The city of Tokyo in Japan is undoubtedly the political, economic, and cultural center of that country and one of the largest cities in the world, which holds within its history numerous disasters and success stories that have traveled the world. Such is the case that occurred 32 years ago, which made it clear that human beings have no limits. On January 24, 1989, the discovery of a 208-liter drum full of concrete in an abandoned factory on a corner of a vacant lot in the city of Coto, east of the Japan Tower, told a sinister, not to mention impressive, story that lasted 44 days. It was discovered after two police officers interrogated two young men the day before on suspicion of the murder of a woman and her son. Once at the police station, they were separated into different interrogation rooms. One of the officers made one of the young men believe that he knew what the boy had done. He thought his partner had confessed to the crime and told the officers where to find the body. However, the officers were shocked because the person they were referring to was a different woman who had been dead for nine days.
When the police arrived at the scene, they found the drum full of concrete. When they handled it, a stench of decay came from inside. When they opened it, they found hair fragments, clearly from a body. When they broke open the drum, they found a girl covered with a bag and a blanket with obvious signs of violence, completely unrecognizable. Once the body was recovered, they found countless signs of torture: broken bones and severe damage to her uterus. It was also discovered that the young woman was pregnant. The violence inflicted was so great that the girl could only be identified by her fingerprints.
The body corresponded to Junko Furuta, a 17-year-old girl born in Misato, Saitama Prefecture. She lived with her parents and two of her siblings. She was a third-year high school student at Yaominami High School. Junko was a quiet, cheerful, and respectful young woman who got along well with everyone. At school, she was quite shy and dedicated herself solely to her studies. She was very intelligent, so much so that she excelled in all her school subjects. Due to her introverted nature, she had never had a boyfriend or any kind of relationship with anyone. She didn’t like going to parties and had no vices. In the afternoons, she worked a few hours twice a week at a plastic molding factory, as she planned to save for her graduation trip. However, because she worked very little and didn’t earn enough, she looked for a new job at an electronics store where she planned to work full-time after finishing her studies. Every night, the girl arrived home as usual. However, on November 25, 1988, she didn’t. Once her parents noticed her absence, they called the police and reported their daughter missing. But hours later, Junko called and told them that she had run away from home and was staying with a friend, and hung up.
That November day, a classmate named Hiroshi Miyano, who was obsessed with Junko, was with his friend. They wandered around the streets of Misato and had agreed to meet at night to rob some businesses and see if they were lucky enough to find some women to abuse. Around 8:30 at night, those young men observed Furuta on a bicycle as she headed home. Hiroshi saw the perfect opportunity and told Minato to knock the young woman off her bicycle and run. And so it happened. Once Junko was on the ground, Hiroshi approached her and, under the pretext of having witnessed the attack, acted concerned and offered to take her home. She accepted this gesture without realizing the sinister plan these men had devised.
During the journey, he threatened to harm the young woman if she didn’t do as he said. So, faced with the threats, he took her to a nearby warehouse with the intention of abusing her. When Junko resisted, he told her she’d better do what he was asking or he would kill her. He then revealed that he belonged to a Japanese mafia called the Yakuza, which had been operating since the 17th century. In Japan, this organization is extremely dangerous because its main activities are extortion, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, and human trafficking. Knowing this, the young woman offered little resistance, and once there, he abused her repeatedly. After that, he decided to take her to a hotel to continue with his macabre plan. When they were both inside the room, Hiroshi decided to call his friends Ogura and Yasushi Watanabe, as well as Shinji Minato, to find a minute to brag about what he had just done. It was then that one of them intervened and told him to keep her captive so they could do whatever they wanted with her. This group of friends had an extensive criminal record, as they had done similar things before and had recently kidnapped another young woman whom they also abused, later releasing her under threats.
Around three in the morning, he took Furuta to a nearby park where Ogura and Watanabe were waiting for them. When they met up, they began to threaten the girl, telling her that they were members of the Yakuza and knew where she lived; if she said anything or tried to escape, they would kill her entire family. It was then that they agreed to take the young woman to Minato’s house in the Adachi district, where they would hold her captive. Upon arrival, they began to humiliate and abuse her as a group. Once they had finished satisfying their perversions, they hid her and took turns guarding her.
Two days later, on November 27th, the group of young men forced Junko to call her family to tell them she was fine and to stop the police investigation into her disappearance. Upon hearing the call, the girl’s parents contacted the police station again to say that it had all been a misunderstanding, as their daughter was with a friend from school. So the police stopped looking for Junko.
When Minato’s parents saw the young woman, the aggressors forced Junko to pretend to be the girlfriend of one of them, but her anguished face made her parents realize that something was wrong. However, they did nothing about it because they were afraid of the Yakuza. Their son was very violent and aggressive, and they knew about the connections his friends had with the mafia and feared reprisals. Soon, the parents realized they were holding her against her will. Even her brother was aware of what was happening, but none of her relatives did anything to prevent the tragedy. This was the beginning of one of the most terrible cases ever committed against a person.
