The police in Japan on Wednesday arrested a man suspected of setting fire to an anime studio in Kyoto that killed 36 people last summer in the worst mass killing in the country in decades.

The suspect, Shinji Aoba, 42, was arrested after he had recovered enough from the injuries he suffered in the blaze to face charges, and after Japan lifted its coronavirus lockdown.

The July 18 attack on Kyoto Animation, a famed anime studio that produced popular “slice of life” shows and movies, shocked Japan for its targeting of a symbol of the country’s popular culture and a major soft-power export. Officials said that the attacker had shouted “Die!” as he entered the building and then tried to escape, but collapsed on the street outside and was subdued by workers.

The Japanese news media reported that Mr. Aoba, who had spent more than three years in prison for robbing a convenience store in 2012, had a grudge against the studio because he thought it “stole novels.”

The police said that after Mr. Aoba had entered the studio, he poured accelerant on the floor and set fire to it, with the blaze quickly engulfing the building. Many of the victims died from carbon monoxide poisoning. At least 30 others were wounded.

The attack came just weeks after an attacker went on a rampage in a Tokyo suburb in which 17 schoolgirls were stabbed, killing one of them and an adult.

Mr. Aoba was unconscious for weeks after the blaze and suffered severe burns that reportedly left him unable to walk or feed himself.

“We will now focus on the suspect’s interrogation and pursue our investigation in order to fully examine the crime,” Toshiyuki Kawase, a police investigator, told reporters.

NEW DELHI — Magan Doodi, a groundskeeper at a golf course in Jaipur, was making his rounds earlier this week when he saw the sky suddenly turn a weird pink.

It wasn’t some quirk of the weather. It was locusts — millions of them, “like a spreading bedsheet,” he said.

“The locusts have attacked the golf course!” Mr. Doodi yelled into his cellphone during the battle Monday morning. “It’s man versus locusts!”

Scientists say it’s the worst attack in 25 years and these locusts are different.

“This time the attack is by very young locusts who fly for longer distances, at faster speeds, unlike adults in the past who were sluggish and not so fast,” said K.L. Gurjar, the deputy director of India’s Locust Warning Organization.

The locusts poured in from the east, from Iran and Pakistan, blanketing half a dozen states in western and central India. Because most of the crops were recently harvested, the hungry swarms have buzzed into urban areas, eager to devour bushes and trees, carpeting whatever surface they land on.

On Monday, Jaipur, a sprawling city of 4 million and the biggest in the state of Rajasthan, was besieged. A blizzard of bugs flew over concrete buildings and the wealthier neighborhoods, swooping in on trees and plants, crossing graveyards and jewelry markets, attracted to the manicured golf course in the heart of the city.

After he saw what was happening, Mr. Doodi, the groundskeeper, yelled out to the caddies and other key personnel, urging them to make whatever loud noise they could to drive the bugs away. Some grabbed firecrackers. Others steel plates to bang on. Another person ran up to the roof of a maintenance building and started thumping on empty plastic containers, like drums.

Residents clamored to protect themselves and their flora, spilling onto the streets banging plates with spoons and jumping into parked cars to honk horns.

“I got out of my room and came out on my terrace at around 10 a.m. and saw a long shadow on the ground,” recalled Nikhil Misra, a lawyer in Jaipur. “I just stood still. It was something I had never seen in my lifetime.”

“I looked up and saw a cloud, not the cloud that gives you rainfall, but a cloud of locusts, thousands and thousands of them hovering over my head,” he said. “It was a silent attack. It was a strange kind of fear, as if being overtaken by aliens.”

Scientists say that this outbreak, though separate from recent outbreaks in East Africa, is driven by the same factors: unusually warm weather and more rain. They blame climate change.

“All this started in late 2019, when there were warm waters in the western Indian oceans,” said Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune. “These waters triggered lot of rains over the East African regions and the Arabian Peninsula. This seems to have triggered an ideal condition for breeding of locusts.”

The movement of the swarms depends on the winds, which are blowing west to east and a little south right now. That could put the swarms in India’s bushy center very soon.

The Indian government wants to tackle this regionally and has offered to set aside some of its differences with Pakistan to provide the neighboring country with pesticide to spray on its side of the border. India has made the same offer to Iran, which responded positively, Indian officials said.

Indian scientists said that in a single day, a modest locust swarm can travel 200 kilometers and eat as much food as about 35,000 people.