More than 20 years have passed, but the pain suffered by Junko Furuta’s relatives and friends still cannot subside. The once beautiful and lovely 17-year-old schoolgirl is now just a cold grave, making people feel endless pity. The case of female student Junko Furuta is one of the most notorious and worst torture and murder cases ever recorded in the history of Japan.
Hell on earth
Junko’s body was found in a barrel filled with concrete on a strip of reclaimed land in Koto, Tokyo (Japan) after dying at the hands of sick people and animals on November 22, 1989. What makes people extremely angry is that the sentence for these people is only a few short years in prison.
At the time of the case in 1988, Junko Furuta was a pretty 16-year-old schoolgirl in Misato (Saitama province). She is always obedient, does not play around, does not drink alcohol or smoke. In addition, Furuta always actively participates in school and class activities. With her admirable academic achievements and beautiful appearance, she always receives attention from other students, in both positive and negative ways.
One of the people who falls in love with the young girl is Miyano Hiroshi, an individual male student, the leader of a group of bad boys at school. In the past, he used to hang out with the Yakuza gangster gang, so he was also a famous guy in the area, no one dared to disobey him. Miyano also offered to pursue him but was flatly rejected by Furuta. From then on, he considered her a thorn in his side and began planning revenge.
On November 25, 1988, Miyano and three other teenagers aged 16-18, including Minato Nobuharu, Wanatabe Yasushi and Jo Kamisaku kidnapped Junko while she was on her way home and held her captive in his house. Jo Kamisaku’s parents in Ayase district (Tokyo). This was the beginning of the next 44 days of hell when she was subjected to extremely horrifying torture.
After Junko Furuta disappeared, her parents became worried and reported the incident to the police. However, the kidnappers forced Junko Furuta to call her parents and tell them that she had run away and would stay at a friend’s house and that she was not in danger. Unable to realize what was coming to her and too scared, Junko Furuta did what the kidnappers told her to do.
The parents of Nobuharu Minato (one of the four young men who kidnapped Junko) visited their son several times, but Junko was forced to recognize her as the girlfriend of one of them. However, Minato’s parents saw that she was clearly uncomfortable here and raised many questions, but they did not dare to do anything for fear of retaliation from Hiroshi Miyano.
From here, Junko Furuta’s days of hell, having to endure unspeakable suffering, began. On the first day, they forced her to take a photo together as their girlfriend. She was detained without clothes and forced to have sex every day. The kidnappers also “invited” their friends to join and took turns raping her up to 400 hundred times.
The girl was starved to the point of exhaustion. They fed her very little and also forced her to eat cockroaches and drink her own urine to stay alive. They forced her to take off her clothes and masturbate in front of them. They played animalistic games such as using lighters and cigarettes on her, and stabbing sharp objects into sensitive areas of her body…
In the following days, they tortured her brutally and non-stop. Smashed her head and face onto the concrete ground. Then, to satisfy their animalistic desires, they hung her arms from the ceiling as “sandbags” to beat her whenever they felt she was in a bad mood.
10 days later, Furuta could not breathe through his nose due to blood clots in his nasal cavity. Her internal organs were seriously damaged, causing her to vomit after eating. This provoked the kidnappers, causing them to punish and beat her even more.
While her kidnappers were resting after drinking, she tried to call the police but was discovered and punished by burning her arms with cigarettes, pouring flammable liquid on her legs and feet to burn, and using many unspeakable animalistic tricks to torture the girl.
By December 10, 1988, she could not walk because her legs were severely burned. They continued to beat her with bamboo sticks. Her hand was smashed by weights and her fingernails cracked. They used golf clubs to hit her body. They used everything they could to torture and torment her. More despicably, they lit cigarettes and stabbed sharp objects into sensitive areas, causing the girl to suffer extreme pain.
They forced her to lie outside on the cold balcony. They always changed their forms of torture, stabbing needles into the chest area. The left eye was cut and damaged with pliers, a heated light bulb was used, and scissors were used to stab the private area, causing a lot of bleeding in the private area. Unable to urinate normally.
The injury was so severe that it took her more than an hour to crawl downstairs to the toilet. The eardrum is severely damaged. Extreme brain damage. During those hellish days, Furuta begged her kidnappers to let her go, but they did not want to free her that easily. On the 40th day, she begged her torturers to die to end it all. On January 1, 1989, Junko welcomed the New Year alone. The body was damaged, crushed, and could no longer move.
On the 44th day (January 4, 1989), they played a game with her, she won and made the kidnappers mad. All four men beat the girl with an iron barbell, poured gasoline on her legs, arms, face and stomach, then set her on fire. She vomited a lot of blood on her mouth and nose. This final torture went on for 2 hours. Junko Furuta died later that day, in extreme pain and loneliness. The killers placed the girl’s body in a barrel, filled it with concrete and dumped it in Koto, Tokyo.
Nothing in the world can compare to the 44 days of suffering she had to go through. But they all asserted that they were unaware of the seriousness of her injuries and that they thought she was pretending.
Later, when her mother heard the details of what her daughter had gone through, she fainted. She then had to be treated in a mental hospital with unimaginable panic and extreme pain.
Those who “stand by and watch”
The unfortunate girl was detained and tortured for many days in Kamisaku’s house. His parents also lived there, knew everything that was happening, but did not dare to report it to the authorities for fear of retaliation from their son and his group. Kamisaku also threatened her to pretend to be one of their girlfriends if she met the family around the house where she was imprisoned.
