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Murder of Junko Furuta

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Junko Furuta (古田 順子 Furuta Junko, November 22, 1971 – January 4, 1989) was a 17-year-old Japanese high school Student who was abducted, tortured, raped, and murdered in the late 1980s. Her murder case was named concrete-encased high school girl murder case (女子高生コンクリート詰め殺人事件, Joshikōsei konkurīto-zume satsujin-jiken) due to the state of her discovered body in a Concrete drum filled with 208 litres of concrete.

Contents

Crime

On November 25, 1988, four boys abducted Furuta, a third-year high school student from Misato, Saitama Prefecture, after school. They held her captive for 40 days in a house in the Ayase district of Adachi, Tokyo, owned by the parents of one of the boys, a 17-year-old named Jō, who was later given the surname Kamisaku. Furuta was a student at Yashio-Minami High School and she had been kidnapped shortly after leaving school.

Over the course of her confinement, Furuta was repeatedly raped, beaten, and tortured, including being subject to genital mutilation, by her four captors until they killed her. The parents of Kamisaku were present in the home for at least a part of the time that Furuta was held captive, and though she pleaded with them for help, they did not intervene, later claiming that they feared their son too much to do so.

The killers hid her corpse in a 208-litre oil drum filled with concrete. They disposed of the drum in a tract of reclaimed land in Kōtō, Tokyo.

Prosecution

The boys were arrested and tried as adults, but, because of Japanese handling of crimes committed by juveniles, their identities were concealed by the court.

For his participation in the crime, Kamisaku served eight years in a juvenile prison before he was released in August 1999. In July 2004, he was arrested for assaulting an acquaintance, whom he believed to be luring a girlfriend away from him, and allegedly bragged about his earlier infamy. Kamisaku was sentenced to seven years in prison for the beating.

In July 1990, a lower court sentenced the leader to seventeen years in prison, one accomplice to a four-to-six-year term, one accomplice to a three-to four-year term, and another accomplice to an indefinite five-to-ten-year term. The leader and the first two of the three appealed their rulings. The higher court gave more severe sentences to the three appealing parties. The presiding judge, Ryūji Yanase, said that the court did so because of the nature of the crime, the effect on the victim's family, and the effects of the crime on society. The leader received a twenty-year sentence, the second highest possible sentence after life imprisonment. Of the two appealing accomplices, the one that originally got four to six years received a five-to-nine-year term, and the other had his sentence upgraded to a five-to-seven-year term.

Furuta's parents were dismayed by the sentences received by their daughter's killers, and won a civil suit against the parents of the boy in whose home the crimes were committed.

Aftermath

The case drew nationwide attention towards the sentencing and rehabilitation of youth offenders, especially in the context of youths charged as adults, and became well known within the media.

At least three Japanese-language books have been written about the incident.

An exploitation film, Joshikōsei konkurīto-zume satsujin-jiken (女子高生コンクリート詰め殺人事件, Concrete-Encased High School Girl Murder Case), was made about the incident by Katsuya Matsumura in 1995. Yujin Kitagawa (later a member of the music duo Yuzu) played the role of principal culprit.

Seiji Fujii wrote a novel about the case, 17-sai, which was turned into a manga by Youji Kamata. Contrary to what had really happened, the novel shows a happy ending for the girl, who survives and her kidnappers are sentenced to jail for many years. Waita Uziga (author of Mai-chan's Daily Life) also made a controversial manga, Shin Gendai Ryoukiden, about the case, with much more violent and crude content.

References

Murder of Junko Furuta Wikipedia