141: Truly Barbaric: Teen Boys Kidnap, Torture & Brutally Murder 17-Year-Old Girl Junko Furuta
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Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to an all-new episode of Serialistly with me, Annie Elise. Whether you are tuning into the podcast for the very first time or if you are a returning listener, thank you for dropping in and listening to today's episode. Today, we're going to be talking about

Now, for those of you who are new, let me just kind of break down who I am and what it is we do over here. My name is Annie Elise, and I like to just jump on the mic here and talk with you guys about a true crime case, whether it's been weighing heavy on my mind for one reason or another, whether it has certain levels of conspiracy or crazy details that I'm trying to wrap my mind around. For me, jumping on the mic and sharing these cases is a little bit

cathartic in a sense and of course we do it to help raise awareness to help keep these victims voices active even after they unfortunately are no longer with us and I like to just do it in more of a conversational manner not so formal not all of the flowery language but really just breaking it down like I'm talking with a friend of mine I'm sharing a story with my bestie on the couch while we're having a glass of wine or eating fro-yo or doing something like that so that's

the vibe, and hopefully that's conveyed through the podcast. I don't know, I guess you tell me, but that is the vibe that we are going for. Now before we get started in today's case, I do want to warn everybody listening and give a little bit of a trigger warning of sorts here that the case we're talking about today is especially graphic. I mean, incredibly so, and it also involves the sexual assault of a minor. So please keep that in mind as we get into it. Now

Now today's case is a little bit of an older case, guys. It actually took place in 1989 in Misato, Japan, which is about 22 miles outside of Tokyo. But even though this case happened more than, I don't know, what, 30 years ago now, it had a really massive fallout that is still affecting people today.

There are ongoing debates about how it all got resolved and what it really has to say about how the criminal justice system works or doesn't work in some cases, I should say. Now, a lot of times when I cover these murder cases, the big questions are, of course, who did it?

Why did they do it? What was their motive? How did they meet? How did this all happen? And that's also a focus of a lot of police investigations too. You need to figure out who the killer is, establish the motive, because it makes it easier to then get the conviction in court. But today, what I really want to ask is, I want to ask what happens after that? After the trial? After the conviction? After the murderer goes to prison? How do we know if justice really has been served? Which

Which, let's just be honest, the answer to that question really does come down to how you define the word justice. Is justice a conviction? Is justice just naming the perpetrator in public? What does justice look like? And it looks differently to everybody, regardless if you're involved directly in the case or you're just speaking about the case like we are.

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But before I get too philosophical on you guys, I'm going to rein it in a little bit here, and I want to take you back to when this all started going down. Back in November of 1988, specifically November 25th, 1988. That is when 17-year-old Junko Furuta failed to come home from her shift at her part-time job.

Now, Junko, let's talk about Junko for a minute. She was very, very responsible. So it definitely wasn't like her to stay out late without telling her parents or her brothers, especially because on this particular evening, she was supposed to come back after 8.30 p.m., I mean well after dark.

But for reasons that aren't entirely clear, her family didn't go straight to the police. Instead, her father Akira, her mother, and her two brothers called everybody that they knew to ask if they had seen Junko, or if they had heard from her and might know where she had been.

They also decided that they were going to just kind of take the search into their own hands and start searching the town by foot themselves, hoping kind of that just by walking around in this town in Moscato that they would stumble across Juneco and that they would run into her and then it would be end of story.

Now, maybe this was a bit of wishful thinking on their part. June Ko's disappearance was really alarming, but it's possible that they were in denial. Like, if they maybe treated it like she was just a couple of minutes late getting back home, then everything would be okay if they just didn't jump to conclusions right away. Finally, by November 27th, though, which was a full two days later, they couldn't ignore the reality of their situation any longer. She was missing. So that is when they decided to file the missing persons report with the police.

And later that same day, their phone rang. I don't know who picked up exactly, if it was Junko's parents or if it was one of her brothers, but whoever it was, they must have been so incredibly relieved when they heard Junko's voice on the other end of the line. But then, whatever feeling or sense of relief they had in that moment, it must have just quickly dissolved. Because then Junko said that she had run away.

She told her family that she wasn't in any immediate danger, that she was just staying with a friend, although she didn't say which friend this was. It seemed like Junko knew that she had been reported as missing at this point, maybe because her disappearance was already a huge news story, but she also told her family that she didn't want the police bothering her, so they should just close the case. Now, I don't know how the family felt about

this, if they believed Junko or if they just went ahead and honored her wishes by pulling the missing persons report, but I wouldn't blame them if the call actually made them even more suspicious. That is something odd to say. I mean, it was really out of character for Junko altogether, and like I said before, she was generally responsible, and she certainly didn't come across like the sort of person who would just run away out of nowhere.

