*T/W: This article contains graphic depictions of torture and assault. Reader discretion is advised.
A bright young girl was tortured to slow, agonising death for 44 days. This teenager was every parents’ dream. She was the perfect daughter. She was kind, she was smart — her future was supposed to be full of success, not the bleak horror it turned out to be.
The crime was believed to be the “worst case of juvenile delinquency” in post-war Japan.
Junko’s beauty was her downfall. She caught the eye of Hiroshi Miyano who asked her out, which Junko politely declined. Infuriated, Miyano devised a plan for revenge. So one day, he sent someone to kick Junko off her bike and pretended to help her, even offering to walk her home. Junko agreed, not knowing that she was walking straight into the trap that Miyano had set up for her. The four boys responsible for the capture and subsequent torture of Junko Furuta are Hiroshi Miyano, Nobuharu Minato, Kamisaku Jo, and Yasushi Watanabe.
Miyano began his psychopathic rapture by sexually assaulting her in an abandoned warehouse before he and his friends decided that it would be more “fun” to kidnap her. Junko was forced to call her parents to tell them that she was running away, and so began her 44 days in hell.
She was physically and sexually assaulted, starved, and subjected to various acts of degradation and humiliation. Junko’s internal organs were subjected to so much trauma that she eventually lost control of urinary and bowel movements. What is even more sickening is that Minato’s parents were aware of Junko’s presence in their house the whole time, but were too afraid of his connections with the yakuza, and so Junko’s torture continued.
It wasn’t until twenty days in when Junko finally managed to dial an emergency number before she was caught. She was punished with terrifying consequences that left her fingers to be no longer functional.
Things came to a head when Junko, in her brutalised state, managed to beat the boys at a game of mahjong. In a fit of rage, the boys poured gasoline all over her and set her on fire for the second time. Junko went into convulsions before dying a few hours later. Her body was placed in a 44-gallon drum before being filled with cement and discarded in Tokyo.
She wasn’t found until a year later when Miyano accidentally confessed to her murder. All four boys pled guilty to “committing bodily injury that resulted in death,” rather than murder.
Hiroshi Miyano, the alleged leader of the crime, was sentenced to 17 years in prison but Tokyo High Court judge Ryūji Yanase sentenced him to an additional three years. The 20-year sentence is the second-highest sentence given in Japan before life imprisonment. Nobuharu Minato, on the other hand, originally received a four-to-six-year sentence and was re-sentenced to five-to-nine years by Judge Ryūji Yanase upon appeal. Yasushi Watanabe, who was originally sentenced to three-to-four years in prison, received an upgraded sentence of five-to-seven years. The fourth perpetrator, Jō Ogura, served eight years in a juvenile prison before he was released in August 1999.
Many believed that the sentences were too light for the severity of the crimes committed.
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