The case of Junko Furuta is a very dark, soul-crushing story. This girl was subject to torture, murder, and many other heinous crimes.
- Junko Furuta is a 16-year-old girl, living with her parents, and her older and younger brother. As she grew up, she attended Yashio-Minami High School, a private high school in Yashio, Japan. She worked part-time jobs at a plastic molding factory after-school to afford her school expenses and to save up for a trip after graduation. Furata later accepted an after-graduation job at an electronics retailer. While at school, Junko was very liked and appreciated by her schoolmates. She was very popular and people idolized her for her effort put into school work and her dreams of becoming a Japanese singer. The night of the attacks, Junko noted that she was looking forward to watching the final episode of Tonbo (Dragonfly) とんぼ, a Japanese drama, while not being able to watch it.
On November 25, 1988, Miyano and his friend, Minato, both perpetrators in the trial, wandered the streets of Misato intending to rape the local woman who were walking home at the time. They later found Furata, riding her bike home after a long shift at her job. Minato later was ordered to kick Junko off her bicycle and rob her by Miyano. Under the assumption that Miyano witnessed the attack by accident, he ran up to Furata and helped her up, offering to walk her home safely.
- Hiroshi Miyano, an 18-year-old male, had frequent run-ins with the law. He had problematic behavior since his childhood, such as damaging school property and shoplifting. These offenses gave Miyano a bad reputation in his small community. Later, in April 1986, he enrolled in a private high school in Tokyo, Japan, which is where he converged with the other men connected to this crime. Even though he dropped out of this school after only a year, he continued to commit multiple crimes during his school time, slowly escalating over time. At this time, he was living with his girlfriend, the older sister of Yasushi Watanabe, another perpetrator in this crime. He picked up jobs working as a tile worker, attempting to save up enough money to later propose to her. Dissatisfied with the pay he was making, he frequently became involved with gangs and started committing sex offenses. This behavior later was the reason that his girlfriend started losing interest, ending the relationship soon after.
After gaining Junko’s trust, Miyano later raped her in a warehouse, and later again in a nearby hotel, threatening to kill her if she spoke about the attacks to anyone. Miyano later called his friends over to the hotel, Shinji Minato, Yasushi Watanabe, and Jō Ogura, to report and brag about the rape. Ogura offered the idea of holding her captive, allowing multiple people to sexually assault her during the time they held her. Their group had many crimes against them, recently kidnapping another girl before Furuta, releasing her after only a couple of days.
3:00 a.m., Miyano took Junko into a nearby park, where the rest of the gang was waiting for her to arrive. The boys discovered her home address in a notebook kept in her school bag, threatening to murder the rest of her family while inside the house if she tried to escape the boys’ grasp. The boys overtook her, later taking her into a small house and gang-raping her. This house, which was owned by Minato’s parents, later became their regular gang hangout spot.
On November 27, Junko’s parents notified the police about their daughter’s disappearance. To demoralize her parent’s hope of finding her, the perpetrators forced Junko to call her mother and claim that she had run away, threatening to kill her if she didn’t follow their orders. She also was forced to say that she was safe and hanging out with some friends, those “friends” being Minato, Watanabe, Miyano, and Ogura. Junko was also forced to act as Minato’s girlfriend while his parents were around. They dropped this claim as Minato’s parents stopped caring about what he was doing with his life. His parents later admitted that they did not wanna intervene with Minato’s antics because they were fearful that he would become violent towards them.
On the night of November 28, Miyano invited two other boys to the gang house, Tetsuo Nakumara, and Koichi Ihara respectively. They walked up the stairs, noticing Junko sitting, wearing a long sleeve t-shirt and a skirt that Miyano previously had stolen from a clothing store a couple of days prior. The boys later drank cough medicine, pretending it was drugged, and acted high for a long period. As Junko realized this fact, she tried to run away, screaming in fear and knocking items over. Miyano later grabbed her legs and Koichi Ihara quickly put a pillow over her face. This awoke Miyano’s parents and they proceeded to check on Junko and the boys: Miyano claimed it was nothing and not important. The group then proceeded to gang-rape the woman into a state of unconsciousness: staring at the ceiling while not blinking.
- This group held Junko captive in Minato’s residence for more than 40 days, where they repeatedly, every day, beat, raped, and tortured her. They also invited other men and young teenagers to come over to the home and encouraged them to take turns having intercourse with her.