I mean, Junko got good grades, she almost never missed school, and she was a very, very hard worker. She was saving up money at the time for a trip that she was going to take with her friends after graduation too. Nothing about her past behavior gave any sort of indication that she might want to just take off and leave her life behind.

And I mean, also, the night that she disappeared, it was the series finale of Junko's favorite TV show, Tanbo. And Junko had been telling people how excited she was to get home, catch this new episode, watch it. But instead, she just took off. It wasn't really making any sense. So the things that Junko said on this call were not matching anything that her dad and the rest of the family knew about her. It was totally out of character.

But they didn't have any other information about where she had gone or why, so there wasn't much else that they could do. They could just wait and hope that Junko would come home, or that at the very least, the police would find her and confirm that she was safe wherever she was. But even with the authorities actively investigating, the family didn't get any updates on Junko for over four more months.

Then, on March 29th, 1989, detectives finally found Junko, and they reached out to her family with some truly devastating news. Junko was dead. When Junko's mother went to go and view the body, it was practically unrecognizable. Junko was emaciated, and I mean to the max.

At the time of her death, she weighed a little over 65 pounds, and her body was covered in scars. There were signs that she had been beaten, battered, and just hurt.

horribly, horribly tortured and mangled. Even the police had a very difficult time looking at her, and these are people who deal with violent crimes on a regular basis, and they were even having a challenging time looking at her. That is how horrible her body's condition was in. I mean, they were just horrified by Junko's condition, and I can't imagine how her mother handled that moment if the police were even unable and struggling to handle that moment.

In fact, it actually took her mom a while to even agree that it really was her daughter, and not just some other random unfortunate girl. But then, once the reality set in, Junko's mother screamed. She fell to her knees, and she was just completely overcome with grief and pain. Not only because her daughter was dead, but because it was so clear in this moment that her daughter had suffered tremendously.

I mean, it is bad enough to lose a child, but it looked like somebody really went out of their way to torture Junko before she took her last breath. And then this added an entire new layer to Junko's disappearance. It showed that this wasn't some type of freak accident. Junko had been murdered. Savagely murdered. Now,

Now to explain how and why she was killed, I have to go back to the day that Junko disappeared, November 25th, 1988, about four months earlier. Junko was on her way home from her job at that plastics company, and it was about 8.30 p.m., and at this time, she had the horrible misfortune of crossing paths with two young men. One of these young men was a 15-year-old named Nobuharu Tatsumaki.

Minato, and the other boy was an 18-year-old named Hiroshi Miyano. Now, Nobuharu and Hiroshi were not the type of guys that you would ever want to bump into on a dark night, certainly not. For one, Hiroshi had connections to the infamous Japanese gang called Yakuza.

If you've never heard of the Yakuza gang, they were an organized crime group in Japan. I mean, think of a group that is just as powerful and as feared in Japan as the Mafia is in Italy. They were also known for requiring some of their members to perform violent, almost mystical-type rituals.

Some Yakuza members even actually mutilated themselves. So in short, they are just a group that does not mess around. They are some very, very scary and violent people. Today, the Yakuza is on the downswing. But in 1988, they were a very big deal. And they pretty much owned the criminal world for decades. And they were even making headlines on CNN as recently as 2013.

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When it comes to Hiroshi, I don't know if he was just actually a low-ranking Yakuza member, or if he knew people who were involved, what his direct connection was. From what I can tell, it sounds like he wasn't anybody with any real type of power, but he was connected to them in some type of way, which regardless, it made him a very dangerous person to cross paths with.

He and Nobuharu also had a history of sexually assaulting young women, and on that day, they were on the hunt for another victim. They were prowling a neighborhood in Misato, and from what I can tell, this was their go-to hunting grounds. People who lived in the area said that they regularly heard screams from young women on the street. It is absolutely horrible.

horrifying to think about. Now, I have heard competing information about how Nobuharu and Hiroshi chose Junko that day as their victim, and I'm not sure which version of the story is true, so I'm going to lay both of them out for you. The first story is that Hiroshi and Nobuharu had never seen or interacted with Junko before. She just had this unfortunate misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then they decided to attack her.

The other account says that Junko actually did know Hiroshi because they went to the same school. Now, in this version of the story, he apparently had a crush on her, which really is not that surprising because Junko was beautiful. She was sweet. She got along with all of the boys. She also had two brothers and was a bit of a tomboy in a sense. However, she never had really dated much.

