The Horrible Case of Furuta Junko
44 days living in hell, the inevitable demise seemed like a sweet end to her suffering.
This is the story of how a youthful and energetic high school student was unfortunately associated with one of the most hideous and brutal crimes of modern times. After 44 days of agony and torture, death itself seemed like a merciful escape.
What Furuta had gone through can be described in one single word: hell.
Before we move on, please note that the following article contains graphic details and photos that some readers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.
Among The Wolves
Pretty, bright, and bubbly are how her friends often described her as. Born on January 18, 1971, in Misato in Saitama Prefecture, 17-year-old Junko Furuta was a straight-A student at Yashio-Minami High School. Despite having to maintain a part-time job, she managed to perform well at school.
She had a reputation for being a "good girl," who was far removed from vices such as doing drugs, smoking, or drinking, yet Furuta was very well-liked among her peers. When life was seemingly beautiful and peaceful, tragedy hit like a meteor.
Even Furuta herself wouldn’t expect her life would change abruptly as such. Her bright future ahead was tragically cut short. The young woman soon disappeared and was eventually found dead on March 30, 1989. [1]
Unbeknownst to most, what led to her unfortunate demise was something rather innocent - a love confession.
As a good-looking girl who was constantly scoring As in classes, she had caught both the attention and admiration of every student in her school, including Miyano Hiroshi, a problematic student. Miyano soon found himself deeply in love with Furuta, so much so that he decided to confess his feelings to her, only to find Furuta had turned him down.
Of course, Miyano was furious. Instead of taking the hint and respecting the girl’s decision like a normal human being would do, Miyano plotted to “revenge” Furuta, in an unimaginably violent and cruel manner.
It’s worth keeping in mind that Miyano was not just any regular problematic guy whose sole purpose was simply fucking up his own life and messing with people, he had connections with the local yakuza. Other students had never dared to go against his will, let alone reject him. Furuta was then considered a thorn in his side.
In case you don’t know: Yakuza /jəˈkuːzə/ are members of transnational organized crime syndicates originating in Japan. The term is equivalent to “Mafia” or “Gangster” in English [2].
Miyano Hiroshi, along with three other guys - Jō Ogura (a.k.a Jo Kamisaku); Minato Nobuharu; and Watanabe Yasushi, had formed a group of chinpira (low-ranking yakuza) [3]. This group of 16-18-year-old teenagers chose Minato’s house as their frequent hangout, and their vicious plan took place on 25/11/1988.
Got Dragged To Hell
The Hunt
Furuta finished her shift at 8:30 P.M. and cycled along her usual route home from her part-time job [4].
Coincidentally, Miyano and his associate, Minato, happened to be hanging out in the nearby park. Initially, their aim was solely to accost and rape young women, however, there was a shift in their plan as soon as Miyano saw Furuta cycling by.
Following Miyano’s order, Minato violently knocked Furuta off her bike, sending her tumbling to the ground. He immediately fled the scene while Miyano slowly approached the girl under the guise of a concerned passerby. After helping her to her feet, Miyano offered to take the puzzled Furuta home, to which she agreed.
Trusting his apparent goodwill, Furuta was unaware that Miyano was leading her to an abandoned warehouse [5], where he would rape her. By the time she realized the true nature of his intentions, it was too late. He threatened to kill her and her family, using his connections with the yakuza to force her into submission.
And that was the last time her loved ones ever saw Furuta alive.
44 Days Of Agony
After the assault, Miyano was left unsatisfied, to the point that he decided to take her to a hotel in Adachi to abuse her again. As if his scattered ego after the rejection had somewhat healed, he proudly bragged about this newly acquired “achievement” to his three other friends.
But the real nightmare was only just beginning. Now that the other boys were aware of the situation, Miyano decided to take Furuta to meet them at the nearby park. Once again, Miyano exploited his supposed connections with the yakuza to prevent Furuta from any intentions of escaping. The distressed Furuta was then gang-raped by the whole group.
The boys were apparently thrilled at the idea of holding Furuta captive, for the sole purpose of keeping her as their “pet” - something they could assault, abuse, and torture just for a sense of relief. However, keeping Furuta captive was merely impossible, especially when her family had reported her disappearance to the police on November 27th.
The police were prompted to search for Furuta Junko, and the boys were desperate to find a way to derail the investigation, somehow.
They smuggled Furuta into a property that Minato’s family owned. Upon arriving at the house, they forced her to call her parents and lie to them, saying that she had run away and was then staying at a friend’s. Even though her reasoning was so weirdly strange, considering that Furuta was a straight-A student with no reason to be a runaway, her call eventually prevented the police from carrying on the investigation.
Furuta was then kept captive for the next 39 days. Now, here’s the brief timeline of what might have happened to Furuta in 44 days of capture.
