Between November 1988 and January 1989, Japanese schoolgirl, Junko Furuta was tortured until she begged for death. When she finally died, her body was stuffed into an oil barrel and the drum was filled with concrete. Her body was found a year later in Tokyo.
Junko Furuta had rejected the class bully, Hiroshi Miyano. Miyano was known to brag about his connections to Yakuza and was no stranger to violence. He was incensed when Junko rejected him. Days later on November 25th, as Junko was cycling home from work, someone knocked her off her bicycle. Miyano was there and helped her up, he said he would walk her home. It was a trap. He raped her in an abandoned warehouse, then a nearby hotel. She was abducted by the 2 boys, 18-year-old Hiroshi Miyano and 15-year-old Nobuharu Minato.
Minato, Miyano and 2 other boys, Yasushi Watanabe, aged 17, and Jo Ogura aged 18 took all of Junkos belongings. They told her if she did not do exactly as they said the Yakuza would kill her family.
They took her to Minatos home, 2 days later when people were starting to question her disappearance, they boys forced her to call home and say she had run away. For the next 44 days she was endured some of the most heinous and unspeakable torture.
She was forced to eat her own excrement and live cockroaches. The boys hung her from the ceiling and beat her. She was starved, raped, mutilated and sodomised for over 6 weeks. They would drop barrbells onto her stomach and chest. She had her eyelids burnt with cigarette lighters.
Junko was forced to masturbate in front of them. They sodomised her with scissors, lit fireworks, iron rods, skewers and a red-hot lightbulb.
Minatos parents knew she was in the house, they later claimed they were afraid of their son but they weren’t the only ones who let Junko Furuta down. The 4 boys would invite friends over to join in the rape and torture, one boy's parents found out and told the police. But when the police showed up the Minato family denied knowing anything about it. Up to 100 people knew she was there but no one helped her.
Around 2 weeks after her abduction Junko managed to locate a phone and call the police herself, but she was caught before she could speak. From this point on the abuse escalated. They would soak her with lighter fluid and set her skin on fire. When she would convulse from the serious trauma her body was suffering, they would accuse her of faking and light her on fire again.
On January 4th 1989, Junko beat the boys at a game of Majhong solitaire. Infuriated, they beat her with barbells and bamboo sticks before setting her alight. The attack continued for two hours and she finally died.
During the 44 final days of her life, she was raped between 400-500 times, beaten until she lost consciousness, set on fire, had her genitals mutilated and her nipple torn off. She was sodomised with various items including iron bars and lit fireworks. She was forced to sleep outside in freezing temperatures.
After all of this, her body was wrapped in a blanket, and placed into a drum, then covered with wet concrete. The drum was disposed of in Kōtō, Tokyo.
3 weeks later, after being arrested for another gang rape, Miyano confessed to the murder believing police already knew what he had done. They didn’t.
All 4 of the murderers accepted plea deals. Miyano was sentenced to 17 years, later increased to 20. Nobuharu Minato was sentenced to 5-9 years. Yasushi Watanabe was sentenced to 5-7 years and Jo Ogura was sentenced to 8 years in a juvenile prison.
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