She was sort of like the girl next door, everything that a guy like Hiroshi could want, and just grounded enough for him to think that he had a chance with her, or maybe he thought that he was entitled to her attention just because he liked her.

But beyond that surface-level attraction, there really wasn't any reason for Hiroshi to expect that Junko would return his feelings, that she would be into him as well. I mean, he had a criminal history, and Junko was pretty much known as a good girl. She also didn't drink, she didn't party. So then when Hiroshi asked Junko out, she said no. And the rumor is that he didn't handle the rejection very well.

In this version of the story, when Hiroshi saw Junko riding up along him on her bike, he chose to attack her because he wanted to punish her for not giving him a chance. Regardless of why he and Nobuhiro went after Junko, their tactics were really deceptive.

First, Nobuhiro rode up the street on a motorcycle. When he passed Junko, he knocked her off of her bike. Then, Hiroshi ran over and pretended to rescue her. He ran Nobuhiro off completely, trying to be this knight in shining armor for Junko, and then he offered to walk with Junko so that she would make it home safely.

He acted as though he was going to protect her, or if anybody else tried to mess with her, he would intervene and he would get her home safely. Now obviously, he was certainly not being very heroic. He and Nobuharu had planned this entire thing in advance. It kind of gives the vibes of that movie enough with Jennifer Lopez, if you've ever seen that. Different situation, of course.

but these two good friends plotting what their move was going to be and how they were going to victimize somebody, how they were going to hook them. But from Junko's perspective, Hiroshi had just shown himself to be a nice guy who genuinely cared about her well-being, somebody who wanted to protect her, somebody who cared about her. So she stayed off of her bike and she allowed Hiroshi to walk her home, unknowingly walking directly into the trap that he had set for her.

Once Junko's guard was now down, Hiroshi somehow persuaded her to go to a warehouse with him. And once they were there, he sexually assaulted her. Afterward, he got on the phone and started bragging about it to all of his friends. He let Nobuharu know, hey, yeah, our plan worked. And he also talked about the rape with two other teenagers.

One of them was 17-year-old Joe Ogura, and the other was 16-year-old Yasushi Wadabi. Now, if you're watching the YouTube version of today's episode, you'll see that we weren't able to find an uncensored photo of Yasushi, and there is a reason for that, which I will get into later. So like Hiroshi and Nobuharu, Joe and Yasushi were absolute trouble.

All four of them used to attend the same school, and it seems like that's where they met in the first place. But Joe and Yasushi ended up dropping out, and they spent the last couple of years committing petty crimes. Now, not only was this not the first time that Hiroshi had sexually assaulted somebody, but it also wasn't the first time that he had raped a young woman using this exact same strategy, where Nobuhiro pretended to attack her, and then Hiroshi intervened and played the part of the rescuer.

Usually, he raped his victim and then he let her go, but for reasons that aren't entirely clear, and again, it could be because Hiroshi had a personal vendetta against Junko, but this time around, he didn't release her. After he talked with his buddies, his gross group of friends, the four of them decided that they were going to keep Junko, they were going to keep her hostage, and they continued assaulting her, taking turns over and over and over.

Once they made their decision, the three guys dragged Junko off to a neighborhood in Tokyo called Adachi. Nobuharu's parents owned a house over there, more like a second home, and it was empty most of the time. So, Nobuharu, Hiroshi, Yasushi, and Joe locked Junko up in this house, completely shutting her inside Nobuharu's bedroom.

This means that that night after Junko first went missing, when her family was hitting the town by foot trying to find her, hoping that they would run into her, they really had absolutely no chance of finding her because at this point, she was out of town and she was out of their reach.

The boys warned Junko that if she resisted or if she tried to escape, they or the Yakuza gang would hurt her and also hurt her family. And the threats were convincing enough that Junko agreed after the first two days that she was going to make that phone call to her family, the one where she lied and said that she had run away and asked her parents to close that missing persons report.

it wasn't her idea to lie to her family the kidnappers made her do it they forced her to do it so that they could buy more time to just continue to mess around with her and continue to assault her what followed after that phone call to her parents was about a month and a half a full 40 days

of true horrendous torture. During that time, which stretched from late November until mid-January, the four teenage boys just continued to repeatedly rape Junko, and they just passed her around and shared her with their friends as well.

Unfortunately, many of the people who did assault her were never identified, which does make sense because why would anybody keep a record of who came by this house to abuse this poor little girl? And why would any of them, after the fact, step forward and admit what they had done? So we can only guess who did and how often. But it has been estimated that up to 100 people assaulted Junko throughout her 40-day captivity.