Soon, the place became a regular meeting place for gangs, as these individuals invited groups of people, including members of the Yakuza, to torment the young woman, to beat her, and to abuse her. By the seventh day, Junko had been abused and violated more than a hundred times. They kept her without food and without any clothes. Every day that passed, they humiliated her in inhuman ways. Often, they made her sleep on the balcony despite the low temperatures, well below zero degrees. Other times, they forced her to sit for hours in a freezer. Afterward, they took her out and forced her to drink her own urine. They fed her cockroaches and then they forced her to touch herself in front of them, to dance and sing songs while they beat her. Among the many tortures was the insertion of foreign objects into her private parts, including an iron bar. She was completely mutilated.
One night she realized her tormentors were asleep. Seeing an opportunity, she tried to escape. Since the young woman was badly beaten, she crawled as best she could and slowly went downstairs. Once she reached the phone, she called the emergency number, but unfortunately, the receiver saw her and she managed to hang up just in time before she could say anything. After that, he immediately beat her. The police called back and returned the call. They were informed that it had been a mistake and that she had dialed by mistake. The police did not investigate further and ended the call.
After she hung up, she called the other members of the group and they took her up to the room where they were holding her captive. Once there, they brutally punished her. They began to mock her, lit a candle, and burned her with its flame. Not content with this, they poured lighter fluid on the girl’s legs and set them on fire as punishment. In trying to escape from such a savage act, Junko went into convulsions, but her attackers thought she was just lying and mocked her. Because of this, they set fire to her feet until the girl could no longer bear the pain and they extinguished the fire. Incredibly, despite all the abuse she suffered, she managed to survive.
One might think that after such a punishment, those young men would stop, but that was far from the truth. After doing the unimaginable, they continued to beat her and even cut part of her chest and pierced it with sewing needles. On one occasion, one of them had the idea of setting off fireworks in the young woman’s rectum, even though she begged him to stop. At this point, she ceased to be a victim of abuse because she was so badly injured that she was no longer attractive to them. However, it was established that she was abused between 400 and 500 times by more than 100 men. The situation reached the point where they threw dumbbells at her stomach and burned her to put out their cigarettes. They tied her hands to the ceiling and used her body like a punching bag until her internal organs were so pulverized that blood poured from her mouth.
At one point, her nose was so full of blood that she could only breathe through her mouth. She was so malnourished and dehydrated from prolonged starvation that she couldn’t even stand. The place where she was was filled with feces and urine, but since the men couldn’t stand the smell any longer, they forced her to go down to the bathroom. It took her more than an hour to crawl down the stairs to get there because her body was so injured and weak. By this point, she was unable to walk. She couldn’t drink water or eat because she vomited after every attempt, which not only kept her dehydrated but also angered her attackers, who then punished her with more beatings. It was astonishing to the police how the girl had endured so much damage and how no one reported the incident.
Besides these filthy acts of cruelty, it still wasn’t enough for these men, so they used her body parts. They subjected her to intimate acts to have fun by inserting various objects into her, including a hot light bulb which exploded internally after she was punched in the abdomen. They also used scissors, a baby bottle, and other lit objects. Due to the constant blows, the young woman fell unconscious, and far from stopping or showing remorse, they grabbed her by the hair and slammed her hard against the floor. Her eardrums ruptured, leaving her unable to hear properly. This only enraged them further. When the girl didn’t react, they submerged her head in a bucket of water until she regained consciousness. Because she was drowning, her body managed to revive her.
By then, she had been punished for over 30 days. The brutality of the attacks dramatically altered her appearance. Her face was so swollen that it was difficult to distinguish her features, her hands were mangled, her nails were broken, and her body emanated a strong, rotten smell. She was so thin that her bones were visible; every part and every visible limb was bruised, and her eyelids were burned from the wax they dropped on her face, preventing her from seeing. After witnessing Junko’s current state, the boys lost interest in her. As a result, they decided to kidnap another girl, who entered the same way using the same modus operandi. She was gang-raped but released during the 44 days of her brutal ordeal. They robbed her daily, hoping to kill her, but they didn’t want that. They wanted to satisfy their twisted minds in such a vile and ruthless way that she went from being a human being to an object of amusement.
January 4, 1989, arrived. That day, the young men wanted to have even more fun. Junko could not stand up, but she was motionless on the ground. Even so, they challenged her to a game of tile-laying called Mahjong Solitaire, the objective of which is to clear the board by eliminating all the identical pairs from the game. Unexpectedly, and despite not being well physically and mentally, she managed to beat the boys. So, to punish her again, they made her stand up and beat her feet with a stick until her body collapsed and she fell to the ground in a convulsive fit. As Junko bled profusely, pus oozed from her infected burns. The men covered their hands with plastic bags and continued beating her. They dropped an iron dumbbell on her stomach and finally set her on fire. The final attack lasted nearly two hours until she could no longer endure it and died that day.
