Junko Furuta

Case background and investigation

Junko Furuta was a 17-year-old senior at Yashio-Minami High School who lived in Misato, Saitama Prefecture. According to the account summarised by Wikipedia and Unseen Japan, she was cycling home on the evening of November 25, 1988, when two teenage boys stopped her. One knocked her from her bicycle and the other approached her as though offering help. She was sexually assaulted and then taken to the home of one of the boys in the Ayase area of Adachi ward, Tokyo.

She was kept in an upstairs room of that house for roughly 40 days. Court findings reported by those sources describe repeated rape, beatings, burning and starvation carried out mainly by four youths aged 16 to 18, with other young men taking part in some of the sexual assaults. Some outlets, including Tokyo Reporter, give the period as 44 days, but the interval between the abduction and her death is 40 days.

Furuta died on January 4, 1989. Wikipedia gives the cause as traumatic shock following a further assault. The following day the youths wrapped her body, placed it in a metal drum, filled the drum with concrete and left it on vacant land in Wakasu, Koto ward.

The killing came to light through an unrelated investigation. According to Unseen Japan, two of the group were arrested in January 1989 over another offence, and the death was disclosed during police questioning about a separate rape case. Police recovered the drum on March 29, 1989, and the body was identified by fingerprints. The remaining members of the group were arrested afterwards.

The four principal defendants were tried in the adult criminal courts even though they were minors. In July 1990 the Tokyo District Court imposed a 17-year term on the defendant treated as the leader and shorter indeterminate terms on the others. Prosecutors had asked for life imprisonment for the leader. In July 1991 the Tokyo High Court increased three of the sentences, to 20 years, five to nine years and five to seven years, and left the fourth at five to ten years. Wikipedia reports that the parents of the lead defendant paid 50 million yen in compensation to the Furuta family.

The case is known in Japan as the concrete-encased high school girl murder case. Unseen Japan reports that the weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun published the defendants' names in 1989 despite the anonymity normally given to juveniles, and that criticism of the sentences fed a later debate that led Japan to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 14. All four men were eventually released. According to Tokyo Reporter and Wikipedia, three of them were later arrested for new offences, including one who received a suspended sentence in 2019 over a 2018 assault in Kawaguchi, Saitama.