Absolutely appalling and gut-wrenching. And some of them raped her more than once, which if you do the math, that works out to several assaults a day every single day. It is absolutely brutal and barbaric.

Now, one of these guys apparently did feel bad about what he did to Junko. I'm not sure who this person was. His identity has not been made public, but I think that he must have been young because he did still live at home. Apparently, he went to his parents and he explained everything that was going on. So finally, at least one person in this story did the right thing, and this person's parents ended up calling the police right away, which

Which is great, you would think. But when the detectives showed up at Nobuharu's house, his parents were there. And get this, they covered for him. They acted like they had no idea what was going on. And for the record, that's been their stance ever since, even after the truth came out. That there was just no way for them to know that their son was imprisoning a teenage girl in their house. Now personally, I do not buy that for a single second.

I don't know how often they were at this second vacation house of theirs, but if they did spend any time there at all, there was no way in hell that they just failed to notice this 17-year-old girl who was staying with them, being assaulted by a steady stream of strange men coming in and out.

How does that go unnoticed? Apparently, at one point, they did say that they saw Junko there as well, but Nobuharu claimed that she was his girlfriend. But I mean, come on. She was getting thinner by the day. She was covered in bruises, covered in scars. How can any single rational person ever take one look at this girl and think that she was at this house by choice and that there wasn't something way more sinister going on?

Plus, other people in the neighborhood saw Nobuharu's parents doing work on his bedroom and on the balcony outside during the time that Junko was imprisoned. So how would they have missed any of this?

this. They apparently were replacing the shutters. They were also, get this, scrubbing everything clean, which again, how can you possibly do that much work in the house without ever noticing what's going on? And why were they so desperate to scrub the place down, especially if they hadn't realized that their son had something to hide?

I'm sorry, but I don't buy it for a single second. And I get that nobody wants their child to be arrested, right? But helping them get away with kidnapping and rape, it is just unbelievable. I mean, when the police showed up, his parents just smiled, cool as can be, and act

acted like they had absolutely no idea why anybody had reported any sort of criminal activity coming from their house. They told the police that they were welcome to come inside, take a look around, and acted like nothing was afoot.

Now, I have to say, this must have been an absolutely Oscar-worthy performance right here because the detectives apparently decided not to go inside this house. Apparently, the fact that his parents were willing to cooperate with the investigation was enough for them to figure that, hey, they must not have anything to hide. So, they just left her suffering.

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Protect your reputation with exterior products by James Hardy. Now, as if this weren't horrible enough already, Hiroshi and the others, his buddies, they went out of their way to make Junko's life a living hell. Beyond the repeated sexual assaults, they were absolutely tormenting her. The details of what Junko went through are

are absolutely barbaric and horrible. Her kidnappers hardly fed her any real food during those 40 days. Instead, they would force her to eat cockroaches, they would force her to drink urine, and she did all of this because she was starving, she was dehydrated, she had no other choice. She also was not allowed to wear clothing at any point during her captivity.

Even on the nights when they would shut her outside on the balcony to sleep in the frigid winter air, she had nothing covering her. Now, I want to give a little bit of a content warning because this is where we get even more graphic, if you can believe it. But on top of all of that, they also forced her to masturbate in front of them and also in front of the other rapists that they had invited over to sexually assault her.

I guess they found this humorous or I don't know, it turned them on, but it was just a way to continue to degrade her, disrespect her, torment her. And all I can think about is how incredibly violated she must have felt about all of this. I mean, when these monsters weren't raping her,

They were beating her. They were urinating on her. And they were doing other just truly unspeakable things. Hiroshi and the other kidnappers, his good old friends, sexually assaulted her with a variety of objects as well, including a pair of very sharp scissors, also metal rods, and even a bottle.

They ripped off her left nipple using a pair of pliers, and investigators found burns in and around her genital area. They also beat her regularly, at one point so badly that they damaged her internal organs and she lost control of her bladder. And this next detail is especially horrible. They stuck firecrackers in her mouth and in other orifices of her body, if you get where I'm going with that.

and they let them explode inside of her. I know I keep using this word, but I truly don't know any other word to use. It is just barbaric. Like, to the core, to the absolute definition, it was truly barbaric. You wouldn't wish this kind of activity and circumstances on your worst enemy. People wouldn't treat dirt this poorly. It is just horrible.

Yet somehow, miraculously, amazingly, Junko had survived all of this. Now I'm sure that if you follow true crime or you have ever been involved, unfortunately, in a case yourself, you've heard me or you've heard somebody else say to you at some point that rape, it's not even about sex. It has nothing to do with sex.

