wee hours 復習
偶然にもAkimとかぶってしまいました。
神奈川県相模原市で起きた殺傷事件は、多くの海外メディアでも取り上げられています。
Letter Foretold Japan Rampage That Killed 19 Disabled People
A young Japanese man went on a stabbing rampage Tuesday at a facility for the mentally disabled where he had been fired, officials said, killing 19 people months after he gave a letter to Parliament outlining the bloody plan and saying all disabled people should be put to death.
When he was done, Kanagawa prefectural authorities said, 26-year-old Satoshi Uematsu had left dead or injured nearly a third of the almost 150 patients at the facility in a matter of 40 minutes in the early Tuesday attack. It is Japan's deadliest mass killing in decades. The fire department said 25 were wounded, 20 of them seriously.
Security camera footage played on TV news programs showed a man driving up in a black car and carrying several knives to the Tsukui Yamayuri-en facility in Sagamihara, 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Tokyo. The man broke in by shattering a window at 2:10 a.m., according to a prefectural health official, and then set about slashing the patients' throats.
Sagamihara fire department official Kunio Takano said the attacker killed 10 women and nine men. The youngest was 19, the oldest 70.
Details of the attack, including whether the victims were asleep or otherwise helpless, were not immediately known. Kanagawa prefecture welfare division official Tatsuhisa Hirosue said many details weren't clear because those who might know were still being questioned by police.
The suspect calmly turned himself in about two hours after the attack, police said.
Uematsu had worked at Tsukui Yamayuri-en, which means mountain lily garden, from 2012 until February, when he was let go. He knew the staffing would be down to just a handful in the wee hours of the morning, Japanese media reports said.
The facility employs more than 200 people, including part-timers, with nine of them working the night of the attack, Hirosue said. All those killed were patients.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/hatred-troubled-japan-knife-attackers-rampage-40880341
今回気になった表現はthe wee hoursです。
weeはOxford dictionaries.com.では（主にスコットランド語で）“little”と定義されています。
さらに、『ジーニアス英和辞典』（第五版、大修館書店）を見るとthe wee hoursは、アメリカとスコットランドでは「真夜中過ぎ」を表すということがわかりました。夜中の12時を過ぎると、数字が一ケタになり、0時、1時と数えることから来ているようです。
ちなみにイギリス英語ではthe small hoursとなります。
逮捕された容疑者はあえて、この真夜中に犯行に及んだことがわかります。(flyingbird)
