Osamu Nagase, a visiting professor of disability studies at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, said the public was implicitly approving the attacker’s perception that the victims “didn’t deserve life.” He added: “If we want to pay respect to those 19 victims, they cannot remain nameless. They cannot remain faceless.”

Such nondisclosure is unusual. In other rare instances of mass killings in Japan, like the stabbings of five elderly victims on Awaji Island, south of Kobe, last year, or a knifing attack in 2008 that left seven dead in the Akihabara neighborhood of Tokyo, the police identified the victims within days.

Indeed, across the globe, the naming of victims is seen as a way to honor them and the losses suffered by their families. As details about individual victims are revealed, the public is reminded of the humanity that has been brutally taken away.

Yet in the case of the Sagamihara killings, the police said the families themselves had requested anonymity, specifically because the victims were disabled. Some, fearful of the stigma, had not even told relatives, friends or co-workers that their sons or daughters resided at Tsukui Yamayuri-en, the center where the attack took place.

In Japan, the decision to withhold the names has been condemned by a number of disability rights groups, as well as many newspapers. “The families’ feelings should be respected,” an editorial in Tokyo Shimbun read, “but we need to know their names and keep the memories of how they lived and lost their lives.”

Seiko Noda, a member of the House of Representatives and the mother of a disabled son, told another paper, Mainichi Shimbun, that withholding the names of the victims “denies their entire lives.”