It's about power. Generally speaking, it's understood that if somebody sexually assaults somebody else, it's because they want to control them or they want to humiliate them. And Junko's experience for those 40 days was utterly humiliating and completely destructive.

Not just physically, although she must have been in an incredibly immense amount of pain, but also psychologically too. Hiroshi, Nobuharu, Joe, and Yasushi showed so much disdain for Junko, it is just beyond words. Now at least once, during her time in captivity, she did manage to slip away from her kidnappers, just long enough to make her way to a phone, and she was about to dial for help.

But just before she could make that life-saving call, one of her kidnappers, and I'm not sure exactly who, saw her. And that's when they dragged her back to Nobuharu's bedroom. And the punishment for this attempted escape was even more brutal than what she had even survived so far. These four boys, they beat her within an inch of her life.

And then they doused her legs in lighter fluid, and then they set them on fire. Which, let me just remind you, the majority of these boys are young. They are teenagers themselves. So to have the capability of being this evil, this vile, it is bone-chilling. It is so incredibly painful.

scary to think about, that these monsters at such a young age at that are walking among us. Now after this, again, incredibly, Junko lived through all of this torture. However, she couldn't go on for much longer.

And truly, I don't blame her. I'm sure most people don't because I can't imagine how anybody could keep fighting through all of that. Especially because now, by early January, her stomach had been so badly damaged that she couldn't even keep down water. Anytime that she drank anything, she would just vomit it up right afterward.

And on the very rare occasion that she was allowed to use the bathroom, it would take Junko forever to get down the stairs to the toilet and then back upstairs. She could barely walk at this point. And if she was able to make it down and back safely, she would just be so exhausted from the trip that she basically couldn't do anything that entire day. By the new year, whenever she saw Hiroshi, Nobuharu, or any of the other guys, she just begged them to kill her.

to end her suffering, just kill me now. But even this didn't end their cruelty. On January 4th, 1989, Hiroshi, Nobuharu, Joe, and Yasushi invited Junko to play a game, a game of Mahjong with them.

Now this must have been an attempt to embarrass her or even mock her. I mean, I just have to assume. Because by now, Junko, she was beaten, she was incontinent, she was utterly just broken to an extent that she just wanted to die. She was begging for them to kill her.

It's not like they thought that she was going to sit down with them, play this fun game, have a fun game night with them. And of course, I don't exactly know what Hiroshi and his friends truly had planned in this moment, but I do know that the game didn't play out how they expected it to. Not at all. And that's because...

Junko won. Which I have to say, that is a little bit of like, I don't know, chef's kiss, divine intervention, whatever you would want to call it in that moment, because it's nice to know that she could still stick it to these calculated, cruel, kidnapping rapists, even after all that she had been through, and kind of say, I'm still smarter than you, I still can beat you, I'm not giving up. I mean, it truly is incredible.

But apparently, this just set Hiroshi and all of his friends off completely. They became unhinged, so much so that they hit her with a barbell until she began to have a seizure. Later on, the boys claimed that they thought the Junko was faking it, and I don't know why they would assume that, because she was seriously ill and seriously injured, and a seizure seems very predictable in these circumstances.

So I don't know if they were lying or what, probably, but they did say that after she began to have that seizure, they lit her on fire again. Which I have to say this, even if she was faking it, why would anybody do that?

It is just so unspeakably cruel, but it doesn't honestly surprise me because it doesn't seem like any of these boys had a nice, remorseful, kind bone in their body. And I don't think it matters if Junko was actually having a seizure or not. These guys were evil, full stop. A little while later, they put the flames out that were on Junko's body.

But it was too late, and for a few more hours, Junko continued to suffer. But after a month and a half of an absolutely hellish existence, Junko finally got her wish, and she died. She died in an absolutely horrendous way. Hiroshi decided that what they were going to do to dispose of her body and cover up the crime and get away with it was by encasing her body in concrete.

He had read about a killer getting rid of a corpse this way, and it seemed like it was a good idea to him, so that's what they decided they were going to do. They shoved Junko's body into a barrel, and then they carried it to Hiroshi's house. In his driveway, they filled this barrel with concrete, splashing some of it onto the ground because they were just so incredibly sloppy when they were doing this.

Then, when Junko was totally encased in this barrel, they dumped everything in a Tokyo-area landfill. And as wild as it sounds, they almost got away with it. Even though Junko had been reported as missing, the police never connected her to Hiroshi, to Nobuharu, to Joe, or to Yasushi.

So enough time went by that Hiroshi and his friends must have figured that they successfully got away with murder. So because of that, it really should come as no surprise that they continued to be violent. They continued to be dangerous. Which, I mean, honestly, why would they change? If there literally were no negative consequences after they committed one of the worst crimes they could possibly ever commit...

