Serious juvenile crimes soar / Nagasaki murder of 4-year-old by 12-year-old
THE DAILY YOMIURI/July 18, 2003, Friday/No. 3

The abduction and murder of a 4-year-old boy by a 12-year-old boy in Nagasaki has drawn national attention to the rise in recent years of heinous crimes by minors, in particular those committed by juveniles apparently on sexual impulse.

However, the rash of crimes--thought to be sexually motivated--by male offenders as young as 10 against younger children of the same sex remains extremely puzzling even in the eyes of experts.

The boy, who admitted abducting and killing 4-year-old Shun Tanemoto, was a first-year student at a middle school in Nagasaki. The offender, whose name is being withheld as stipulated under the Juvenile Law, is currently in a juvenile classification facility before being subjected to hearings at the Nagasaki Family Court.

According to accounts given by police and other sources, the 12-year-old, accompanied by Tanemoto, entered a seven-story parking garage in central Nagasaki at about 8:30 p.m. on July 1.

He apparently told Tanemoto he would help him look for his mother's car there.

Taking Tanemoto by the hand, the middle school student then walked around each floor of the building.

About 30 minutes later, the two reached the roof of the 20-meter-high parking garage, where the 12-year-old suddenly began stripping off Tanemoto 's clothes.

"After stripping him naked, I kicked him in the stomach," the investigators quoted the boy as saying.

"When I started hurting him with the scissors, he began screaming far more loudly than I had expected. So I thought it better to throw him off the roof instead of allowing him to return to his parents," he told the police.

The boy made the statements in an extremely faint voice in an interrogation room after being picked up for questioning on July 8, according to the investigators, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In the past few years, the incidence of sexual abuse has risen alarmingly, with middle school boys and even fifth- or sixth-year primary school boys, or 10- to 11-year-olds, as offenders and younger boys as victims.

For instance, a third-year middle school student aged 15 in Utsunomiya was put under police custody in January on suspicion of molesting a 6-year-old boy, while a 14-year-old, a second-year middle school boy, was arrested for allegedly sexually abusing a 5-year-old boy in the Soraku region of Kyoto Prefecture in March.

A lawyer who has dealt with a number of juvenile cases in the Tokyo metropolitan area said, "The number of cases has surged in the past year of so in which middle school and even younger boys sexually abuse boys aged between 4 and 8."

A common characteristic of the perpetrators of such offenses is that they cannot explain why they committed the obscene acts, the lawyer said.

The offender in the Nagasaki incident admitted that, before committing the July 1 abduction and murder, he had abandoned a 3-year-old boy after stripping him naked in a commercial store complex building in the city on April 27.

The motive of the boy's sexual attraction toward a young child of the same sex and then tossing the screaming victim off the roof with the knowledge that doing so would be lethal to the victim is baffling, a police officer said.

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Are stricter laws the solution?

In another incident, an 11-year-old boy, who police said admitted that he had set six houses on fire in July 2001, was quoted as telling the police without emotion that he felt pleasant and refreshed when he saw the houses in flames. An 86-year-old woman died in one of the fires.

The boy was later learned to have been bullied by his classmates about six months prior to the arson.

The bullying was brought to an end and the boy again become cheerful, his teacher said, adding that he had no idea what made the boy commit the crimes.

In April and May this year, a 14-year-old boy in Saitama Prefecture, and 13-year-old girl in Niigata Prefecture, set fire to their homes, causing serious injuries to members of their families.

The boy, a third-year middle school student, told police that he felt "disgusted with myself for pretending to be a good, honest boy," while the girl, a second-year middle school student, was quoted as saying she committed the crime because she felt lonely.

According to a survey by the National Police Agency, the number of boys and girls aged 13 or younger who were questioned by police on the suspicion of breaking the law in 2002 totaled about 20,500 nationwide.

In an apparent reflection of the falling youth population, the figure is about 25 percent lower than five years earlier.

However, an analysis of the figures showed that the number of those who committed such heinous offenses as murder and arson and cases of inflicting bodily injury was about 1,760 last year, an increase of about 10 percent from the corresponding 1997 figure, the NPA said.

An NPA official said offenses committed by those in their early teens have become more vicious.

Among such crimes are the killings of two children by a middle school student in Kobe in 1997, the hijacking of an express bus by a 17-year-old and the killings of three family members and the serious injury of three others in the family in Oita Prefecture in 2000.

In light of such horrific juvenile crimes, the age of criminal responsibility under the Juvenile Law was reduced to 14 from 16 in 2001.

The boy who admitted committing the Nagasaki crime, however, cannot be held criminally responsible as he is 12.

Some people are calling for the punishable age be lowered further, while others, including Justice Minister Mayumi Moriyama, oppose that idea.

"These problems should be dealt with from the viewpoint of education and welfare tasks for the benefit of juveniles, and more effort should be made to improve the environment surrounding boys and girls," Moriyama said.

Lawyer Hajime Tada who took charge of the 2000 case in which a 17-year-old boy killed a woman in Toyokawa, Aichi Prefecture, said the boy told him that he committed the murder simply out of a desire to experience killing a person.

The lawyer said psychiatric examinations later showed that the boy's impulse for killing a person resulted from "a mental disorder that makes a person obsessively pursue something they are interested in."

He pointed out that such minors are not aware of their mental condition.

"What is needed is not more stringent law and regulations for juvenile offenses," he said. "There must be a redoubling of efforts on the part of adults to make juveniles feel at ease."