Junko Furuta: The 17-Year-Old Who Was Tortured For 44 Days For Rejecting A Classmate
Wikimedia CommonsJunko Furuta was kidnapped and murdered by four teenage boys in 1980s Japan.
Born in Misato, Saitama, Japan in 1971, Junko Furuta appeared to have a promising future. She had a reputation as a beautiful and intelligent student at Yashio-Minami High School. Furuta was also widely known as a “good girl,” who refused to drink, smoke, or do any kind of illegal drugs.
But unfortunately, she crossed paths with a classmate named Hiroshi Miyano at school in November 1988. Miyano had connections to the Yakuza, a powerful Japanese organized crime syndicate. He was also determined to date Furuta, and he was enraged when she turned him down.
Mere days after the rejection, Miyano and his friend Shinji Minato were at a local park preying on girls and young women when they spotted Furuta on her bike. Miyano and Minato soon abducted her, raped her, and took her to their other friends, Jō Ogura and Yasushi Watanabe, who also raped her.
Tragically, that was just the beginning of her agony. The four teenage boys then smuggled Furuta into a home owned by Minato’s family. There, she would be held captive and forced to pose as Minato’s girlfriend whenever his parents were around. And she was soon subjected to a barrage of heinous beatings, rapes, and torture until her eventual murder in January 1989.
Over the course of 44 days, Furuta’s captors continued to rape her, inviting other boys and men who they knew to join in on the abuse. In total, Furuta was raped over 400 times. Her captors also subjected her to other forms of torture, like shoving scissors, fireworks, and a lightbulb into her vagina and anus. Eventually, they completely destroyed her internal anatomy.
The boys also made her drink her own urine, eat cockroaches, and masturbate in front of them. They hung her from the ceiling and beat her with golf clubs, bamboo sticks, and iron rods, and burned her eyelids.
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The four murderers of Junko Furuta (Hiroshi Miyano, Shinji Minato, Jō Ogura, and Yusushi Watanabe).
Perhaps most tragic is that Furuta could have been saved. Once, a boy who had been invited over to the home left when he saw Furuta and told his brother about her. The brother alerted their parents, who called the police. But when the cops arrived, the Minato family, allegedly fearing Miyano’s Yakuza connections, told the police there was no girl in the home.
Furuta, too, tried to contact the police, but the boys discovered her and hung up before she could speak. When the cops called back, Miyano assured them the call had been an accident. As punishment for calling the authorities, the boys doused Furuta’s legs in lighter fluid and set her on fire.
On January 4, 1989, Junko Furuta’s kidnappers finally murdered her. After brutally torturing her one final time, they placed her body in a 55-gallon drum, filled it with concrete, and dropped it on a cement truck.
Furuta’s body was only discovered after Miyano and Ogura were arrested two weeks later on an unrelated gang-rape charge. When an officer mentioned an open murder investigation during Miyano’s interrogation, the boy mistakenly believed that Ogura had confessed to Furuta’s murder. And so Miyano ended up telling the police where to find her body.
According to Tokyo Reporter, all four boys received shockingly light sentences for the crime. Miyano was sentenced to 20 years in prison, Minato received a term of five-to-nine years, Ogura was sentenced to five-to-10 years, and Watanabe received a term of five-to-seven years.
The light sentences were attributed to the boys’ youth, but it’s widely believed their connections to the Yakuza played a bigger role. Because of this, many people in Japan feel justice has never been served in the case of Junko Furuta. And unfortunately, it seems as if it never will be.