Why would they ever stop? Anyway, in late March of 1989, Hiroshi and Joe were arrested for sexual assault. This was of another victim, a crime that had absolutely nothing to do with Junko. During Hiroshi's interrogation, a police officer made a comment, and it's a little weird. I'm not sure if maybe something got lost in translation or what.

But the detective said, you shouldn't kill people. Which, duh, right? Obviously murder is wrong. And I'm not sure why the police officer was talking about killing people at all at this point, because they were questioning Hiroshi about an assault, and that assault hadn't ended in murder.

One source says that he said this to make fun of Hiroshi in a way. But again, I'm not seeing the humor at all here. I mean, maybe it would make more sense if I spoke Japanese. I don't know. If you are a Japanese listener or you speak that fluently, let me know if I'm missing the mark here.

Either way, I guess I'm not the only one who was confused by this statement, because Hiroshi heard it, and he assumed that the police officer was hinting that he already knew about Junko's murder. So in Hiroshi's mind, he figured that if he was about to be busted, and if he confessed, he could get ahead of the charges. Or the detectives may go easier on him because he's the first one to come to the table, the first one to maybe strike a deal, to be honest.

Which, for the record, was all completely wrong. The police had absolutely no idea that Hiroshi, Nobuharu, Joe, and Yasushi had anything to do with Junko, period. They didn't even know that Junko was dead yet. So it's entirely possible that if Hiroshi hadn't just panicked and decided to spill his guts...

it's possible that the murder would never have been solved. So I guess we can all be grateful that Hiroshi just wildly misjudged this situation. I mean, so badly. Because right away, with almost no provocation whatsoever, he told the detectives absolutely everything. After he described the horrible torture that Junko suffered from and the way that he murdered her, he also told the police exactly where they could find her remains.

The detectives followed Hiroshi's instructions, and everything was just as he had described. Junko was still in that barrel, still surrounded by concrete, still in that garbage dump, and

and by March 29th, her body had been recovered. So this is how the police ended up calling her family and asking them to come down and view her horribly tortured and mangled body. So now, the authorities had the culprits. They had a confession, they knew Junko's death definitely wasn't an accident, she absolutely suffered before her murder, and that was clear from the state of her body and also from Hiroshi's statements.

but Japan's criminal system did not come down on these four teenage murderers the way that you would expect. Partly because all four of the killers were legally minors, as I mentioned. Even Hiroshi, who was 18 years old.

In 1990 and 1991, when they went to trial, Japanese law said that you are not an adult until you turn 20 years old. And that was the case up until 2022, just recently. And now the age has finally been decreased to 18 years old. Now, for the record, this new legislation, it had nothing to do with cases like Junko's, where these vile, torturous monsters got around their charges because of their ages. With

With an aging population and a declining birth rate, the thinking is it's time to get those teenagers contributing as adults to the economy sooner. Aging society causes a lot of social problems such as patient economic growth and so forth. But we are expecting the younger generation to be more active. So Hiroshi, Nobuharu, Joe and Yasushi were all charged as juveniles.

And due to their ages, their identities were withheld from the public. In all of the documents, one of the suspects was just called A, another was called B, one was C, and then the last one was the letter D. I think Hiroshi was A, and I think Junko's identity was withheld too, and that she was called the letter E. But beyond that, I'm not sure which person went with which letter. But either way, it doesn't really matter for what comes next.

The courts were making an effort to protect everybody's privacy, which ended up being for nothing, because a reporter with a Japanese magazine ended up leaking everybody's real name anyway. The magazine's editor, who approved the release, said, and I quote, "...to make a long story short, we decided that beasts don't have human rights." Which...

Amen. I mean, given how horrible Junko's final month and a half were, it is no surprise that people read this article and they immediately decided that Hiroshi, Nobuharu, Joe, and Yasushi, they were all guilty. All of them were guilty. People were furious.

And they only got angrier when the court handed down its verdict. Nobuharu, the boy who knocked Junko off of her bike and set this whole thing in motion, this whole strategic plan, the guy who kept Junko in his bedroom locked up the whole time,

He only received five to ten years in prison, which is absolutely no time at all. But to hear his family tell it, he actually got a bad deal here. In an interview with the press, Nobuharu's mother actually accused Junko of ruining Nobuharu's life. Can you believe that? They were trying to say that she was to blame for Nobuharu assaulting and murdering her.

