10 Horrendous Details Surrounding The Murder Of Junko Furuta, 44 Days Of Hell

6 /10 First Days Of Torture

After kidnapping her, they began not to be ‘only’ contented with raping her: the beatings started, as did the torture.

Junko’s concerned parents reported her disappearance to the police, but the criminals forced her to call her mother and say that she had run away but was safe and staying at a friend’s house.

This stalled the investigation that could have saved her, while they made her dance and sing while being beaten, inserted foreign objects in her genitals and underfed her, and left her to suffer from exposure by sleeping naked in the balcony of the house.

5 /10 The Minato Complicity

Another point of inflection in Junko’s suffering came when Minato’s parents quickly realized that she was not their son’s girlfriend, as she had claimed.

But, in what was the most cowardly thing to do, both they and Minato’s brother decided to turn their eyes away and not report it to the police.

Simultaneously, the torture was scaling up, and she was beginning to be burned, cut, and bludgeoned, as, at the same time, her captors brought other men to rape her.

4 /10 Death As Relief

After having been raped over 400 times, forced to inhale paint thinner, drink absurd quantities of milk, water and alcohol, hanging from the ceiling to be used as a punching bag and a thousand other stomach-revolting atrocities, Junko, extremely weak from all the abuse, was begging her tormentors to kill her.

However, the four boys kept abusing her with ever-growing cruelty, to the point in which she was practically unable to walk or move anything but her arms.

She began to decompose from all her untreated wounds, which gave her some rest at the hands of her briefly disgusted captors. She began to wait for death as her relief.

3 /10 The End, At Last

And that relief finally came on January 4th, 1989, when she happened to win at a mahjong game against the four boys.

Miyano began to take his frustration out on her, hitting her and kicking her, and soon everyone joined him in his miserable actions.

Junko, bleeding and secreting pus from every wound (her captors, apparently disgusted once again at this, put on plastic bags in her hands to keep beating her), was set on fire. She tried to put it out before becoming unresponsive and dying after forty-four days of hell.

2 /10 Judicial Injustice

Her four captors didn’t get their hells, however. All of them pledged guilty to ‘committing bodily injury that resulted in death,’ which meant a very much reduced sentence compared to being condemned of murder.

They all received less than nine years, except for Miyano, who received a twenty-year-long sentence.

All of them were granted anonymity by the court. Still, a Japanese magazine unmasked the four monsters and rightly added that “given the severity of the crime, the accused did not deserve to have their right to anonymity upheld.”

1 /10 Four Free Criminals

Today, the four of them are free, and all of them have committed new crimes. It is widely believed that their affiliations with the Yakuza gained them the leniency of the court.

It is also believed that this was the reason why, when Junko was still alive and only sixteen days into her hell, a couple of police officers dispatched to investigate the Minato house did not go in after being told (by the Minato parents) that there was no girl inside. If they did, she might even be alive today.