According to the groups’ statements in court, they admitted to shaving her pubic hair, forcing her to dance to music while she was naked, and masturbate in front of the boys. They also left her on a balcony in the middle of the night with little to no clothing. They inserted objects into her vaginal crevice and anus, such as a lit match, a metal rod, and an empty alcohol bottle. The boys also force-fed her copious amounts of beer, milk, and water. She was also forced to smoke multiple cigarettes at once and inhale paint thinner, which causes skin, eye, and respiratory system irritation, along with many other side effects. In one incident, Miyano repeatedly burned Junko’s legs and arms with a lighter and a large amount of lighter fluid.
- By the end of December, Junko was extremely malnourished after being only fed small portions of food and later being forced to only milk. Due to her several injuries and infected burns, she became unable to walk on her own or even use the toilet. She became confined to only Minato’s room and lay there for 40 days in severe weakness.
Her appearance substantially altered due to the brutality of the acts put upon her. Her face was so swollen that it was difficult or even impossible for her to talk. Her body also became seriously crippled during the months of the attacks, leaving a rotting smell that caused the boys to lose sexual interest in her. As a result of the smell, the boys later found and gang-raped a 19-year-old woman who, just like Junko, was picked up on her way home from work.
January 4, 1989, after losing a game of mahjong, a Chinese game of collecting winning sets of tiles placed on a board, Miyano decided to take his anger out on Junko by again pouring lighter fluid on her swollen body and setting her on fire. Furuta made attempts to put out the fire, gradually becoming responsive after not being able to extinguish it. The boys continued to beat her up, soon igniting a candle and dripping hot wax over her face. They also placed two short candles on her eyelids and forced her to drink her urine.
After she was kicked multiple times, she fell onto a stereo unit and collapsed into a sudden fit of convulsions, and large involuntary movements of the limbs. As she bled profusely while pus emerged from her infected burns, the boys continued to beat her, now donning plastic bags over their hands. They soon dropped an iron exercise ball onto her stomach continuously. These attacks lasted multiple hours and she later succumbed to her wounds and died shortly after the two-hour mark.
Less than 24 hours after Junko’s death, Minato’s brother called him to report that Junko appeared to be dead. Afraid of being convicted of murder, the gang wrapped her swollen body up in blankets and shoved her into a travel bag, also packing a VHS copy of Tonbo (Dragonfly) とんぼ. The boys then later put her body into a 210-liter drum and filled it with wet, uncured cement. Around 8:00 p.m. the same day, they loaded Junko’s cement-covered body into Minato’s car and eventually disposed of the body in a cement truck in Kōtō, Tokyo.
Image of Minato via https://www.tokyoreporter.com/crime/junko-furuta-killer-again-on-trial-chaos-in-the-courtroom/
- While being held captive, Junko mentioned to her captors several times that she regretted not being able to watch the last episode of her favorite show, Tonbo (Dragonfly) とんぼ. This was the motive of Miyano placing the VHS of the show in her travel bag. He placed it in her bag not because he pitied her, but because he wanted her to be able to watch it after she died and not haunt the boys.
January 23, 1989, Miyano and Ogura were convicted and arrested for the gang-rape of the 19-year-old girl whom they had kidnapped in December while still having Junko. Not knowing if Ogura confessed to the crimes against Junko, Miyano told the police exactly where to find her body. The officers were puzzled by the confession, believing that he was referring to the murder of a different woman and her seven-year-old son that happened nine days before Junko’s abduction, a case that remains unsolved to this day.
January 24, 1989, the police found the exact drum containing Furuta’s body. She was identified through fingerprints. On April 1, 1989, Ogura was arrested for a separate sexual assault case and re-arrested for the murder of Junko. Watanabe, Minato, and Minato’s brother’s arrests followed. Several other perpetrators’ arrests followed for abusing and raping Junko, including Tetsuo Nakamura and Koichi Ihara, who was charged with rape after their DNA was found inside and out of Furuta’s body.
Image of Junko’s body finally being found inside the concrete drum via https://japaninsides.com/44-days-of-hell-the-story-of-junko-furuta/
Sources:
https://www.tokyoreporter.com/crime/junko-furuta-killer-again-on-trial-chaos-in-the-courtroom/
https://kileystruecrime.squarespace.com/kileystruecrimeaddict-blog/the-murder-of-junko-furuta
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta
https://japaninsides.com/44-days-of-hell-the-story-of-junko-furuta