I don't even need to tell you how absolutely disgusting and gross this sentiment is. I mean, literally, even talking about it now, I want to smack this lady. It is truly appalling. And just like the entitlement, the absolute just...

foulness of this woman. But honestly, what do you expect? This is the same woman who helped her son imprison Junko and got rid of the police officers who could have come and saved Junko's life. Okay guys, we are going to take a final break in today's case to hear from our final sponsors. As for the other killers, the buddies that they brought in after they put this horrible plan in motion, Joe got five to nine years and Yasushi had the lightest sentence. He got three to four years.

Again, for kidnapping and murder. Hiroshi, the oldest killer and arguably the mastermind behind the attack on Junko, he was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Later on, he tried to appeal the decision, but actually got his term bumped up to 20 years. So three out of the four murderers in this case got less than a decade behind bars, and

And even though Hiroshi had a little bit harsher of a penalty of 20 years, I mean, that is nothing given how much Junko suffered, given the absolute animalistic, barbaric torture that they inflicted upon this young girl. Because when you do the math, even if Hiroshi served his full sentence and didn't get any type of parole whatsoever, he would still be back on the streets as a free man before his 40th birthday.

Still a full life to live ahead of him. How is that justice? How is that fair? All four of them also had to pay 50 million yen in damages to Junko's family. Now, that might sound like a lot at the surface, but adjusted for inflation and also converted to U.S. dollars, that's a little over $360,000 today.

Which, to be fair, isn't a small amount of money, but split between four people? Again, it just feels like an absurdly small punishment for a crime of 40 days of torture, 40 days of rape, and then murder. And of course, in true garbage trash bag human behavior, Nobuhir's parents, who stood by him every step of the way, refused to pay his share.

And it wasn't because they didn't have the money. Oh no, they did have the money. They actually sold their house and they gave their money to the three other guys, Hiroshi, Joe, and Yasushi. Almost like they wanted to repay the other killers for what they had lost in court fees. It is unbelievable. I have never heard anything like it.

Again, like, what is up with these people? What is wrong with them? How can you twist this story so much that you think your son Nobuharu and his dirtbag friends got the raw deal here? How at all is that working? The math certainly is not math in here. Understandably, every single part of the sentencing and the aftermath, it sparked outrage all over Japan.

Many of the people who had been following this case insisted that this was not justice, not at all. It wasn't fair and it wasn't right. But to put some of the decisions in context a little bit here, I do want to touch on one issue that might be relevant.

Now, there are a lot of different opinions out there about criminal justice. We talked about that a little bit at the beginning of this episode. And there's also a lot of different opinions on what sort of purpose prison is supposed to serve. Some people think that criminals need to be punished. Like, you did something wrong, you hurt somebody else, so something bad needs to happen to you to make it even. And if that's how you think about justice, then clearly Hiroshi, Nobuharu, Joe, and Yasushi's sentence did not fit the crime.

But then there's this other philosophy that says that prison should be more about rehabilitation, not about punishment.

Like, the goal isn't to make a criminal feel bad because of what they did, but more so to address whatever issues made them commit the crime in the first place, and then prevent them from doing something similar in the future. So if that's your attitude and your take on it, then the extremely short sentences might not sound so outrageous. I mean, a decade or two in prison is an extremely mild sentence for murder, even a murder that isn't as horrific as this one was.

But if Junko's killers were released with a whole new mindset and went on to become productive members of society, maybe you could argue what was some sort of positive outcome. Except, that's not what happened here. The three killers with the shortest sentences all got out of prison in the 1990s, and Hiroshi completed his term in 2009.

And after they each paid their extremely small debts to society, three of the offenders went on to commit more horrific crimes and get arrested again. The first problem and reoccurrence came up with Joe. In 2004, he got into an argument with an employee at a club. I don't know the full details of this, but the argument escalated to violence, and Joe physically attacked this guy.

So he served another four years in prison before once again getting out again in 2009. At some point along the way, Joe also changed his name. I guess so that people wouldn't associate him with the horrendous murder that he had committed, but I'm not certain.

So not only did he get a pretty speedy release, he also got a fresh start with a brand new identity. I mean, how on earth is that fair? He went free again in 2009, that same year that Hiroshi finished his sentence, who also ended up being a repeat offender too. Apparently, he fell right back in with his organized crime connections.

but now he was committing low-level financial fraud. He was busted again in 2013, and he went back to jail. And like Joe, Hiroshi also legally changed his name somewhere along the way. But as bad as their later crimes were, Nobuharu was probably the worst. After he also changed his name, he was convicted of yet another attempted murder.

By August 19th of 2018, Nobuhiro was now 46 years old, and his life hadn't really gone anywhere since the murder. He was unemployed, he didn't seem to have any "real" prospects , so Nobuhiro was walking down the road that day when he got into some kind of argument with a guy in a car. Apparently, the guy and his friend were on their way home from a barbecue when they stopped at a traffic light or something.

