, "It's alright. You can jump. You can do it!"

He jumped off the balcony and only sustained minor injuries.

The man joined Kyoto Animation about 30 years ago and saw the studio grow as its productions slowly gained recognition around the world.

"All the acquired know-how, everything that money can't buy, was destroyed in an instant" by the arson attack, he said.

"I just think, 'How dare you,'" he said, referring to the 41-year-old suspect Shinji Aoba, who was hospitalized with severe burns after the incident. "All we can do is wait to find out why 'KyoAni' was attacked and for the law to bring him to justice," he said, using the nickname for the studio.

"I want to recover and create high-quality works again," the survivor said. "That would be a nice tribute to my colleagues who lost their lives."