However, her attackers didn’t realize what had happened and left. Hours later, Minato’s brother entered her room and noticed that the girl wasn’t moving and didn’t seem to be breathing. So he called his brother and told him that she appeared to be dead. Once the young men arrived, they realized what had happened and, fearing that someone would discover the body, they wrapped her in a blanket and put her inside a suitcase to leave no trace of her body. They came up with the idea of putting her in a 55-gallon drum and filled it with concrete. Around 8 p.m., they loaded it into a truck and finally disposed of it in a vacant lot.
19 days later, on January 23, 1989, Hiroshi was found. He and Jo Ogura were arrested for abusing the 19-year-old girl they had kidnapped. Women’s underwear was found in one of the aggressors’ homes. During the interrogation, one of the officers made Hiroshi believe he already knew what they had done. He immediately thought that Ogura had confessed to the crime, so he told them where to find the body.
Once the case was made public, investigators found a report in which two police officers were sent to the house after a report was received from the parents of a young man who indicated that they had a girl being held captive in that house. However, when they arrived, they were received by Minato’s mother, who told the officers that if they wanted, they could come in and look inside the house. Believing that this was sufficient proof that there was nothing wrong, they rejected the invitation and left the site. If they had searched the house and located her, they would have faced her. The terrible ordeal would have lasted only 16 days, and she could well have recovered from her injuries. Due to these actions, the two officers were dismissed for not following police procedure.
The young man who reported the incident to his parents told them that they went to Minato’s house and that he allegedly forced them to abuse the girl. When the young man left the place, he arrived home and told his brother what had happened, and his brother told their parents what had occurred. Subsequently, the parents contacted the police. However, the DNA of one of them was found on the body of Furuta after the arrest of Hiroshi and Ogura, who had been arrested just a few days earlier for abusing another young woman. Two more people were found to be involved, and Yasushi Watanabe and Minato’s brother were investigated for complicity in the case. However, because they were very young, the Japanese court did not initially release their names. Although, due to the cruelty of the case, some journalists asserted that the aggressors did not deserve anyone to defend their human rights. Although the group of four young men were the main culprits of the murder, it is believed that there could have been as many as one hundred men who violated her, as the autopsy revealed more than 100 DNA samples from different people.
Forensic studies reported that the cause of death was shock due to the torture inflicted. The suffering and stress were so great that her brain shrank. When Furuta’s parents found out what these young men had done to their daughter, her mother fainted due to mental trauma and had to undergo psychiatric treatment because she couldn’t bear to hear about the atrocities her daughter had been subjected to.
Before the trial, the investigations showed that the mastermind behind the murder was Hiroshi Miyano, who was Furuta’s classmate in high school. The young man was obsessed with her and tried to court her on more than one occasion. Furuta never paid him any attention because she knew of Hiroshi’s connection to the mafia. Besides, Furuta was a young woman who cared about her studies and wasn’t interested in a relationship, but this guy wasn’t used to being rejected, as he often went out with his gang. He was well-known because everyone respected and feared him; it was no secret that the boy belonged to the Yakuza. It is believed that the version that they found Junco by chance is a lie, as Hiroshi had indeed planned revenge for her rejection.
The four members of the gang pleaded guilty to inflicting injuries on the girl’s body but denied murdering her because the perpetrators were all minors when the crime was committed and could not be tried as adults. In July 1990, a trial court sentenced Hiroshi Miyano, the alleged leader of the crime, to 17 years in prison. However, the young man was not happy with the sentence and appealed the decision. Because of this, he was given an additional three years, and his final sentence was 20 years. In addition, the aggressor’s parents had to pay 50 million yen to Junko’s parents as compensation. Minato, who originally received a sentence of 4 to 6 years, received a final sentence of 8 years in prison. Minato’s parents and brother were not charged in the crime despite being aware of all the events. Yasushi Watanabe was also sentenced to 8 years for complicity in the case. He spent eight years in juvenile detention before being released in August 1999. After his release, he reportedly boasted about his role in Junko’s case.
Once the trial was over, people considered the sentences to be too unfair, as given the severity of his actions, he deserved a harsher sentence due to the brutality of the crime. Three of the four individuals involved in the case were released from prison before serving eight years. In July 2004, Jo Ogura was arrested for assaulting a man he believed had been involved with his girlfriend. He punched and pushed him into his truck, then proceeded to beat him for four hours. Afterward, he was returned to prison and sentenced to seven years. Following this incident, Ogura’s mother blamed the affair for everything bad that happened to her son. She went to the young woman’s grave and vandalized it, claiming that it had ruined her son’s life. Ogura was denied parole in 2004 but was released years later. However, in 2013, he was arrested again for fraud, but due to insufficient evidence, he was released.
Minato, on the other hand, was arrested in 2018 for attempted murder after hitting a man with a metal rod and then cutting his throat. This case is considered one of the cruelest ever seen in Japanese history.
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