Already wanted for the murder of an old woman, 24 year old Masahiro Kanagawa, stabbed eight people outside a mall in Tsuchiura, Ibaraki Prefecture. One 27 year old man died. Kanagawa was said to be something of a loner who loved playing computer games, and was not very good at communicating or expressing himself. Kanagawa…
This was big on the morning news shows today. A 43 year old bus driver killed his wife and son. His wife, Crisanta, was originally from the Philippines. Some friends of the family were interviewed saying that Crisanta had talked about their families plans to sell their apartment, move to the Philippines and live off…
Takaaki Obara, a 57 year old high school basketball coach was convicted of raping a member of the girls’ basketball at a hotel when the club was away for a tournament. He was also convicted of punching members of the team in another hotel. The english story on Mainichi points out that he was “highly…
He was fired but all is good. The principal of Bunkyo Gakuin University admitted to the theft giving the ubiquitous catch-all Japanese reason. He was drunk. He’s since been fired as principal. My comments?He was fired, but probably received his entire severence pay… at age 52, I guess he’s been working and paying into the…
In an attempt to blackmail some money out of a random guy on the train a student from Konan University had his girlfriend accuse the poor guy of groping her. Fumiyuki Makita, a 24 year old senior was expelled from Konan University and arrested for false accusation. (Minor sidenote: He’s a 24 year old senior….
The story is that Richard “Scott” Tucker walked into a bar near the apartment building he owned to complain about the noise. He was puched, kicked, and then eventually choked to death. It seems that the perpetrator, Atsushi Watanabe, will get only “a minor punishment” because witnesses say that Tucker was trying to pick a…
The story in English on Mainichi can be found here:“Exec arrested for saving naked photo of junior high school girl on his mobile phone” It says the guy met the girl online (probably on one of the cell phone dating cites) then offered her a million yen to send him a photo. He got the…
I think this story isn’t getting as much air time in Japan as it should… not because of the right wing activist angle, not because of the suicide angle, but because a guy took a taxi to the south gate of the Japanese Diet building and… pulled out a gun Ok, maybe I overemphasize with…
New facts about the case California has against Miura keep coming out so I’m not going to try to pull new information out of the news… I’ll just try to give a little perspective from over here. The fact is, a lot of Japanese people are pretty angry about this case. There’s a lot of…
This is an update to the story I mentioned in a previous blog post about the Sumo murder case. The stable master Junichi Yamamoto (formerly known by his Sumo name Tokitsukaze) andYuichiro Izuka, Masanori Fujii, and Masakazu Kimura, the three other Sumo wrestlers involved in the assault which resulted in the death of 17 year…
For non-specific reasons, the family of the girl that was the alleged victim of rape by the Okinawan marine has dropped the charges. The family cited reasons such as wanting to maintain privacy, and not wanting to go through the trouble of pursuing the case as reasons for dropping the charges. It may be that…
I don’t want to get all sociological and everything, but I’d like to stress the word REPORTED. REPORTED I urge people who read news about Japan’s low crime rate to keep in mind that this is the number of cases reported and filed officially. There are many cases that go unreported for various reasons, as…