Day 1 - Day 11 (November 25th - December 1st, 1988)
Miyano and his associates, in fact, had a history of accosting and raping local young women before, however, they would usually let their victims go afterward. It seems like Furuta was the only exception.
During her time staying at the house owned by Minato’s family in Ayase in Adachi Ward, Furuta was gang-raped every day. It was reported that she had been assaulted a total of 400 times, by not only the four boys who captured her but also other strange men. Some sources even disclosed there might be up to 100 different men who had engaged in the abuse [6].
At some point after the abduction, the boys got ahold of Furuta’s address through her notebook in her backpack. With this profound information they had just gleaned, they threatened to give her address to yakuza members if she attempted to escape, which left Furuta vulnerable and overpowered. Feeling enabled, they humiliated and raped her again and again [7].
On November 27th, Furuta’s family reached out to the police, deeply concerned for the well-being of their daughter. In order to stop the investigation, the boys asked Furuta to tell her distressed parents to stop looking for her, which they did and the search had been canceled. But that wasn’t the only time the boys exploited her vulnerable state for their own gains.
Soon enough, Minato’s parents started to question Furuta’s frequent presence inside their house. Whenever the parents were home, Furuta pretended to be the girlfriend of one of the boys. The fear over her safety was strong enough to keep Minato's parents unaware of the horrors unfolding within their own home.
The situation persisted for several days, the boys decided to leave Furuta naked and starved her as a punishment. The humiliation went on and escalated to an even higher level. They started feeding her cockroaches and coercing her to drink her own urine, to the point that her strength was completely drained from being raped and starved over time.
It was a harsh winter, the temperature dropped way below zero and Furuta was left naked on the balcony at night. She was trembling in starvation and constant pain as the winter breeze cut on her chapped skin.
The boys started to come up with different ideas to “entertain” themselves, not limited to physically abusing Furuta in the most brutal ways that exceeded one’s imagination. It was reported that they had inserted objects into her genitalia area, one of which was a still-lit lightbulb and sometimes, fireworks. As if it wasn’t enough, they would usually hang her from the ceiling and turn her into a punching bag, which caused severe internal bleeding as her organs suffered from the constant damage.
Day 12 - Day 20 (December 2nd - December 10th, 1988)
Despite enduring brutal torture, Furuta somehow survived. Yet, the violence escalated with each passing day.
They would pour flammable liquid on her limbs and set them on fire multiple times, or apply hot wax on her eyelids and watch her squirled in pain. Then sometimes, they would drop iron dumbbells on her torso and beat her with bamboo sticks, so much so that her ability to urinate and defecate had far been irreparably damaged [8].
Suffering from severe internal injuries had prevented her from consuming food and drink, therefore she would usually vomit whenever she drank water. Despite the sufferings, Furuta almost made it out alive once. It was when she happened to reach the telephone and called for help.
The young deviants were resting after drinking, and Furuta made her way to the nearby telephone. She managed to dial the police, however, her attempt was soon noticed by one of the boys, Miyano Hiroshi himself. Miyano stepped in and ended the call just in time before she could say anything. The police soon phoned back, but the call didn’t reach Furuta.
In fact, the boys were torturing Furuta while Miyano informed the police that the call was a mistake.
To punish her for attempting to escape, even when she failed to do so, they set her legs on fire. The fire was only put out when she stopped screaming and went into convulsions, which the assailants thought she was faking. They continued to beat her up and set her on fire again, however, seeing that Furuta was completely unconscious, they left her alone. She managed to survive this time.
Day 21 - Day 44 (December 11th - January 4th, 1989)
Furuta’s conditions were gravely critical.
The torture kept on going, as they continued to push things even further: pouring hot wax on her eyelids, stabbing her chest with sewing needles, cutting her left nipple with pliers, etc. Her injuries worsened and pus kept on coming out from the wounds. Furuta could no longer walk normally due to the pain, which took her an hour to crawl downstairs to use the restroom.
Desperate and hopeless Furuta begged her captors to end her suffering and “get it over with”, a swift death was nothing short of an escape for her. And of course, they refused to grant her that luxury blessing. On January 1st, 1989, Furuta spent her last New Year's Eve on the balcony, all alone.
Her demise finally came on January 4th, when Miyano challenged her to a game of mahjong. Despite her terrible conditions, Furuta somehow ended up winning against Miyano, which enraged him and the other captors. They started beating her with iron rods, then poured flammable liquid on her legs, face, and stomach and set her on fire again [9].
After 2 hours of constant beating and burning, Furuta drew her last breath. Realizing the girl wasn’t faking her faint, and potentially had died, the boys immediately sought ways to dispose of the body in fear of being arrested. Finally, they all decided to dump her body into an oil drum that was then filled with cement. The oil drum was left at a nearby park and discovered months later.