Junko Furuta tried to beg the family to help her more than once, but they did nothing. Because Kamisaku at that time was a low-ranking leader of the Yakuza gang and he boasted that he could use his connections to kill anyone who got in the way.
All four perpetrators were later arrested and appeared in court. The identities of the kidnappers were kept confidential by the court because they were minors, although they were tried as adults for the crimes they committed. However, some weekly newspapers named their real names, demanding “Human rights cannot be treated brutally.” Furuta’s real name and details about her private life have also been thoroughly published in the media. Kamisaku was tried as a mastermind.
These predators confessed to kidnapping, raping and torturing the girl. However, they all asserted that they were not aware of the serious level of damage on Furuta’s body, they thought that she was pretending.
They also reported that “possibly a hundred people” knew Furuta was imprisoned there, but it is unclear whether they visited the house at different times while the girl was imprisoned there, or some of them also raped or abused her. When they didn’t let her escape, she begged them several times to “kill me…”.
The four men offered brazen defenses to lessen their responsibility “leading to causing harm leading to death” rather than committing the crime intentionally. The Kamisaku family sold their house for about 50 million yen to compensate Furuta’s family.
It is known that these four criminals are the type of people who like sadistic things. Sadism is defined as using suffering to achieve sexual satisfaction. These people like to torture, and cause pain, and they like to see the victims’ reactions from writhing to panic. The tears on the victim’s face, the fear in the eyes, and the pleading made the reactions even more exciting.
Torturing victims is a way for these people to enhance their ego and self-worth. Having complete control over a helpless person makes them feel like God in their twisted world. The scary thing is that these people never stop thinking about how to make others suffer. But they are constantly devising and implementing new torture methods.
One cruel torture will not satisfy a criminal’s needs. It’s like eating a cake or a potato chip. It’s hard not to eat a second one, or even a third one. Or if you drink coffee, over time, a little bit of coffee no longer gives you the strong impact it once did. You need to drink more because you get used to it. Likewise, those who enjoy cruelty need more blood each time they act. Therefore, in the above case, in the following days the criminals used more and more disgusting and insane torture methods. They simply need to torture their victims more.
Unfair
In July 1990, the court sentenced the leader to 17 years in prison and his accomplices to 3 to 8 years in prison. The ringleader and 2 of his 3 accomplices appealed. The presiding judge, Ryuji Yanase, then decided to increase the sentence because of the impact on the victim’s family and the impact on society. The final leader was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the second highest sentence after life imprisonment.
In addition to these four names, based on evidence collected on the victim’s body, the police arrested two other men, Koichi Ihara and Tetsuo Nakamura. Other people involved in the case were not investigated and held accountable.
Junko’s family was truly devastated by the verdict for the murderers. When some of the incriminating evidence was overturned based on puzzling natural traces, semen and hair taken from the girl’s body did not match any of the arrested men, the lawyer decided that no enough elements to constitute a crime and it is impossible to protect or defend them further. There are speculations that the evidence was contaminated by multiple unidentified people who raped Furuta.
The severity of the crime was great, but the sentences the perpetrators received were too lenient. Either way, these guys are now over 30 years old and have all been released from prison. Justice will never be served after more than 20 years. They deserve to be punished more than what they did to Furuta, an innocent girl who had to go through unspeakable pain. The special and extremely unfair thing is that the mastermind who caused her death was only sentenced to a few years in prison and now he is outlawed.
Currently, all four defendants have completed their prison sentences and were released. They changed their names and surnames after being released from prison. Those who committed terrible crimes every year suddenly became honest people, except for one person – Jo Kamisaku.
Jo Kamisaku was tried as the main accomplice of mastermind Hiroshi in the Junko Furuta case, but in the end he received the lightest sentence of 8 years in prison. At the time of the crime, Kamisaku was only 17 years old and he completed his sentence just before his 25th birthday. When he was released from prison, Kamisaku changed his name and was accepted to work at a technology company. Thanks to his new identity, Kamisaku quietly reintegrated back into society.
However, within the next 5 years, Kamisaku returned to the Tokyo underworld and got into trouble with the law. In July 2004, Kamisaku was arrested for assaulting an acquaintance named Takatoshi Isono out of jealousy. Kamisaku followed Isono, threatened, beat and locked the victim in the trunk of the car, then took him from Adachi to Misato, then continued to assault and torture the victim for 4 hours. Kamisaku also threatened to kill and dispose of the victim’s body.
Like defendant Hiroshi, it is clear that Kamisaku has absolutely no remorse for his previous crimes. During the Isono assault trial, Kamisaku denied all charges of assault, intimidation, and threatening to kill the victim. However, in the end Kamisaku still had to receive 7 years in prison. Up to now, this sentence has ended and no one knows where Kamisaku is wandering after being released from prison.
It can be said that the torture and murder of Junko Furuta caused great outrage in Japan and was called “the murder of a female student buried in concrete”. This has been an indelible stain in the criminal history of the land of the rising sun, inspiring many comics, novels and movies. At least three books inspired by the incident were published.
Author Seiji Fujii wrote a novel based on this incident. Contrary to what actually happened, the novel offers a happy ending – the girl survives and the kidnappers are sentenced to many years in prison.