Nobuharu walked past and gave them some sort of look. The driver asked, "Hey, what are you looking at?" And Nobuharu took offense to this. So he reached through the car window to punch him. The driver tried to defend himself, and the friend got out of the car to break up the fight.

But Nobuharu started throwing down with this guy too, trying to fight this guy as well, even though it was two against one. And Nobuharu held his own, mainly though, because he grabbed a piece of metal that was on the ground, and he used that to beat these other two guys. Now we know that Nobuharu has a killer instinct because of what happened with Junko. So it's probably not surprising that once he got this weapon, he had the upper hand in this fight. So he beat the absolute best.

crap out of this driver, and then he slit his throat. Luckily, in this case, both victims survived this attack, even the guy whose neck he had just completely slashed. Nobuharu claimed that he didn't mean to kill either one of the guys, which is pretty hard to believe given how far over the line he went with this beating, but

I guess he figured that this argument would work because he had said that same thing when he had killed Junko. Like there was just no way that he could have ever anticipated that she was going to die after he beat her until she had a seizure and then set her on fire.

And it's safe to say he didn't feel much remorse at all, because now here he was trying to kill another person again. So it's clear that even if we're defining justice as being all about rehabilitation, justice certainly was not served here. Not for Junko, and not for her family. Speaking of her family, at some point after her body was found, they moved away from this town. And afterward, they pretty much just disappeared.

They refused to talk to reporters, reporters who just kept hounding them and showing up at their door, and they've only made a few very rare appearances in public. They accepted Junko's high school diploma on her behalf, and then about a month later, they were at Junko's funeral. At that funeral, one of Junko's friends read a dedication.

Jun, please go home. I never thought we would reunite like this.

Here is part of what it said. There is no more pain, no more suffering. Please rest in peace. Which does sound like, yes, a nice sentiment. But clearly her family was still in a lot of pain. A lot of pain and suffering, so much so that they decided they needed to leave town. It sounds to me almost like they tried to put their old lives behind them and reclaim some degree of privacy. And if so, I do hope that they have found peace.

It's just so incredibly unfair that Junko's parents and brothers now have to deal with the consequences of her murder while most of her killers are now walking free. And that might be why Junko's story is so famous. I mean, even today, it is one of the most notorious true crime cases out there because of how enraged people are by the lack of justice.

She's almost like their version of JonBenet, in a way, because this girl, which, to be clear, again, Junko was a girl, she was not an adult, but like JonBenet, she became famous for being brutally murdered and never receiving justice. It's one of those cases that just sticks with you for one reason or another. However, unlike JonBenet, we know exactly who killed Junko. We caught them, we brought them to court, we got a conviction, and the result was still a miscarriage of justice.

And this case really did root a lot of heavily debated topics out there about justice, rehabilitation, the rights of victims and killers, especially when they're minors.

So I just hope that the conversation about these issues continues and something good comes from them. I mean, Junko didn't die to reform the criminal justice system. She didn't choose to die at all. But at least if we can raise awareness about important issues and make change, we can ensure that some small sliver of good can come out of a story that would otherwise just be a meaningless, heartbreaking, brutal tragedy.

There are a couple of different petitions on Change.org demanding that the Japanese police lock up Junko's killers and give them harsher sentences for the murder. And altogether, these petitions, they have tens of thousands of signatures. But I'm not sure if anything will come of them. I mean, there's no rule that says that Japanese authorities need to listen to Change.org. And as infuriating as the trials and their measly sentences were, there's no indication that anything about the hearings was illegal.

Even if the police wanted to get Hiroshi and the others in more trouble, I don't know that they could under the law. And I'm curious to know from you guys where your stance is on justice. Do you think that these boys got off way too easy? Or does it make sense to you to be more lenient with juvenile offenders, even in extreme cases like this one?

Was Junko's absolutely horrific murder a fluke in the criminal justice system and one that flew under the radar? Or should the criminal justice system be a lot harsher with killers like these boys?

Let me know what you think in the Q&A section over on Spotify or even in the review section over on Apple. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Serialistly. I know that this one was certainly a tough one and a difficult one to get through, so I appreciate you hearing Junko's story and allowing her voice and what happened to her to continue on so that hopefully there is some change that comes from it.

Before you close out your podcast app, don't forget to make sure that you're following the podcast so that you don't miss any future episodes. And I will be back on the mic with you very soon to talk about another true crime case with you. Until then, be nice, don't kill people, and I'll be talking with you again soon. All right, guys. Bye.