Only then was their crime brought to light.
The Unconcerned Bystanders
The failed phone call to the police wasn’t the only time Furuta came close to the door of freedom. In fact, some people were well aware of what was going on. However, instead of helping the young girl, they chose to remain silent.
As you already know, Furuta was kept captive at Minato’s house, where she had to pretend to be a boy’s girlfriend. Yes, his parents knew that Furuta wasn’t anyone’s girlfriend and that their son was getting involved in the cruel act against her.
From the moment they started suspecting the unusually frequent presence of Furuta and screams that jolted them out of bed at night, they knew something was wrong. However, they were more worried about Miyano’s connections with the Yakuza and Minato’s violent tendencies, so they turned a blind eye [10].
It turns out that Minato’s parents weren’t the only ones who kept their mouths shut about this. According to u/nona_ssv, a Redditor who lived in Japan, there is a documentary of the incident in which the reporter was interviewing a boy living near the house of horror.
The boy mentioned that on his way home from school, he often heard loud music and a girl shouting “Please stop!” about eight times during the day [11]. The boy didn’t report this to the police, as if the screams weren’t something to be alerted about.
And since the screams were loud enough that the boy could hear it despite the loud music playing, it’s safe to say that the neighbors living close by might have heard it as well. However, it looked like they all kept silent for the same reason: Miyano and his Yakuza acquaintances.
Turn back time to when Furuta made her phone call to the police. Despite having told the officer on the line that the call was a mistake, the police still knocked on their door a few weeks later, not because of Furuta though.
There were two officers dispatched to the house to investigate another rape case, which was reported by 16-year-old Koichi Ihara and his older brother. Both boys confirmed that they were bullied into raping and torturing a girl in Minato’s basement. Believing in the confidence of the Minato’s as they invited them inside for a thorough search, the officers simply declined and walked away, writing on their reports that they had done a “preliminary search” [12]. Not long after, the two officers were soon dismissed for this.
“If you look at the comments section of that documentary, you're going to find plenty of people saying something like 隣人も共犯 (the neighbors are accomplices) or something to that effect. So even in Japan, most people are pissed off at those neighbors.” - u/nona_ssv on Reddit [11].
Back to the murderers, what did they get for brutally murdering Furuta? Well, they still got to keep their lives, if that’s what you want to know.
Miyano was sentenced to 17 years in jail in 1990 after he allegedly confessed to the murder by accident, he and Jo Ogura were both arrested for another rape at the time. After having appealed his sentence, Miyano had to serve his time in prison for 20 years.
He was released in 2009 and changed his name to Hiroshi Yokoyama. He started living a lavish life with all the money earned from involving in fraud, which caused him to be arrested in 2013. However, he was soon released without being prosecuted accordingly. Meanwhile, Jo Ogura received a sentence of 5 to 10 years in juvenile prison, since he was 17 at the time of the murder. After being released from prison, he changed his name to Jo Kamisaku and attempted a normal life, only to be arrested again for assaulting a club manager [13].
Shinji Minato and Watanabe Yasushi got a sentence of five-to-nine years and five-to-seven years respectively. They soon got out of jail and led a normal life afterward. While Shinji got arrested again for attempted murder in 2018, Watanabe managed to not re-offend since his release.
The reason why they all got a light sentence was because they were minors at that time, and instead of being charged with murder, they were all sentenced for “causing bodily injury resulting in death.”
The assailants are indeed the worst part of this tragedy, and so were those who turned a blind eye to her screams and allowed her suffering to take place. After all, Edmund Burke was right, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Reference:
[1] https://unseen-japan.com/furuta-junko-horrific-murder/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta
[4] https://unseen-japan.com/furuta-junko-horrific-murder/
[5] https://allthatsinteresting.com/junko-furuta
[6] https://medium.com/@lisariggio1994/40-day-nightmare-the-torture-and-murder-of-junko-furuta-bd2e131ad18d
[7] https://mru.ink/junko-furuta/
[8] https://vocal.media/criminal/the-brutal-murder-of-junko-furuta-mbig03xv
[9] https://japandaily.jp/did-junko-furutas-killers-ever-get-sentenced-for-their-crimes/#Forty-four_days_of_torture
[10] https://people.howstuffworks.com/junko-furuta.htm
[11] https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueCrime/comments/qces7v/junko_furuta_locations_sources_confirmed/
[12] https://vocal.media/criminal/52-lock-up-junko-furuta
[13] https://thecinemaholic.com/junko-furuta-killers-where-are-hiroshi-miyano-jo-ogura-shinji-minato-yasushi-watanabe-now/