Japan in 1998

During the development of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Japan was fairly calm. They held a multitude of sports tournaments, and had a fairly quiet year. The only real bump in the media was a mass poisoning, taking place in Sonobe distict of the Wakayama Prefecture. One Masumi Hayashi poisoned the group curry with 1000 grams of arsenic, roughly enough to kill 100 people. Only 4 died, but it inspired a large amount of copycats due to the attention given to the incident by the media.