Telling their stories

Junko Furuta

The beginning of her end

       Junko Furuta was a 17 year old girl from Misato-shi, Saitama, Japan. She was born on January 18th, 1971. She attended Yashio-Minami high school. Furuta was a good student and did nothing to get into trouble, that was until she said "No" to Hiroshi Miyano, an 18 year old student who had taken an interest in Furuta. Miyano had connections to the Yakuza (Japanese mafia) and nobody ever dared to defy him out of fear. He was angry with the fact he had just been rejected by the girl he was interested in, so he hatched a plan. He had someone assault Furuta on her way home from her part time job. He then came up to help her and offered to walk her home, it only went downhill from there.

The kidnapping of Junko Furuta

     On November 25th, 1988 Junko Furuta was kidnapped by four teenage boys. Their names were Hiroshi Miyano, Kamisaku Jo, Nobuharu Minato, and Yasushi Watanabe (their names have since been changed).  After offering to walk her home Miyano took her to an abandoned warehouse where he proceeded to rape her multiple times. Himself and three of his friends decided to kidnap Furuta that day.  She was held at the parents house of Nobuharu Minato. There she was raped and tortured for forty four days before her death. 

The torture of Junko Furuta

       In the forty four days of her captivity Furuta was tortured daily. She would be beaten with golf clubs, dumbbells dropped onto her stomach, eyelids burned with hot wax and lighters, hung from the ceiling and used as a punching bag, breasts pierced with sewing needles, had her vaginal area burned with lighters and cigarettes, had hot light bulbs inserted into her vagina and then exploded, her left nipple was ripped off with pliers, had fireworks set off inside her anus, starved and dehydrated, her body set on fire on multiple occasions, bottles shoved into her vagina and anus, bones smashed with weights, left in the freezer and on the balcony when it was freezing cold outside, had an iron bar and scissors and needles and chicken skewers forced into her vagina. She was unable to walk, eat, drink, or control her bowels. Her brain had also decreased in size and had eardrum damage. She could not breathe through her nose due to accumulation of blood in her cavities. She also could not urinate properly anymore.

The rape of Junko Furuta

       Junko Furuta was raped multiple times daily. She was both vaginally and anally raped. It is believed that over one hundred men raped her. Some were members of the Yakuza, who also aided in torturing her. By the time of her death she had been raped over five hundred times, not including with foreign objects. And she was raped by at least twelve men in one day at some point in time. She had been forced to masturbate and humiliate herself infront of multiple men. 

The murder of Junko Furuta

       After forty four days of being raped and tortured, Junko Furuta died of shock on January 4th, 1989. Her captors challenged her to a game of Mahjong. She had won the game which made the boys angry. They then beat her with an iron barbell and set fire to her legs, arms, face, and stomach. Adding that to her previous state, Junko fell into shock and died the next day. Her murderers stuffed her body into a fifty five gallon drum and filled it with concrete. They disposed of it in Koto, Tokyo. If it weren't for one of the boys mistakenly mentioning Junko while being questioned because of another crime, they would've never found her body.

Justice for Junko

       Since the four boys were juveniles the court withheld their names. The boys are all out of jail now, because of their age they received lesser sentences despite the severity of their crimes. Three of the boys served less than nine years. The leader was originally set to serve seventeen but after his appeal it was increased to twenty years. Two boys also got an appeal and had their sentences increased from eight to ten years. The last boy kept his original sentence of eight years. Hiroshi Miyano was released from prison in 2009 after serving twenty years. Nobuharu Minato served five to nine years, his release date is unknown but he is out of prison. Yasushi Watanabe served five to seven years, his release date is unknown but he is also out of prison. Kamisaku Jo was released from prison in 1999 after serving a ten year sentence. 

Opinion

        Whether these boys were young or not, they deserved the same sentencing as an adult. I believe these boys deserve life in prison or a death sentence. They have no remorse for what they did to Junko and they are still committing crimes now that they are released from prison. Junko Furuta did not get the justice that she deserves. After all of the suffering she was put through these boys are now allowed to live their life and act like nothing ever happened. Who knows if they could put another girl through the same torture that they put Junko Furuta through. They deserve to remain in jail for the rest of their lives to prevent this from happening to another innocent girl. This case just goes to show how messed up Japan's legal system is.